I eat excellent bread, clean meat, good crisp veggies, organic fruits and nice wine and cheese. It is one of the things I am truly grateful for. I'm not kidding. You can't ask a single mother of three working two jobs for minimum wage to eat that way. I am lucky.

I don't know of a single economist who disagrees that when you raise the minimum wage, you kill jobs for the poor.

I am quite uncomfortable using legislation to peg the minimum wage.

Let me just go on record and say this: I am not for decreasing the minimum wage.

What I want to do is create jobs that make the minimum wage irrelevant.

Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.