#RaiseTheWage

We nerd out *hard* on the minimum wage as Dems in Congress renew their push for $15 — PLUS: Chad Bolt returns to break down the news of the week, ICYMI.

This week on Off-Kilter… $7.25. That’s the hourly rate America’s federal minimum wage has stayed stuck at for nearly a decade. But this week, Democrats in the 116th Congress took a quick break from railing against Trump’s shutdown to make raising the poverty-level federal minimum wage to $15 an hour one of the top items on their list now that they’re back in control of the House. Congressional Republicans’ predictable refrain is their favorite zombie myth: raising the minimum wage kills jobs. So to dig in to whether there’s any truth to such claims, Rebecca brings in one of her favorite nerds: Rachel West, director of antipoverty research at the Center for American Progress — and as her title would suggest, a scary-deep expert when it comes to the research literature on this and other antipoverty policies. (Warning: they nerd out hard.)

But first, Chad Bolt, associate director of policy (and of shameless plugs) at Indivisible returns to join Rebecca for an update on the shutdown and the toll it’s taking on struggling folks; a look at how some of the most important committees in Congress, like the House Financial Services Committee, are poised to make waves under new leadership (Maxine Waters! AOC! Ayanna Pressley!!!); AOC’s schooling of former Governor Scott Walker on how taxes work; the terrifying Trump proposal to block-grant Medicaid; and more of the week’s biggest stories in poverty and inequality.

This week’s guests

• Rachel West, Director of Antipoverty Research at the Center for American Progress
• Chad Bolt, Associate Director of Policy at Indivisible

For more on this week’s topics

• For more on the toll Trump’s shutdown is taking as it drags on, check out; CAP’s overview of how it’s hurting low-income families; this NPR story on how furloughed workers are taking temporary gigs to make ends meet; DCist on how some (like friend of the show Kings Floyd) are being forced to “choose” between paying their bills and affording needed medications; TalkPoverty on how the shutdown is causing some parents to pay twice for childcare
• Rebecca’s op-ed in Rewire on how the shutdown is jeopardizing SNAP and other food assistance programs
• The National Low-income Housing Coalition’s interactive map showing which HUD contracts are expiring under the shutdown
• PLUS: this NYT piece on how the shutdown may throw the U.S. economy into downturn
• Here’s why you should get excited about the new blood on important Congressional committees like House Financial Services
• Get up to speed on why a federal court just blocked the Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the Census
• Here’s a quick refresher on block grants (and why Trump’s call to block-grant Medicaid is so dangerous and evil)
• For more on the #RaiseTheWage Act (and a great roundup of the research Rachel referenced), check out her nerd-heaven twitter thread (and if you’re not following her, you’re doing it wrong)

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. $7.25; that’s the hourly rate that America’s federal minimum wage has stayed stuck at for nearly ten years. But this week Democrats in the 116th congress took a break from railing against Trump’s temper tantrum to make raising the poverty level federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, one of the top items on their list now that they’re back in control of the House. Congressional Republicans’ predictable refrain in response is their favorite zombie myth, sing it with me folks, raising the minimum wage, they claim, kills jobs. So to help me dig into whether there’s any truth at all to the Republican Party’s claims, I bring in one of my very favorite nerds, and that’s Rachel West. She’s the director of anti-poverty research at the Center for American Progress. And as her title would suggest she’s a scary deep expert on the research literature on raising the minimum wage and other anti-poverty policies too. Warning; we nerd out hard, y’all. But first, Chad thank you so much for coming back and helping me out with this week’s “In Case You Missed It” again.

CHAD BOLT: Hey, no problem, I wasn’t sure I’d be invited back.

VALLAS: You were and I mean, I don’t want to put a percentage of why I had you back on the following but it may have had something to do with the fact that I get to introduce you as the associate director of shameless plugs at Indivisible because that works so well last week and was also so accurate that I kind of don’t want to let it go.

BOLT: Look I just want to make sure folks have got everything they need to be an effective advocate to their members of congress.

VALLAS: And I appreciate it and you know I’m just ribbing you because I love you, the stuff you guys put out is really, really useful and actionable. But a thing that we need to start with here because it’s still the dark cloud looming over Washington, looming over really communities across this country, it’s Trump’s government shutdown. Obviously still in force, what day are we even up to at this point?

BOLT: We are on day 27 of the shutdown.

VALLAS: Is it 27? Or is it 26? Oh, do you know what? This is so interesting, if Jeremy were here he would have said it was day 26 because he would have given away the day we’re taping! But you appropriately said day 27 because this is going to air tomorrow.

BOLT: That’s because Jeremy just always messes stuff up on Off Kilter.

VALLAS: I love how you feel really good about how you’re doing that better than he did on air and this is you’re only a couple weeks into doing this as a regular stint so I really hope Jeremy still listens to this show and is hearing this right now.

BOLT: This is pretty terrible, I’ve taken over Jeremy’s seat on “In Case You Missed It” on a temporary basis and I’ve done nothing but sh*t talk him.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: And create things that Will needs to bleep out. So on that note, but totally serious note so we’re in day 27 of the government shutdown. It is now multiple days past the point it needed to reach to attain the notorious distinction of being the longest government shutdown in US history. So if Trump is looking for ways to say we’re number one for his administration, he’s certainly finding them in that regard. But as this shutdown continues to drag on and on and on, people are paying the price in very human terms. And we got into that a little bit last week with some of the effect we were already seeing but that’s only gotten worse, particularly for federal workers and contractors.

BOLT: So there are actually 800,000 federal workers not getting paid right now, either because they’re at work but not getting a paycheck or because they’ve been told not to come to work in the first place and not getting a paycheck. And that’s taking a huge toll on folks. People are applying for temporary jobs so that they can continue getting paid during the shutdown. They’re relying on credit cards to pay the bills, they’re relying on family and friends. I read about one federal worker who was actually in government service during the 2013 shutdown and thought wow, I’d better plan ahead in case there’s another one of these and so he went and got his EMT license so he’s be prepared to hop into a temporary gig again if this happened again. Read that he is on the EMT hustle at the moment, so it’s pushing people so unnecessarily to have to make hard choices. I read about another employee who had to choose between paying her electricity bill and the medication that she needs. And the thing is all of this adding up. So it’s having a very significant impact on individual federal workers but it’s all rolled together and starting to have a much broader effect on the economy.

