http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-cant-keep-his-story-straight-the-minimum-wage
He does not think there needs to be a federal minimum wage, he thinks individual states should set their own rates based on what is going on in their states. Is this controversial? Yes, but it is also realistic, the federal minimium wage has not provided enough income for people to have a minimum standard of life so it is failing people. Hillary has called for $12 an hour because she thinks anything more than that would not get thru Congress and at least that would help. Obama had called for $10 per hour, the same as Trump, who said we should leave it alone or raise it to $10.
Trump has said that "I’m saying that if we’re going to compete with other countries we can’t do that because the wages would be too high.”
Remark: We are competing with China and other nations that can pay low wages to provide products, either US companies need to accept less profit and treat their workers better, giving them living wages, or nothing really changes, the jobs stay overseas.
(1) Trump, like congressional Republicans, does not support an increase to the federal minimum wage; (2) Trump is not convinced the federal minimum wage needs to exist at all; and (3) Trump wants states to do their own thing.
Would people be better off if states did their own thing? If you had honest people running the states who cared about their people it would. Do we have that by and large?
The all-too-common misconception is that wages are (or should be) somehow dictated by how much
it costs to live. This has no viable connection to the level of pay a worker receives.
The two major determinants in the level of pay are..
1) The relative difficulty in replacing one qualified worker with another
2) The amount of value in dollar terms the employee is able to provide.
Just basic economics, friends.
[Edited on 7/28/2016 by alloak41]
Those things are true, however humanity dictates that our legislators become knowledgeable about what it costs for their constitutents to live and survive, in a land that promises every American the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Universal Living Wage needs to be examined, implemented, even if on a statewide basis.
