Brilliant, as usual, watch your Senator from Massachusetts and enjoy.
Sen. Warren: "Are you telling me you can't raise your prices by eight cents?"
At a Senate hearing on raising the minimum wage, Senator Warren explains that if the minimum wage were reflective of gains in worker productivity since the 60's-70's it would be about $22 per hour today, but somewhere in between then and now trickle down never happened. Those are my words, not hers.
Funny how right about the same time workers wages stagnated CEO pay began to skyrocket and has never looked back.
So Senator Warren asks, who got the other $14 dollars?
More below the fold . . .
Here is the end of the exchange . . .
Sen. Warren: "Are you telling me you can't raise your prices by eight cents?"
Rutigliano: "You know, typically, when costs rise we don't actually raise it just four cents, we might actually go a little higher. It has an inflationary effect on the economy, so, you may actually be taking away the money you just gave that employee, through the minimum wage increase on raised prices throughout the economy.
Sen. Warren: "I have to say, you've now switched your argument from what it was going to do to your business to what it's going to do to the economy, and I think Dr. Dube, you've looked at the inflationary effects of increasing the minimum wage, can you just give us a quick summary on this data?
Dr. Dube: "I think it is uncontroversial amongst economists that a minimum wage increase of this sort would not have a noticeable impact on the overall price level, because just the math doesn't add up, the number of people aren't getting the raises, there's not enough for it to show up in some kind of a wage/price spiral, so the effects on the overall price level? Very small."
ooooohhh, so now you are going to explain economics to Elizabeth Warren, please proceed . . .
Warren astutely points out that now that he can't defend his own personal interests the businessman has to claim that raising the minimum wage would hurt workers because prices would go up, never bothering to figure that earning more money would give those workers increased purchasing power which would drive the economy forward. As if spending money is so bad why would workers even want to EARN more money if they have to SPEND it. This is why businessmen often make horrible economists, they may know what it takes to run a profitable restaurant but they have no idea what they are talking about when discussing the larger national economy.
At the same time, the logic that says paying workers more might hurt the economy is NEVER applied to paying corporate executives too much. When it is raising workers wages we hear these stories that it will lead to inflating prices and other horror stories, but when the question turns to outrageous CEO compensation we are all told how necessary that is to attract "The Best and Brightest". Two different sets of rules.
So what happened to that $14per hour of increased productivity earned by workers since 1960 that never "trickled down"? I know where it went, right into the pockets of the wealthiest 1% of Americans.
Just want to say for the record thank God for Senator Elizabeth Warren. This may not be a huge SCHOOLing, I might have gotten more excited about this than I should have, but it is a great thing to behold, a Senator actually fighting for working class people. We need as many of those as we can get.
The Gentlemen Mr. Rutigliano above was respectful, to be sure, his mistake was trying to explain economics to PROFESSOR Senator Elizabeth Warren. In her rebuttal Senator Warren was polite and succinct, standing by the facts themselves. No wonder the Republican party and their financial backers fear this woman.
The floor is now yours.