VALLAS: I want to give a shout out to the federal worker you mentioned because I saw that story too and it’s actually a friend of mine and someone that a lot of listeners of the show might know, it’s Kings Floyd who’s done a lot of work in the disability community and with groups like CAP’s Disability Justice Initiative. So there are folks out there who this is what happened to Kings. She had to pay her electric bill and in fact we all deal with auto-pay, we have our bills on schedule and her electric bill was taken out of her account because it was time to have that paid. And she didn’t have enough money left for her medications that she needs. Think about the how monstrously f’d up it is that federal workers are having to make, I’m putting choices in very big scare quotes between keeping their lights on and staying healthy and being about to afford their prescription meds. That is what is impacting people who are often portrayed by the right as being a hell of a lot more privileged than they really are, having more of a cushion than we know a lot of them to be.

BOLT: So, so true.

VALLAS: I also want to just note, we talked about this a lot last week with Sam Berger, our resident shutdown nerd who we brought in as our ringer on this stuff but it just can’t be overstated. Federal workers are in a position where at least as Republicans keep reminding us are most of them going to get backpay to make them whole for the paychecks we’re not getting right now. But federal contractors in a lot of cases, and we’re talking about custodial workers, we’re talking about cafeteria workers, some of the lowest paid folks on the federal payroll. Contractors are not necessarily in a position where they are going to get that backpay. And so we might actually see some of the folks who are the lowest income and the least able to afford to take this kind of hit being the ones who end up being the hardest hit by the shutdown.

BOLT: It’s just cruel. They go into public service, they’re working for the federal government and they’re working without pay and it’s going on a month now and so understandably it’s having pretty dire effects on them and their families. And it’s not just on an individual basis. An average federal worker has missed on average $5,000 in pay so far. That’s a total of $200 million in unpaid wages each day. And on Tuesday the Council of Economic Advisers doubled their estimates for how much economic growth is being lost each week. So this is all starting to have a really, really negative effect on the economy generally. They’re now estimating that over the last month we’ve lost half a percentage point in economic growth. Keep in mind that over the last quarter growth was just above 2 percent so to lose a half percentage point of that through this totally unnecessary government shutdown that is throwing so many peoples’ lives into a tailspin is just such a shame.

VALLAS: So one other set of impacts that is not necessarily happening in this moment but which is looming and we started to reference a little bit of this last week. But I really feel like it deserves some attention right now is the impact on nutrition assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. We talked last week with Sam about how as part of its’ chaotic scrambling response to this shutdown the Trump administration through the US Department of Agriculture had announced last week don’t worry, food stamp benefits are good through February and a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief and went oh, OK, maybe we’re OK. But boy is that not the end of the story. And if you dig just a little bit deeper what you end up actually seeing is that if the shutdown drags on past February, which who knows, I’m not seeing an end in sight, I don’t know if you are.

BOLT: No.

VALLAS: We made Sam look into his crystal ball last week and even he, who often is very proud to make prognostications that other people are worried about making, I mean he didn’t even know, right? So if the shutdown drags on into March the Trump administration made very clear, they don’t have a plan for what to do with SNAP. In fact right now what they’re scrambling to do is to get low income households SNAP benefits to them early, ahead of March in ways that are creating all kinds of chaos for welfare offices across this country, for families who are now being told just hold onto that, that’s your Februrary benefit, that’s your March benefit. Please just budget this appropriately, I mean come on man, this is what’s happening. And at the same time you’ve got programs like WIC, that’s Women, Infants and Children that stands for, that’s literally infant formula and food for pregnant women and women with young children under five. That program isn’t even funded all the way through March, or excuse through February. And we’ll start to run out of funds and already is if the shutdown continues to drag on. Same deal with school lunch and school breakfast. So really huge, far-reaching impacts on a whole range of programs that literally allow families to put food on the table.

BOLT: Yeah, the list goes on and it really underscores the consequences of the shutdown are only going to get more and more severe the longer it goes on and the number of people it effects and hurts is going to get bigger and bigger as it goes on. And meanwhile what is congress doing?

VALLAS: Yeah, so we’re getting stuck in the depressing horrible news here of how this is impacting people, how this is impacting the economy, what is congress doing right not about this, Chad?

BOLT: So shamefully, Rebecca the answer is pretty much nothing, which is really too bad but I want to be clear about who the key actors are here. Trump could make this go away in a second by saying he would sign the legislation that the House has already passed to reopen the government. So first and foremost this is his shutdown he said so. And he continues to own it but the reason why this impasse in congress hasn’t even reached Trump yet is because Mitch McConnell continues to protect him. Mitch McConnell is totally complicit in the Trump shutdown because he refuses to put legislation that has already passed the House to a vote on the Senate floor. He wants to pretend it’s business as usual in the Senate. It’s not for all of the reasons we just discussed and so the Democrats have done a great job of driving that message home. They’ve blocked votes on legislation that is unrelated to the shutdown that McConnell’s trying to move. Again, he’d like to pretend that the Senate should be focused on other things, they shouldn’t. They should be focused on reopening the government. But what it means is that there’s been no progress. So rightfully the House and Senate actually had a scheduled recess coming up next week and both the House and Senate have decided to cancel that recess. So they can stay in DC and keep at this even though there’s at this point no real end in sight. But that brings me to what folks can do.

VALLAS: And that’s the thing I think people are really wondering right now. You’ve got if I had to put my cards on the table and I feel like a lot of people are starting to speculate along these lines, what could bring this shutdown to an end. Some people are starting to say is it riots at the airports by TSA workers, is it, I mean just the other day I was hearing about this in a meeting earlier, apparently a gun made it through security at an airport and wasn’t found until the person had not just boarded the plane but landed. So that kind of stuff is happening right now, it’s those kinds of things that potentially are going to help bring this to a close. But what should people be doing right now if they want to help raise their voices and help bring this thing to an end?

BOLT: So circling back to what I said earlier about McConnell being a one man barrier in the Senate. What we need to keep doing is keep the pressure up on senators, whether you’ve got a Republican senator or a Democratic senator, keep the pressure up. Slowly but surely more Republican senators and I do mean slowly but surely more Republican senators, it was Lamar Alexander from Tennessee this week are coming out and saying the shutdown should end, the Senate should vote on the House legislation that’s already passed. We need more of that. So if you’ve got a Republican senator what you need to do is keep calling their office and saying I want you to make a public statement that the Senate should be voting on the House passed legislation, pressure Mitch McConnell to put that to a vote, he is the one who can, he is the only one who can decide to schedule a vote in the Senate on that bill and if he did it would pass, that’s the thing. The Senate is ready to pass this legislation, it’s Mitch McConnell in service to Trump, in protection of Trump who’s not putting it on the floor. And if you’ve got a Democratic senator, as them to continue standing strong, don’t make a deal for wall money and continue opposing legislation unrelated to ending the shutdown so it forces Mitch McConnell to admit this is not business as usual and that he’s got a job to do for the American people and that’s to put the House legislation on the floor to a vote.

