AOC: Increasing Minimum Wage Will Also Ease the Government’s Expenses on Safety Nets

EXCERPT:

OCASIO-CORTEZ: “Listen, I think that if any — not just Senator Manchin, but any person who thinks that a $15 minimum wage is a crazy socialist agenda is living in a dystopian capitalist nightmare. We should not prop that up. We should not continue that. People are sleeping in their cars, they can’t afford baby formula, there are basic goods that people can’t afford to live on on $7.25. It is deeply, deeply shameful that we’re even having this conversation. Because when you take the minimum wage from several decades ago and you actually account for inflation and productivity gains to today, it should be $24 an hour. So we need other Democrats to understand how deep of a compromise $15 an hour is. And by the way, this bill has a multi-year phase-in as well. So even if we pass this, to Progressives’ discontent, by the way, we’re talking about a multi-year phase-in, which will really chip away even more. So $15 for — as you mentioned, even his own constituents believe in the $15 minimum wage, it almost — every pocket of this country, you cannot afford rent if you’re making minimum wage. And in the United States of America you should — you know, if you’re working a full-time job, you should be able to afford to live. And by the way, when we keep minimum wage artificially low, it’s at a huge cost to our government and taxpayers as well because they are essentially enormous subsidies to companies like Walmart, Amazon, et cetera, in the form of us paying for social safety net programs that would not be necessary if people were paid the living wage to begin with.”