when the house returns for votes. when those votes happen we will play those comments from the president. remember, too, all of our coverage from today, this news conference included, available at c-span.org. >> the house returns at 6:30 eastern and they'll take votes on a number of bills. they debated 14 bills today, including a number out of the foreign affairs committee. we'll have coverage of that coming up at 6:30 eastern. reminder, too, they'll take up a resolution tomorrow to hold the attorney general and the commerce secretary in contempt of congress. our live coverage tomorrow here on c-span. >> tonight on "the communicators" congressman roe khanna talks about the big issues facing the tech industry and the oversight role of congress. congressman khanna is interviewed by craig.

>> people were outraged. the things congress should be doing to keep political campaigns from using our data to change the way we think about our votes in ways we struggle to perceive. mr. khanna: absolutely. we need to pass strong privacy laws. i have an internet bill of rights which articulates a few things. we should never have data collected without knowing about it and our consent. we should know what's happening to our data. so in the cambridge an lit can case facebook should have a responsibility to immediately notify people when they were transferring their data. they didn't do that. people should also have been able to inquire at any point with facebook what was happening with their data. that law wasn't there. i think if you pass a basic protection for people online, ou would avoid things like the cambridge-analytica scandal. >> watch "the communicators" tonight at 8:00 eastern on

c-span2. >> c-span's "washington journal" live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up tuesday morning, we'll look at a new crip-ipsos poll -- c-span-ipsos poll. the poll also showed little interest among americans in exploring the solar system, going to mars or traveling to the moon. members of the science, space, and technology committee will join us from capitol hill to talk about u.s. space policy and the 50th anniversary of the apollo 11 moon landing. our guests include -- california democratic bera, oklahoma congressman lucas, mr. walz, katie hill, texas republican

congressman brian babin. and texas democratic congresswoman eddie bernice johnson. be sure to watch c-span's "washington journal" live at 7:00 eastern tuesday morning. join the discussion. >> tomorrow, the confirmation hearing for mark esper to become the next defense secretary. if approved he would replace jim mattis which left the post at the end of 2018. the senate armed services committee will hold the hearing and you can see it live at 9:30 a.m. eastern on c-span3. after that u.s. census director testifies on the 2020 census and what's being done in order to conduct a secure and accurate count. he'll be speaking before the senate governmental affairs committee and that starts live tuesday at 2:30 p.m. eastern. also on c-span3. and wednesday, president trump holds a campaign rally with voters and supporters in greenville, north carolina. and if the senate is out for the night we will show the

president's comments starting at 7:00 eastern on c-span2. >> former special counsel robert mueller is on capitol hill next week testifying in back-to-back hearings about possible obstruction of justice and abuse of power by president trump and russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. our live all-day coverage on wednesday, july 24, starts at 8:30 a.m. eastern. watch live on c-span3, online at c-span.org, or listen with the free c-span radio app. >> a new c-span poll shows that 78% of americans view nasa favorably. that's over 11 times more than those who have an unfavorable view of the agency. americans also want nasa to continue to lead in space. among republicans and democrats, more people disagree with privatizing space exploration than agree with the policy.

overall, only 27% of those polled support private businesses leading u.s. space efforts. you can find all of the results, including the findings on americans' attitudes towards space force and the belief in fe on errestial li c-span.org. a discussion about e memo ways, especially a call for a $15 minimum wage. joining us is heidi shierholz. she was the chief economist for barack obama and she serves as policy director at the policy institute. and michael farren with the mercatus center at george mason university. thank you for joining us. guest 1: thank you for having us. host: congress debates a bill for the normal wage. what is being proposed? guest 1: to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025.