VALLAS: And we’ve re-upped Indivisible’s handy tools for anyone who’s looking to engage. Those are as usual on our nerdy syllabus page, folks can find them there. Look I did the shameless plug for you, Chad!

BOLT: I know that was so beautiful Rebecca, I’ve taught you well.

VALLAS: I mean I was nervous I was stepping on your toes for a second and putting on my shameless plug hat.

BOLT: Not at all, I could not have done it better myself.

VALLAS: I guess it’s not shameless if it’s not for my stuff, it’s altruistic, was that an altruistic plug?

BOLT: I’m loving it. [LAUGHTER] This episode’s going great so far for me, somehow Jeremy’s not even here, he’s the one receiving all of the brunt.

VALLAS: You do have a pretty good gig I have to say, you’ve set this up well, Chad, just going to congratulate you for that.

BOLT: I’m going to ride it as long as I can.

VALLAS: So speaking of congress because I really can’t handle anymore of the doom and gloom shutdown talk right now.

BOLT: Yeah, let’s get to some good news.

VALLAS: Yeah I gotta say speaking of congress we do have some good news coming out of congress and we I think have been hoping for the news we’re about to share for some number of days now waiting to see when the new committee chairs and assignments are going to be announced and we actually got that news this week and a lot of it’s really exciting, particularly the House Financial Services Committee, which is where I want to start even though it sounds really wonky but we’ll explain why.

BOLT: Boom, the House Financial Services Committee! [LAUGHTER] My mood is improved even just seguing from one topic to the next, I’m already so excited about this.

VALLAS: “Boom, the House Financial Services Committee” definitely a phrasing that has never before now been uttered but it deserves to be today.

BOLT: Get used to it Rebecca. [LAUGHTER] Because the “Boom” House Financial Services Committee is going to be chaired by none other than Maxine Waters.

VALLAS: Whoo hoo Auntie Max. Love me some Auntie Max.

BOLT: She’s just such an outstanding leader and incoming chair for this committee, really excited to see what she does both in terms of legislation and in terms of using her committee’s oversight authority to hold the Trump administration accountable. But why is this committee so important? It’s got a pretty wide ranging jurisdiction over issues and federal agencies that it oversees. And it’s the committee that decides as you might have guessed from its name whether to constrain banks or let them run wild. It decides whether to stop discrimination in banking and lending or let it go unchecked. It decides whether to make student loan servicers answer to the students they serve or to continue taking advantage of them. and to be honest Rebecca this is a committee that historically members of both parties wanted to try and get on is because what it meant is that you can bring in a lot of fundraising dollars from industry. I’m happy to say this new batch of freshman in particular that have been added to the committee that is not what they are here to do. And so some of the names that we saw added to the committee, so excited about this.

VALLAS: I’ve got to be honest I don’t know that if I didn’t know what was coming next I would say how could I get more excited than to have Auntie Max chairing this committee that does all those things and has all the oversight responsibilities you just mentioned but wait, there’s more.

BOLT: There’s more! So we’ve got Chuy Garcia who’s a great new member of congress out of the Chicago area. Rashida Thlaib from Michigan, Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts.

VALLAS: Actually my parents’ member of congress.

BOLT: Love it, that’s a fun fact!

VALLAS: It is indeed.

BOLT: I had no idea.

VALLAS: In case you’re listening, congresswoman.

BOLT: Yeah, very important constituent here in the Off Kilter studios. We’ve got Katie Porter out of California and of course we’ve got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

VALLAS: Last but not least, the big AOC.

BOLT: So really excited to see what this committee does.

VALLAS: And I want to jump in there since you just mentioned some of those names. Just to put two and two together here, you described the immensely important responsibilities that this committee has as well the approach that has been taken in the past to why people have been especially excited to be assigned this committee but in the moments after the committee assignments were announced we started to see tweets from some of the freshman members that you were just naming. I want to share a couple of these because of how wonderfully cause for optimism they are but also but how amazing it is to thing of the following as radical for what this committee might be taking on. We saw Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley say quote, “to anyone that’s ever come home to an eviction notice, felt overwhelmed by student debt, or worked the second and third shift; when I learned that I was appointed to the Financial Services Committee tonight I thought of you, we belong everywhere, I’ll never stop fighting for you.” AOC, “Personally, I’m looking forward to digging into the student loan crisis, examining for-profit prisons, ICE detention and exploring the development of public and postal banks to start” And then she puts some big smiley faces. I got to say to see these and other freshman members joining the House Financial Services Committee with the explicit goal and mission of addressing the financial struggles of everyday Americans instead of cozying up to and looking out for Wall Street is exactly the kind of change that I know I’ve been hoping for from this congress.

BOLT: It’s so, so huge. It wasn’t that long ago that I was coming on the show to talk about a piece of legislation moving through congress that we were calling at the time the bank lobbyist act.

VALLAS: Oh God, it’s still too soon, I’m sorry I have all kinds of feelings.

BOLT: I know.

VALLAS: That are welling up that I’d forgotten I had.

BOLT: I’m sorry, but don’t worry we’re turning a page. So this was a bill to deregulate some of the largest banks in the country, it was written at industry’s behest. Republicans used their control of the committee we’re talking about now to move it through the House and frankly a lot of Democrats got on board with that effort in the senate. As someone who’s followed economic policy for a while I would like to think of this as a turning point. It is the last gasping breath of the democratic approach to just generally economic policy. Where thinking of it as playing on the other side’s home turf, thinking of all of our economic issues as being away games, having to play out of the Republicans playbook, this is just such a serious turning point I think. And I hope that that approach for Democrats becomes a thing of the past and we can look back and say wow the bank lobbyist act, that was the last time we ever tried the deregulatory scheme. And this new batch of folks on the committee, for reasons that you just said, those tweets are really stirring, particularly Ayanna Pressley, this is an entire new purpose for Democrats on this committee and I’m just really excited to see Democrats wanting to reclaim home field advantage on the economy, start writing our own playbook on it again.

VALLAS: Now it’s not just who’s getting on committees that is cause for celebration this week. It’s also, I think people probably know where I’m going with this, it’s also —

BOLT: Who’s going off of them!

