Target Employees Won The 'Fight For $15' but Weren't Ready for the Trade-Offs - "Under pressure from activists, Target announced in September 2017 that it would hike wages for all 323,000 employees to at least $15 per hour by 2020. This was a major victory for the "Fight for $15" movement—a win that was supposed to have repercussions for retail and fast food workers everywhere. "Our momentum is unstoppable," a Minneapolis Fight for $15 organizer told Common Dreams. Two years later, the story is pretty different. "I got that dollar raise but I'm getting $200 less in my paycheck," a Target employee named Heather told CNN. Heather's hours have been cut from about 40 per week to around 20, she explained. And she's hardly alone. CNN Business (which withheld employees' last names) has interviewed 23 Target employees in the past month. Many tell the same story: They are working fewer hours and have lost some employment benefits as a result. Target only provides health insurance benefits to workers who average at least 30 hours of work a week. It's almost as though hourly wages are only one part of a worker's compensation—and that hiking wages might cause other, unintended consequences."
The Effects of California's $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage on Prices - "We analyze the effect of California's $20 fast food minimum wage (Assembly Bill 1228), enacted in September 2023 and implemented in April 2024, on consumer prices using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Indices for food away from home across 21 metropolitan statistical areas. Food away from home prices in California's four in-sample MSAs increased by 3.3 to 3.6 percent relative to 17 control MSAs through December 2024. Our estimates are stable across a number of specifications. Placebo tests on price indices for goods and services that were not affected by the policy, including food at home, show no differential increases in California's MSAs. The price increases we estimate likely arise in part from spillovers to the full-service sector, as well as changes in the production functions and product quality choices of limited service restaurants."
Did California's Fast Food Minimum Wage Reduce Employment? - "We analyze the effect of California's $20 fast food minimum wage, which was enacted in September 2023 and went into effect in April 2024, on employment in the fast food sector. In unadjusted data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, we find that employment in California's fast food sector declined by 2.7 percent relative to employment in the fast food sector elsewhere in the United States from September 2023 through September 2024. Adjusting for pre-AB 1228 trends increases this differential decline to 3.2 percent, while netting out the equivalent employment changes in non-minimum-wage-intensive industries further increases the decline. Our median estimate translates into a loss of 18,000 jobs in California's fast food sector relative to the counterfactual."
California fast-food wage hike causing automation, researchers say - "Researchers found that California's minimum wage hike for fast-food workers led to "negative outcomes" such as automation and reduced work hours. The researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz suggested in a report published in March that the policy could produce unintended consequences such as an increase in menu prices, a loss of overtime and benefits, reductions in employee working hours, and an implementation of automation that replaces workers. The minimum wage for workers was $16 before the $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers became law in April 2024. Gov. Gavin Newsom said in September 2023 the increase would help workers earn more as the cost-of-living rises. "The results indicate a plethora of negative outcomes such as higher menu prices for consumers, reductions in employee working hours, widespread elimination of overtime and loss of benefits for employees," said Stephen Owen, an economics lecturer, University of California, Santa Cruz. "Further decreases in employee opportunities are being driven by automation and the adoption of labor replacement technologies is accelerating." The report came after a Berkeley Research Group study discovered not only were there 10,700 jobs lost between June 2023 and June 2024 in the sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The prices at the establishments soared by 14.5% after the new minimum wage became law. Despite the findings, California officials doubled down on minimum wage laws. A phased-in minimum wage hike in Los Angeles mandated up to $30 per hour for airport and hotel workers. The law was signed into law last year by Mayor Karen Bass, mandating that their hourly wage must be raised by $2.50 each year until they reach $30 in 2028. The Hotel Association of Los Angeles (HALA) recently commissioned a study that found hotels have eliminated or expect to eliminate 6% of positions, roughly 650 jobs, since the Hotel Worker Minimum Wage Ordinance took effect in September. While these laws raise concern from business owners, advocates in Oakland, California are pushing for a $30 minimum wage. On the East Coast, the city council in New York City is weighing a proposal to boost the minimum wage to up to $30 — a move that newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani signaled that he would sign on the campaign trail — causing consternation among the business community."
