Can you hear us yeah, hi, so you're with the committee right now Good morning, this is representative Tom Stevens We have welcome to the house general housing military affairs committee We have most of us are here. We're ready to go to hear your testimony based on what you share with us Also electronically, so please feel free to start Thank you so much for your opportunity to participate today. I am glad that you're taking it out I submitted last night my testimony So it's like this I hope that you guys will find time to review it as well Here I just wanted to highlight a few things that I think are important for you to remind us to continue to debate about Once I will hide my Which is the youth week I also Conversations that I know you guys have having having about that quick Scenario and then I'm I mentioned you I know that you guys are considering your committee considering a bill From I Benefits The harm for young workers and for adult workers would be actually Is a serious harm possibly It could be that for example From a lower minimum wage for teen workers. It could incentivize some employers To hire more workers in place of more young workers in place of adults Oh and or to adopt a high turnover staff model To maintain a youth a young workforce So the indirect consequences for This sort of exemption could be to drive down wages for the wage adults as well And so in essence Fiddle policy could create a loophole Another thing that I would briefly like to highlight is that a youth wage In an extension of the youth wage in Vermont who possibly have the unintended consequence of advancing corporate attacks on the minimum wage the National employment law project Tracks all of these issues and so we are aware of what Opponents of the minimum wage had been doing what they had in the closing one of the things that we found out that last year was that a well-known opponent of the minimum wage has been pitching to to the often conservative legislator legislator's The implementation of a youth wage in order to drive down wages for all workers on the low wages in low wage industries So that is one thing to consider if you are debating And one last thing I will say about the youth wage is that young workers Do deserve to also earn a full minimum wage in Actually coming back from the full $15 minimum wage could possibly also have the consequences of really impacting College-bound teams This was trying to pay for college students by working full-time or close to full-time during the summer Who are you often these workers tend to be? from low income or moderate income families in the way that they try to finance their education by working the most that they can when school is Not a session so they can't pay for some of their tuition or expenses that way And so these workers these young workers those from low and middle-income families could be the most effective So those are some of the things about the youth wage I just really wanted it quickly to highlight for you for your consideration But let me go on to the benefits quick unless you guys have any questions about that. This is part of my testimony Okay, so quickly on the benefits quick part of my testimony I know that this is something that you Or something to have trace. I believe in Vermont as a possibility And I will speak only in general in a general sense because I am not fully I'm not I don't have an expertise specifically in Vermont Public programs, but in general what we have been Well, we have found because it's the question that has come up in other Campaigns in other parts of the country as well. What we have found is that the The major public benefits programs you see have some sort of fake out a gradual Wages increases as wages increase or as they come increases for families who are receiving benefits the three main and most broadly Equal programs the EICC the title tax credit and snap or food stamps Those are the three main programs in the country that I tend to have the most impact because they they have more Generous Invisibility criteria And these three programs, especially they have these sort of gradual things out and they can increase it In my testimony in the written part of it. I had a Two scenarios one is for Single adults without children working 40 hours a week another one is for people adults raising one child and Working 40 hours a week and another one for one adult with one child working about 20 hours a week and Because a child is adults and Adults who are working full-time who don't have dependents Not qualify for any program. They really don't have a benefit They wouldn't be a thing that But for the other two families Single adults with one child working their full or part-time The amount that they could possibly be facing very sensitive about what they work the Single adults with one child working full-time will tend to have the most to lose because they their income may Go about much more than obviously the Family working full-time And if they are receiving the same types of benefits they will have more to lose to care for that Nonetheless in either scenario of these two single parents working in a full-time The net they are met better off nonetheless one will be Will be able to keep more than their income than the other but they are not going to be in the red In the end so that's something to really keep in mind as you also Try to be true to the question to find a benefit And in the end I think it's important to keep in mind that When considering a benefits cliff scenario when you as you continue to debate this topic If there are in fact benefits with that to be family we believe that the This is an opportunity for the legislature to take up a review of the eligibility Special to the company you can I know there's some federal rules that may prevent you from totally adjusting this but as as much as you can as the legislature can It would be good to have this as an opportunity to review a legibility criteria to review also funding from the state with allowing the legislature to address the needs of workers who are earning more because of the minimum wage increase but we still need some assistance So those are the main points of the benefits cliff In quickly I would like to move on to The benefit of a minimum wage I know that Somebody our basic super from EPI will be set to sign later But he may be able to give you much more detail than I can on some of the Economics part of the benefits of the minimum wage but I wanted to see people choose some of the Benefits of the of a $50 minimum wage or a minimum wage increase in general That I think Would be open to keep in mind We have found or some Some studies that have those benefit those increased That a minimum wage can be an effective strategy for dressing declining with There is for example Francisco has had experience with Minimum wage increases that at the end of all significantly above Both the federal and to California made Minimum wage levels and because of they have had several years Sort of experience that happened as a facility to do a study of what happens when you When you saw labor standards including a minimum wage significantly what happens to workers in the economy and what our researchers found was that the minimum wage policy that Francisco had adopted in back in 2003 had Over the long term pen permanently raised Citywide he raised with about a 10% of the workforce. So the policy of raising a minimum wage Did in fact have the benefit of Rating which is for the wage workers the success of he is the The 2003 Minimum wage increases in Francisco Met the mayor and back in 2014 to actually push for and eventually win in $15 minimum wage increase through a ballot support goal, which was overwhelming increase by school There are some other benefits also the minimum wage Including a decrease of poverty To Another And what they found as the researchers on this that For the basic needs of their children Can be to a decrease in Again, the latest child abuse neglect for paid workers, I'm sure that this would be a great news In for months for the minimum wage to address any Kind of these problems that way The minimum wage can also be improved educating the law comes and Frigidation rates University of Massachusetts study affected issue It's on data high dropout rates that long-long control gently make parents no wage job And that youth and low income families have a greater life because of the experience in health problems So addressing this to a minimum wage increase would obviously help when it goes through problems that that number of others can be made In one of the thing is just our own role to the health and well-being California study That estimated estimated that increase in the state's minimum wage at that point it was 213 That was a proposal Which would have significantly benefited by health and well-being of California and they found that They were committed that these that work with benefits would have fewer chronic diseases and severely experience that hunger would have Looking or and they would be here and we don't possibly take care of their Obesity rates among our population and obviously it would also help with the pressure that I thought Could help with some of the stress that some Some parents may be Before some of the high-nights that I wanted to bring up for a course in hearing again, my system was about 30 pages long It should go on to any other parts of it, but For the second half of your comments or were you going to touch on some of the effects of the minimum wage on on small businesses Okay, yeah, oh Sorry, yeah, so I So what we have found Is that in general the minimum wage is not going to this is a In general the The minimum wage does not really have been helped to be too unaccompanied It And so when it comes to questions about employment and what it could whether it could happen, especially with that small business is unlikely because of That sort of finding but with regard to small businesses I Don't believe right down before Vermont side when we have both got other proposals in other states and we have looked at the The Largest small But we find usually is the large businesses do not have a Do not pay more than small Small businesses that you can a little bit more than large businesses So increasing the minimum wage to 15 would more or less even the same feel for small business The it would again, I haven't looked at this for Vermont I don't think but we have gone that for the other campaigns that we have looked at So I can't imagine that Vermont would be that different but So yeah, so a Increase in the minimum wage to 15 Usually acts as a labeling the same feel for small businesses We find also of the or a polls of Business CEOs and business owners have found that about 80% of the CEOs and business owners Of all sizes of businesses of all sizes 80% support raising in the minimum wage in their state while only a 8% Opposite so that is a big a significant level of support for minimum wage increases We Have in in the in the in New York State at the campaign for 15 a couple years ago there were Represented for small businesses Or in this business in general all in general also that endorse the $15 minimum wage campaign over there and For example the in New York the greater New York Chamber of Commerce endorsed the campaign the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and was the campaign The simple line I mean Westchester African-american chambers of commerce endorsed the campaign Petra in it also in that in California the Golden Gate Fresh Translations Did not oppose it the proposed increase over there and Just in general this is what happens a lot of small businesses Do provide public support for a minimum wage campaign? It's a There's happened in a whole lot of studies on the impact of minimum wage increases on small businesses specifically but From an individual I would have just seen that businesses of all sizes Even though who outbases on this even though who are skeptic Skeptical of the minimum wage increase Prior to the enactment of the law And that's being the benefit of a higher