there are a few more minor provisions, the two key ones being after that it would automatically update the minimum wage going forward so it would not do the things minimum wages do if you do not index it. it will no longer erode over -- purchasingion power will be maintained. one thing people do not know is the federal law allows employers workers $2.13 per hour. host: what you think about that approach? guest 2: it is a worthwhile idea and it is noble to want to raise wages. the problem with the minimum wage, especially federal been my wage, applies the same standard

across many different areas that don't have the same effect of the minimum wage. research has shown the rural effect of the minimum wage is much higher than the urban effect of the minimum wage. there are already higher minimum d.c. that9 states and cover 60% of the population. the u.s. south will be hit hard by federal been wage. host: we have not seen a minimum-wage federal increase in more than 10 years. guest 2: i don't think a federal minimum wage is the right policy to pursue. the minimum wage is like fishing with dynamite. it is flashy and effective but it can cause collateral damage. we want to avoid the collateral damage while at the same time implementing a policy that rages -- raises wages. somee subsidy would have of the benefits of raising wages

rather than the minimum wage, which reduces the incentive of the employer. taking a look at the minimum-wage snapshot. benefits of increasing minimum wage to $15 and what they found was the benefits to low-wage workers of increasing the memo wage vastly outweigh the cost. i will disagree with michael. i think the research is clear that you raise the normal wage and getting money in the pockets of low-wage workers reduces inequality and poverty without the negative impact many people have historically thought they were there. they don't show up in the data when you use rigorous research. negativere was some effect to a $15 increase. guest 2: people spin it one way,

advocates spent at the other way. the middle-of-the-road answer is the cdl reports found there would be significant affects from the mineral wage, as well as raising the wages of the workers who managed to keep their jobs. that is the matter of what happens with the memo wage. if you keep your job or your hours, your income goes up. or the people who have their jobs cut, it represents an income loss. host: a potential 1.3 billion jobs lost. guest 1: i think they made an error in their assessment of this literature when they picked the parameters that they need to use to do their employment estimates. this literature is vast. there are some high-quality studies and some not so high-quality studies. the not so high-quality studies

find negative employment effects of minimum wage increases. the high-quality studies find minimum wage increases we have seen have not cause significant job loss. the error they made was instead weighting the studies better, they matched them altogether. that is how they found this negative impact. the key thing is, even if you accept cdl's -- cdo's pessimistic predictions on job loss, -- they still far outweigh the costs. call if you want to talk about the proposal. if you earn the minimum wage, (202) 748-8000. if you are a business owner, (202) 748-8001. all others, (202) 748-8002. thet 2: the specifics of

report are important to understand. a lot of the proponents of minimum-wage are spinning this ted the should have weigh high-quality studies more highly. the 11 studies that the cdo used were cents the 2014 study that found negative effects. though studies are looking at the effect on all workers, which is why they use those studies. they are all peer-reviewed. three of the studies found actual positive impacts. the cdo used those. more studies found mild negative impacts. which is essentially what the cdo used in its analysis.

less than one third of the academic studies that used were actually positive the rest were negative. increases at an accelerating rate the higher you raise the rate. they got the numbers exactly right. what a: let's talk about low-quality study looks like. one study that was used in the assessment of what would happen is a study that looked at the employment affect of increasing the memo wage -- the increase in seattle. researchers that found data. thing, relative to

if they had not done it, they could not pin it down well. their data was good but they only had data for washington state. there is no comparison group to seattle and washington state. it is a unique place within that state. there is no other place they could look at and say here is an apples to apples comparison. even though they tried really hard, they had this great data, it was flawed because they did not have good comparison groups. more regular studies to a much better job of making apples to apples comparisons. when you do that rigorous job, but those studies find is increasing the minimum-wage does not cause job loss. host: a quick response? guest 2: the seattle study looked at the hours of been wage workers. comparisonght, a

group could only be in washington, as well. the researchers controlled that as best they could and still found the number of hours a low-wage worker worked after the inflammation of the minimum-wage wage went down. the average earnings went down by $75. differences between states over time that if implemented the minimum wage. that research finds there is a negative impact of the memo wage. it is the case study literature looking at the difference between pennsylvania and new jersey that started the question over whether memo wage has the effect. see is where you start to the can of impacts. the minimum wage has a unique impact every place every time and that is why we should be careful about increasing the

federal memo wage. guest 1: can i just make one last time. i feel like the literature is very clear but we will disagree. what we will probably not disagree on is the cbo found even if you take the most pessimistic analysis of job loss, they still find the benefits outweigh the costs. benefits are important. pennsylvania, go ahead. hello? i am sorry. part of the dumbing down of america. race, andch uses attack against unions and whatever they can to distract

