The most pro-business thing you can do is to help middle-class people thrive.

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.

Raising the minimum wage allows business people to stop thinking about workers simply as costs to be cut and allows you to start thinking about workers as customers to be cultivated.

The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers.

But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.

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.

I was at the forefront of the effort to pass $15 minimum wage in Seattle, and have been collaborating with the people who are trying to make that happen across the country.