wage in terms of increased sales for their stores in terms of work retention and so they tend to spend less because of that on Recruitment and training through these workers that may be leaving to seek out their better opportunities But there are benefits for small businesses and large businesses That are from a $15 minimum wage. Oh, now we have a question for you in general Was there again that we have a question for you from representative Christie Sure. Hi in that. Thank you very much for your work. My question speaks directly to States similar to Vermont As far as the rural nature of our state Have you looked at any comparisons To states similar to us in regard to those General statements you said that most of the Inputs you had was anecdotal around the small business reaction but Did you do a comparison state-by-state or relative to rural states by any chance? Hey, we haven't we've done Or we have done A analysis for for states that have had minimum wage campaigns Of 15 or more or so we did do some for I think Maine is more or less Similar terms of population In cities versus rural populations It's we're going to do a small business comparison and then we just open up bad in That analysis that we did Okay, so um, so as you make you like they know in Maine there was a valid proposal for 12 which passed So it's not quite 15, but it's very Very cold 15 dollar minimum wage that you are considering now And we did do the comparison of small business large business Waitings and And so what we found there We found that in small retailers a about $12 $12,800 per hour for full annual run work and In comparison large retailers paid a significant event which is about $10 and seven cents an hour early So it was that reporting I can send Forward you just think I would help to read it Why that obviously why that keep this is the number Is that then March or the small retailers were already paying More or less the minimum wage that was being proposed For the balance and in Maine back in 2016 while The large retailers were paying about almost three dollars less than they were Why that we also included in the data report was The benefits for full workers and for the economy in general as in in vain there were about Oh 29 percent of the space workforce would expect they'd be benefiting from a minimum wage increase For 29 percent, it would be better to be affecting The employers of those that 29 percent of the space workforce that would have been significant We found that as you know, certainly the wage the The expected wages wage increases for these workers with total about $557 million When spent by the workforce, which you can lower which workers spend to spend the money right away, especially in local businesses $560 million dollars would have had an impact on the space economy And it's particularly the small businesses that would be See that that money Invested back into their own businesses by these workers purchasing their goods and services Thank you. We have another question from representative Smith. Uh, good morning. Thank you for being with us on phone today I have a question Are you located somewhere here in Vermont in Burlington or in a rural area? No, we have I would love to move to Vermont. I was in there for uh, I was there for a uh, uh, a hearing On the the initial hearing the joint committee hearing Last year and I I said to remind multiple places But that's been your question though. We don't have a Office in Vermont. We have One in new york or main one in new york. I am based in dc That's our second main office and we have another main office in california and then we have a few Home offices and a few parts other parts of the country Um, I'm looking on uh page 17 of your report here You say 80 of the CEOs and business owners and executives that companies both sides support raising the minimum wage Uh Did you poll businesses in Vermont to come up with the 80 percent? Or is this a nationwide poll? That is a nationwide poll and actually it was done that by a Uh, typically a opponent of them in minimum wage and this was actually a poll that was leaked to the media So that is by this was by month's global On behalf of the council speak chambers that did the polling the poll they were out there are members and Sound that 80 percent of them weren't supported raising the minimum wage I'd like to follow up a little bit on something that representative christy asked you Uh, I see you you the business associations you've mentioned, uh, the brooklyn chamber of commerce The long island west chester A chamber of commerce uh golden gate restaurant association Uh, these are all coming from states. For example, new york's budget is 140 billion dollars Vermont's budget is probably two or three billion. I'm not really sure what it is But does that have anything any bearing on a minimum wage, uh, affecting Retail smaller retail businesses So part of the reason why I am citing these examples What most people from new york is Actually because now it was very much involved in that campaign and I personally was Very involved in supporting To have seen that campaign. So I know a lot about that That campaign in new york Those are the businesses that we or the business groups that were that we know were support Um, because of our work in new york And I've got one I have one last question for you Uh, yes Were you aware that the Vermont retail grosses association is opposed to this minimum wage bill? And have you if you were or weren't Have you had an opportunity to discuss anything with with them and the way they feel about it? No, I have not had the opportunity and I do not know They were um, it doesn't necessarily surprise me. Um, there are uh, sometimes Some business associations that will not uh be endorsing a Minimum wage increase that there are some others that will And what was surprising about new york and sorry to go back to that But uh, what was surprising about the endorsements in new york was Were that many of these business associations that I that I uh Reference in my testimony Do over to send a lot more In fact, uh, many of the businesses their members testified at the hearing So, uh, it depends on who Is publicly In proposing or endorse or endorsing campaigns like these Uh, some will have members that are going to be We're unable to publicly endorse To the minimum wage increase and others from other ones while May not be as publicly All right, um, I have taken the position All right. Thank you I hear that. Um, he ended up old face where it says 80% of CEO's business owners and executives Blah blah support raising them in wage. Is there a Uh, was that based on a target number or is that just the You know 15 13 14 or is that just a broad statement Now once, uh, that was a general question but I will be either this one or another full Uh, data and through that question about the 15 surprising if there was not a whole lot of, uh, uh, antagonism to 15 Uh, then you just read what you think going from that, uh If I can't find data Okay Thank you Any further questions anybody Well, thank you. Yannette. This is a very full report lot to lot to Pick through while we're reading it and I appreciate you Um, taking us through some of the high points on it. I appreciate your time Sure, no problem. Thank you so much for the opportunity and I would be happy to uh, to answer any questions via email or On the point of again with any any of you guys individually if that would help Thank you. Thank you. What's that? You're still the tip Oh wait Um, yeah, the representative you pointed out there's still um information in your report on the tip wage Yes, uh, so I I understand that you are not considering the tip wage at this point And I would like to say, uh, thank you for bringing that up. I was just sure I should uh I Or not looking at it now, but uh On the fifth week, I think it's important to consider maybe in the future. Let's wait a second if there is a proposal No, we could to consider I mean the tip workers In uh, for mods, uh, I believe the situation is about 50 percent of the full minimum wage And that is a greater than in many other states It's a great start to start by the but we find that Because this worker tends to have higher poverty rates. So we need force to upgrade them up all the way to 100 percent of the full minimum wage Uh, the we believe that the uh, elimination of the tip wage is really crucial for improving the life of these workers and The there are various reasons why this the complaint should be eliminated. Uh, I mentioned poverty rates It ties the rate of the general workforce For this worker's power. Sorry. It ties the rate of poverty Uh, compared to the the fault, see the rest of the workforce is actually Uh, significant, uh, in that unfortunate that this worker is Uh, many of the workers have experienced that type of poverty But uh, in addition to poverty rates, uh, that affect this worker in general, uh eliminating the situation would really help with the reinforcement, uh, of the the minimum wage for these workers the, uh The tip wage or the sub-minimum wage system is really difficult in force because and because of the way that it works workers Employers, uh, and workers would have to be tracking their hour and their pet hour in order to be fully compliant with the law. Um, so because it doesn't happen that way it depends on all of their tip pools that, uh, many, uh, restaurants Uh, and, uh, the prices, uh, of the tip, uh, policies, uh, may have It's not always clear that, uh, that the workers end up keeping things that they earn, um, fully um, uh, the This place is trying to let workers earn at least the minimum wage that's supposed to be the way that it works Uh, I think that the knowledge works out when it doesn't when workers do not have or not earning a hundred or are not earning at least the minimum wage It's, it, the burden is on them to go, uh, to the employer and that can act to be, uh, to be brought up to the full minimum wage as we It's becoming a power dynamic. It's not always something that workers are willing to do. Um, and, uh, that can be a problem, uh, obviously for sportsmen Uh, that can lead to wage theft. That may not be something that works as a employer in terms of doing it, but that might be the confidence of that. Um, a, there are other reasons for eliminating the tip pools. It's this place, or it's, it's the work that's supposed to be, uh, for them not to be female workers. And that is, uh, when you have higher poverty rates, um, lower, uh, in general earnings from, from, from, from, from, from, uh, when you have higher rates of, uh, wage theft, uh, and you have a population that's mostly female. It can be, uh, obviously for heads of families, uh, households who are female. That can, especially those who may be single, that can be significant and problematic. And it's just in general, uh, it's the unfairness of having a workforce that is having to depend on, uh, the generosity of job customers is problematic in that sense as well. Uh, we find that the Vermont, uh, Russian industry is actually pretty strong. It, it could possibly, uh, very likely, uh, withstand, uh, the gradual phaseout of the, the switch there, um, in all the way to 16, uh, or whatever the rate may be at that point, uh, in the future. Um, in general, when you compare, uh, tax credit states, such as Vermont, with non-tax credit states, those who pay the foreman in the way through their tax workers, you don't find that the tax credit states are doing better than the Russian industry. Those states are doing better than the other ones. In fact, the, the one fairway states, which is how we call this state, where it, uh, people get to work here in the full minimum wage. Um, those states tend to, uh, have, uh, great, uh, Russian industries, uh, the, their, uh, in terms of sales and employment, uh, um, tend to do well. Uh, they, uh, also have projections, uh, they came from now to show that they are, uh, will be, still be being, uh, in terms of climate as a retrofactor, um, uh, as opposed to, uh, for the, uh, the, uh, the state. Um, so in general, uh, this is a