Republicans want to keep you working for peanuts

From Robert Reich

The fourth major Republican debate began with the GOP's three leading candidates saying they oppose efforts to raise the minimum wage.

Donald Trump: “There is nothing that we do now to win. We don’t win anymore. … Taxes too high. Wages too high. I hate to say it, but we have to leave [the minimum wage] the way it is.”

Truth: Too high? Germany is more competitive now than the United States, with a higher tax rate than in the United States, a higher median wage, and even its lowest-wage workers better paid. How can Germany do it? Because its average worker is better educated than the typical American worker (Germany invests like mad in education, including world-class technical education), its infrastructure is more up-to-date, and its workers have more of a direct say in their companies.

Ben Carson: “Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.”

Truth: A higher minimum wage puts more money in the pockets of people who will spend it, thereby creating more jobs. The last time the U.S. raised the minimum wage, more jobs were created than were lost. After I led the successful fight to raise the minimum wage in 1996, a record-shattering 22 million net new jobs were added to the U.S. economy.

Marco Rubio: “If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine.”

Truth: Machines have already supplanted most good-paying manufacturing jobs -- pushing millions of Americans into the personal service sector (retail, restaurant, hotel, hospital, childcare, eldercare, physical therapy, etc) where human attention and touch are are so critical that machines can’t replace human beings. But most of these jobs pay very little. Which is why the minimum wage must be raised. Today’s minimum is already 24 percent below what it was the minimum was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.

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