the common man. abouthe scripture talks -- it is all about dumbing down the people, keeping get distracted. host: your question about the minimum-wage, sir, what is it? caller: what is wrong with a minimum wage? how can it hurt? it can only help the common men. guest 2: that is a great question. i can answer that with decades of research by economists on this. if you think a cigarette tax decreases the amount of cigarettes people by, if you think a soda tax or a carbon tax decreases the amounts of those useucts people use, or the of fossil fuels in production, you should understand minimum wage has the same effect. it is the basis of modern

economics, it is the law of demand. specifics and of labor markets are a lot more complex, but at a certain point, if you raise the memo wage, you will see economic impacts. guest 1: i think your question is great and your intuition is totally correct. what is wrong with this? when anybody suggests an increase in minimum wage, there is a refrain of you are going to hurt the people you are trying to help and it is just not true. one of the things your intuition is getting it that economists are strained to understand is 101 modelse, econ that if you increase the minimum wage you will cost jobs, they are based on laughable assumptions. it is that low-wage employers have no power to set wages

anywhere below the full value of of thed and keep some extra for themselves. anyone on the street would state what you say. that is crazy. that does not make any sense. you would be absolutely right. when you actually relax those crazy assumptions and allow that employers do have some power to suppress wages, they have the power to set wages below a total -- a worker's total worth to the firm and keep some for themselves, you get the outcome that it does not cause job loss. host: here is a business owner from ohio. caller: hello. question, if you raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, you are going to have to give up something and the unions

will not give up prevailing wage laws. if you give up prevailing wage laws, you would increase the ability for it to get done and reduce the cost by 25%. guest 1: this question of what happens with businesses is an interesting one and it is good to dig in and talk about it. when you increase the minimum wage the point is you get better wages to workers sort increased labor costs. what is the impact? when you get money into the pockets of low-wage workers who are likely to spend it, it increases demand for goods and services. offsets some of the increased costs. itther key thing it does is reduces turnover of minimum-wage workers. turnover is incredibly expensive. having toody leaves,

find somebody new, higher them, transition costs can cost up to around 20% of annual wages. when you increase the minimum wage, you reduce turnover because you get more money in the hands of low-wage workers and chaos in their lives goes down. when you reduce turnover as minimum wage does, that is another way businesses recoup cost. businesses recoup cost. for those reasons and others, businesses should not worry about an increase in minimum wage. when you have increased minimum wage in the past, it has not caused businesses to go out of business. guest 2: the idea it decreases turnover is correct. i spoke with a mcdonald's manager and it said it costs him $500 to onboard a new employee to give them a uniform and training. the problem is decreasing

employee turnover is bad for employees. they have fewer opportunities to find better jobs with better pay , better working conditions, things like that. the problem with unions supporting minimum wage is that union contracts are written that if there is an increase, the union gets a bump to its own minimum wage or requires a contract rewrite. the los angeles times reported about a unionized hotel in los angeles it paying its workers $10 per hour because unions get an exemption from complying with the minimum wage. the other hotel across the street which was not unionized was affected by the cities minimum-wage of $15 per hour. minimumt's hear from it wage earner from alexandria, virginia. hello? to doug in south

dakota, he earns minimum wage. good morning. caller: i make more than memo wage. people probably don't want to pay $15 but the people receiving the wage probably want the $15. pulling $200,000 per year and they get a pension. five years they pull a $19,000 pension every year. if you are in congress for longer you can pull up to 80% of your wages. and ryan is making $85,000 he could start collecting that pension at age 50. we pay 72% of their insurance, they go on obamacare. host: the topic of the memo wage. what is your question or

comment? caller: how can they be so different? people need to make a living wage and congress is way above that. wage goeshe minimum up, 22 up accordingly? guest 2: there is definitely a a fact that people that are higher than the memo wage see their wages raised, as well. it would cover directly about 17 million workers in 2025 but it would also indirectly affect the wages of another 10 million workers. right now there are about 400,000 people that make exactly the federal minimum wage. if you increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, you will have to minimum wage cover over 20% of all hourly

workers. guest 1: i totally agree with michael. this is really pinned down in the literature. when you increase the minimum underit is not just those that get bumped up, there are spillover effects. employers want to preserve internal wage ladders so the people getting moved up, the people who are above them get a raise. is a person on twitter that says raising the minimum wage will increase automation. you already see it at mcdonald's. guest 1: we hear that a lot. we will replace these jobs with machines. here is one thing i think is useful. i have spent my life worrying about what the labor market is delivering for u.s. workers and i am not worried about automation. inhave always seen increases

