Politics & Power Quote by Bill Pascrell

“Close to a decade” is doing two jobs at once: it’s a clock and a cudgel. Pascrell frames wage stagnation not as an economic side effect but as a deliberate political delay, a wait imposed on “working-class Americans” by a system that can act but chooses not to. The phrase “have waited too long” shifts agency away from workers (who are often told to retrain, hustle, or accept the market) and onto lawmakers who control the legal floor. It’s an accusation disguised as sympathy.

The real rhetorical muscle comes from the historical yardstick. By invoking 1938, Pascrell drags today’s argument out of the usual partisan trench and into a longer American story about the state stepping in when markets don’t. That reference is also a subtle legitimacy move: the minimum wage isn’t some modern progressive novelty; it’s been federal policy since the New Deal. Calling this stretch the “second longest period without a pay raise” turns a policy dispute into a record of neglect, the kind of statistic meant to embarrass opponents and stiffen spines among allies.

Context matters: this line lands in the post-2008 era when productivity kept rising, costs kept climbing, and wages at the bottom barely moved. By focusing on time elapsed rather than an hourly number, Pascrell invites listeners to feel the lag in their bones - rent cycles, grocery bills, years of “not yet.” It’s not just a case for raising the wage; it’s a case that the country has normalized inaction.