Political Quotes

“I called Joseph Stiglitz over at the White House the other night. Mr. Stiglitz is chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for the President. I called him because I was reading his textbook where he said, there is danger in increasing the minimum wage. That textbook that he published a couple years earlier, it said wherever there is a group of people demographically or wherever there are parts of the country in particular distress, whenever the minimum wage is above the equilibrium wage, there is going to be unemployment. Mr. Speaker, so I asked him: Do you not, do you still agree with that concept? He said: Well, we talked about how much unemployment would result, and we concluded that the unemployment that is going to result from the minimum wage increase is not going to be that significant. The fact is that he agrees, everybody agrees that it causes unemployment. We seem to be on a trend of saying, since 82 percent of the people think wages should be higher, let us have Government do it. Do we really think that Government control can determine markets, can determine productivity, can ultimately determine the wages of people? I think the answer is no.”