The Heterogeneous Effects of Large and Small Minimum Wage Changes: Evidence Over the Short and Medium Run Using a Pre-Analysis Plan by Jeffrey P. Clemens, Michael R. Strain - "This paper advances the use of pre-analysis plans in non-experimental research settings. In a study of recent minimum wage changes, we demonstrate how analyses of medium- and long-run impacts of policy interventions can be pre-specified as extensions to short-run analyses. Further, our pre-analysis plan includes comparisons of the effects of large vs. small minimum wage increases, which is a theoretically motivated dimension of heterogeneity. We discuss how these use cases harness the strengths of pre-analysis plans while mitigating their weaknesses. This project's initial analyses explored CPS and ACS data from 2011 through 2015. Alongside these analyses, we pre-committed to analyses incorporating CPS and ACS data extending through 2019. Averaging across the specifications in our pre-analysis plan, we estimate that relatively large minimum wage increases reduced employment rates among low-skilled individuals by just over 2.5 percentage points. Our estimates of the effects of relatively small minimum wage increases vary across data sets and specifications but are, on average, both economically and statistically indistinguishable from zero. We estimate that medium-run effects exceed short-run effects and that the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage is substantially more negative for large minimum wage increases than for small increases."
Meme - "INSTEAD OF SENDING POOR COUNTRIES MONEY SHOULDN'T WE BE TELLING THEM TO RAISE THEIR MINIMUM WAGE?"
18,000 Jobs Out the Drive-Thru Window - WSJ - "California’s $20 fast-food wage rule, up from $16, took effect in April 2024 on chains with at least 60 locations nationwide. “This is one of the largest one-time minimum wage increases in United States history,” write three economists at the University of California, San Diego, and Texas A&M, who published their paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research. Analyzing federal data, they find that the law raised wages about 8% “relative to the fast food sector elsewhere in the country.” On the other hand, by that September, “employment in the fast food sector in California fell substantially, with estimates ranging from 2.3 to 3.9 percent,” the authors say, “even as employment in other sectors of the California economy tracked national trends.”... The study only measured job losses through September 2024, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data has suggested there may be more losses since. The economists add a note of caution that their analysis likely understates the negative effects of large minimum-wage increases. For one thing, the California law didn’t apply to fast-food chains with fewer than 60 locations. For another, some cities had higher local wage rules ($17.55 in San Jose), meaning that the true change imposed by the state law was blunted in some areas... The Democratic Party’s socialist nominee for New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has called for increasing the city’s minimum wage to $30. Andrew Cuomo, his supposedly more moderate competitor, wants a $20 minimum. These guys will never learn because they don’t want to see the world as it really is."
Meme - "r/povertyfinance
Minumum wage increases made me more poor.
Less hours and even more understaffed than before. After I get paid everything around me has gone up. California minumum wage going from $12 in 2020 to $16. I worked at the bank since 2020 making $15 an hour and getting $1 increase to now $19 an hour. Minimum wage from 12 to 16 is +33%. my income only went up +26%. cost of rent + 50%. cost of groceries +50%. There is no winning its only in the short term but long term this is hurting us all more than expected."
flumpdog MOD: "pretty much every possible rule-violating political topic that could be touched on has been, so post is being locked."
Time to regulate greedy companies to stop them from cutting hours!
Joe Wallin on X - "Let's take a look at how Seattle's DoorDash law actually turned out. In 2024, Seattle implemented "PayUp" — a minimum wage law for food delivery drivers, setting the rate at $26.40/hour. The intent was to protect workers. Here's what actually happened: DoorDash added a $5 fee to every order. Customers stopped ordering. Within two weeks, 30,000 fewer orders. UberEats volume dropped 30%. Drivers — the people the law was supposed to help — saw their available deliveries cut in half and earnings per hour fall 25%. A new National Bureau of Economic Research study confirmed what the numbers already showed: higher per-delivery pay was completely offset by fewer deliveries and lower tips. Active drivers saw zero net gain in monthly earnings. KUOW reported this week that two years in, the results are undeniable — Seattle is now the most expensive delivery market in the country. Denver, Portland, and San Francisco, cities without these laws, saw delivery revenue grow 20-40%. Seattle stagnated. The parallel to what's happening with WA tax proposals is obvious. SB 6346 would impose a 9.9% income tax on high earners. The QSBS add-back bills would strip federal tax exclusions from founders. The argument is always "just a small tax on those who can afford it." But capital moves. Founders move. Companies incorporate elsewhere. The DoorDash data gives us a controlled experiment: same company, same product, same time period, different policy environments. The city with the heaviest regulation saw the worst outcomes — including for the workers it tried to protect. Incentives matter. Every time."
