The One Question that will stump ALL your Republican friends...

[JHB]

40. More specifically, how would you encourage companies to accept the higher overhead...

...that comes with paying people living wages, incentivizing the use of carrots rather than sticks to improve performance, improving working conditions, halting anti-union efforts, etc.

In short, what incentive does a company have to contribute to the wider economy by circulating part of the value created at lower levels (i.e., pay people more) instead of just shooting that same value upward to the owners and shareholders?

Please be specific, because much of the resistance you've noted comes from several decades of prescriptions for "creating jobs" which had specific recommendations to be more "business friendly" that were pretty obvious in the ways they would make money for some people, but left as a handwave how this would improve things for lower level employees in the broader economy. Yet the fruits of this arrangement never quite reach down that far, so we have three decades of stagnant wages and ever-more precarious jobs in the face of booming productivity and high profits.