Is the tide finally turning against left-wing insanity? As surprising as it sounds, a progressive policy proposal just failed in California.
“Californians rejected a measure that would have raised the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour,” the Washington Examiner’s Jenny Goldsberry reports. “Over two weeks after Election Day, California has counted over 99% of the votes and revealed that a slim majority of 50.8% as of Wednesday voted against Proposition 32. This is the first time voters have rejected a wage raise in a state election.”
“The state already has a $16 minimum wage and a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers,” Goldsberry noted.
Apparently, even Democratic voters in California have seen how their current policies are working out and decided not to make things worse, which is exactly what this ballot initiative, if successful, would have done. (Side note: It probably shouldn’t take more than two full weeks for a state to count its votes.)
We all want hardworking people to earn more and all have sympathy for those struggling to get by. But simply jacking up the mandatory minimum wage to $18 an hour does not make workers more productive. All it really does is make it effectively illegal for any business to employ anyone who can’t provide that much in value. For example, a teenager who could add $15 an hour in value for his boss is now effectively unemployable. As the economist Thomas Sowell says, “The real minimum wage is always zero.”
How does pricing people out of the job market or forcing them to work illegally under the table help them, exactly?
To the extent employers are forced to absorb additional labor costs, it will simply lead to higher prices for consumers. For example, a famous study found that McDonald’s “passed along” nearly 100% of the cost of minimum wage increases via higher menu prices. And working-class people aren’t meaningfully better off if the number on their paychecks goes up if the prices of the things they rely on do, too. Plus, these increased costs would only further strain small businesses that are struggling to survive in the Golden State.
All of these consequences are predictable with basic economic knowledge, but that’s not something California voters typically possess. However, they may have woken up, at least on this one issue, because of the drastic failure of their state’s recent implementation of a $20 minimum wage for fast-food restaurants.
As the Employment Policies Institute reports, 98% of surveyed California restaurants said they responded by raising prices, 89% said they reduced their employees’ hours, and 70% reduced their staff, consolidated positions, or both. Oh, and 89% of restaurant owners said they were now less likely to expand their operations in California.
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Other than that, it’s going swimmingly.
You know progressive advocacy is going poorly when progressives can’t even convince people in California, of all places, to get on board with their terrible ideas. Maybe, just maybe, Golden State voters are finally starting to wake up, and they might save their state from its self-imposed, slow-motion economic decay.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.