Time to force greedy gig companies to guarantee minimum hours and to hire more workers
New York’s War on the Gig Economy Will Lead to Higher Prices - "The New York City Council recently voted to have the city’s minimum wage rate for app-based restaurant delivery drivers cover grocery drivers as well. Now it appears determined to go even further. The council is considering whether to scrap the at-will employment arrangement—which allows either workers or employers to terminate the relationship at any time and for any reason—under which the city’s gig economy has operated since its inception. Doing so threatens the future of gig work in New York and will result in higher food delivery prices for New Yorkers. The proposed bill purports to protect gig-based delivery drivers by requiring app operators to establish “just cause” before deactivating a driver’s account on their network. Platforms would need to provide 14 days’ notice of any such action. The bill also sets up an arbitration process through which drivers can contest their deactivation. What constitutes “just cause?” The bill would require the platforms to prove that there are “bona fide economic reasons” for deactivation. This can only be done by offering up business records showing “a proportionate reduction in volume of sales or profit within the fiscal quarter prior to the deactivation.” There’s no clear indication as to what constitutes a “proportionate reduction,” but the bill necessarily takes that determination out of the hands of the companies and puts it into the hands of bureaucrats and arbitrators. The bill’s sponsors frame the legislation as a response to a flurry of deactivations, with reports of up to 50 to 70 delivery drivers being deactivated per day. The uptick mostly appears to trace back to December 2023, when New York became the first city in the United States to enact a minimum wage for app-based restaurant delivery drivers. This law caused a host of adverse effects—not least to drivers themselves. Once the minimum-wage law went into effect, the platforms incurred higher labor costs, which soon led them to migrate to a shift-based approach. The waitlist to become a driver on popular platforms such as UberEats grew to tens of thousands, and the platforms became leery of lackluster drivers taking spots from more productive individuals on the waitlist. As a result, platforms had an incentive to deactivate the accounts of idle or subpar delivery drivers. In other words, one misguided government policy (the minimum-wage ordinance) created unintended consequences (deactivations). Now city officials are trying to respond by instituting another misguided policy: eliminating at-will employment. This one-way ratchet effect is part of a larger push by the progressive Left to redefine gig work from contracting arrangements to full-scale employment. For years, the Left has sought to reclassify all gig workers from independent contractors who enjoy flexible working arrangements to traditional employees. This battle continues to rage in state capitals across the country. Meantime, the Left is attempting to press its gig-workers-as-employees agenda through other means, like eliminating at-will employment status. The more policymakers treat gig workers like traditional employees—through reclassification, minimum-wage mandates, and curbs on at-will employment—the less flexibility drivers have. But flexibility is the Number One benefit drivers look for in choosing gig work. These policies also inevitably raise the cost of food delivery for consumers. The recent minimum-wage ordinance raised food prices by 10 percent in New York. Other cities that have instituted minimum-wage rules for delivery drivers have seen similar food-price spikes."
Possum Reviews on X - "I'm not sure if it's that they don't understand second order effects, of if they just don't care about the long-term consequences when they have the chance to feel good about something right now. A classic example is raising the minimum wage. They hiked the minimum wage in Seattle and Portland, and predictably, employers responded by pausing the hiring of new minimum wage workers and cutting the hours of existing ones, resulting in fewer jobs and lower pay. They were warned this would happen, but they did it anyway because being able to say "we raised the minimum wage" looked and felt good in the moment. That's worse than stupidity. That's contempt for how your decisions affect other people in favor of short-term dopamine hits."
