joining us is brenda buttner. >> hey, nice to see you. >> with this global market, is it enough to say be an american, keep your businesses here at home? >> you made a good point. it is a global marketplace. companies in america are basically competing against companies in other countries that have far lower tax rates. that's huge. the tax rate in the united states takes a huge bite out of company's profits, out of their margins. in order to be competitive, they have to bring that tax rate down. it doesn't look like it's going to happen from washington. so the only way they can do that is by acquiring a foreign company or merging because the income they make there will not be taxed at u.s. rates. if you add in state levies to the u.s. corporate rate, it is double that of europe's corporate tax rate. so there really is a huge disadvantage to american businesses. >> when you talk about tax reform, of course that's a huge mountain to climb, probably won't happen before the mid term elections. do you ever see it happening and is it a must do in. >> you look at the tax code. you know doing

let's talk about it with brenda buttner. hey, brenda, good to see you. >> nice to see you. >> the minimum wage in chicago might go up to $13 an hour. the mayor is behind that. >> that's a 58% increase. >> yeah. that's a big -- a huge increase. >> yeah. >> i'm going to bundle something in and you can break it down. private companies like ikea decided to increase the minimum wage without government prodding, if you will. is it a trend, or is this something you look at by a case-by-case, city-by-city basis? >> you made an slept point which is, basically, do you want government to tell you how to set your wages, or should a business set its own wages? i think the trend really is to raise minimum wage. it's very -- in an election year it's very positive. it gets a lot of votes. but the truth is that you have to look at it in a case-by-case basis. chicago has a huge unemployment rate. seattle, much lower. san jose, san francisco, which recently raised their minimum wages, much lower unemployment rate. when businesses are told they