automation since the beginning of work. people have always started to use more sophisticated machines and on and on. ast process started as early we can remember and it is ongoing. it is not increasing at any faster pace. this is the thing the economy can absorb without hurting workers. what i am worried about is the minimum wage eroding overtime. that is what hurts workers. we need to increase labor standards. guest 2: this is going to be one of the situations where heidi and i have to disagree. she is probably the only economist that is not worried about the ratchet effect. once you increase the tightness of a bolt, you can't un-tightknit using a ratchet. it only tightens. employers tend to

invest in more capital sensitive production methods when you increase the minimum wage. shiftingmcdonald's is to self-serve kiosks, the fact that walmart is shifting to self-service, that happens naturally, as heidi says. but the minimum wage accelerates the impact by raising the cost of labor over what it might be. it forces the future honest faster than we might realize. mcdonald's has stated it will not fight the federal minimum wage anymore. bezon has said it will starting off workers at a $15 minimum wage and they will be advocating for a federal memo wage. this is something economists call raising rival costs. you drive the lower cost producers and small shops out of

business. minimum-wage does shift employment from smaller employers to larger employers. it might actually generate the kind of market power. host: that is michael farren with the mercatus center at george mason your mercy. we also have heidi shierholz from policy institute. california is next, a business owner. this is george. hello. caller: hello, good morning. i have a question about where you are getting this 1.3 million job loss number from? as an employer who employed a large number of people, i cannot think of anyone who hires excess people can just be eliminated because of the minimum wage.

host: what kind of business do you own? he hung up. guest 1: george's intuition is right. when labor costs go up a little bit, businesses see higher demand for their goods and services. it helps them. they say reduced turnover they find other ways to absorb cost. the weight of the best literature shows when you increase the minimum wage, it does not cause job loss. one of the things that is crucial with business owners, a particular small business owners, when thinking about increasing the minimum wage, they may think what it might be like if they had to raise their own wages independently to $15 per hour or whatever raise idea. in that case, a business might face a competitive disadvantage that might hurt them and they might have to lay off people.

that is the beauty of a wage floor. when you raise the labor standard, everyone faces the same prices and same rules and nobody faces a competitive disadvantage. that 1.3 million jobs, part of that comes from research that the cbo uses. the actual impact of the minimum wage is something different that what researchers have been looking at all the time. the decrease in employment comes from future job growth that does not happen as a result of employers shifting to more capital-intensive things, like using more machines to make their existing employees more productive. the idea of a $15 minimum wage having the same level playing field affect across the entire u.s. is not correct. it has an impact on different

kind of employers in different regions. a small shop that is less sophisticated that uses more low skilled labor in its operations will be more affected by the minimum wage than a larger place like home depot or walmart. host: let's hear from our line for others from florida. caller: good morning. the $15 minimum wage. , it isng to economists amazing how they think. they have no concept of what a small business is. we had a small business for years. we had three employees. most of those people came to us part-time after school. we have to train them. if there was a $15 an hour minimum, that $15 per hour would

have cost us about $30 per hour because one of us, either my husband or i, would've had to stop what we were doing in order to train them. the other people who take a part-time job after school do not need a living wage, so to speak. they live at home with mom and dad, this is their first venture into putting money into their own pocket. when our kids went to work, the object was you want a car? earn enough money. expenses,o living they didn't have to purchase food, all of these other things. host: stay on the line for a second. since you spoke to their world, i want you to get a response. guest 1: i have nothing to say, i completely the unders -- i completely understand the trashing of economists. as an economist, i am ok with

that. the idea that minimum-wage workers are young workers working part-time jobs after school for spending money, whether or not that was really ever true, it is actually not true today. didcan really dig in as cbo about who would get a raise if the minimum wage increased and there are a lot of grown-ups supporting families that would get a raise under a minimum wage increase that are working low-wage jobs. that is the kind of thing we see pervasively in the labor market. what we find is that if you to $15e the minimum wage per hour, the average age of the person who would get a raise under that increase is 35 years old. we are talking about people -- that is not a highschooler working after school that can depend on their parents. that is someone depending deeply

on the earnings from their low-wage job to make ends meet. that is the reality of low-wage workers today. guest 2: she describes it perfectly and the caller identified a. even economists don't like other economists. regarding the fact or the finding that the average wage of a person affected by the minimum-wage would be 35 years all, that is because this proposal to change the federal soimum wage is so enormous, outside the scope of previous research that we are pushing it to the point where over 20% of workers- 20% of hourly would be covered by the minimum wage. that would be the highest it has ever been. the biggest number before that 1979 and that was before the implementation of state and city minimum wages.

