but the fact of the matter is that our research today shows that looking forward path means we must move beyond treating the american people as simply a list of demographic boxes. and i ll give you my own personal example. my grandmother raised five kids in poverty as a waitress. my parents spent 20 years paying off medical bills for my brother who was diagnosed as an infant with neuroblastoma. i am a gay man who cares about marriage equality, and i have an african-american niece and nephew who i have a particular set of worries and concerns about. the party must be a party that can care about the tipped wage worker, can care about access and economic activity and care about things like marriage equality and criminal justice reform, and our success as a party means devising a path forward that includes all of those things and doesn t just prioritize one over another. when the autopsy is written on what didn t go your way in this past election, other than say not going to wisconsin an
fight voter suppression and react to grassroots politics in this country. the truth is the very rich are becoming much richer. 4e million living in poverty and middle class declining. we have got to bring people together to create a government and an economy that works for all and i m pledged to do everything that i can to make that happen. i would like to go on some of those trips. we will follow you, if you ll let us. oh, my god. we would love to have you. i ll tell you something else i think. i did an event with cnn yesterday and we are doing something with msnbc. we need to have town meetings, not just all of these talking heads, in all due respect, on television. go out. ask the mothers of this country whether they can afford $15,000 a year for child care. ask a low wage worker whether you can survive on nine bucks an hour. talk to some of the elderly people in this country who have nothing in the bank! as they face retirement. ask a disabled veteran if they are making it on $
labor secretary. jd, respond to that. thomas makes the point that the labor secretary nominee is not someone supportive of, for example, a minimum wage. will those folks who are in that very dark and shaded part of the country get the relief they re looking for? well, i think a lot of folks in that part of the country when they think of the labor secretary they re probably more unset about his views on immigration than the minimum wage and we can sort of figure out which is more important from the perspective of low wage worker, but i really think that ultimately these voters are going to judge donald trump not on who he puts in some of these positions but on whether their lives actually get better over the long-term. you know, these folks give politicians a fairly long leash. they voted for bush in 2000. a lot of them voted for barack obama in 2008 and have just now swung to donald trump in the past few months, so i really think that whether those things that thomas talks about, t
institutional racism is a huge factor in our whole efforts to address income inequality. we must not forget that. thirdly, let me say, back to what tianna said about minimum wage. we need to be looking at raising not only the minimum wage, which i agree is really just a pittan krft e, but we need to move to a living wage where people can develop a pathway to middle class through a living wage. we have to understand that income inequality, ceo compensation is at its highest now when you re looking at what the lowest wage worker makes versus ceos. it s outrageous. so, we have to really look at what some of these structural issues are and the republican tea party, i don t believe will even consider this because their ideology is about getting government out of the lives of people when, in fact, government is not the panacea. we re saying government has a
these are americans that work full time to support a family and if the minimum wage kept pace with productivity, they would be getting paid well over 10 $ an hour. instead the minimum wage is $7.25. when congress refuses to raise it, it loses value because there is inflation and everything else costs a little bit more even though inflation has been low and costing more each year. that means each dollar is not going as far and they have a little bit less. over the past year, the failure of congress to act was the equivalent of a $200 pay cut for these folks for a typical minimum wageworker. that s a month worth of groceries or two months of electricity. it makes a big difference for a lot of families. the good news is that in the