There's a lot of interesting information being released these days, which gives a window into how politicians so often say one thing and do another. As IWF's Charlotte Hays wrote in Townhall, emails released by Wikileaks suggest that Hillary Clinton's policy team knows that the dramatic minimum wage hike she supports would backfire on low-income workers by destroying jobs:
Of particular interest is an April 2015 email, spotted by the eagle-eyed Sean Higgins of the Washington Examiner, from Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a think tank with ties to the Obama administration, which also provided a perch for Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, while he was out of government. Tanden wrote to Podesta and three other high-ranking Clinton campaign officials: "Substantively, we have not supported $15 – you will get a fair number of liberal economists who will say it will lose jobs." One liberal economist who feared job loss was Alan Krueger, an Obama adviser, who wrote last year in the New York Times that research indicates that a $12 minimum wage would "do more good than harm for low-wage workers," while a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage "would put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and unintended consequences."
…Of course, this is standard fare among conservative economists. The news from the Wikileaks dump is not that minimum wage hikes cost jobs but that progressives probably know this, too, but find it politically expedient to advocate something that will help them get votes, while ultimately harming their constituents. Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic politicians, along with union leaders, continue to hail raising the minimum wage as a quick fix for poverty, ignoring the job losses we now know they know will happen as a result of their policies.
You can read Charlotte's entire piece here and learn more about how the minimum wage harms people who must need job opportunities by clicking here. Be sure to share this important story and let your friends know that while a minimum wage hike may sound compassionate, in practice it's anything but.