Former Minnesota Governor and failed 2012 GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty said that Republicans should support increases in the minimum wage, though he was against the Senate bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.
“If you’re going to talk the talk about being for the middle class and the working person, if we have the minimum wage, it should be reasonably adjusted from time to time,” Pawlenty, CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, said on Wednesday.
He added, “For all the Republicans who come on and talk about, ‘we’re for the blue-collar worker, we’re for the working person,’ there are some basic things that we should be for. One of them is reasonable increases from time to time in the minimum wage.”
Pawlenty, who also said on MSNBC that Jeb Bush could win the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, later said that he, too, was for amnesty legislation, which the Congressional Budget Office determined would lower the wages of American workers.