Owner of credit card processor sets new minimum wage: $70K a year

It's been remarked that whomever said "Money can't buy happiness" was never poor. The owner of a Seattle-based credit card-processing company agrees, according to a report in the New York Times.
 
Gravity Payments founder Dan Price on Monday gave all of his employees, even the lowest-paid clerks, a salary of $70,000. Price said he decided to raise salaries after reading a Princeton report on happiness, and after hearing from friends and employees, that people who earn $40,000 - well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour - still have a hard time making ends meet.
 
The report, researched by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and others, puts the annual salary needed to achieve financial stability at $75,000.
 
Calling the U.S. pay gap of CEOs making 300 times more than the average worker "ridiculous" and "absurd," Price said he would pay for the wage increases out of his own salary, which he is cutting to $70,000 from $1 million.

Read more from the New York Times.