really, uh, important, uh, point, uh, every important policy to consider, uh, to eliminate the constraints. Um, that's more or less, uh, really brief overview of the constraints, uh, and issues, and I'll be happy to answer questions if you have any. All set. No, thank you for that clarification. I'm glad to be reminded of, of, of that, that's, um, while it's not necessarily part of the bill right now, it has been part of our conversation committee, so thank you for that. Great, thank you so much. Uh, thank you for hearing me today. Great, thank you. Enjoy the day. You too, thanks. Bye. Uh, it looks like she, she raises some very interesting, uh, points, and what I'm wondering is, would it be possible, you know, and I know we, we don't have a lot of time, but if we might be able to, uh, isolate a couple of the data points, uh, in her report, and maybe have a correlation done, you know, by, uh, joint fiscal, uh, to see where, uh, there's a nexus, uh, in some of that to help us, uh, zero in. Which points? Um, I, I was, I was really interested in the, uh, that link to Maine, uh, being a very similar, uh, demographic, you know, to ours. Uh, she didn't have it in this report, but, uh, I think that she said that there was a link, you know, available. It's probably in her bibliography, that particular link, in what aspects to, to, to just compare, like, um, the, you know, the small business, uh, piece, was, I think what she was looking at primarily, uh, was how that affects, uh, paralleled, you know, our work here. Let's see if we can formulate that into a direct question a little bit later. Do we have a delay before the next one? Right. How long would you like? Is he not available? No, we told him between 10 and 1015. Do you want me to tell him that we're going for 10? So great for 10? Yeah. Well, welcome and thank you for, for weighing in with us. Sure. I know that you worked on this issue, uh, and did for the, um, last fall's study committee, um, and appreciate your, sharing your views with, um, with us. So, um, please, please jump in when you're ready. Okay, we'll do, and, and I understand you all have my presentation, or it's, uh, being shown to you, so I'm just going to make reference to all of the slides as I, as I go through. Perfect. And there's a little bit of a delay if I have the sound coming through my phone. So if, if I'm talking and you want to interrupt me with a question, please don't hesitate to do so. You may just have to wave to stop me. Okay. All right, great. Okay. All right. So again, just put my means of instruction. I'm going to have my name is David Cooper. I'm a senior analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, which is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization in Washington, DC. We focus on looking at the economy through the lens of a typical working person. How is it performing for that person? And we try to research policies that we think will help, low and middle income workers and their families. That's our, our mission. So if you turn to the slides, uh, very quickly put into the, the slide too, after the title slide, just a quick outline of what I'm going to go over today. Uh, first try to provide some historical context for the minimum wage. Talk a little bit about the different dimensions by which economists typically evaluate the level of the minimum wage, both the standard of living measures and then these relative measures that I'll get into. I'll say a little bit about why I think minimum wage policy is particularly important in Vermont right now. And then I'll talk about what the research literature says about the effects of raising the minimum wage because there's been a ton of research on this topic. So we'll get into that as much as we can. So looking to the next slide, um, you know, I think this slide shows what, what I think is, uh, the U.S.'s primary economic challenge right now. And it has been for decades, the, a chart that my organization has produced. And what you're looking at is the dark blue line in that chart. I hope you have color. The dark, dark blue line is, uh, total economy productivity. So productivity is just a value of goods and services produced per hour at work in the economy. And it's indexed to 1948. So what's happened to productivity since 1948? And then that light blue line underneath it is typically our, is typical hourly compensation in the economy. So basically the average hourly compensation of a non-supervisory worker since 1948. So excluding managers and highly paid executives, what's happened for those folks. And what you can see is that from 1948 to roughly the mid-1970s, as productivity went up, average hourly compensation for most workers went up, writing new line with productivity, which is what we would expect. As we can produce more for each hour of work, people should be paid more for each hour of work. But I hope in the mid-1970s we had this disconnect. Where productivity continued to rise while hourly compensation started to go flat. And what you can see is that since 1973, hourly compensation has risen only about 11% as of 2015. I looked at the data for 2016, it's about 12% now as of 2016 since the mid-1970s, while productivity has risen, you know, it's almost doubled since that time. And I should note that this compensation measure includes contributions to print benefits, so things like employer contributions to health care and retirement plan. So it's not that contributions to those things have taken money away, it would have been going into wages. When we look at total compensation, it's basically flat since the 1970s on an hourly basis. And this, but one thing that's important to note is that this story has not been uniform for all workers. If you look to the next slide, the next slide is showing what's happened to hourly wages at different points in the wage distribution. And that top line is wages for highly paid workers. So wages at the 95th percentile have risen about 50% since 1979, which is the first year that we have good hourly wage data. Wages of typical workers in the US or middle wage workers, workers at the median, have only risen about 9%, a little over 9% since 1979. And this is all adjusted for inflation. Low wage workers, represented in this chart by the gray line, and that's the 10th percentile wage that someone was making, more than 10% of workers with less than 90% of workers, their wages have just barely risen above where they were in 1979. And that only happened in the last year. Prior to that, those low wage workers were actually earning less than their counterparts almost 40 years ago after inflation. So this rising inequality in wages has led to a host of problems for the US. We have, it has stymied our ability to reduce poverty more greatly. It has led to a huge loss of income for middle income households. We have a chart that I didn't include just to take the time, basically showing that had household income risen uniformly across the income distribution since the late 1970s, the typical US household would be making about $18,000 more per year today than they do. But that huge growth in inequality has led to that loss of income that they're not making. Now, let's look pretty quickly. Again, if anyone wants to stop, please don't hesitate. If you come to the next question, yes. Do you have a question, Representative Stevens? Thank you for bringing the productivity into the conversation here. I have a question, though, about the timing of everything. I mean, the way that we've treated workers at wage levels has changed essentially since the mid-70s or early 80s, or unions have decreased that, and that's suppressed wages across the board. Great. And Anne, on top of it, we have shipped many, many, many manufacturing jobs overseas, which to me seems that that in and of itself, moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy has suppressed the wages as well. How does that compare with this increased productivity? What is the productivity measuring? How do you measure how good of a cashier I am at a gas station? So you're actually, you're jumping to my next slide for me. So thank you. If you look to the next slide, when we talk about what led to this great count, because we've producted wages, a lot of the causes are exactly what we were talking about. The first one being globalization. The shift, as you said, to a lot of manufacturing jobs being moved off-seat, offshore overseas, with no protections or very little protections for domestic workers, the decline of immunizations and collective bargaining, reducing folks bargaining power, too many periods of high unemployment, which have reduced worker bargaining power, because employers don't have to raise wages to attract and retain staff when there's high unemployment. The growth in the financial sector as a share of the economy and the explosion in executive compensation, mostly since the late 1990s. And then the last bullet is the thing that we're going to talk about today, this need labor policy decisions that have reduced worker bargaining power, one of them being failure adequately raised and then in a way. The gentleman, I'm sorry, I don't know your name, mentioned how that affects productivity. Well, the productivity measure that I'm showing was total economy productivity. So it's what's the whole economy's capacity? What is the whole economy producing per hour of work? That has sadly risen. That doesn't necessarily mean that product duty in every single occupation has risen the same way. Some of them have risen a lot more, some of them a lot less. The point is simply that the U.S. economy has had the growth in its capacity to reward everyone more for each hour of work we just happened for the reasons that are listed on this this page, these five reasons that have contributed to that. Thank you. Does that get to your question, sir? Yeah, I didn't anticipate the third slide, so thank you. Sure, yeah, no problem. So again, we're going to be talking about this last bullet, the labor policy action specifically the minimum wage. And if you look to the slide after that, this is slide six. What you can see on this chart, that blue line again is that labor productivity line. The red line is the inflation-adjusted value of the federal minimum wage. And what you can see is that from the minimum wages in section in the late 1930s until, you know, roughly the late 60s when it reached its high point, the minimum wage was raised at roughly the same pace as productivity growth. In 1968, the federal minimum wage reached its inflation-adjusted high point of about $10 an hour in today's dollars. Throughout 1970, the federal minimum wage was raised again relatively frequently, but we had very high inflation in the 1970s because the value of the wage asserts these plans. In 1980s, we didn't raise the federal minimum wage at all. So it's in value, the value just eroded throughout that decade. And then we only raised it two more sets of times in the mid-1990s and then again in the late 2000s. But those increases during those periods were never large enough to undo the erosion and value that took place in the 1980s, such that today at 725, the federal minimum wage is worth about 25% less than it was worth in the late 1960s. I'm going to get to Vermont's specific stuff in a minute. So again, this is just sort of the federal context. The light blue line in the middle of that chart is showing what would the federal minimum wage be if it were linked to just the wages of typical workers at the economy. So again, I was saying earlier that wages for the typical worker haven't really grown that much since the late 70s. But if we just linked the federal minimum wage to those wages, it would be almost $12 an hour today. If the federal minimum wage since 1968 had grown at the same pace as overall productivity growth, it would be almost, it would be over $19 an hour today. So again, that doesn't mean that necessarily we should have a federal minimum wage of over $19 an hour, or that low wage workers have seen that same level of productivity growth. But what it's saying is that there is capacity