VALLAS: Who’s getting taken off of committees and of course we are talking about the illustrious Steve King, a.k.a. the Republican Party’s own white supremacist that they are still not disavowing but have taken the small, if positive step this week of taking him off of committees. I have to say there’s been a lot of debate about this this week and clearly strong message being sent by a lot of folks on the left that this is not enough, we still have a white supremacist in congress, in the Republican Party who the party does not feel uncomfortable enough with that fact to disavow or to push out of the party or of congress but this is a small step in the right direction. It reflects greater recognition that I think we’ve seen on the part of Republican leadership to date that it’s a problem to be a white supremacist.

BOLT: Yeah.

VALLAS: So I will award them a golf clap, I think that’s probably what’s due here.

BOLT: It is long, long, long overdue.

VALLAS: And also maybe a good step would have been back in November or beforehand not backing him to be reelected. So let’s be clear, there was a lot more that could have been done and could still be done here but a good sign none the less and also cause for remarking upon as we think about who is coming onto committees. But Chad, speaking of AOC, speaking of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez who I feel barely ever gets called by her name, I’m part of the problem there.

BOLT: I try to make a point of it.

VALLAS: She had a pretty, I feel like it’s silly to say she had a big week on Twitter because that is her life, she uses social media incredibly effectively and really is driving so much of the debate in these early days in the 116th Congress, but this week there’s been one really, really notable movement on social media that she really kicked off which was around taxing super, super wealthy people in this country a little bit more. What did we see happen, Chad?

BOLT: So she’s floated a proposal to raise marginal tax rates as high as 70% which anyone who listens to your show probably knows that’s a little higher than the current top tax rate.

VALLAS: Certainly higher than Trump wanted it to be when he lowered it as part of his tax law.

BOLT: That’s right but there’s actually a really good economic case and a lot of economists agree on this that 70% is around the optimal tax rate for very high incomes and I think at this point it’s probably taking just a second to break down exactly how marginal tax rates work.

VALLAS: Because that’s a super wonky term, let’s break that down.

BOLT: Yeah, and the audience for this I think actually is none other than former governor Scott Walker who took it upon himself to tweet some stuff about marginal tax rates this week. He explained it to a fifth grader in a way that didn’t get it quite right.

VALLAS: I feel bad for the fifth grader who was learning from someone who also didn’t understand tax policy despite how much time he spent trying to lower tax rates for rich people in his former state.

BOLT: So what he said to the fifth grader is OK, imagine you got paid ten dollars for doing chores at your grandma’s house and then you went home and your parents took seven of those dollars from you leaving you with three dollars. That’s how taxes worked under Reagan is what his tweet said. And that just really gets it wrong because the kid in this example doing the chores, his first ten dollars under the US tax code under presidential administration is taxed at zero percent, anybody’s first ten dollars is not taxed.

VALLAS: And I love hearing this because the way you’re putting it probably sounds like it’s only the first ten dollars, it’s actually a lot more than the first ten dollars, too.

BOLT: It actually goes way higher.

VALLAS: It actually goes a little higher, just for anyone who’s wondering.

BOLT: But you don’t get into that 70 percent range and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is not proposing that you get into that range until you’re onto your ten millionth and first dollar. So from your ten million and first dollar yes, a 70 percent marginal tax rate would mean 70 cents was taken in taxes out of that dollar. But keep in mind you’re making ten million dollars! That’s not, that’s different from the kid that Scott Walker was talking to who got paid ten dollars for doing chores at his grandma’s house.

VALLAS: A little bit, it’s a little bit different if you were to tell me would I feel different if I had an income of ten dollars a year versus ten million dollars a year, yeah there’s a pretty friggin big difference there that Scott Walker might not understand. But part of what as really interesting in watching the response to this was well here she comes out with this proposal and really I think pretty clearly just to start some conversation she wanted to see where that was going to go. Republicans freaked out. The entire Republican Party, Twitter melted down trying to shut her down because they went oh my God, and the reason that they freaked out so much was because she had tapped into something that actually is really popular. It turns out Americans don’t think that super rich people in this country are paying enough in taxes and actually even the concept of raising the marginal tax rate on ten millionaires — is that the right term?

BOLT: Millionaires making at least ten million a year?

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: That takes so much longer, this is why we lose, Chad, this is why we lose. So even that new idea that she’s floating here itself it turns out polling tells us in one and a half times more popular than Trump’s border wall just for context.

BOLT: Yeah so if you take nothing else away from our discussion now of marginal tax rates it’s that 59% of Americans in this recent poll support the idea, and not just generally about raising taxes on the wealthy although that is an extremely popular idea. But the specific proposal of raising top rates to 70% in a recent poll, 59% of Americans supported it. so if you hear someone talking about an idea like this and saying oh, there might be a good case for it but politically it’s just dead. It’s not, it is extremely popular and both parties need to catch up to where the American people are on this.

VALLAS: Well and that’s I think where this goes and part of what I think we’re seeing from AOC and the potential that she has and is using so well from this bully pulpit that she’s got is the power to shift the Overton window incredibly rapidly in ways that help close the gap between where the American people are and have been for sometime on a lot of issues like taxing the rich more so that people are paying their fair share if they have a first yacht and a second yacht and a third yacht to put in their first and second yachts. The lag between where the American people are on these issues and the policies they want to see and where Washington is because that gap is monstrous. We’re going to talk more about that later in the show in the context of the minimum wage for example where we’ve got hugely popular policy, raising the minimum wage and yet Washington not able to keep pace larger because Republicans opposed that, but also because you just called this out and I think it’s really important because in a lot of ways and also because and you just called this out and I think it’s really important, because in a lot of ways Democrats in congress have, for a long term, been scared to bring up what they have viewed as a dirty four letter, which is [WHISPERING] taxes and that the concept of raising [WHISPERING] taxes has been viewed as so toxic and so third rail that we’ve socialized people away from going to where the American people are and where economic policy might inform us. So really excited to see where this conversation goes and thank you AOC for tapping into what the American people actually are hoping for from their leaders in congress. Meanwhile hate to spoil some of the good news here but got to bring back in the bad we heard from the Trump administration just a few days ago that they’re not done trying to take healthcare away from tens of millions of Americans and specifically they’re not done trying to dismantle the Medicaid program in order to do that. So Chad what did we hear out of the Trump administration this week.

BOLT: Yeah so I think it would come as no surprise to listeners of this show that this is an ongoing fight that the Trump administration wants to take up you’ll remember the congress and Republicans in Congress through Trump care tried to decimate Medicaid as we know it and those effort continue now administratively. The Trump administration we’ve learned is continuing to draw up plans to block grant Medicaid which would be a huge, huge change to the program and have tremendous implications and they’re planning to do it through Trump’s executive authority, totally going around congress.

