Nick Brana joins us to discuss his efforts to “Draft Bernie for a People’s Party;” and economist Ben Zipperer explains how, contrary to conventional wisdom, raising the minimum wage will not result in significant job loss.
Nick Brana was the National Political Outreach Coordinator on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign through the 2016 Democratic National Convention and went on to become a founding member of “Our Revolution.” He is the founder and director at “Draft Bernie for a People’s Party.”
“The American people are progressive, and they’re ready for political change. And representatives in Washington of both parties – the Democrats and Republicans – do not represent what it is that the American people want to see. And so that’s kind of the starting intellectual foundation for this.”
Nick Brana founder of “Draft Bernie for a People’s Party.”
Ben Zipperer is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. His areas of expertise include the minimum wage, inequality, and low-wage labor markets. Prior to that, Dr. Zipperer was research economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He is a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a research associate at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley.
The skeptics of minimum wage increases have been consistently shown to be wrong by very careful economic research… minimum wages – at least the kinds typically passed in the United States – tend to do their job. And what I mean by that is they tend to raise the wages of low wage workers and give them higher income; and they do so with very little to no negative costs in terms of employment losses.”
Ben Zipperer economist at the Economic Policy Institute
Draft Bernie?/Raising Minimum Wage