in the economy for minimum wages significantly higher than what we currently have, based on either growth in average wages for normal workers or overall productivity growth. So let's go back to the next chart. This is where I'm going to start getting into some of the Vermont specific data. This started showing what's happened to hourly wages in Vermont since 1979, and the picture is a little bit better than the U.S. average, but still nothing to pop the champagne over. What you can see is that at the 90th percentile, again, high wage workers in Vermont have done relatively well since the late 70s, wages at the 90th percentile have grown about 41 percent since 1979. Middle wage workers, represented as the median wage, the gray line, have risen about 27 percent since 1979. Again, not bad relative to what's happened to the U.S. as a whole. And then at the 10th percentile, wages have risen about 11 percent since 1979. Again, much better than the U.S. average, but nothing, you know, for 40 years of economic growth and 11 percent raise is really nothing to celebrate. You'll also notice that most, most if not all of that increase took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now, why is that? That's because at that time, the federal minimum wage was raised, Vermont's minimum wage was raised, and we had very low unemployment. We had unemployment below 4 percent for a number of years there. When you have that much low unemployment, you're getting a lot of market pressure to raise wages as well. So that's why you saw that huge, that big jump at the late 1990s. The other thing that I would point out is that wages at the 10th percentile of Vermont in more recent years have started to go up, that the result was being crazy since the state had enacted in recent years, plus the fact that Vermont's minimum wage is indexed for inflation for each year because it goes up a little bit for however much prices have gone up. And that's what I wanted to point out in the next slide, is to put the slide eight. There's a lot of lines here, you know, it's very busy, but so I'll just point out, I've highlighted a couple points of it. And I made this chart a couple years ago when I was giving a presentation in New Hampshire, so it doesn't go to the most recent year, but the trends are still the same. And I just want to point out, this is showing what's happened to wages in Vermont relative to what's happened to wages in the state, neighboring states in New England. And I would just focus on the white blue and the orange lines in each chart. And if you look at Maine, you can see that from about 2000 until 2009, our criminal record recession started, wages for the bottom 20 percent were basically flat, and then they started to fall after the recession. In Massachusetts, in the bottom left, there's a little more kind of up and down throughout the 2000s, some growth at the late 2000s and then sort of down again after the recession. In New Hampshire, New Hampshire, actually, I think the most interesting one, you had this growth in wages until the early 2000s, and then they just slowly eroded over the next decade basically. In Vermont, as the 10th to 20th percent, but also basically the bottom 20 percent of workers, wages rose until the 2001 roughly 2002, and then they stayed basically flat. That's a direct result of the de-indexation in Vermont's minimum wage. The fact that the minimum wage is adjusted for inflation every year. And basically, what I want to point out there is that, not your neighbors, at least when I made this chart, have that indexation. And that's why it's so important, because Vermont, better than any of its neighbors, have actually preserved wages for the bottom 20 percent of workers, whereas a lot of your neighbors haven't been able to do that because they don't have that inflation adjustment. Okay, so looking to the next chart, the next slide. Now I'm going to start to get into kind of how I think you should be evaluating levels of the minimum wage. And this chart is showing data from a tool that my organization produces called the Family Budget Calculator. The Family Budget Calculator has highly localized data on the cost of living for a variety of different essential budget items, housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, other necessities and things like clothing, cell phone, taxes. And we have data on this for every single county in the United States, as well as every single major metropolitan area. And you can choose what size family you have, and it'll tell you what it takes in that area to have what we call a modest but adequate standard of living. So this is not destitution. This is not absolute poverty. This is someone who has a secure standard of living. They're paying all the bills, but they have no savings afterwards. There's nothing built into this budget for savings, for college, retirement, anything like that. And these data are actually probably a little out of data. This is from our 2014 version of the Calculator. We just released a new one about a month ago. But anyway, even looking at the 2014 data, what I did is I pulled out the data for rural Vermont. So this is not Montalier or Burlington. This is sort of a more rural area. And what you're seeing is that in that first column, that left-hand most column, someone who was a single adult with no children needs over $32,000 a year to have what we would call a modest but adequate standard of living. If that person works full-time 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, that's an hourly wage of about a little over $15, now $15.66 per hour as of 2014. I have a question for you, David. Brian Smith from Derby. I live in the ruralest part of the state. Most of the people that I know that are making $10.50 an hour, single or married or one with a child or one with not, don't work 40 hours a week in the Northeast Kingdom. They work $15.60. Partially because they choose to and they like their jobs and partially because they have no options. It doesn't look like you've taken into any consideration here when you're basing something on a 40-hour week. That's right. I'm just doing the calculations for someone who's working 40 hours. If they choose to work more than that, so be it. But I think we have a lot of labor standards that target folks being able to work 40 hours and that's all they should have to work. If someone wants to work more, so be it. But I think it would be your decision whether you would think you need to set labor standards such that it would require someone to work more than 40 hours to achieve their income. Sure. I agree with that. But you'll also see these people living in poverty, they've got two skadoos in the yard or a four-wheeler or a four-wheel drive truck that they're making payments on. These figures just kind of don't add up, so they must be making time and a half. So probably most of people work in 50 hours a week, I would guess. Yeah. All I'm presenting is what it would take for a regular full-time worker. Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you. Representative Gonzalez. So in addition to no savings, does your budget also assume no debt? So this is just being the bills that are listed here. So if someone had credit card debt, student loan, whatever, that would have to be on top of all this. Thank you. So again, just other questions? I also assume that it means no savings. Yes, that's right. Or retirement. Correct. And now our other measure like this, there's an MIT, has a similar sort of living wage calculator and other folks produce things like this. I think there's even some Vermont-specific ones elsewhere, but in any event, the findings are all pretty much the same, that to meet this adequate standard of living on a full time schedule, you need more than 15 even right now, or even as in 2014. Okay. So looking to the next chart, this is just showing the value of the federal minimum wage again and also Vermont's minimum wage. The gray lines are the nominal values for the discrete dollar value. The green line is the inflation adjusted value of Vermont's minimum wage. The black line is the inflation adjusted value of the federal minimum wage. Again, you've got the high point in the beginning. And then you've got today's value, 2018, the Vermont minimum wage is equal to 1050 right now, I believe. In 2017 dollars on last year's dollars, that's the equivalent of 1027. That's why you're seeing the 1027 there for 2018. And because it's in the current law, it's going to be in that fermentation of that flat line going forward after 2018. Looking to the next chart, the next slide, slide 11, you can see where the minimum wage would be at 15 and 2024, which I understand is what the Senate bill that was passed would be. 15 and 2024 is the equivalent of about 1274 in today's dollars because inflation obviously is going to be eating away at the value as of those increases until you get to 15. So it's a real increase after inflation of about 24% over today's minimum wage value over the next six years. Next chart, slide 12, this is just showing how that minimum wage full-time annual income compares to the federal poverty line. Now again, anyone who is a poverty researcher or who has done anything with the federal poverty line knows that it is a woefully inadequate measure of what it actually costs for folks to get by. Nevertheless, it is our longest-running measure of income adequacy, so people still use it. What you can see is that today's Vermont minimum wage, a full-time, full-year worker at the minimum wage makes just over the poverty line for a family of three. If you were to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2024, you'd get just about $2,000 above the four-person federal poverty line. Now the next chart, if you put this slide 13, this is one of the other measures that I think is really important to consider in one of the dimensions that economists often use to value the strength of the minimum wage. And that is to look at what's the minimum wage relative to the wages of typical workers in the economy. So in other words, how far away is the lowest paid job from a middle-class job? And what this chart is showing is that at its highest point in 1968, the federal minimum wage would equal to a little more than half the wages of a typical worker in the economy. So the two lines are just two different ways of measuring wages of typical workers. One of them is the average wage of production workers, the other one is the median wage of full-time workers. But they basically tell the same story. In 1968, the minimum wage would equal to 52 to 53 percent of the typical wages in the economy. As of 2017, the federal minimum wage was equal to about a third of the wages of a typical worker in the economy. So someone who is in that lowest paid job, whether they are starting out in the workforce or whether they have been stuck in a low-wage job for a while, they are much further away from the middle class than someone in that same position a generation ago. Now, the next slide shows the Vermont-specific data. There is no, I can't get Vermont data back to 68, so we can look at it from 67 forward. And what you can see is that in 1979, at its highest point, the minimum wage in Vermont was equal to almost 54 percent of the median wage in Vermont. So again, the lowest paid worker in the state economy was making a little more than half of what a middle-wage worker was making. At the 2017, that value was about 46 percent, 46.4 percent. The dotted green line is a projection of what would happen under current laws. There's no changes made. If you assume that middle-wage workers, their wages will rise just a little bit faster than inflation. This is assuming that half the percentage above inflation, real wage growth for middle-wage workers, then the minimum wage would equal about 45.6 percent by 2024 of the median wage in Vermont. If you went to 15 by 2024, based on these projections, the minimum wage would equal about 56.6 percent of the median wage in Vermont. So middle-wage workers would be earning a little bit more than their counterparts