February 17, 2014
In this morning's Washington Post, E.J. Dionne makes the conservative case for raising the minimum wage. The money quote, all puns intended, comes from a Republican in California, Ron Unz, who ran for governor of that state and is a Silicon Valley millionaire:
“One of the strange things in our society right now is that we have all these low-wage workers who are getting $7.50, $8 or $9 an hour,” Unz said, “and because they earn such small wages, the government subsidizes them with billions or tens of billions of dollars of social welfare spending that comes from the taxpayer. It’s a classic example of businesses’ privatizing the benefits of their workers while socializing the costs.”
