EJ Antoni
California’s list of public policy failures was already long, but hiking its minimum wage to $20 an hour for fast-food workers may belong at the top. The predictable fallout in lost jobs and higher prices are already being felt, and the flood of residents fleeing the state is poised to accelerate.
The Golden State is already home to some of the highest taxes and costs of living in the country, the consequences of failed government policies. A higher minimum wage is more of the same.
Consider California’s “green” energy policies that have created the highest utility rates in the nation. Instead of rolling back those mandates, it’s created a new one: surcharges on utility bills, making the middle class pay more, even if they don’t use more.
The overtaxing, overspending and over regulating by the government in Sacramento has turned the state into such a basket case that 1.2 million more people left California than moved in over the last three years—by far the biggest loss of any state, beating New York by 35%.
Californians clearly don’t like the effects of these policies, but they just got more of them with the higher minimum wage law for fast-food workers. This particular policy provides a superb example of how disastrous economic ideas become law: wonderful rhetoric, terrible results.
1,200 Pizza Hut Drivers Among First Victims of California’s $20 Minimum Wage Folly
The law was advertised as forcing “greedy” corporations to pay workers a “living wage.” But businesses are not charities and cannot pay employees more than they produce, or they’ll go bankrupt. Employers pays taxes and other costs on top of an employee’s earnings, and at $20 an hour, many fast-food workers don’t provide enough value to justify the highest minimum wage in the country.
Not surprisingly, California’s fast-food companies have now frozen hiring, » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/commentary/californias-latest-job-killing-policy-more-bad-news-golden-staters