in 79. And I see a gentleman reading. Yes, you're actually agreeing. Thanks, I've been called worse than that. Does the statistic for the middle-wage jobs, does that take into effect the upward wage compression? Yeah, so raising the minimum wage is never really going to affect wages at the median. You're probably, most of the research shows that the wage compression, at least in the five years after an increase, tends to occur up to maybe 20, 25th percentile. It's never really going to rise as high as the 50th percentile. Never as high as the median. I'm going to respectfully disagree on that, but that's cool. Thank you. That's what the research has found. From previous minimum wage increases, I couldn't say for something that would be significantly larger than past increases. So the next slide is where I'm starting to get into why I think minimum wage policy is particularly important in Vermont. So there's a lot of misconceptions about who's affected when you raise the minimum wage. There's sort of a long stereotype that minimum wage workers are just teens working part-time after school for, you know, video game one year, whatever it may be. The reality is that most low-wage workers who would be affected by increases in minimum wage are older red winners for their families. So the average age of someone who would be affected by an increase to $15 by 2024 is 38 years old. In either Vermont, specific, specific. The vast majority are not teenagers, 88 percent are 20 or older, 45 percent are 40 or older, what more than half are women, 22 percent of these workers have children, the majority work full-time, and on average they earn more than half their family's total income. Now these are statistics from an analysis that I did years ago when I was looking at an increase in the federal minimum wage up to 15 by 2024, but these are the Vermont-specific numbers. The next few charts are from an analysis done by a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on Mulchata. The researcher also did a similar analysis. Our statistics are a little bit different from each other, but the conclusions are basically the same. Chata finds that if you increase the minimum wage in New England, in any of the New England states of 15 by 2024, who would be affected by this increase? And in Vermont, what's interesting is that the share of those workers that have a college degree is higher in Vermont than in any other state in New England, 24 percent in Vermont compared to the next closest one being 23 percent in Massachusetts. Looking to the next slide, looking at how many of these workers work full-time in Vermont, Chata finds that 72 percent of workers who get a raise from 15 by 2024 in Vermont work full-time. Again, that's the highest percentage of in any state in New England. This is showing that the income earned by workers likely to be impacted by 15 to 2024 Chata finds that on average, these workers are 63 percent for their family's total income in Vermont. Again, that's the highest percentage of any state in New England. Yes, that's in the handbook. So can you go back one slide and just give people a different context for what this means to you in terms of the full-time workers in particular? In terms of what? In terms of the full-time workers in particular? Yeah, I think what this is just showing is that in some cases it may be that an increase in the minimum wage is going to primarily benefit workers who are only working part-time. This may be a second or no in the family. There may be one spouse, for example, that works full-time and then a spouse that only works part-time. And it may be that typically part-time workers earn lower wages, so a minimum wage increase might only be affecting those part-time workers. What this is showing is that almost three-quarters of the workers that would be impacted by an increase in Vermont's minimum wage, $50, are full-time workers. So these are primary red workers. These are folks who visit their primary jobs. It's not something that they're doing just sort of on the side. Great, thank you. Okay, so we went over the next slide, so let's skip that one. We'll go to the next slide with the map of the U.S. on it. So now talk a little bit about research on minimum wage employment. This is the topic that you sure most discussed when the minimum wage proposal is put forward, is what's the effect on employment going to be? Now early research on the minimum wage effect on employment in the 1970s and 80s seemed to confirm the textbook understanding. The textbook understanding being that if you raise the minimum wage, it's going to lead to a loss in jobs. Again, early research folks found increases in the federal minimum wage. They seemed to confirm that finding. In 1990, after you had that whole decade in the 80s where there was no increase in the federal minimum wage, you had a lot of states start raising their minimum wages above the federal minimum wage, including Vermont. And when that happened, it created what we would call natural experiments. You could look at what happened to jobs in one state that raises minimum wage compared to a state that didn't. And probably the most famous of these studies in the mid-1990s, a study by economist David Carter, now improver, looked at what happened in fast food employment along the New Jersey, Pennsylvania border when New Jersey raised its minimum wage and Pennsylvania did not. And what they found is that fast food employment on the New Jersey side of the border actually went off relative to fast food employment on the Pennsylvania side of the border after New Jersey raised its minimum wage. So this went exactly opposite to what the conventional thinking had been. And this really sent the economics profession to a bit of a tailspin. And there were tons and tons of papers published in subsequent decades trying to isolate whether this is just a single isolated case where this is happening or whether this was, whether there was a need for us to really rethink our understanding of the minimum wage as a fact on employment. Just look to the next slide. You know, as I said, there were tons and tons of papers published after Carter and Frugers were trying to figure out what was going on here. One of the most important ones was a study in 2010 that took that Carter and Fruger approach and applied it nationwide. So they took the case study and they generalized it. They looked at what happened at cross border counties for every single minimum wage increase in the United States from 1990 to I think 2006. And this started just showing all those border counties that were analyzed. And what the researchers found is that increases in the minimum wage had no detectable effect on employment in the states that raised them, relative to the states that didn't when they looked at those cross border comparisons. If you look to the next slide, this is again just showing how much research has been done on this topic. There's been a lot of meta-studies, so studies of study, taking the findings of all the different research on the minimum wage, the chart that I'm showing is the one that looks, we call it a funnel graph. It's looking, you have this spike shooting up. All those blue dots on that graph are estimates of the minimum wages of effect on employment in some study. And along the x-axis, along the horizontal axis, it's the effect on jobs. So as you get closer to zero, that would be no effect. As you get further to the left, that would be a negative effect. If you go further to the right, that would be a positive effect on jobs. The vertical axis, the y-axis, is the statistical power of the study. So in other words, how good of an estimate is it? What's the precision of the estimates from a statistical standpoint? And what you can see is that the estimates are clustering right around zero, and the estimates with the highest statistical power, the ones that are most precise, are falling right on that zero line. So again, this is confirming this research that increases in the minimum wage, at least the ones that were done throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and really no significant effect on employment whatsoever, either positive or negative. Or at least, that effect was so small that we had trouble measuring it. Now there have been, representative consultants. And when you're saying no effect on employment, since these are metacities, I assume that that means a wide variety of things. But can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by no effect? Yeah, so let me hold that question because I get into that in a subsequent slide. Great, thank you. So just last slide on this topic, if you turn to the next one, this is a new study that just came out last year that is really novel because it looks at this in a totally different way. What the researchers did was they took every job by hourly wage and put it into bins of different wages relative to the minimum wage. And they looked at what happened to the number of jobs in these different wage bins five years after a minimum wage increase. And what they found is that the wages five years, the jobs five years later above the new minimum wage, so that was the blue lines, was essentially exactly the same as the number of jobs below the old minimum wage, which would be the orange line. So in other words, and this is a quote from the study, on average the number of missing jobs paying below the new minimum during the five years following implementation closely matches the excess number of jobs paying just above the new minimum. This leads the overall number of low wage jobs essentially unchanged while raising average earnings of workers below the new minimum wage. Just further confirmation that the changes that happened to the job structure after a minimum wage increase, you tend to see more jobs paying more than the new minimum and obviously less paying, less jobs that are paying lower than the new minimum. You know, why is this, why isn't there some substantial negative effect on jobs? If you close to the next slide, there's a brief paper by John Schmidt called, Why does the minimum wage have no discernible effect on employment? It talks about the different channels of adjustment through which we think these effects are playing out in the economy. Why isn't there a more substantial negative effect on jobs? The first one is that when you raise the minimum wage, it tends to lead to a reduction in turnover. Workers stay on the job longer and as a consequence of that, that's a cost savings for business because they don't have to spend as much recruiting, hiring and training new workers. And the research on this has shown and tended to find that for every 10% increase in minimum wage, you get about a 2.2% reduction in turnover. The second thing is that when you have more workers staying on the job longer, they tend to find improvements, there tends to be improvements in their productivity, businesses buying new efficiencies for those workers, maybe because managers decide if they're paying workers more, they should expect them to be more efficient, more productive. In any event, that's a cost savings as well for businesses. You do get wage compression, which the one gentleman referred to earlier. In other words, workers who may have been higher up the food chain may see a smaller raise than they would have otherwise because some of that money is being paid to workers at the bottom of the wage scale and so the overall wage distribution is compressed. You do see small price increases resulting from minimum wage increases, but the size of these price increases is important to know is relatively small. The studies that have looked at this have found generally that 10% increase in the minimum wage, wage to a price increase in highly affected industries of between 0.3% and 1.5%. So that's not quite the wrong prices, that's just the industries that hire a lot of low-eat workers, places like fast food, retail, hotels, that sort of thing. With the lady going to raise her hand, that's what I saw. I didn't hear. Thank you. I hope you can see him in the