$7.25 perse it is hour does not mean everyone who is a low-wage worker earns that level. earning thee minimum wage are between 16 and 24 and 55% of those people are in the south. the south will be much more strongly affected. the impact is concentrated in low-wage areas. the fact we have not found effects until now is because those have been in areas where the minimum-wage does not have an effect. host: what you think? caller: i think they still are not understanding or the problem is for a small business. idea, or from what i have isrd, of a small business

15, 20 employees. i am talking about a small business. host: thank you, i appreciate that. guest 1: what i have found in my discussions with small business owners is it is conflict on its head. small business owners know their employees, spouses and families. they care about these workers. it is not the faceless, i work for mcdonald's, walmart and i am one person in an army of workers. it is very much the other way and small business owners, as a result, want to be able to pay their workers a minimum wage. they could be at a huge competitive disadvantage to employers if they were trying to pay higher wages and other employers weren't. a higher minimum wage is good for small businesses. they can pay their employees more.

they don't have to be at a competitive disadvantage. glad the caller gave her story because she described kind of mom and pop operation that will be more affected by a $15 minimum-wage than any other employer. the reason mcdonald's won't find it and amazon has raised their and there is a wage war among other stores to raise wages to pull employees away from competitors, is because they can afford it and they have sophisticated operations to reduce the amount of wasted their operation. a small business employer struggling to get by does not have that kind of capacity. host: from new orleans, and earner of minimum wage. robert, good morning. caller: good morning.

to dan ins go indiana. a business owner. caller: good morning. host: go ahead. caller: me and my brother own a restaurant, if we raise this minimum-wage, we are going to run into spending wages another $100,000 per year and that is not even including the supplies we purchase, those will probably go up because other companies have to raise their minimum wage . --profited around 100 and 30 $130,000 to $150,000. if we raise our wages up $100,000 and we will have to , are we our supplies

going to have to raise our prices for food? is not going to keep people from coming out to eat? we feel like it will hurt us tremendously. host: the price of goods and services. guest 2: there was a really good example of this happening last year in canada. fast food of employers and restaurant employers in general is a strong one. labor represents 30% of their production costs and food in 5% profitly has about margin, which is half the profit margin on average of all businesses, which is about 9%. raising the minimum wage on restaurants is much harder for them to deal with than other businesses. tim hortons example in canada recently was the tim hortons franchisee, the umbrella

corporation overseeing the franchisors refused to allow the individual restaurants to raise prices or change other things in regard to restaurant operations, and terms of production costs. the answer was in order to maintain that profit margin of 4% to 5%, they had to reduce benefits of employees as a result of the minimum wage going up. the minimum wage is like a balloon, you can squeeze it at one and and it will bulge at the other end. if you squeeze it hard enough it will finally break. guest 1: the point that you made , which i totally understand, if you increase the minimum-wage will it keep people from going out to eat? what we know is it is the exact opposite of that. you are getting money in the hands of people who may be under their previous age might not

have been able to go out to eat. if you get some more money in their pockets they will have to go out and spend it so it raises demand. the other question about will increase prices, we talked about -- many ways to adjust increase demand for their goods and services. that reduces the impact of the minimum-wage. we see reduced turnover. one thing businesses do is increase prices a little bit. there was a good study that looked at the increase in restaurant prices when minimum wage goes up. in theease of 10% minimum wage causes an increase of .6% of prices. you get a big increase in minimum wage, a little bit of

that gets passed through to customers. shows -- polling shows customers are really to pay a little more to give workers a better wage. host: we need a commonsense approach that affects the economic reality of each region because $15 in new york is not $15 in alabama. guest 1: there is discussion about a regional minimum wage. we question where we work, have a family budget calculator that looks of the cost of health care, transportation, housing, food, the list of things people have to spend money on by county. you could really look at what people really need to get by. county, noere is no

