very people it's designed to help. Let's see, we're going to take the lowest skilled, least productive, least experienced people in the US and DOUBLE the cost to hire them. And we don't think that's going to have an impact on unskilled employment rates. It would impact it on two fronts:

1) investments in automation which reduce the need for low skilled labor become more easily justified.
2) higher skilled potential workers who are no longer in the workforce (non-working spouse, retired person, etc) are drawn back into the workforce by higher wages and displace lower skilled, less experienced workers.

I think you also have to ask yourself SHOULD every job come with a "living wage". Should there be some jobs... flipping burgers, bagging groceries, busing tables... which are best done by part-time and/or student workers who gain valuable experience (and spending cash) and don't need a $30K per year pay rate. .

On healthcare where I break with Bernie is his proposal to pay for it. I've run the calculators on his tax plan... it's whacked. I'd honestly retire if his tax plan were put in place.

And the way we protect the american factory worker is to focus on things that we can do better than the rest of the world. That would/should be high value, lower volume, higher skilled industrial manufacturing. The Germans kick ass at this and have an educational system geared towards training their workforce to keep them competitive. No amount of protectionism is going to bring low skilled factory jobs back. We compete in a global environment, and we just can't compete with the labor cost advantage Asia has over us for low skilled manufacturing. I suppose we could go full on protectionist and only sell to ourselves, but I can't imagine that would have a good overall outcome for us.