Give A Shift About Nature | Facebook - "Idea: Tie minimum wage to the average local rent. Make the bosses go to war with the landlords. 🤣"
Left wingers are always dishonest and compare minimum wage and average rent. Not content with destroying the employment market, they want to destroy the housing market at the same time too
Meme - Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath: "The blue states in the image below have electricity prices that are as much as 4x the electricity rates of the red states. This is not due to any technological inferiority in those blue states but specific policy decisions that have driven competition out and prices up."
Time to mock red states again. Weird how "greed" is worse in more left wing places (like how the cope for how renewable energy driving up energy prices even though it's supposedly cheaper to produce is "greed", despite the US having cheaper energy despite it allegedly being the home of Capitalism Run Amok). Another cope is that expensive energy is good because energy use is bad
Nina Turner on X - "Americans don’t want war. We want healthcare. We want good education for all, free of debt. We want everyone to have housing. We want livable wages. The ruling class gets rich off war while the working class dies."
The US government spends almost 5x as much on healthcare than on defence, but left wingers are willfully ignorant, so that doesn't matter
Wealth Tax in Spain (IP): 2025 guide - "In 2023, Spain introduced a solidarity tax on large fortunes. Initially temporary, it was extended indefinitely in 2025."
Weird. Left wingers tell us that temporary taxes don't become permanent, so those who say they may or are likely to be are spreading misinformation. Just like Canada's 1917 income tax was meant to be temporary
‘War on Poverty’ May Have Created a Permanent Underclass, Economists Say - "A recent study by economists Kevin Corinth and Richard Burkhauser, which analyzed poverty rates before and after America embarked on the War on Poverty, concluded that, while poverty decreased substantially since 1964, this was achieved largely by welfare supplanting “market” income such as wages, investments, and profits. In addition, before the 1960s, market income had succeeded in reducing poverty at similar rates to what the War on Poverty achieved. “Our new research shows that the United States made strong progress in reducing poverty during the quarter century before the War on Poverty began, and that this progress was entirely accounted for by increases in market income, not government transfers,” Corinth told The Daily Signal. “In other words, there was a lot of benefit and not much cost during this earlier period.” Before the War on Poverty, poverty reduction was achieved across racial groups. Economist Thomas Sowell wrote in 2004 that the poverty rate among black families fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960, without government assistance. According to Corinth and Burkhauser, “During that 1939–1963 period, it was the growth of market income rather than government transfers net of taxes that reduced poverty rates. In fact, poverty fell no faster in the 24 years after the War on Poverty was declared than in the 24 years before, even when applying the same initial poverty rate to both periods.” And while some claim that government spending has reduced poverty by as much as 90% since 1964, it may have also built a barrier to upward mobility for America’s poorest... income mobility is declining in America and that expansive welfare programs appear to be trapping more people in government dependence. A January report by the Congressional Budget Office found that, for the poorest 20% of Americans, government payments increased from 26% of total income in 1979 to 42% in 2022. And as welfare programs expanded, market income for America’s poorest declined as a share of total income. Whereas in 1979, welfare payments were only about half the amount of private income sources for the lowest quintile, the two income sources were roughly equal by 2022. According to a February report in The Daily Economy by analyst Tyler Turman, based on this Congressional Budget Office data, “despite historically unprecedented economic gains for low-income Americans, more of them are dependent on government assistance than at any point in the country’s history.” The “welfare state’s perverse incentives” often discourage recipients from taking the steps that typically move Americans into higher income categories, such as pursuing higher-paying jobs, accumulating wealth and property, or getting married, Romina Boccia, director of entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, told The Daily Signal... She cited a 2022 study from the University of Chicago and the Atlanta Fed regarding the penalties for welfare recipients who breach income thresholds. It showed that a family’s wage increase from $54,000 to $55,000 could cause them to lose more than $25,000 in childcare benefits... If the goal of the War on Poverty was to boost Americans’ self-sufficiency, it appears to have fallen short. What it has achieved, rather, is a costly expansion of government, long-term dependency for the poor, and a perennial voting bloc for politicians who feed the addiction."
