Elizabeth Warren has little to say about Hillary Clinton in 2016
If you want to know who Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren thinks should lead her party into the 2016 elections, you can ask her, but don't expect a direct response.
The Massachusetts senator ducked the question when asked whether she thought probable candidate Hillary Clinton should represent the future of the Democratic party.
"I think we have to see first of all if she declares and what she says she wants to run on. I think that's really the interesting question at this point," Warren said Thursday on "CBS This Morning."
While she has repeatedly said she will not be running for president in 2016, Warren has a strong opinion about what candidates for the nation's highest office should be talking about.
"I think there needs to be a vigorous debate in the whole question about running for president. I think everyone who is running for president needs to be talking about what they plan to do to strengthen and rebuild America's middle class," Warren said. "Let's be clear, this has been my lifetime's work, and I have watched year by year by year where America's middle class just has to take one punch after another. We've reached a point where this isn't going to work anymore."
But when asked how she differs from Clinton, she spoke only about her own stances.
"I'll tell you where I stand on all of the key issues. It's up to others to say whether they stand there as well or if they stand in some different place," Warren said. "I'll tell you where I stand on minimum wage; I'll tell you where I stand on equal pay for equal work."
Raising the federal minimum wage has long been a cause Warren has promoted, arguing that it's not the living wage it was when she was a child.
"My dad had had a heart attack, we had lost our family car, we nearly lost the house," she said. "My mother got a minimum wage job at a time when a minimum wage job would support a family of three, kept us above water. Today that won't happen and that's because of policies written in Washington."
She would not offer a specific number at first, but said she has supported it at $10.10 an hour. In August, the Senate failed to advance a bill that would have raised the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour.
"I would support it at a higher number and I am perfectly willing to sit down and negotiate with those who are willing," she said.
Warren also said she supports efforts to decrease interest for student loans to 3.89 percent.
"Right now the United States government makes billions of dollars in profits off the backs of kids who are trying to get an education through student loans. And the Democrats, 100 percent of us, have lined up to say in the United States Senate that the interest rate on student loans should be reduced. That would save a lot of people hundreds of dollars a year, some thousands of dollars a year," Warren said.