Raise Minimum Wage Quotes

#1. Oftentimes when you have the federal government or others step in and start to raise minimum wage, what happens is you take away or reduce some people's opportunity to grab the bottom rung of the economic ladder to get the opportunities and the skills that you need to move up that economic ladder.

Kevin Madden

#2. What we need to do is raise the minimum wage. We also need to hold onto equal pay. Women work for 76 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. That's not right in America.

John F. Kerry

#3. The bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.

Jim Clyburn

#4. As we move beyond Women's History Month, I am committed to advancing legislation to raise the minimum wage and ensure women are paid equally for equal work.

Colleen Hanabusa

#5. [W]e have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: Hiking the minimum wage has little or no adverse effect on employment while significantly increasing workers' earnings.

Paul Krugman

#6. 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.

Thomas Perez

#7. 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.

Bill Pascrell

#8. This is the debate we have every time we talk about the minimum wage, that if we raise it even 50 cents, that it means employers are just going to shut down. It's not true.

Stephanie Cutter

#9. The American people want to raise the minimum wage. Every poll tells us that. That bill will not get to the floor of the Senate. The American people want to ask the rich to pay more in taxes. But the legislation that will get to the floor is tax breaks for billionaires.

Bernie Sanders

#10. Hillary Clinton understands that if someone in America this country works 40 hours a week, that person should not be living in poverty. She understands that we must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

Bernie Sanders

#11. Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.

Edmund Phelps

#12. We should raise the minimum wage so that no one who works full time has to live in poverty

Barack Obama

#13. To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise,

Barack Obama

#14. My wife and I decided to try and kick start our kitchens to a $15 minimum wage for cooks. I've probably had to go through and raise every menu price now by 50 cents because it took away my profit. I just underestimated what it was going to cost.

Tom Douglas

#15. Regulate the banks, get money out of elections; raise the minimum wage, environmental issues. They're all very important and the Occupy movement made a difference. It shifted not only the discourse but to some extent, action on these issues.

Noam Chomsky

#16. If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine.

Marco Rubio

#17. We have to raise the minimum wage.

Martin O'Malley

#18. In my view, we need a massive federal jobs program which puts millions of our people back to work. We must end our disastrous trade policies. We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. And we have to fight for pay equity for women.

Bernie Sanders

#19. The difference between the very wealthy and the working poor has grown. We raise that minimum wage and we move forward with the vision of this president that we have, which is everyone pays their fair share.

Barbara Boxer

#20. I don't know of a single economist who disagrees that when you raise the minimum wage, you kill jobs for the poor.

Newt Gingrich