VALLAS: Spoiler, legal advocates have already said this is so freaking illegal oh my God, he does not have the authority to do this without legislation but we also know that that’s Trump entire playbook at this point. When he doesn’t get his cruel agenda through congress he turns around and he sidesteps congress and tries to do the same things or as close to them as possible by fiat, he’s actively being sued for trying to take Medicaid away from people who can’t find work or get enough hours at their job. He calls them work requirements, we know it’s really just dismantling Medicaid and this is just another chapter in that same story. I’m actually planning to have more discussion on this next week because it’s really worth digging into the details but for anyone who doesn’t remember what block grant means from the health care debate. We actually have numbers we can put to this because of having fought this fight so many times before and also so recently. We’re talking about a policy that if it were in effect would cost between 14 and 21 million Americans their Medicaid. That is what’s at stake and we’ll talk about this next week by make no mistake, people die, people die from policy changes and cuts to health insurance like this and that’s what’s at stake if Trump really does go down this road so lots more this week but just wanted folks to be aware that that was in the mix from the news cycle that is mostly shutdown right now and drowning out a lot of other important things. I want to close with one piece of good news Chad.

BOLT: Let’s do it.

VALLAS: Because I feel like, I keep bringing myself down and I keep needing to give myself a little shot in the arm in response.

BOLT: I like that we’re alternating between good and bad.

VALLAS: Except that it’s kind of a rollercoaster emotionally as I’m living this.

BOLT: It totally is.

VALLAS: I’m like yay, no, yay!

BOLT: Off Kilter: emotional rollercoaster.

VALLAS: Oh my God and I guess that’s kind of what 2019’s going to be in so many ways, we’ve got this new congress, we’ve got the presidential primary season heating up but we also still have Trump in the White House but —

BOLT: Get ready.

VALLAS: My emotions are complicated.

BOLT: Keep your arms and hands inside the car at all times.

VALLAS: That’s a pro-tip. So the good news we’ll close out with, folks may have seen a federal court blocked the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the census, that’s a proposal that we saw Trump pushing as just yet another attack on immigrants, yet another attack on communities, many of whom are living in the shadows. This was an attempt to scare people using the census. We also know it would have had really far reaching policy implications because the census is what the federal government uses to count people and so we would end up with an inaccurate count that could have all kinds of far reaching implications for policy, for budgeting, for federal programs, federal agencies and tons more. The court concluded that the question, if it had been added to the census would cause hundreds of thousands, if not millions of immigrants in this country to go uncounted, we know that’s exactly what the Trump administration was after. This was by design and also released at the same time when there was a literal Nazi working in the White House on things like this as well as the public charge attack on immigrant communities.

BOLT: That’s right.

VALLAS: So not the end of the road here. I’m sure we’re going to see continued battling in the courts but at least one piece of good news for the moment that it’s worth ending on.

BOLT: Yep, this is great news because I’ve said it before I think on this show, a healthy democracy would have rejected Trump the way a healthy body rejects a virus. But you can’t have a healthy democracy if you’re not counting everybody who lives here and particularly if you’re undercounting one particular population to the tune of hundreds of thousands or millions. And so like Rebecca said, this is not over but we did get a piece of good news on this this week.

VALLAS: Chad, bring me some more good news next week, I’ll miss you in the meantime but do not go away, more Off Kilter after the break and we’re goin to be nerding out hard, hard folks, on the minimum wage.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Earlier this week House Democrats introduced legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from $7.25 an hour where it’s been stuck for a decade thanks to their Republican counterparts who have kept our nation’s lowest paid workers from getting the raise they sorely need and deserve for almost ten years. So I decided it was time to bring in my favorite minimum wage nerd, someone whose research is referenced all the time on this show and in anti-poverty circles more broadly and that’s Rachel West, direct of anti-poverty research at the Center for American Progress. Rachel thank you for letting me steal a little bit of your time and your brain on one of my favorite topics.

RACHEL WEST: And I’m going to request a title change to chief nerd for 2019, thank you for having me on Rebecca.

VALLAS: I’ll check that one out with Neera and see if I can get back to you.

WEST: Thanks, please do.

VALLAS: So Rachel, part of the reason I wanted to bring you in to nerd out a little bit is because people are probably familiar with the politics of this issue, how overwhelmingly popular raising the minimum wage is, we’ve talked about it a lot on this show, not just in the congressional context but actually at the state level where we’ve seen ballot measures and cities taking action at the state and local level to do what congress hasn’t been able to do in almost a decade because of Republican opposition to paying workers what they deserve. But what we haven’t talked about in quite some time is what actually happens when you raise the minimum wage and you know this research better than anyone. You’ve actually produced some of this research and that’s really what I want to get into with you today. But before we do that probably helpful to back up just a little bit and help people remember and also come to this issue for the first time if they’re not familiar with this particular piece of legislation. What’s in the so-called Raise the Wage Act that was just introduced this week?

WEST: Well your listeners will all be familiar with last congress’s Raise the Wage Act, which is very similar but really historic. So like you pointed out it’s now been ten years since Congress raised the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour so this legislation by 2024 gradually increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour and there after would index it to median wages so that we prevent the kind of crisis we’re in right now where it’s been eroding over time and basically becoming a poverty wage.

VALLAS: So basically that would mean it would rise with inflation. What people are actually taking home in their pay would keep pace with inflation as that moves forward.

WEST: Yes and even better it would keep pace with median wages which tend to rise even faster than inflation. So it would help gradually pull low-wage workers wages up even further.

VALLAS: And that’s a really important clarification because I misspoke. It’s actually better than indexing it to inflation.

WEST: Yes and good thing you misspoke so we can emphasize that point. This is a bold bill and it’s much needed. It also includes two lesser known provisions that don’t get as much attention as that headline $15 per hour that address the sub minimum wages for various groups of workers. One of those groups of workers is tipped workers. They legally can make as little as $2.15 per hour and it has been stuck at that rate for 28 years, since 1991. Another group is workers with disabilities, a group of workers that I know you have worked with and for very passionately, you know can be paid just pennies per hour for their work by employers, all of it legally. And so it would phase out those two subminimum wages and bring us up to one fair wage for all workers of $15 an hour.

VALLAS: I want to do one quick side note because we were actually, you and I both in the same conversation recently with some of our colleagues and someone importantly pointed out, actually s.e. smith, deputy editor of TalkPoverty, there is one group of workers this bill is not going to help and it worth reminding folks, listeners, policymakers that this is a missing piece here but it’s people behind bars in our nation’s correctional facilities who still can be legally paid nothing or just pennies an hour for their labor because basically modern day slavery is still legal in this country through that one back door way. Just want to acknowledge that as we’re saying it’s most workers not quite all workers, but a huge, huge, huge deal to be including these two groups who for so long have been left out of other minimum wage increases to date. So Rachel what’s been happening in the decades since minimum wage workers who earn this federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour haven’t gotten the raise.

