Republican Mehmet Oz, running against Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) for the state’s open United States Senate seat, says Washington, DC, ought to unleash high-paying energy sector jobs for Americans with wages they can live on rather than tinkering with the minimum wage.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Saturday, Oz said left-wing politicians such as Fetterman are overly focused on increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour when he says Pennsylvanians can hardly live on such a salary.
“My goal is not to get people just the minimum wage, it’s to get them much more than the minimum wage,” Oz said.
Lawmakers, Oz said, must go beyond the federal minimum wage and unleash energy sector jobs across the U.S., particularly in Pennsylvania, that would offer living wages with good benefits and opportunities for pay increases in the future. Such a plan, Oz said, is backed by American union workers.
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“My goal is not to get people just the minimum wage, it’s to get them much more than the minimum wage,” Oz said.
“In Pennsylvania, as a good example, we have a very very big advantage because we have so much natural gas and other energy beneath our feet here in Pennsylvania — enough to power the country for hundreds of years,” Oz continued.
“And yet, we’re not allowing energy producers to harvest it. And many of these energy companies are scared of John Fetterman,” he said. “They know what his policies have been, he’ll regulate them to death, and he isn’t going to allow them to do what they desire … to export [natural gas] overseas. We have so much opportunity to build a facility in Philadelphia to export natural gas that would allow us to hire tens of thousands of high-quality trade jobs. Unions like it.”
Oz said he envisions Pennsylvania as the nation’s leading energy state with salaries well beyond a $15 minimum wage — income that is close to impossible, he said, for families to live on.
“The minimum wage under [John Fetterman’s] plan is $0 because you’re not going to have a job,” Oz said.
“My ambition is to move away from just the minimum wage … I was with a hotel worker and I asked him how much money he was making and he said about $15 an hour and I asked how that was working and he said ‘Not that well, it’s very hard to raise a family on $15 an hour.’ He’s right,” Oz continued.
“You want to get $25, $50, $100 an hour salaries out there,” he said. “These trade jobs, if you’re building a pipeline … or harvesting natural gas, which by the way is very good for the environment … these are the kinds of movements you want amongst our people, bringing great wealth to the community.”
During the 2020 presidential election, as Breitbart News reported at the time, Pennsylvania union workers sounded the alarm on President Joe Biden and Democrats’ green energy agenda as an ultimate job-killer.
Likewise, Breitbart News analysis found that a Democrat green energy agenda similar to that of the one Biden promised to implement — supported by Fetterman — would wipe out Pennsylvania’s entire energy sector costing hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in lost wages.
Despite now defending fracking, Fetterman previously on multiple occasions said he did not support fracking and suggested he would like to see a ban on fracking across Pennsylvania.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.