RazörFist on X - "Reminder: The Great Society was JFK's idea, originally called "The New Frontier", and was based on a really shit book by a Democratic Socialist named Michael Harrington that Kennedy became obsessed with."
Kyle Becker on X - "Democratic politicians created the modern welfare state because it leads to a permanent dependent underclass, not because it "helps" people. If you want evidence of this, note that everything the government regulates, subsidizes, or funds leads to an increasingly unaffordable standard of living for Americans. This creates an "affordability trap" that radical Democrats hope will lead to systemic collapse and complete dependency on the government. Again, this isn't because it "helps" people. It's because it gives the elites power to dictate how Americans live."
Geoffrey Lawrence on X - "The welfare cliff traps generations in poverty. I grew up in public housing, and hearing people say “I got a good job offer but I can’t take it because I’ll lose my benefits,” is how I became libertarian."
Clearly if you disagree with an ever expanding welfare state you have no empathy and just want poor people to suffer, and this shows that capitalism has failed and capitalism is broken, because it cannot offer good jobs (at the same time left wingers demand even more welfare, so it becomes even harder for jobs to be more attractive than it)
Tom Elliott on X - "NY @KathyHochul admits the exodus of NYers to sunnier tax climates in Florida & Texas. (cc @ZohranKMamdani ) "New Yorkers are exasperated. They feel that everything’s stacked against them. They’re not getting ahead. Their rents are too damn high. Their child care costs are high. Their utility bills, and thank you to Washington, we’re going to have higher prices at the pump ... Wall Street businesses looking at Texas, they’re not going there because they have a nicer governor, I know that for sure. But they’re going there because of the tax rate. We have to be smart about this so we can fund what we want to fund with what we already are taking in.”"
Jim Muessig on X - She literally told conservatives to leave the state. The “less nicer” governor of Florida has never said such a thing to liberals"
Weird. Left wingers tell us it's a myth that people move because of taxes
Team Talarico on X - ".@JamesTalarico : The only minority destroying America is the billionaires. Trans people are 1% of the population. Muslims are 1% of the population. Undocumented people are 1% of the population. We are focused on the wrong 1%. Trans people aren't taking away our healthcare. Muslims aren't defunding our schools. Immigrants aren't cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians. The culture wars are a smokescreen. They want us looking left and right at our neighbors instead of looking up at them. The biggest divide in our politics is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom."
Rock Chartrand🤑 on X - "Billionaires aren’t a ruling class by default. They become dangerous only when government has the power to grant favors. The problem isn’t wealth at the top. It’s power concentrated in the state. If you think a handful of rich people control everything, ask yourself why the solution is always more centralized political authority. If concentrated power is the threat, why expand it? Billionaires are the chosen scapegoat for government corruption and incompetence. This is just anti American way to prey on envy and resentment for the purpose of abolishing individual rights and the pursuit of happiness."
Connor Boyack 📚 on X - "The problem with socialism isn't that it eventually runs out of other people's money. The problem is that it runs out of incentives to create wealth in the first place."
Basil the Great on X - "🚨GERMAN CHANCELLOR ADMITS EU IS A COMPLETE FAILURE Destroyed growth with insane bureaucracy and paperwork "Germany and Europe have wasted incredible potential" "We have become the world champion of over-regulation""
Austin Padgett (LudwigNeverMises) on X - "It’s insane the leader of Germany is forced to admit this. We are witnessing the fall of one of the pillars of the dominant socialist orthodoxy. Single markets like the EU are often sold on the idea they will facilitate trade when in reality the standardization of regulations prevents the competitive pressure needed to dismantle bureaucracy. This is precisely why the EU wanted to push this standardization onto the rest of the world, so they wouldn’t have to compete with anyone outside of the EU either. Trumps destruction of the globalist project has forced their hand. Without being able to “level the playing field” by handy caping everyone else with the same regulations, Europe is forced to change. “We must reduce bureaucracy substantially in Europe. The single market was once created to form the most competitive economic area in the world but instead we have become the world champion of over regulation. That has to end.” -Chancellor Friedrich Merz The world is changing. The EU has failed."