WEST: So we’ve done some research on this here at CAP and in that time inflation has eaten away the minimum wage’s purchasing power to an incredible extent such that a worker who is making $7.25 today in 2019 needs an extra 41 working days which is more than 8 weeks just to make the same pay that he or she did in a single year in 2009, the last time the wage was increased. So that means that they’re losing out on the equivalent of $2,400 almost in purchasing power every year. Certainly a hell of a lot more, almost 50 times more than they’re going to get from Republicans’ tax plan, they are losing just by virtue of congress’s inaction.

VALLAS: And I always find that really important and powerful to mention because often in policy debates people focus on what things cost to do them. So you’ve got Republicans in congress who will cry out oh my God, we’re spending too much on x, y, or z policy priority if it doesn’t end with tax cuts for bajillionaires so they can buy a second yacht to put in their first yacht. But you almost never really hear serious discussion about is the cost of inaction, and so what you’re talking about right here is workers, our lowest paid workers in this country literally taking a pay cut every single year that Republicans in congress stop them from getting the raise that they deserve.

WEST: That’s right and it’s not just all workers and it’s not just any workers, it’s particular workers. So women for example make up more than half, well more than half of the people who would get a raise under this new bill. Workers of color are highly disproportionately affected by low minimum wages. In fact, 40% of Black workers the Economic Policy Institute analyzed would get a raise under this bill as would a third of Latina or Latino workers. And when we’re talking about minimum wage workers today it’s not the story of just teenagers working a summer job. In fact fewer than ten percent of the workers who’d get a raise under this new bill are teenagers. These workers are older, they’re better educated, they’re more productive than they’ve ever been in the past and almost 30% of them have children that they’re supporting.

VALLAS: Now Rachel this is where I want to get nerdy. Great intro, great set up for people a little bit of minimum wage 101 there but people might be listening yeah, I know all those things. I know about the minimum wage and all the stuff you just said is stuff I already know. Well here’s where I want to dial up the nerdiness a lot. Because I know I can do that with you. So what you hear from Republicans in congress about why they don’t want to pay workers more is not, you rarely hear them say well I don’t think people are working hard enough of any other kind of argument that’s on the merits about the workers. What you hear is this zombie myth but it’s going to kill jobs and that’s the refrain that gets repeated over and over and over by opponents of raising the minimum wage. And I also want to acknowledge are also the restaurant industry and big business —

WEST: Ding ding ding!

VALLAS: And there’s other entities that also raise other different kinds and related arugments as well or claims I should say. But I want to take on this it kills jobs zombie lie and myth because that is the one that has the greatest sticking power within the Republican Party. So Rachel you know this research and I want to spend some real time here with you, what do we know about that claim?

WEST: So first I want to point out you’re exactly right on the myth. We always want to ask when there’s a strong claim that’s not backed by evidence, who benefits? And you hit the nail on the head with businesses and the restaurant industry in particular so just to point that out before we dive in. But I would say the minimum wage is one of the best-studied topics in economics. Not only because economists love labor but they also look for rich historical data sets. And minimum wage changes give us one of the richest data sets on public policy levers in the country. Federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in ten years but 29 states and DC have increased their wages to varying degrees over the previous decade. So we’ve got this wonderful variation across states and over time and now even at the city and county level. And that is what helps economists sort out correlation from causation. And so they can really answer quite well to a sophisticated degree the question that you asked. Does the minimum wage help or hurt workers? And in particular that hurt conservatives want to claim comes from killing jobs. We have a ton of research on this. Starting with the seminal paper back in 1993 where these two economists David Card and Alan Krueger compared two neighboring states, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, one of which, New Jersey raised its minimum wage and the other of which didn’t. so they looked at fast food workers in an industry that is particularly effected, big employer of minimum wage workers, before and after the change in each state. And they used econometric methods to study what happened to number one, earnings and number two, employment, so jobs. They find not surprisingly that earnings went up but surprisingly to them and many other economists, they didn’t find that jobs got lost. In fact they found that employment actually went up slightly. So this kicked off a huge revolution and an increase in sophistication in the methods that economists were using to look at minimum wage increases over the prior two to three decades. And so we’ve had a ton of research since then that does this in a much more sophisticated question.

VALLAS: So bring us up to speed on the next chapter of this research. That’s the seminal original work that takes us all the way back to the 90s, had some really important findings but a lot of time has passed since then and we’ve seen a lot more states and localities and minimum wage increases. Did later research find anything different?

WEST: Later research has continued to confirm those findings largely, showing that there’s strong benefits for workers in the form in particular of increased earnings but no discernable job loss with one exception I’ll get to. So the next generation of research took this natural experiment of two neighboring states in one time period and generalized it to include dozens and dozens of states and in fact bordering counties, payers of bordering counties across a state border where there was a change in minimum wages and not in another and looked across multiple years, three decades of data to be able to combine all of that in a single statistical model so that they would be able to push back on the idea that it’s just something particular about Pennsylvania or New Jersey that drive your findings. Or it’s something particular about the early 1990s that are driving your findings that there’s no job loss.

VALLAS: Those are important considerations if folks might be thinking about it as they’re hearing you break down some of the methodology here. Folks might be going yeah but to really be able to be confident in this kind of a policy change I would want to look at more than just one or two states. People might also be feeling that way about I’d want to look at a longer span of time. So you’re saying that’s exactly what this does.

WEST: So three economists, Arindrajit Dube, Bill Lester, Michael Reich had this again seminal 2010 study that looked at dozens of these bordering county pairs across 27 years of data in the same statistical model and confirmed the findings that Card and Krueger had found on a much smaller level which was that workers experienced higher earnings but there wasn’t a decrease in employment. So businesses didn’t close their doors, workers didn’t lose jobs and that has been, that was until the last couple of years the state of the research. Now as you know in the last couple of years we’ve seen, in the last few years we’ve seen states and even localities go much higher than ever before in terms of pushing their own minimum wages as congress has stalled.

VALLAS: And that’s part of what people might be thinking about what comes next year, OK if that research helps reassure me that raising the minimum wage slightly isn’t going to have the kinds of negative effects that Republicans in congress continue to tell me that it will, $15, that sounds really high, people might be wondering can we really go that far with an evidence base that we feel confident in?