corner. I can, I'm sorry. I see where you're talking here about there'd be some small increases. I'm on, I think, yeah, we're on the same chart. In Vermont, there are a lot of older people living today than there used to be, probably maybe because young people are leaving for better wages, better jobs somewhere else regardless, but these people that are old and live, they don't get any more money now, they're living on a fixed income. With all of the services in the area, if wages are increased and the minimum wage is increased, don't you feel that's going to have an impact on these people living on fixed incomes when they go to the shopping or they go to a dinner or something like that? Well, to the extent that they spend their money in highly affected industries, like fast food restaurants and some retail places, it's possible, sure, that they could pay more in prices, for sure. But again, the price increases are, overall are quite modest. I mean, a 0.3% increase in the cost of something relative to a 10% increase in the pay for a lot of workers, you know, that's a trade off that I think some people would say is reasonable for folks on fixed income. Sure, it may be harder. I don't disagree with that. Great, thank you. So lastly, the fifth item on this list is also worth pointing out, and that is the increased consumer demand generated by an increase for the minimum wage. And what that is basically saying is that when you raise the minimum wage, you're effectively shifting income from an entity that is less likely to spend every single dollar, namely business owners, shareholders, hiring from households, to a low wage worker who probably spends every single dollar they receive, right away, simply because they have to. So because of that shift, you tend to see an increase in consumer spending overall. It provides this modest stimulus. And so a lot of businesses are able to absorb those additional costs simply because they have more customers coming through the door as a result of the minimum wage increase. Now, moving to the next slide, the lady asked about how to correctly sort of understand these job loss effects if they exist. And, you know, the point I would make on this first, that first bullet point is just to say that research has always been very clear on wage impacts. And what I mean by that is that every study that has looked at the increase of the minimum wage on wages finds that greater minimum wage does raise wages, period. But the important impacts are a lot more opaque. As I said, the results of this huge sort of academic debate as to whether there is a small negative or a small positive effect. But the truth is that the effect is so small that I don't think folks should be, you know, I don't think policymakers should be making their decisions based upon whether this effect is statistically significant or not, or statistically significant or not, just given how small it is. When we talk about job loss in the low-wage labor market, what we're really talking about is a change in the total hours of work for low-wage workers. Now, most low-wage workers only work a portion of the year and they tend to change jobs a lot more frequently than higher-wage workers. So, if that's the case, if you raise the minimum wage and it actually did have some negative effect on the labor market, what that would mean for folks on the ground is that those who are low-wage workers who would have spent a portion of the year unemployed or just choosing to not work, they might spend a little bit longer unemployed or they might spend a little bit longer just choosing to not work as a result of the higher minimum wage. Or their employer might reduce the number of hours that they work per week. But because they're earning more per hour on net their annual income, it's likely to still be higher than it would have been otherwise, or at least no lower than it would have been otherwise. And research has generally confirmed this. If we look at what's happened to total family income after minimum wage increases, it tends to go up. So in other words, whatever the effects on total hours worked are, there is a clear positive effect on total earnings per year. And this is true even on pessimistic analyses of minimum wage increases, they tend to find that the increase in the minimum wage still leads to a net increase in income even if hours are reduced. And obviously I'm hoping I'm perfectly happy to take more questions. You know, I think it's important to keep in mind that today's low-wage workers are making less on average than their counterparts 50 years ago, at least nationally and in Vermont. It's a little bit better, but it's still 11% increase is not, as I said, something a publishing thing works over. Past increases in the minimum wage have been too infrequent, leaving millions without sufficient earnings to meet their basic needs. And this has led to a growth in inequality between workers at the bottom and workers in the middle that is shown by those charts that I showed earlier. Minimum wage workers in Vermont are more likely than a lot of their New England counterparts to be primary breadwinners working full time. And research has shown that increases in minimum wages have not led to any substantial negative effects on jobs. This justifies bolder increases. This justifies trying larger increases that we've done in the past. Because if the increases we've done in the past have had no substantial negative effects, then we basically left money on the table for low-wage workers. And unless we do those bolder increases, we're never going to give the minimum wage to a level that is actually a level that allows someone to live a decent life. That's all I'll talk about. Representative Stevens. Regarding this last slide, but also the concept of what full-time work is. I mean, Vermont has a rule when it talks about this kind of, in this argument, full-time employees, someone who works 40 hours a week. Of course, under the ACA, that's like 28 hours a week is considered a full-time job. I mean, there's lots of different levels. But when it comes to the difference between job loss and full-time jobs, and we're talking more about a minimum wage worker working 40 hours a week, that could be two jobs. That's not, I mean, there's just not as many low-wage jobs that go to 40 hours a week. I'm making that as a statement. It should be a question. Do you find that most low-wage jobs are coming in less than 40 hours? We do know that most low-wage workers per week and not full weeks per year. So yes, most low-wage workers are more likely to not work full-time for a year. Does that answer your question? Yeah. I mean, I'm so, when I say that $15 an hour is, if at 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year is equivalent to $31,200, that's really the outside for those numbers. I mean, but a person can work 40 hours, they just may be in different jobs and therefore different benefits and different schedules of benefits that they might receive. Is that, I mean, I'm not wrong in doing it that way, am I? No, that's not the right way. I mean, someone, folks will find hours however they can, and that's actually one of the channels of adjustment that is understood to be why we don't see the way that somebody's effects may be playing out is that a worker, when they get that wage increase, may actually stop working in their second job and just start, just retain one job at that point because at a higher hourly rate, they're able to meet their needs on only one job. And second question on these lines, and it just about went out of my head as I was going to ask you, so let me get back to you in a second if we're still here. Representative Strong. So thank you for your presentation, Dave. My question is, in the lower wage jobs, minimum wage jobs, how did you take into account the fact that those who do show up and receive training and are dependable often get raises in that job within weeks, months, or a year? How do you take into account that level? In a way, the study reminds me, it just stays at minimum wage and that's just it, but over time, their wages do go up. So how do you take that into account? Well, so you have to remember that what I'm looking at in all these historical charts, it's looking at kind of who is at that 10 percent wage. It doesn't mean that it's the same person year after year who's earning the 10th percentile wage. They may be slowly moving up, but it's a representation of whoever the worker is in that 10th percentile, they are worse off or no better off than a person in that same position 50 years ago or 40 years ago, whatever it may be. And it's true that folks do see raises as they stand in a job and they may be moving away from minimum wage the same as someone in that starting role 10 years prior. Because you have productivity improvements, because the economy is growing, we have the capacity for that person to start off at a better position than the person that preceded them a decade ago. And that's what I think minimum wage policy is about in many ways. It's raising that floor so that each generation starts off a little better than the next one or each, you know, yeah, I think I said it reasonably well there. And so that was, I'm sorry, that was kind of where I slipped, so thank you, Representative Strong for picking me up here. The thing is anecdotally in particular, but also the idea that the minimum wage is an entry-level wage and that people do receive raises off of that because that's what we think should happen. We've also heard testimony where there are people who especially work in larger stores, fast food chains, where they have not received an increase and that it's company policy not to give them incremental raises except for when forced, when mandated by law. Do any of your studies, you know, kind of going along with what Representative Strong was asking, do your studies show that there are people that do linger in low-wage jobs because those are the jobs they can get, whether it's a small town or whether it's in a fast food store? Well, so that's actually what the chart that is, you know, the cartoon of the stereotype and then the real person, you know, is affected by the minimum wage policy, that's actually what that chart is getting at because when you look at statistics of workers that are at exactly the minimum wage, they tend to do fit closer to that stereotype. They tend to be a lot younger, they tend to be part-time workers, they tend to be, you know, folks who don't necessarily have families. When you start moving just a little bit above that minimum wage, the demographic profile starts to totally change into the average person being this older worker who's working full-time, who may have children, and that is a consequence of what you're describing, that even if some folks maybe got one raise at some point to get them above the minimum wage, there's still a lot of people who are earning just above the minimum wage that are older in life, further along in their work life, and are not just starting out in the labor market. And in following up with that in terms of your earlier post slides on the sub-minimum wage, the number of people who are in sub-minimum wage and the high number of Vermonters who have college degrees in these, I mean again, the thing that we say is that we'll go to college, you'll get a better-paying job. That doesn't seem to always, I mean that is true to a degree about what we're seeing in Vermonters people, can I extrapolate and say what we're seeing is that people who have education aren't being paid at a level that their education perhaps should get them to? Yeah that's absolutely right. I mean when the fact that so many workers who have college degrees would be affected by minimum wage policy shows that unfortunately college is not a cure-all for a lot of these folks. It doesn't solve the underlying stagnation of wages that I talked about at the outset. And actually if we look at what's happened to wages for college-educated workers, they've basically been flat for the last 20 years. So even though college-educated