Zanny Minton Beddoes Quotes

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 real minimum wage is zero.

Literally, if we took away the minimum wage - if conceivably it was gone - we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.

A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.

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.

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 said, on a number of occasions, that we could have a lower minimum wage or no minimum wage.

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

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.

I'm more concerned about maximum wages, not minimum wages.

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.

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.

The national minimum wage has not been increased in 9 years. By year's end, 21 States across America will have a minimum wage exceeding the Federal minimum wage.

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.

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.

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.

When I started in the business, the minimum wage was $1.25. I've seen an enormous number of wage increases. Basically, it applies evenly to everyone in the business.

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

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

Like all other contracts, wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.

it seems to me absolutely scandalous to try to set wage levels which wipe out jobs. I mean these are people who are not on the dole. They want to work and if you price them out of the market, its gonna be a lot worse for them and for the economy.

My question becomes, 'If we want to empower people with higher pay, there are probably better ways to do it that are more enduring than simply a federal mandate on wage level.'

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

Establishing a 'livable wage' floor would immediately reduce the gap in average pay between American women and men.

We will always be a fair wage nation in a low wage region.