city or someone be able to get a $15 minimum wage. what that says is the cost of living concern about a $15 been my wage is not about the low-wage regions, but in the higher wage regions we will need a higher minimum wage. the federal law we are talking about allows states and localities to go higher. we are seeing that now in many places, it is getting a lot of attention, and that would also be able to happen if we were at a $15 minimum wage nationwide. guest 2: the $15 minimum wage would cover 20% of hourly employees which is a vast outlier. the previous research we have looked at would not be able to accurately estimate the effects of a $15 minimum wage. even progressive economists who study the minimum wage have said

they are leery of increasing the minimum wage this high. a new york times article mentioned this. the issue is a $15 minimum wage applied in tuscaloosa is not the same thing as a $15 minimum wage in new york. it has an impact depending on how deeply it cuts into the wage distribution. intoll cut very deeply low-wage, rural, southern states, especially compared to high wage states on the pacific coast and the northeast. if we are going to have a minimum wage, a local minimum wage is a much wetter way to do it. a federal minimum wage is a bad way to do it. -- if we are going to have a minimum wage, a local minimum wage is a much better way to do

it. caller: if we are having problems with the wages in the united states, does it really make sense that we have imported 11 million low skilled workers from mexico to actually drive our wages down because they are working under the table, they are working for less than minimum wage. thatave a huge labor pool is keeping the wages artificially low. the public school system in louisville, right across the river from where i am at, jay-z is suffering badly. the literacy rate is low. what are those people going to do when they get out of school if we artificially raise these wages to $15 per hour?

it is going to make them difficult to find a job. -- it is going to make it difficult for them to find a job. the young lady had it wrong. she is making an assumption when she says all you need to do is raise your menu prices .6%. i have run a business and running a business is like steering a ship. you can't turn it on a dime. to assume your business is so nimble that you can just compensate for a $15 an hour minimum wage just like that and it will not affect your business and you will not struggle with that is extremely naive. host: we will consider the point you put out there. guest 1: the question of if we have people coming into the labor market who don't have as many skills, the one thing we know now, you can closely look at the qualities, the

characteristics of the people who would get a raise under the minimum wage increase. low-wage workers today are much better educated, they are much older. they have much better thancteristics then -- minimum wage workers earlier. we are seeing increases in education. the question about immigrants coming in, this is not a conversation about immigration so we don't have to get into that deeply, but we know immigrants come in all the way across the education spectrum. a lot of immigrants are coming in all across the education spectrum. for every low-wage worker, immigrant, non-immigrant, we need strong labor standards to make sure people are not able to undercut what workers at that

level deserve to earn in the u.s. economy. guest 2: i think the caller showed some pretty good economic intuition in the ideas he was asking about. regarding minimum wage, if you set a high federal minimum wage, it is going to automatically incentivize workers to try to get around that. using undocumented workers who do not have to be paid the minimum wage because they are not on the federal roles is one way to do that. i'm not saying that is something that exists widespread, but the core idea of economics is incentives matter and the $15 minimum wage would increase the incentives to find a way to get around the minimum wage. there is good economic research that finds immigration does not decrease wages. it results in additional economic growth in the local area as a result of the incoming

immigrants demanding new products and services, themselves, as well. regarding the effect of minimum wage on prices, the research heidi quoted said 10% of the minimum wage results in a .6% increase in prices. that is likely based on recent research based on wages today. would5 minimum wage increase the federal minimum wage by over 100%. done research previously it is actually about 3%. 100% minimum wage would result in an increase in restaurant prices of 30%. that will affect people deciding whether or not to go out to eat. question fore one both of your economists.

is it true that for every dollar put into the economy returns $1.50? is that true? second, the gentleman said it would be detrimental to the southern states if they raise everinimum wage, has he studied which states draw the most federal subsidies? it is the southern states because of the low wages. mcdonald's for [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] >> live back to the house floor for a series of votes. votes will be taken in the following order. motion to suspend the rules and ass h.r. 2744, agree to h.res. 432 and pass h.r. 2037. the first electronic vote will be conducted as a 15-minute vote. pursuant to clause 9 of rule 20,