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No person can maximize the American Dream on the minimum wage.

The minimum wage is not something that you want to stay on as a permanent basis. For example, if you have a minimum wage job, you don't stay there 20 or 30 years. You don't put your children through college working on minimum wage.

We have to raise the minimum wage.

Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anyone who's tried to pay a heating bill, fill a prescription, or simply buy groceries knows all too well that the current minimum wage does not cut the mustard.

A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.