Should America be looking to Seattle for solutions to its broken economic system? On Sunday, The Nation’s editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel appeared on ABC’s This Week with Neal Karlinsky and conservative commentator and Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot, to discuss Seattle’s historic minimum wage hike to $15 an hour. “This is smart economics,” argues vanden Heuvel. “It’s good politics and it’s morally right.”

While the minimum wage hike is double the federal rate and currently the highest in the country, many have questions regarding whether the hike will squeeze low-wage workers out of jobs and cause employers to move toward the use of automation in the workplace. Still, vanden Heuvel holds on in support of the 77 percent of Americans in favor of increases like these: “If we are a country that believes in a strong middle class and healthy families, we need rules of the road…. we need to have a sense of fairness in this country that’s also good for business and the economy.”
—Victoria Ford