The fundamental law of capitalism is: when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more workers. The idea that high wages equals low employment, it's absurd.
The person earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 isn't going out to eat at restaurants. They're not taking piano lessons. They're not going to the gym or the yoga studio. They're not sending mom flowers on Mother's day. What good is this person in the economy? If you raise it to $15 an hour, they're doing all of those things. And all of a sudden, not just business thrives, but small business thrives.
I think the idea that giant profitable corporations should pay their workers enough so that they don't need food stamps - since when is that left wing? How did that become "leftie?" That doesn't seem leftie to me. That seems common sense.
My message is that the counterclaim - which is that if wages go up, employment will go down - is a scam. It's a con job. It's an intimidation tactic. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere that it's true. On the contrary, where you find high wages you usually find low unemployment.
You can go back 150 years and literally find the same people saying the same thing in the same way. "If we have to pay you more, it will be bad for you." And that's because saying that is a much more polite way of saying, "I'm rich, you're poor, and I would prefer to keep it that way."
If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth to the wealthy leat to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.
But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.
When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it's a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the other way around.
Raising the minimum wage allows business people to stop thinking about workers simply as costs to be cut and allows you to start thinking about workers as customers to be cultivated.
The most pro-business thing you can do is to help middle-class people thrive.
If you care about real change, deep structural change, that involves politics, and all politics is friction. It takes leadership, and the willingness to create that friction, that leads to social change.
I was at the forefront of the effort to pass $15 minimum wage in Seattle, and have been collaborating with the people who are trying to make that happen across the country.
The only reason to have a 300-foot-long boat is because they're bigger than 200-foot-long boats.
Raising the minimum wage a lot across the board would make a big difference. It's not the only thing, but it's an indispensable part of solving the problem.
Fast food workers are all the governor has power to enact. Your state legislature is held hostage by the same nitwits that hold hostage the federal [government]. People who have confused suffocating collectivism, which is bad, for a necessity to solve collective action problems, which is what all human endeavor is based on.
The idea that high wages equals low employment, it's absurd.
Raising the overtime threshold - something that is about to happen. This is more complex so not as many people understand it, but it's equally consequential.
Raising the minimum wage is very efficient. Everybody's on the same playing field, it's a very simple rule, it doesn't require a lot of administration, you don't have to negotiate anything. It just is what it is.
The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers.
Now one person doing the job of one and a half. So as an employer I can get two people to do the work of three, and think about what that does for profits.
I was more conservative when I was younger. But I don't think that I've moved left - I think the country has moved right.
