Nick Hanauer Inspirational Quotes (11)

Raising the overtime threshold - something that is about to happen. This is more complex so not as many people understand it, but it's equally consequential.

I was more conservative when I was younger. But I don't think that I've moved left - I think the country has moved right.

Raising the minimum wage is very efficient. Everybody's on the same playing field, it's a very simple rule, it doesn't require a lot of administration, you don't have to negotiate anything. It just is what it is.

Fast food workers are all the governor has power to enact. Your state legislature is held hostage by the same nitwits that hold hostage the federal [government]. People who have confused suffocating collectivism, which is bad, for a necessity to solve collective action problems, which is what all human endeavor is based on.

I think the idea that giant profitable corporations should pay their workers enough so that they don't need food stamps - since when is that left wing? How did that become leftie? That doesn't seem leftie to me. That seems common sense.

When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it's a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the other way around.

If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth to the wealthy leat to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.

You can go back 150 years and literally find the same people saying the same thing in the same way. If we have to pay you more, it will be bad for you. And that's because saying that is a much more polite way of saying, I'm rich, you're poor, and I would prefer to keep it that way.

If you care about real change, deep structural change, that involves politics, and all politics is friction. It takes leadership, and the willingness to create that friction, that leads to social change.

The fundamental law of capitalism is: when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more workers. The idea that high wages equals low employment, it's absurd.

Now one person doing the job of one and a half. So as an employer I can get two people to do the work of three, and think about what that does for profits.