John Raese Quotes

The minimum wage was enacted in 1937 during the Great Depression and it has been increased 16 times. It's a well-established economic policy to help families.

We have to raise the minimum wage.

Those of us in the Congress must confront and overcome Republican intransigence to increasing the minimum wage, extending unemployment insurance and protecting food stamps.

Raising the minimum wage means raising the living wage - and that's good news for Ohio.

I'm not sure there's another way to help move more people out of poverty than to raise the minimum wage.

President Obama has made a minimum wage increase a focal point of his economic agenda.

Raising the minimum wage isn't just pro-worker; it's pro-economic growth.

Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.

President Obama believes that income inequality is one of the most pressing matters facing the nation. If we are going to be a country that provides ladders of opportunity and believes in a thriving middle class, then we have to raise the minimum wage.

Raising the minimum wage means we have workers paying more in to support the Social Security system.

The most important lesson to take away from allowing the minimum wage and unemployment benefit data to talk is that abstract notions of what is right, good and just should be examined from a concrete, operational point of view. A dose of reality is most edifying.

living wage

We need to see the FLSA and the minimum wage as part of a larger struggle to cut poverty and to address the challenge of income inequality.

Minimum wage laws have never worked in terms of having the middle class attain more prosperity.

To reward work, to grow the middle class and strengthen the economy, to give millions of Americans the respect they deserve... It's time to raise the minimum wage.

Some states are doing better than others. Some states naturally have stronger economies. So it's not as simple as saying, 'Let's go to $15.' If you do it wrong, you can hurt the very people you're trying to help.

I was on the committee that helped raise the minimum wage here in Seattle. I introduced a statewide bill to raise the minimum wage in Washington state my first year in the state senate, and I really believe that raising the federal minimum wage, while not the answer to everything, addresses a lot of the issues at the very bottom.

I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows. When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market. That is the economic reality that seems, at least so far, to be missing from this discussion.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

It is time this Congress listened to the American people and minimum-wage workers, and it is time that we act.

You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, but it's a popular thing to do as well.

The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues, and that's not their concern.

The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs.

The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high.