California is the land of expensive, useless bureaucracies, which Democrats allow to do nothing but impose more regulations on Californians.
In 2023, California created a fast-food council to micromanage fast-food restaurants from wages to working conditions. The council, the first of its kind in the United States, exists to justify California’s fast-food minimum wage hike, which jumped to $20 an hour, and the council has the ability to increase over the coming years. By now, you know how this went: Fast-food restaurants shut down, cut jobs, cut worker hours, raised prices, or did some combination of those things.
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More notably, though, the council that is required to meet at least twice a year does not really exist. The last subcommittee meeting for the council took place in February 2025. It has now been over a year since the council has done anything, and even then, it could not be bothered to gather all nine members. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) plucked the council’s chairman for a different state appointment after that last subcommittee meeting, and it hasn’t gathered since.
Despite this, the council was still allocated $1.1 million from the state budget.
This is not a call for Newsom to appoint someone to chair the committee, though it is noteworthy that he can’t even be bothered to do something as simple as that. If a council of bureaucrats can exist and not actually do anything for a span of 15 months (and counting), then what is it actually accomplishing? If a group of nine people cannot meet, as is required by state law, why are they receiving millions in taxpayer dollars? Why does this council even exist?
CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATS CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT
The answer is that it was a “compromise” between businesses and rabid unions over the fast-food minimum wage, and California’s solution to every problem is to create a new bureaucracy that can keep heat off of legislators and Newsom because, after all, it isn’t its decision to dismantle the fast food industry. It’s the decision of the council of unelectable, unaccountable bureaucrats (the council that those California politicians created). It is no coincidence that California’s biggest booming job industry is the public sector.
The fast-food council was yet another lazy justification for more regulations on California businesses and more power in the hands of the California government, which is not accountable to voters in any real way. The fact that the council has been essentially inactive for 15 months now proves that California creates “solutions” that solve nothing for “problems” that don’t exist, all while burning through taxpayer dollars.