Bernie Sanders: “This amendment is simple and straightforward. Millions of Americans today are working for starvation wages. What this…”

“This amendment is simple and straightforward. Millions of Americans today are working for starvation wages. What this amendment does is raise the Federal minimum wage from an embarrassingly low $7.25 an hour to a living wage of $17 an hour over a period of 5 years. In other words, 5 years from now, everybody in America would make at least $17 an hour. That is not a radical idea. Quite unbelievably, the average American worker today makes $42 a week less than he or she did 52 years ago. Almost all of the new wealth that has been created has gone to the top 1 percent--a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the people on top. It has been 16 years--16 years--since the Federal minimum wage has been raised. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator's time has expired.”