sending state employees home early. just to give awn idea of the preparations there. here in new york where we are seeing about 300 salt spreaders out on the roads, trying to get ahead of the storm, about a thousand snowplows standing by, as well as people at the stores buying up snow shelves, food, water, preparing to hunker down as long as they immediate to weather out this storm. officials warning people to stay off the roads. they say that if you do have to go out there, be sure to pack extra supplies and flashlights, food, water. just be prepared in case you get stranded overnight. port authorities staffing extra people. trying to keep the bridges and tunnels open and the trains running. right now the big takeaway from this is if you don t have to be outside, stay inside. back to you. get your mittens out. thank you. after the break, more an dozen states kick off 2014 with minimum wage increases. can congress follow suit and get it down at the federal level?
would be some. the main way to have higher wages at walmart and other retailers would be to have higher prices. and that would be because it actually makes the workers more productive. the reason that low wage jobs are low wage is that, you know, a company like walmart does not make a lot of profit per employee. if you have higher prices, you ll have higher profits to support higher wages and higher consumer prices. i think that, you know, minimum wage increases are one of the policies that are available right now that do produce real standard of live increases for people who work at walmart and similar employers. i also think policies generally that support full employment will tend to push wages up. that s what we saw during the 1990s, the one period in the last 30 years when we had good wage growth across the entire income spectrum. i would caution against expecting that unionization will produce a lot of wage increases at retailers. it may produce benefits against other kinds of ab
swept it s floors, this country offered you a basic bargain. a sense that your hard work would be rewarded with fair wages and descent benefits, a chance to buy a home and save for retirement and most of all, a chance to hand out a better life for your kids. but over time that engine ban to stall and a lot of folks here saw it. that bargain began to fray. technology made some jobs obsolete. global competition sent a lot of jobs overseas. it became harder for unions to hire the middle class. smaller minimum wage increases for the working poor.
that just doesn t add up. joining us now is former chief economic adviser to the vice president and senior fellow at the center on budget and policy priorities, the great jared bernstein. jared, okay, tell us. why is the number nine the right number at the right time when it comes to the minimum wage? because if you look at the history of minimum wage increases, they ve always been in the kind of range that we re contemplating if we re talking about going from the current federal level of $7.25 to $9 in 2015. the chart that you re showing there is one that i made over the weekend. i don t know what you do for fun on the weekends, but i like to take the alog rhythm of minute pages thanks for allowing me to talk about log rhythms on television. if there are children questioning whether you use your math in real life, sometimes you do. this shows that historically
a fact evidence in jim talent trying desperately not to say anything about it in 2006, business interests, the backbone of the republican party have fought minimum wage initiatives tooth and nail over the years. like the chamber of commerce, that brags it continues to propose increase. p.r. spinster rick burr bur man s policy institute. this is is really awkward for republicans. on the one hand, they re so reliant on the support of business interests, they represent business interests. but on the other hand, they recognize that opposing minimum wage increases is really bad electorally, even in conservative states. so republicans have been against the minimum wage, but very quietly. i m convinced the republican jihad against acorn was not about some fake expose.