Capitalist Calls for $15/Hour Minimum Wage
Guess who’s calling for a $15-an-hour minimum wage ? A self-proclaimed capitalist.
Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer made our case for a minimum wage increase yesterday in Bloomberg .
“The fundamental law of capitalism,” he says, “is that if workers have no money, businesses have no customers.”
Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, he says, is “perhaps the most powerful and elegant antidote” to rising economic inequality and declining job quality that crumble consumer demand.
Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would inject about $450 billion into the economy each year. That would give more purchasing power to millions of poor and lower-middle-class Americans, and would stimulate buying, production and hiring.
Read the whole column here .
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) have proposed legislation to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a $9 rate. Both proposals would index the minimum wage rate to rise with inflation.
