Biden OMB Nominee Neera Tanden Flip-Flops on $15 Minimum Wage

Neera Tanden, President Joe Biden’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), said Monday that she approves of a $15 minimum wage after telling Hillary Clinton’s campaign to avoid such a policy position.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, asked if she would approve of “ending starvation wages” by “raising the minimum wage over a period of several years.”

“Absolutely,” Tanden said. She continued, saying that recent studies had challenged the conventional view about raising minimum wage’s potential job-killing impact on jobs.

Tanden said that job loss rates due to such raises were “relatively low.”

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a study this week that found that raising the minimum wage to $15 would cut employment by 1.4 million but would also take 900,000 Americans out of poverty.

“I think the important thing is to be guided by facts and evidence,” Tanden added.

However, Tanden’s support for a $15 minimum wage strikes a strong contrast from when she advised the Clinton campaign against raising the minimum wage when she headed the Center for American Progress (CAP).

Tanden shrugged off a question over whether the Clinton campaign should consider raising the minimum wage, even noting that some leftist economists believe it would result in lost jobs.

She wrote:

Substantively, we have not supported $15 — you will get a fair number of liberal economists who will say it will lose jobs. Most of rest seems fine (obviously trade sticks out). Politically, we are not getting any pressure to join this from our end. I leave it to you guys to judge what that means for you. But I’m not sweating it.

Tanden came under during her nomination hearings for her years of publicly attacking Republicans, including many Republican senators who will vote on her confirmation.

She apologized to Republican senators on Monday, saying, “I deeply regret and apologize for my language and some of my past language,” Tanden said. “I know I have to earn the trust of senators across the board.”