WEST: Exactly, hit the nail on the head. Now I would say that there were sizable increases in some of these, in the data set that Dube, Lester and Reich used and that others have used since. There’s some big increases there if you look back a little more than a decade, especially in the federal minimum wage. But brand new research that goes all the way up through 2016, so a couple years after we started seeing big changes in state and local minimum wages that include 138 different state level minimum wage changes, research that just came out this week and focuses, instead of focusing just on the restaurant industry, but looking across the wage spectrum so maybe including higher wages instead what they do is focus very solely on low wage workers. So in a nutshell what they do is effectively they count the number of jobs when there’s a minimum wage increase proposed, they count the number of jobs below that threshold and identify the workers by their demographic characteristics and then when the minimum wage switches they say do we still see those workers and how much are they making. And what they find is not surprisingly pay goes up. So what they see is those workers then appear right above the new minimum wage threshold.

VALLAS: Which is what we would hope would happen?

WEST: Do they disappear though? They don’t disappear and that’s the key to saying we don’t find job loss. Now there is one exception to that, which they find which is some amount of employment decrease in the manufacturing sector. Manufacturing is not a big employer of minimum wage workers. So that means that in aggregate they’re finding effective zero job loss because there’s some increases in some industries, there’s a little decrease in manufacturing and that nets out to zero.

VALLAS: So Rachel you’ve broken down all the wonky methodological underpinnings of a whole big research literature that can be summed up in a sentence which is raising the minimum wage boosts earnings for low wage workers and doesn’t kill jobs, is that what I’m hearing you say?

WEST: That’s exactly right.

VALLAS: so what do we know now, because I actually want to take this a little bit farther. People might be going OK great, I feel better I have less heartburn about this, all the claims I’m hearing from Republicans in congress and other opponents of raising the poverty level wage don’t hold water. So yes, if that’s what you’re hearing from all of what we’ve said so far, you’re following along, you’re doing great, but I also want to dig into some more of the minimum wage literature with you that people might not be as aware of and that doesn’t get nearly as much airtime and that’s all of these other far-reaching benefits that raising the minimum wage has. One is a pretty obvious one, what happens to poverty?

WEST: Right so there’s actually a great study that just came out in work they performed this year by an economist named Arindrajit Dube who looks at poverty rates, something that we’re very interested in and says well, if earnings went up what happened to family incomes and in particular the poverty rate? Not surprisingly he finds that when working families’ earnings go up, there are reductions of poverty and in fact really sizable ones. So what he estimates is that if policymakers were to increase the minimum wage on the federal level to $12 an hour, so not even the $15 that congress is now talking about, 6.2 fewer people would be in poverty in America. So that means that the minimum wage is actually slightly more poverty reducing than our quote, unquote “biggest” anti-poverty program which is the EITC.

VALLAS: So breaking news, when you pay people more, they become less poor, is that what I’m hearing?

WEST: That sums it up very well.

VALLAS: So there’s another wonky word that I want to bring into the mix because it’s also important to understand as you, if you want to be nerdy about this stuff, which if you’re still listening I’m going to assume you do and that word is monopsony. Why does one need to understand monopsony to follow along any further?

WEST: Monopsony is the nerdiest of words. So monopsony is one of the two answers to the question of why minimum wages don’t lead employers to cut jobs. The first answer to why, we’ve known for a while. So minimum wage increases result in higher productivity from workers. They reduce the turnover in the work force and they also come out in modest price increases where employers can pass along those costs. But what we’ve discovered in the course of recent literature is that our model of the labor market has been somewhat wrong. It’s not an econ 101 world we’re working in here where you just open up your textbook and you say hey, when prices increases, which are wages to employers, then obviously demand goes down and in this case it’s demand for labor.

VALLAS: I’m flashing back to my high school economics classes where you’ve got the chart of —

WEST: It’s that chart.

VALLAS: It’s that chart, if you’re picturing that too —

WEST: Yes, supply and demand.

VALLAS: Supply and demand and everyone knows what that looks like but keep going.

WEST: Turns out the real world is more complicated and we see that all over economics but we also see it in minimum wage research. So monopsony comes into play, you’ve heard of monopoly I imagine which is when there’s one supplier in a local labor market. Comcast for example and they take up the entire local labor market and that means they can drive up prices, you the consumer have nothing to say about it. well monopsony is similar but it’s when there’s one buyer in a local labor market and that means they can drive down prices. And in this case the prices are the wages. So think about Wal-Mart for example. A big employer like Wal-Mart that might be the main low wage employer in an area, when they’re looking for an extra worker they don’t want to advertiser a higher wage than they already pay because if they hire a new person at that wage they would have to pay all their many workers their new wage too and it would be tremendously expensive for them to just raise wages for that marginal worker because they’d have to do it for all workers. So a monopsonist ends up keeping wages a bit lower than they otherwise would, employing slightly fewer workers, but that means that when they’re faced with a minimum wage increase they can absorbed it because they would otherwise be if not for their market power, they would otherwise be employing more people and at a higher wage.

VALLAS: Now on the flip side what you’re describing is also a big part of why when big employers like Wal-Mart actually do behave like good actors and raise wages themselves, they also potentially have the opportunity to drive up wages in their area and around them because of the far-reaching ripple effects that you’re describing that really are a double edged sword depending on how those large employers behave.

WEST: That’s right I’m not totally sure if K-Mart but K-Mart and Wal-Mart if they are competitors, one of them raises wages, the other one does too. On the flip side that means that they have an incentive, if they’re the big two low wage employers to effectively collude and keep wages low for both of their sakes.

VALLAS: So Rachel a part of the research that actually comes from you and I feel like I’m going down memory lane here. I remember when I met you for the first time and we were actually interviewing you and potentially bringing you onto the poverty team, this feels like a million lifetimes ago and yet it was just five years ago. The way I was introduced to do you was actually through the next piece of research that I want to bring up. And that is the effects of raising the minimum wage on programs that low wage workers often need to turn to because their wages aren’t enough. And here I’m thinking particularly about nutrition assistance, the program formerly called food stamps that is today called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. Tell us a little bit about some of those interactions and some of the things these Republican policymakers who don’t want to see wages go up might do well to keep in mind as they think about how hard their opposition is.

