Michele Bachmann Quotes

The real minimum wage is zero.

A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.

The concept of minimum wage is crazy, if you really stop to think about it. If $8 an hour seems right, why not $20 an hour? If it's coming by order of the government, why stop at any level? Why not just say everyone should get what Gates gets?

The impact of a minimum wage depends on how high it is to average wages. If you have too high a minimum wage, it will hurt job creation, and you will have negative job effects.

Obviously, we want people to be paid a wage that could help make ends meet, but when you increase artificially the cost of labor to do a job, then oftentimes, those jobs will just go away.

The problem with one single minimum wage is that you don't allow for younger people, who are less skilled and maybe more easily pushed out of the job market, or that the minimum wage should vary for different regions.

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.

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.

Everybody feels better about himself, his community, and his country if employers are paying workers well. Economics, though, teaches that if every employer is pressured to raise wages, some labor will be priced out of the market.

On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We've got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers - and there could be a lot of them - will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.

You get paid more at McDonald's than you do under the existing minimum wage.

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

If the opponents of an increase in the minimum wage were correct, then every time you fly to Seattle, you've got to bring a bagged lunch because there shouldn't be any restaurants because they should have all have gone out of business as a result of raising the minimum wage.

I have serious concerns with the discussion around minimum wage because it drives up costs, and it could harm jobs.

Especially for the young and the lowest-skilled, minimum wage becomes a toll that prevents many from entering the work force and gaining the skills that can make a low income or middle class worker a high income worker. This is so obvious that one wonders why liberals keep championing the minimum wage cause.

No one seriously believes that cutting the minimum wage is good for workers.

Raising the minimum wage and lowering the barriers to union organization would carry a trade-off - higher unemployment. A better idea is to have the government subsidize low-wage employment. The earned-income tax credit for low-income workers - which has been the object of proposed cuts by both President Clinton and congressional Republicans - has been a positive step in this direction.

Statistical studies are all over the lot about the pluses and minuses of raising the minimum wage.

The minimum wage was due for an increase, but it was important that we offset its cost to small businesses.

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

Today, there are more Americans working than ever before in the history of our Nation, and the average wage of those workers is higher than it has ever been in the history of our Nation.

The theory that if wages go up, employment goes down isn't a physical law like F=MA. It's a moral law, like 'Bedtime is 9:00 P.M.'

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.

Wal-Mart has always paid low wages, or, as Sam Walton put it, 'as little as we could get by with at the time.'

When you have 7 percent unemployed, you have 93 percent working.