Ben Carson on JobsTea Party challenger in Republican primary | |
CARSON: People need to be educated on the minimum wage. Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases. It's particularly a problem in the black community. Only 19% of black teenagers have a job, who are looking for one. And that's because of those high wages. If you lower those wages, that comes down. You know, as a youngster, my first job working in a laboratory as a lab assistant, I would not have gotten those jobs if someone had to pay me a large amount of money. That's what we need to be thinking about. How do we allow people to ascend the ladder of opportunity, rather than how do we give them everything and keep them dependent?
Q: So, you would not raise it?
CARSON: I would not raise it, specifically because I'm interested in making sure that people are able to enter the job market and take advantage of opportunities.
CARSON: Let me say what I actually said about raising the minimum wage. I was asked should it be raised, I said, probably, or possibly. But, what I added--which I think is the most important thing--I said we need to get both sides of this issue to sit down, and talk about it. Negotiate a reasonable minimum wage, and index that so that we never have to have this conversation again in the history of America. I think we also have to have two minimum wages, a "starter," and a "sustaining" because how are young people ever going to get a job if you have such a high minimum wage that it makes it impractical to hire them?
Q [to Walker]: You have called raising the minimum wage a "lame idea"?
WALKER: I don't want to argue about how low things are going to be, I want to talk about how do we lift everyone up in America. That's what we've done in Wisconsin, that's exactly what we'd do federally.
"6 in the morning?" they shot back. "You must be crazy. What are they teaching you at that fancy school?"
I then went on to explain that they could work much more efficiently during the cool weather, and that I would pay them for 8 hours of work if they could fill 100 bags with garbage in 7 or even 6 hours. Well, you have never seen people work like these young men worked from that point on. By 8:00 in the morning they would have filled more than 200 bags with garbage and cleaned whole stretches of highway.
Those in charge of the program were flabbergasted. They were always saying, "Carson's crews are amazing, but we never see them."
One of the themes you may have begun to notice is that those entities that are bad for our nation tend to want what they want now, without thought to how it will affect future generations. If you use that principle as a measuring stick, in most cases you can easily determine which unions and other entities are good and which are deleterious to the prosperity of our nation.