workers do tend on average to make more than folks with just a high school degree, the wages haven't been rising the way that folks may think. And again partially that's a function of our failure to update these labor standards. Thank you. It is sometimes argued David that that we should continue in Vermont here on our CPI path. And I believe you've answered that but not a question but not quite so directly. I wonder if you would now why that would or would not be a good idea? Well it certainly is good to at least to do that. As I said earlier the fact that Vermont has that indexation has prevented an erosion in wages that a lot of your neighbors have experienced over the last decade for low-wage workers. The question is, is the current level adequate for workers in Vermont today in terms of both what it costs to live and you know what where they are relative to typical workers in the economy. You know if you if you only keep the minimum wage and if you only adjust it for inflation every year what you're basically saying is that no matter what happens in the overall economy someone is a minimum wage worker it's never going to have their material standard of living change. It's never going to improve. You know the next generation's minimum wage worker is going to have the exact same quality of life as the previous generation's minimum wage worker. Now that's better than letting that quality of life erode as has happened throughout most the rest of the country but I think an argument could be made that you know with improvements in technology with growth in the economy with you know the US becoming a much richer country some of the benefits of that should also go to the lowest paid workers so that someone starting off in a job or someone who's stuck in the lowest paid job or close to the lowest paid job is seeing their quality of life materially improve as a result of improvements in the economy overall and that would mean you have to do more than just keep the minimum wage locked in to CPI. The state of Vermont since 1999 has developed a basic needs budget which then ends up with what we consider a livable wage and it and it sort of matches the calculator that you put forward but when I look at again when I look at the number of college graduates that that are working at a sub 15 an hour wage one of the one of the things that this basic needs budget doesn't include is either consumer debt or college debt which are now which have exploded in the last 15 or 20 years. Does your calculator or the calculators you use even include that because I would think that if I'm making less than 15 bucks a year 15 bucks an hour on top of high rent and and and high expenses I have a three to six hundred dollar a month college loan if I'm a college graduate if I'm actually working at this level. Right so our calculator and most of and I don't know of a single one of these budget calculators that includes tuition payments or college debt so that would be on top of the expenses that we're describing. Right that just makes this conversation seem much more magical right because it doesn't take into account those those numbers I mean I appreciate your numbers and how solid they are but I think that's we've seen it in our basic needs budget that there's a that that whole exists. Well again I think that speaks to the problem that we you know you you folks right now and and lawmakers in a lot of parts of the country are trying to deal with a problem that has been building for 40 years the fact that we have not been adequately adequately raising mental wages and updating labor standards for most of the last generation and and now we're at this point where costs of living are significantly further away from the value of the minimum wage and you're trying to make up a lot of lost ground I think that's the problem that you're you're referring to. Great thank you. Other questions. Thank you this has been really helpful. Great happy to be here. Digitally. Feels like you're it worked great. You're sitting in the witness chair. My contact information is on the last slide and Ron has my contact information if folks have additional questions I'm happy to feel emails or phone calls after the fact. Okay appreciate that. Have a great day. You as well. Thank you. Thank you.


So I got a bunch of comments on the issue of religion and atheism and the new atheists and, you know, Kesson's article about, well, we need something for morality, and most people can discover it by themselves. So, you know, this is why we need religion and atheism doesn't provide anything. And indeed, atheism, quietism doesn't provide anything. Atheism, quietism is just the recognition that there is no God, that there's no such thing, and that religion by relying on God is just bogus. It's just fairy tales. It's just make-believe. It doesn't tell you, then, what set of ideas, a rational, makes sense, what kind of life you should pursue, what morality looks like. It's just, all atheism does is say, this is fantasy. Don't take this seriously because it's not based on logic, not based on fact. There's no reality to God or religion. So that's what atheism does.  But you see that the challenges, and this is the challenge new atheists have, is one of the things religion has incocated deep into our culture. Is that the fundamental purpose of morality is to dictate how we treat others and how we relate to others. And that the standard of morality is the other. Not God, maybe, but the other. So if you become an atheist, but you still hold the view that morality fundamentally is how I should treat other people. And that the standard is the other. Okay, where do I get a, where does that code come from? Where does this idea of the other being more important than me somehow, or what do I do with that? How do I know how to behave to other people? What are the rules that should guide me? And it's a little bit well-doing. And I don't think, I don't think as a consequence, people then become lying, cheating, stealing, SOBs and motorists and whatever.  And, but they're still, because they're still stuck in Christianity. They're still stuck with religion, and they don't know it because they don't associate the belief in God and belief in religion with a particular morality, they think morality is the same, no matter whether you're religious or not, no matter where it comes from. And this is to some extent a fault of the new atheists, who basically concord all kinds of ways and all kinds of means to justify their conventional morality in atheistic terms. But it all seems like a caution. It doesn't seem right, because it's not based on any reason, rationality, reality. It seems like they're just replacing God with, well, this is all we know. Do what others, as you were doing to yourself, don't hurt other people, don't lie, don't cheat. But that's all the guidance we have, that's morality, that's it. It's a list of don'ts, commandments. We don't have God to give us commandments. So we need to use our moral instincts. It turns out people don't have moral instincts. We need to just follow the Christian ideas, just don't call it Christianity because we don't believe in Christianity, we don't believe in God. And people are stuck. People are stuck. They don't know exactly what to do. And again, they try. They do all the right things, but without a proper morality, it's hard to achieve happiness. Without a proper morality, it's hard to be successful in life. Without a proper framework for thinking about life, it's hard to be successful at it. So a lot of people who become atheists fail. And then some people blame their atheism for it. A lot of people who become atheists, maybe they don't fail, but they feel like they might fail. They feel like they're going to fail. And as a consequence, they give up on atheism. Or they give it lip service. Or they become agnostics. Oh, they become something. Very few of them become religionists, but some of them do. Look at Dave Rubin, right? And Kissen won't exactly tell us where he thinks he gets his morality from. But they all think they need to get their morality from somewhere outside. That's what they've been taught. It's the only option they have. The article is an article that Kissen, what's his name? Konstantin, wrote about, and I talked about this on a previous episode, wrote about basically being enamored with the new atheists when they first appeared, and then basically becoming agnostic and now kind of not really saying but understanding how important religion is in the lives of so many people. And you get a lot of, and there's a lot of people out there talking about this. There's a lot of people talking about the emptiness, the fact that we now have in America and in Europe we have growing percentages of people who define themselves as atheists. And we also have growing percentages of people who are depressed. We have growing percentages of people who are lost, confused. And of course they link the two, even though there's no evidence of linking those two. Constantly Kissen. No, I don't know what that is. And there's a lot of people who say, no, the solution and what we need is religion. A lot of people say, yeah, look, atheism is true. There is no God.  And there is no morality without religion. His name is Konstantin Kissen, K-I-S-S-I-N, Konstantin Kissen. Thank you, Rob. And you can find the article online. Here's an example. This is from one of the comments on my video. I'm an atheist and I also think that most people need some sort of religion in their life. I'm not sure why many people need that in their life, but they do. But how do you know they need it if you don't know why they need it? How do you know it's a need? How do you know you can't replace that need with something else? With reason, rationality and objective morality, a morality based on reason and rationality. So right off the bat, we just assume they need it. And partially it's this, it's a certain, and I think a lot of young atheists have this, it's a certain arrogance of, well, I don't need God, but they do. Can't trust them. Can't trust those guys. They're low IQ people or something? I don't know. I don't think it's even correlated IQ. But they're not to be trusted. I'm okay as an atheist. I can live my life, but they can't. Then he says, even as an atheist, I would rather live in a town with a very high Christian population than in the neighborhood of atheists. I don't get this. Why? Why would you want to live in a town surrounded by irrational people, surrounded by people who believe in a non-being, a non-entity, who are guided not by reason and rationality, but by commandments and by revelation? Why would you want to live in a town surrounded by people who are basically advocating for a primitive ideology, a primitive philosophy, a philosophy that maybe made sense a thousand years ago, but is completely debunked and refuted and gone? So, you know, these are people who rely on the emotions. These are people who can't handle the world without a super being. Why would you want to live amongst them as compared to atheists who at least don't have that problem? And which makes atheists open to, guess what, arguments, reason, persuasion, whereas with a religionist, it's a book. It's written in a book where preacher told me it's in a revelation. It is what it is. So, I don't get it. I would live, I would much rather live. I mean, by orders of magnitude, surrounded by atheists and surrounded by Christians. He goes on to say, clearly there are people that have a sense of morality without religion. A sense of morality? What does that even mean? What does morality mean? But not enough people do. Religion gives enough people the sense of morality that society needs that it is a new benefit. It is a new benefit. As long as one is not a fundamentalist about it. I think he meant net benefit. That is a net benefit. But here you have, he has a super narrow view of morality, a view of morality that Christianity upholds. That is that morality deals with other people. That is, morality is about not hoarding others. It's about not killing, not stealing, not cheating. And that's all he cares about. But that's such a poor man's morality.  