Raising the minimum wage helps businesses make more money: NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer

There are people marching in the streets all over the country today to increase the minimum wage—and a lot of those protests are near Yahoo Finance’s offices right here in Manhattan. In the midst of this, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer released a report advocating for an increase of the minimum wage for $15 an hour. The report outlines a number of reasons the increase would benefit New York, where the cost of living is the highest in America.

According the comptroller’s analysis, raising the minimum wage would impact 1.5 million New Yorkers and add a collective $10 billion to their salaries. An increase in the minimum wage would also save the city between $200 and $500 million annually in Food Stamps and Medicaid, and add $250 million annually in tax revenue, according to Stringer.

Related: Is $15 an hour a realistic minimum wage?

Still, there’s no such thing as a free lunch and the extra money businesses dole out could hurt their bottom line. “We have fast food restaurants that are making in the billions; they get maximum salaries and they build their business on the backs of people who get a very low wage so we have to equalize that wage so people can put food on the table and pay their rent,” Stringer tells Yahoo Finance.

Not every business is a giant corporation, and small business owners are split on the idea of raising the minimum wage. “The issue of small businesses is certainly legitimate,” says Stringer. “But when you look at places like Seattle that have raised the wage to $15 an hour you see small businesses expanding.” Stringer believes that it’s not a minimum wage increase that hurts small businesses, it’s government fines and taxes. “I wouldn’t take the small business person and pit that person against their worker,” he says.

Stringer says the bottom line is that he’d like to create a wage level that takes New Yorkers working full-time jobs off of government programs. “There is a national campaign to say to corporate America and to our government to say that we can not pay wages that keep people in poverty, that harm children, that stop this movement to the middle class... I would argue that this is a critical issue nationally as we begin this [presidential] campaign.”

Progress has been made - the notion of a $15 minimum wage would have been laughed out of the room a year or two ago, says Stringer. The report he released yesterday received a lot more nodding and recognition, he said.

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