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A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.

Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.

The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high.

When taxpayers are subsidizing low wages, people should be aware of that. We're subsidizing an economy. We're not subsidizing people. They are doing a hard day's work. When we're not rewarding work actively, there's something wrong with the system.

Literally, if we took away the minimum wage - if conceivably it was gone - we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.

Raising the minimum wage means we have workers paying more in to support the Social Security system.

Free market economists frequently see minimum wage legislation as mere political intervention. However, there are decent economic theories which show that, under certain circumstances, minimum wages can be beneficial, as it makes workers more productive.

The minimum wage is something that F.D.R. put in place a long time ago during the Great Depression. I don't think it worked then. It didn't solve any problems then and it hasn't solved any problems in 50 years.

In the general economy, you get government involved in making market decisions - first of all, they're going to get it wrong. For a minimum wage, you will actually reduce the number of jobs available.

When we talk about the kind of folks whose lives will be made better by raising the minimum wage, we're not talking about a couple teenagers earning extra spending money to supplement their allowance. We're talking about providers and breadwinners. Working Americans with bills to pay and mouths to feed.