Raising Minimum Wage Would Save Taxpayers BILLIONS Per Year

A new study shows that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would save American taxpayers more than $10 billion per year. But just like other studies have shown that worker-centric policies will be beneficial, this one will likely be overridden by corporations who want to continue paying us less than what we are worth. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

A new report has come out, showing that if we raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, not only is that going to help 32 million minimum wage workers across the United States, but it's also going to save the country $107 billion per year. Here's how that happens. First and foremost, we have to dispel a myth before we can even get into this. This is the myth that Republicans like to tell us that, Oh, why does somebody flipping burgers at McDonald's need to make $15 an hour? Well, the answer to that is that you actually don't flip the burgers at McDonald's. It is a double-sided grill and you lower the clamshell on top of it. I used to work grill at McDonald's in my teen years, there is no burger flipping, but that's not actually the myth we're going to dispel. The myth is that teenagers are the only ones making minimum wage.

No, the vast majority of people making minimum wage in the United States where people over the age of 25, these are adults trying to make ends meet on minimum wage, minimum wage that has been stagnant for over a decade. So yes, it is time to raise the minimum wage. And in fact, the democratic proposal to raise it to $15 an hour over the next four and a half years is still not good enough. It needs to be $15 an hour today for the rest of today and then forever. And then it needs to keep place, uh, pace, excuse me, with inflation and cost of living, because that's what hasn't happened. Folks, if it had kept pace with those other things and wages were fair based on inflation and cost of living increases, the minimum wage would be well over $20 per hour today. And back to the study.

What happens when you have grown adults trying to support a family on just a couple of dollars an hour is they have to turn to social safety net programs, you know, Medicaid, food stamps, and that costs us money. That's money that the federal government doles out to States that doesn't instead go to other things. It has to go to prop up these workers who corporations want to pay poverty wages too, because they know that the taxpayers are just going to subsidize you privatized the profits, you externalize the risks. That's what happens. That's the formula for these corporations that control our country because we do not live in a democracy. We don't live in a democratic Republic. We live in a corporate ocracy where these corporations are the ones who call the shots. They tell politicians, we don't want to pay more in wages. Politicians are sitting on a mountain of evidence showing us that raising the minimum wage saves us money, pulls tens of millions out of poverty.

Does all these great and wonderful things. And they say, well, your campaign money over here. It looks a lot better than this mountain of data. Let's move forward with your idea to just not raise wages. And this happens with both Republicans and some Democrats who are not on board with raising the minimum wage. And again, we see this time and time again, and it's not just with issues like raising the minimum wage. It's about things like Medicare for all, no matter how many times a study comes out saying that Medicare for all pays for itself and actually saves us money as a country. Like it's the best plan available. Politicians still say, we want, we want these industries to keep price gouging you because they fund our campaigns. Whenever we get a new study saying that, Hey, if we just regulate air pollution a little bit better, we can save 3,400 American lives per year. Politicians say, ah, but these companies might have to pay a couple dollars more per year and that could take away from what they give to my campaign. So I'm not going to do it. So this study, like all of the other ones will probably lead to absolutely nothing because that's what happens in Washington DC, because nobody minus a handful of,

You know, individuals. But other than that,

And those, none of the people in Washington DC actually care one bit about facts and science and data. And most importantly about making the lives of Americans alive,

A little less terrible.