Angus Deaton Quotes

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

We have to raise the minimum wage.

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

The minimum wage is something that F.D.R. put in place a long time ago during the Great Depression. I don't think it worked then. It didn't solve any problems then and it hasn't solved any problems in 50 years.

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.

We never accept low wages as the driving force for employment or growth.

When I travel around the country and talk about the need to raise the minimum wage or expand access to paid leave, I often talk about the need for us to reject false choices.

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

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.

If you look at the future of the Democratic Party, things like raising the minimum wage - Democrats need to get behind raising the minimum wage and be clear on where we stand on trade deals.

The value of the minimum wage shouldn't be eroded, and it has been.

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.

The state of Alaska has a minimum wage which is higher than the federal level because our state leaders have made that determination.

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

During Seattle's successful campaign for a $15 an hour minimum wage, our opponents would sometimes roll their eyes and snort, 'If $15 is so good, why not $50?' It was a straw man argument: Nobody was proposing a $50 minimum wage; it would have been too high, and we said so.

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

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

The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage.

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.

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.

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.

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.