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Friday, November 08, 2013

Poll Finds Strong Support For Minimum Wage Hike; State Employees Pensions Considered Too Low

A new poll found strong public support for increasing Maryland’s minimum wage to $10 an hour, a step being pushed for the upcoming General Assembly session.

The poll by Goucher College also found the majority of the Maryland public regards current pensions for retired state employees as too low, and also thinks all Maryland workers, not just those employed by the state or local governments, should have a pension.

Assessing the name recognition of politicians, the Goucher poll found that U.S. Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, a Baltimore County Democrat who is considering a run for governor, had significant name recognition throughout the state, only exceeded by Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown and Attorney General Doug Gansler, who have been on the statewide ballot twice.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...


As always in situations like this, the devil is in the details.

Linkage, if any, between questions about state employee pensions, minimum wage rate and political animals is tenuous. Array of different questions that were posed to different respondents undercuts the validity of final answers and conclusions.

As an example, larger public pensions could be achieved by larger employee contributions, higher pay rates, increased taxes, better investment results, or some combination of the above.

OweMalley & crew already screwed the investment returns up, resulting in doubling the years of work needed to qualify from 5 to 10. Contributions by employees were also increased. Get ready, John Q. Public to be the next source re-tapped.

Color me dubious!!

Anonymous said...

There should be no such thing as a public employee "pension".

Convert them all to 401 K

Anonymous said...

Has no one ever realized the correlation between minimum wage and cost of products? You raise MW to make it easier for low wage earners to buy things, then prices go up. It is called zero sum economics. Then entertainment goes up, movies, restaurants, concerts, sports tickets, they all go up so those businesses suffer.