This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 27th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The City of Seattle is famous for its very high minimum wage.

Now voters in the state of Washington will

consider hiking the minimum wage and close the gap. Chris Cargill with the

Washington Policy Center discusses some of the lesser known impacts of such a major change in policy.

What drove Seattle in particular and what is driving now Washington more broadly to raise a minimum wage to the highest in the

country? Sure well we already had one of the highest minimum wages in in the

country and it automatically goes up each and every year at 947 an hour right now

and based on an initiative that we passed in the late 1990s.

Washington State's minimum wage is based on a consumer price index in

Seattle and it automatically increases each and every year based on that and

that's troubling for many folks in the eastern part of the state

and rural parts of Washington state. And I think the people of Washington state decided that

they were going to base that a minimum wage on a

number of different factors but decided it was fair to just have it automatically go up each

and every year based on that CPI P. I.

Over the past few years the conversation in the Seattle area in particular has been kind of the conversation

that has unfolded in the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party that it's fair to go up to a higher minimum wage

in the 12 to 13 to 14 maybe even $15 an hour and it's particularly Kishama Samuant and her group,

Koshama Samuant is a Seattle City Council member,

pushed over the past couple of years

...