Morality is about giving you the tools to live the best life that you could live. Not just about how to deal with other people. And if you're concerned about dealing with other people, if you're concerned about being robbed and being stolen and being cheated, is there any empirical evidence that suggests that murderers and thieves and muggers and violent criminals tend to be atheists and not religious? Any evidence of that? Indeed, since the 1990s, the United States has become more secular and violent crime has declined in the United States. Now again, causation, you know, correlation is not causation, but it certainly doesn't look like it's the other way around. You'd expect Europe to be a lot more violent than the United States. And where Europe is violent, it tends to be violent because of religions, people, Muslims in this case. So where's this correlation? Where's this cause of relationship between atheism and violence and treating people badly? I don't know of such a correlation. Neighborhoods that are predominantly atheistic, more violent, more crime-prone than neighborhoods that tend to be religious? No. So it's all just bogus.  At least they have God watching over them. Oh, it's like you've listened to Dennis Prager videos too much.  It's not reality. Not reality. And then he says, this is the funniest one. Would you ever live in Los Angeles or Salt Lake City? Now I'm asking you guys in the chat, where would you ever live? Los Angeles or Salt Lake City?    I really dislike Los Angeles. It's not a city I want to live. But if you gave me a choice between living in Salt Lake City among a bunch of boring Mormons or living in Los Angeles, I'm going to Los Angeles in an instant. It's no competition. Yeah, Los Angeles is probably more violent than Salt Lake City. Probably. I'll take the risk. I want to be around interesting people. I want to be in a culture. I want to be stimulated. I want to be interesting stuff. I want to be able to have a conversation with people. I mean, what are you talking about? And I want to at least have the possibility that people are rational. I mean, when people start talking to me about religion and God, I don't know what to do with them. Where do you go with that? What do you do with it? I find it the most boring and satisfying, distracting, possible place you could think of. And by the way, I think the neighborhoods in LA, primarily where the atheists live, that are just as safe as Salt Lake City. Just as safe as Salt Lake City. But why would you... I mean, have you ever read what Mormons believe in?  I mean, it's completely weird and bizarre.  That's nuts. So I don't get this admiration for Christians. And he says, I get your discussion of past Christian, Jewish, Muslim behaviors, and sadly many Muslims today. But come on. Christians and Jews and Muslims are not acting like that like they did a few centuries ago. No, they're not. They have that capacity. They have the capability. Most of the communists I meet today are not acting like Stalin. But ooh, give them the right circumstances. Give them the right power. I have a feeling they'll do the same thing. One of the great achievements of the West, one of the great, great achievements of the West, is that they separated religion from politics so that we took away that tool of oppression, that tool of violence that Christians had. And he says, now, if you could get everyone trained up to understand that you don't need religion, a god of gods to know right from wrong and how to behave morally just from yourself, and then I'm on board. But people just seem to want religious founding for their morals. People want that, but they're wrong. And we need our responsibility to teach them that they're wrong because they are only getting, because morality is much greater than what they think it is. And this is the beauty. Once you get rid of religion, once you get rid of some being up there dictating to you, telling you how to live, guess what happens? This amazing, exciting thing happens. The world actually opens up to you. What's good is now accessible. What is good, the options of what is good expand. And the standard by which we evaluate what is good is not now some being telling us, thou shalt not, it's reason and rationality. And the orientation of morality now is not just don't do that, don't do that, don't do that. It's what should I do? Suddenly, when you're free of religion, the question becomes, what should I do? And there's a really, really important question that goes along with what should I do, which in religion you're not allowed to ask. It's why? Why should I do that? Versus doing that. You have options. And you have to understand what you're doing. And what happens when you abandon religion and you embrace a scientific morality, a morality based on human survival, human flourishing, human success, is suddenly you discover that morality is not a set of restrictive, scary commandments. But morality is now a tool that opens the world to you. It's a scientific tool to discover, to discover what is good for me. What is good for life? All human life? And what is particularly good for my life? And how should I live? And what should I do? And how should I do it? I mean, how beautiful is that? How amazing is that?  There's a God there looking and evaluating. If you thought that you have never mind the actions that you take. Suddenly you're the only one evaluating and it's your job to discover, success to discover a life, discover how to live it. And yeah, that's in some sense scary. Not really. I never felt scared by that. It's liberating. It's exhilarating. It's motivating. I have this tool, this amazing tool that is going to guide my life to help me be more successful, to help me live well, to help me be happy. And now, you know, what does morality demand of me? I mean, ranch morality demands of you really one major thing. But it's a thing you'd expect as a human being you want to do anyway because it's in your nature. What does Rand expect of you to think? Think. Figure it out. Use reason. Be rational. Rationally evaluate a situation and decide how you should act. Be guided by rational principles. Principles that are there not by dictate, but are there because they are the means to an end. The end of your survival. The end of your happiness. The end of your success. And notice that morality, if morality is a guide to living a good life, morality is a guide to identifying right and wrong, is impossible in religion. There is no morality in religion. All there is in religion is following orders. All there is in religion is doing what you're told. I don't have to do the Abraham example again, but you know, yeah, is Abraham moral for agreeing with God's commandment to murder his son? Yes. He's the symbol of morality according to all the Abrahamic religions. There's a reason they're called the Abrahamic religion because he is an emblem of morality. Because morality for religion is mindlessly following. Following in any case. That's what you're told. Accepting. That's not morality. That's frigging suicide. That's the anti-morality. It's immoral. So no, embrace atheism not as an ideology, but as a door, a little door that opens you up to this vast world of possibilities. And then it's really, really important and Rand's morality and Rand's morality, objective morality is a morality that unleashes your potential by unleashing your mind. To not just think about how do I obey but to think how do I live? How do I choose the best life possible to me? What values should I have in order to be successful at living, at being, at existing as compared to religion? God.   You can test it. You can figure out what works and what doesn't. It's consistent with reality. It's grounded in logic, so if something doesn't make sense to you, don't do it. Go back, figure it out, test it. It's rational. You can see the connections between the things, but if you're still not sure, you can rethink it, redo it, re... It's like science. Does it make sense based on the principles? And does it work? Got a testable hypothesis. Lying is bad for you. You can check. You can test it. Be careful. Experimentation is risky, but you can test it.  I say, you don't believe honesty. Dishonesty is bad for you. Spend the day lying to your best friend. See what happens. They all laugh. They all know exactly what the result would be. They've all tested it already. They all know. So it's not a commandment that shall not, and it's not even lying that objectivism is interested in. It's be honest. Don't accept falsehoods, and therefore don't communicate falsehoods, but don't accept falsehoods. Don't deceive yourself. Facts, reality, that's what matters. That's what an amazing morality that is. What an amazing path that can set you on in life as compared to, again, dogma. The limited scope of dogma. And dogma that is set, that says right in advance, we don't care about you. We care about God. We care about the world. We care about society. We don't care about you. Here's a morality that says, oh, you're it. All right, Troy. Thank you. Really, really appreciate it. Troy came in with 500 Australian dollars as he does pretty regularly. I really, really appreciate the support, Troy. He usually does it, almost always does it, on one of these rants that I give about morality or about something positive about the objectivist virtues in some way or another. So really appreciate that. All right, what else do we want to cover? So, you know, the bottom line is life, to have meaning. You need to take control over it. And that can only happen by giving up on mysticism and religion. And morality, again, should be a guide to success. Not a list of things that you have to do. Not a list of things that somebody else requires that you do. It should be things that you have identified, proven, shown to yourself rationally that you should do in order to achieve the goal of living, of being successful at it. So, you know, I think that it's sad that so many atheists are turning away from atheism and going back to religion. I think it's laziness, but it's more than laziness. It's cowardice. It's basically an admission that they don't want to do the thinking, that they don't want to put in the effort. And it's not even like they don't know about Iron Man. Many of them do know about Iron Man. But it's too hard. It's too complicated. It's much easier to say, and this is the appeal of religion at the end. The appeal of religion is, I don't have to think. God tells me what to do. Priest tells me what to do. Tradition tells me what to do. Somebody else tells me what to do. And there we go. Just do it. Religion is for lazy people. People who do not want to take responsibility over their own lives. But people do not want to take responsibility over their own minds. Don't want to take responsibility over their own values. Don't want to take responsibility over their own happiness. They want somebody else to tell them. And again, this is why religion opens the door up to all kinds of authoritarianism because it's the same thing, right? And people maybe are the forms of maybe secular forms of religion, like environmentalism, like wokeism, but it's all the same thing.  I have no idea how we got here. But he has discovered us and I am warring against Jesus. Yes, I am. I am warring against Jesus and therefore I guess I am Satan, the devil, whatever. Oh, God.  The kind of nonsense you get. Not argumentation, not debate, not discussion, not reason, but just, you know, authoritarian yelling. Everything's all caps and it's like, you are the devil. Why? Because you disagree with me. So be it. So I encourage everybody to, you got to take your life seriously and that means invest in studying a morality, invest in internalizing that morality, invest in working it, in living it, in integrating it, in making it part of you so that you can gain the benefits from it. And it's incredibly liberating it's incredibly liberating as compared to a religious morality which is so stifling. Stifling.