WEST: That’s right I would encourage Republicans to think through the argument that as you point out with poverty level wages a lot of workers are going to have to turn to and will be eligible for rightly. Public assistance like nutrition assistance, like health care, Medicaid and that as a consequence means that American taxpayers so to speak are going to foot the bill for that which is something that we should be happy to do except that there’s a good solution in raising the minimum wage and let me explain how. First of all just to quantify the issue, the University of California Berkeley labor center estimated that low wages of the type that we see in the labor market today cost taxpayers a whooping $153 billion each year. So what CAP asked was what happens to those costs of public assistance programs if you raise the minimum wage? And thinking through the mechanism here, when workers wages go up, some of them will end up getting fewer SNAP benefits, some of them will even see their earnings boosted so much that they’re above the threshold of 130% of the federal poverty line for eligibility for SNAP. But at the same time as they see their benefits decrease by 30 cents for every dollar they earn, their earnings from higher minimum wage far offset that loss. And so they’re left better off. And meanwhile that means taxpayers would spend less money on SNAP, so it’s a win-win situation for low wage workers and for tax payers. So CAP looked at this and estimated that a $12 minimum wage, so not even again, the $15 we’re talking about would save $53 billion in the coming decade in SNAP alone. So that’s not even thinking about a host more social programs. So there are some interesting comparisons when you start to think about initiatives that Trump and congressional Republicans have put forward to cut SNAP and cut workers off that lifeline when in fact what they could be doing is just raising wages.

VALLAS: And Rachel you’ve actually taken a look at some of the numbers here to say well what’s behind door number one would be, say, cutting SNAP, that’s certainly what the Trump administration wants to do. We’ve talked about this a lot on this show but quick refresher, Trump administration wants to take food assistance away from 755,000 people in this country who are largely unemployed and underemployed workers so it would be kicking them while they’re down, taking away the food off of their table to punish them for not being able to find work. And that by their own estimates would save $15 billion, am I getting that right, give or take over the next decade?

WEST: That’s right, $15 billion.

VALLAS: So it sounds like pretty big savings, people might be going that’s substantial money.

WEST: The Trump administration certainly thought it was.

VALLAS: And they certainly think it’s worth doing even though it’s really unpopular and the opposite of what the American people want when we know that two-thirds of Americans oppose cuts to nutrition assistance but how much would we save in SNAP if we went with door number two, and instead helped people earn more so that they could better afford food by raising the minimum wage to $12?

WEST: $52 billion over the coming ten years which is almost four time what the Trump administration’s savings from this cruel new rule about able bodied adults with dependent children, “A-bods” would produce, so really it’s a question of priorities. If Trump were actually trying to help this forgotten man and woman that he talked about, he would be raising the minimum wage. It’s cheaper, in fact it’s almost free for government and it doesn’t hurt people it helps them.

VALLAS: And I’ll do a quick shameless plug even though Chad, our associate director of shameless plugs is not here for this portion of the episode but for anyone who wants to learn more and get engaged in that attack that the Trump administration is waging on nutrition assistance, handsoffSNAP.org is back up and running because it’s not the farm bill that we’re facing anymore with its legislative proposed cuts to SNAP, it is this new administrative attack and we need to be driving as many public comments as we possibly can because the Trump administration is legally required to read every single unique comment that it gets.

So handsoffSNAP.org, check it out there and submit a comment and we want to hear from you. If you’ve got a personal story about how nutrition assistance has helped you, helped your family, maybe you’re a service provider and you work with folks who are struggling to put food on the table, would love to hear from you and help plug you into this fight but back to the minimum wage for a second, Rachel. There’s lots of other far-reaching benefits to, we’re running out of time here because there’s not enough hours in the day to talk about all the benefits of raising the minimum wage but I want to hit on just a few of them really, really quickly. One of those is actually, we could see reduced incarceration and criminal justice spending in this country. And that’s actually some of your original research as well looking at the interaction there.

WEST: Yeah that’s right. We could see a sizable estimates off on savings from enhancing public safety. And that in part as you have done a lot of work on yourself, Rebecca, comes from this legacy of mass incarceration and over-criminalization that we have in this country. And the fact that folks who are returning from incarceration or even just have a criminal record really have a hard time finding jobs that pay a fair livable wage and too often they are being shoved into low quality, very low wage jobs. And so what we see when people experience a minimum wage increase and they can actually make ends meet with work that they’re doing we see a sizable decrease in crime, particularly among younger men, a demographic that oftentimes struggles with this. So estimates for example from President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers showed that raising the minimum wage to $12 would produce a 3 to 5% reduction in criminal activity that would produce an annual societal benefit when economists put monetary numbers to it of $8 billion to $17 billion.

VALLAS: And adding onto that as we do this lightening round of other things you might not have realized would get better if we raised the poverty level minimum wage we would also see a significant improvement in the retirement crisis.

WEST: That’s right so the retirement crisis, this looming crisis for our country where Americans are not able to save because in large part rising wage inequality, so as the rich take more and lower income Americans, particularly those in the bottom fifth are just unable on their wages to sock away money for retirement. What we’re seeing is that in the coming 20, 40, 60 years retirement incomes will be shrinking for that bottom fifth of earners and sizably so. But new research from the Urban Institute finds that if we were again to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $12, that would offset nearly 60% of that decrease in retirement income that the bottom fifth of workers will see by 2065 and that would sizably help address this retirement crisis for working class families.

VALLAS: So low wage workers who work incredibly hard their whole working lives and then end up retiring in poverty and not having a ton in social security to turn back to or to fall back on either, a huge additional long term benefit there. And then lastly, we don’t have a ton of time for this but we would also see some improved health outcomes including reductions in infant mortality, which is another notorious leadership distinction that the United States currently holds our babies are literally dying in infancy because we don’t have a policy landscape that provides them with what they need to thrive before they’ve even taken more than just a few breaths.

WEST: That’s right. We’re seeing an emerging body of research on linking miminum wage to health, which is not something that researchers had thought of too seriously before this era of literally poverty minimum wages. And so effects on both infant mortality and infant health at birth, so metrics like birth weight, but also adult health that can translate into sizable employment gains or educational attainment gains and so on, this is all interconnected and researchers are just starting to explore that avenue so bring me back in a year or so and I will have much more to say about that link because research is coming up fast.

VALLAS: Well I help I get to bring you back in a year or so when this is actually a policy we can talk about going into effect.

WEST: Wouldn’t that be nice?

VALLAS: Wouldn’t that be amazing so lots to watch in the house as Democrats continue to champion this policy that they know the American people have been screaming for for a decade and that the state and local level every single time it comes up and is put to the voters it passes. There’s a reason if you want more of this fabulous nerdiness on the minimum wage and much else that has to do with poverty and inequality and opportunity you should be following Rachel West on Twitter and if you’re not you’re doing it wrong. She’s @rwest817 on twitter, that’s her birthday so you can wish her happy birthday too because she’s a fellow Leo like me. Rachel thank you so much for coming and nerding out with me a little bit and bringing our listeners up to speed on literally decades of complex research.

WEST: Anytime, thanks for having me, Rebecca.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.