Watch as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont absolutely demolishes Republican arguments against raising the federal minimum wage.
Sen. Sanders’ refutation of arguments that raising the federal minimum wage would result in job losses is worth repeating.
I say they’re just factually wrong. In my state of Vermont, our minimum wage is $8.60 compared to the national minimum wage of $7.25. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates in America. You have states where there is virtually no minimum wage at all, and their unemployment rate is much higher. The facts just don’t bear it out. The reality is that if we raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour about 30 million Americans would get a pay raise, and 88% of them are adults. These are not kids. These are working families struggling to keep their heads above water. They need a pay raise. We’ve gotta pass it.
There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that giving a pay raise to the 30 million Americans referenced by Sen. Sanders would be a boon for our nation’s economy, an opinion that’s supported by data.
Princeton professors David Card & Alan B. Krueger started the change in thinking with their breakthrough paper that concluded, “minimum wage lead to increases in pay, but no loss in jobs.” A 2010 study published in the Review of Economics and Statistics showed a ten-percent increase in the minimum wage affected the restaurant and retail employment by less than one percent. And as a recent op-ed in The New York Times by one of the 2010 study’s authors points out, even (PDF) more (PDF) research (PDF) came to the same conclusions.
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