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.”