H.R. 1, the For the People Act, now has 225 co-sponsors, which means more than half the House has co-sponsored the bill, and I presume the House will begin deliberating the bill soon. I mean, yeah, the shutdown takes the oxygen out of the room, almost like that's the whole idea, but if we speak out enough, we can move the conversation in our direction, so Common Cause still helps you
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Raise the Wage Act, then the Economic Policy Institute (among other good government groups) still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act (sorry, Congress.gov still doesn't have a bill number at this writing!) would gradually increase our minimum wage to $15/hour by 2024, which is five years from now, so don't believe the hype about the "shock to small businesses" the bill would cause. The bill would also index the wage to inflation, which means it won't be some politician or other's manufactured hostage crisis every year, and it would also phase out the far lower tipped worker minimum wage, and anyone who complains about that very likely has a heart of stone. Seriously, they should go to the doctor and get that checked out. The rest of us will welcome more good Americans being able to make ends meet -- and get ahead.
Finally, the big pharmaceutical corporation Teva has introduced its own generic version of the EpiPen drug -- and, at $300, it just so happens to cost the same as Mylan's generic EpiPen. You remember Mylan? The big pharma corporation that took massive PR hits for jacking up the price of its EpiPen to absurd heights? Achieving parity with Mylan isn't a good look for Teva, but we're here to help, as a Change.org petition helps you tell Teva to make its generic EpiPen more affordable to good Americans. After all, it's not like most folks just have $300 lying around for a life-saving drug. If you want to mention to them that the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act would let our government manufacture generic versions of life-saving drugs whenever big pharma corporations price them too high, well, I won't stop you. Corporations do generally try to avoid governmental involvement in their affairs.
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