It’s amazing what a flat learning curve ideologues have.
Certain laws of economics are immutable: if someone’s skills and the value of their labor are not worth the amount they demand in compensation for it, then eventually no one will be willing to hire them. Way back in my foggy history, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce charged me with examining just this issue in my role as head of the National Chamber Foundation, the Chambers public policy research arm. I hired an independent economist to examine the issue, and he concluded that indeed, raising the minimum wage cost the most vulnerable American workers jobs every…single…time. He also explained that the political pressure for raising the minimum wage came from unions, which used a ride in the bottom wages as justification for demanding higher wages in their definitely un-minimum wage compensated fields. Unfortunately for me, my scholar, being independent, also disputed the Chamber’s position that minimum wage increases were automatically inflationary across the board. The President of the Chamber had my foundation’s study pulled out by a Democratic Party minimum wage hike advocate and used to refuse his position on a Sunday morning public affairs show. (My ultimate boss had neglected to read the document.) This, as you might imagine, did not help my status in the organization.
If anything, the advances in technology have made that old study at NCF more accurate than ever. Never mind, though: 21st Century progressives seem to care about virtue-signalling and fealty to socialist cant more than actual results or, to put it another way, reality. Naturally California, one of our extreme leftist kamikaze states, arguably the most reckless one, has adopted this attitude. And thus it came to pass that last fall, Governor Newsom signed into law a $20 an hour minimum wage hike on the fast food sector for the “benefit” of fast food workers, even as the segment of the public that most often consume fast food has been slammed by inflation and higher food prices particularly.
Everything we have learned about minimum wage hikes indicated that this would be a disaster, but advocates of the move in the Democratic party pooh-poohed the objections as more proof that conservatives are cruel and greedy. Do these people ever get tired of being embarrassingly, absurdly wrong? As a Washington Times headline put it, “Fast food chains find a way around $20 minimum wage: Get rid of the workers.”
How could they have predicted that between last fall and January, California fast-food restaurants would eliminate about 9,500 jobs? Well, by paying attention. By not allowing progressive cant to override reality. By not maintaining a flat learning curve.
And those job losses occurred even before the new higher wages went into effect. Naturally the fired workers, as my old independent economist explained decades ago, were those with the lowest values and productivity—minority youths with minimal education and few or no work skills. Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza are now firing nearly 1,300 delivery drivers. El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box announced that they will increase their use of robots for food preparation. Other fast foot restaurants are adding “ordering kiosks,” meaning that low-skill workers are being replaced with computer terminals. Perfect! Jobs are lost, and consumers have less human interaction. They call those kiosks “user-friendly.” Baloney: a well trained, smiling clerk is friendly. Machines are never friendly.
Then there are the prices. Wendy’s has raised prices 8%. Chipotle has raised theirs 7.5%. Starbucks has upped theirs by 7%(and their prices were absurd already. McDonald’s has announced it will also be raising prices. Just since last September, fast food prices have shot up 10%.
All of this was so predictable that it required deliberate contrived ignorance to pursue the increased minimum wage provisions on the grounds that they were a means of “social justice.” The truly revolting feature of this debacle is that Democrats passed the law to cater to the warm, fuzzy feelings their supporters have for socialist policies, and the devastating results it would have on the most vulnerable was low on their list of concerns.
Ethics Alarms 
Yesterday’s bill at a fast food for two bacon cheeseburgers with small fries and small drinks was $36.85., ordered and paid for through a kiosk, which I detest doing. There used to be a very nice smiling lady who has Down Syndrome gleefully there to take and process your order, always saying thank you to us. She has been replaced by that dreaded kiosk.
Well, the Good People want others like that smiling lady to be aborted as often as possible, so at least that problem won’t be around much longer…
What is it about societies that causes them to consistently hatch these sort of mass, self-destructive pathologies? Where do people like this come from? And how can they be so legion? What is it about societies that causes them to spawn these seemingly cancerous organisms? There must be an explanation for this phenomenon.
change sex and pronouns as desired:
hard times make hard men,
hard men make good times,
good times make weak men,
weak men make hard times.
repeat about every twenty years or so.
I’m sure the left’s favorite Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, will again say that food, clothing, and housing have no place in inflation statistics and that people who complain about such things need to get ‘back to reality’. This is because Paul Krugman, like Gavin Newsom, make such obscenely much money that little things like food, clothing, and shelter are such a small part of their paycheck that the increases are insignificant.
The Oracle speaks:
The Peculiar Persistence of Trump-stalgia – DNyuz
The little people just do not know how good they have it!
I couldn’t get past the first two paragraphs.
He’s absolutely batty. His eyes and visage are even more maniacal than Jack Smith’s.
It’s worth remembering that minimum wage laws are an gross violation of the constitutional right to freedom of association.
And the personal property right to one’s own life.
Also forgotten is that the minimum wage invariably imposes a social goal — leaving aside its desirability — upon a few sectors of the economy.
Instead, there could be a guaranteed minimum income, where bi-weekly government payments cover the gap between eliminating the minimum wage, and the locality adjusted minimum income (whatever that may be). Pay for it by hugely reducing welfare payments.
But where’s the constitutional abuse in that?
It’s worth remembering that minimum wage laws are an gross violation of the constitutional right to freedom of association.
And the personal property right to one’s own life.
Jeff: I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about here.
Minimum wage laws prohibit my association with people engaged in legal businesses for less compensation than the law deems acceptable. Unless, that is, the compensation is zero, i.e. charity work, then I can associate all I want.
(In addition to the right of assembly guaranteed by the 1A, the Supreme Court has also ruled that the amendment implicitly protects freedom of association.)
And if I have a property right to my life, then minimum wage laws abrogate that right.
I don’t think anyone will take that case on a contingent fee basis….
No, of course not.
But it is, to me, anyway, how we have tolerated this gross expansion of government power where it is supposed to be nearly completely limited.
Maybe because no one looks at it that way?
The truly revolting feature of this debacle is that Democrats passed the law to cater to the warm, fuzzy feelings their supporters have for socialist policies, and the devastating results it would have on the most vulnerable was low on their list of concerns.
But of course, those “most vulnerable” people you mention all vote Democrat, because the Democrats promised free stuff and pay raises.
Paraphrasing Matthew 16:26: What will it profit a man if he gains a great wage, yet forfeits his job because of it?
The answer, of course, is … unemployment and welfare! Yay, free money!
I think the even more expected consequence but actually overlooked is the cost of skilled workers. Obviously if the burger flippers unskilled labor gets $15+ the skilled laborers request more for their work, as it should be, but then shop labor becomes extremely pricey for all of us. Where I live it’s $200/ hour (sometimes more) with a minimum 3 hour charge in most places plus parts, of course. This is fine, but…. how many can afford an emergency repair bill this high? To compound it, very few people are competent in any basic skilled labor like vehicle repairs, plumbing, carpentry, etc… and are too scared to learn.
To quote the late Walter Williams,
“In our society, the least skilled people are youths, who lack the skills, maturity and experience of adults. Black youths not only share these handicaps but have attended grossly inferior schools and live in unstable household environments. That means higher minimum wages will have the greatest unemployment effect on youths, particularly black youths.”
https://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams011316.php3
I hired Walter Williams for one of the NCF studies! Such a great guy.
It’s a good guess that the Democratic Party and organized labor always back increases in the minimum wage because wage agreements on large construction and maintenance contracts are often a multiple of the minimum wage.
Neal Boortz made me understand that somewhere in his 2007 book _Somebody’s gotta say it_.
I should have learned that in economics classes but perhaps it went over my head. Thus I had to finally figure it out reading a popular book by a talk radio host.