Jerry Brown Quotes

Does anyone really believe it is possible to make even the most basic ends meet on $5.15 an hour?

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

Anyone who's tried to pay a heating bill, fill a prescription, or simply buy groceries knows all too well that the current minimum wage does not cut the mustard.

The current minimum wage simply is not supporting Ohio's working families.

The increase in inequality in income is a longtime trend, but the pressure on middle- and low-income workers is going up rapidly. Especially if they live in an area where there are high housing and gas prices, like California.

The sad fact is that in communities such as mine, the minimum wage is the maximum wage.

Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead.

America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.

Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist.

No family gets rich from earning the minimum wage. In fact, the current minimum wage does not even lift a family out of poverty.

Today a minimum wage earner has to work a day and a half just to pay for a full tank of gas. That is simply shameful.

At the current $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. A full-time worker with one child lives below the official poverty line.

It is unacceptable that someone can work full time - and work hard - and not be able to lift themselves out of poverty.

In the 1960s, a minimum wage job would keep a family of three afloat.

Nothing helps families make end meet than higher wages.

I live in a working-class community that is struggling at the poverty line, where people who work full-time jobs still at my corner bodega use food stamps. Do you think they care what the stock market's doing today or what the GDP number is? No.

Workers and students and part-time working parents across New Mexico are taking home too little, trying to stretch dollars as far as they'll go to pay for basic necessities.

Americans shouldn't have to hold down two or three jobs to make ends meet.

The minimum wage should be a living wage.

Even if we raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, it's still hard to prosper on that wage.

We need to do more to help the men and women across the country who are working hard but still struggling to make ends meet due to low wages and high healthcare costs.

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.

The average family earning minimum wage spends 141 percent of their income struggling to meet basic needs - food, shelter, clothing.

Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.