California's liberal legislature doubles down on stupidity.

By Rob Janicki

You have to hand it to liberals in California.  They are not easily deterred by the facts or the reality these facts clearly illustrate.

Not satisfied with the argument and the facts that raising the minimum wage will result in a decline in employment, the California legislature has once again decided to challenge the laws of economics and the recent results of the apparent minimum wage failure in Seattle. See the American Enterprise Institute study here which is based upon U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Based upon that real world experience in Seattle, California's liberal Democrats want to do the same thing to California's most vulnerable, the young and the poor of California, which is to make their employment opportunities diminish even more, as the number of minimum wage jobs declines through automaton and even business closures due to higher labor costs pushing profit margins to zero or worse, into mounting losses, causing business closures. 

Now, why would California want to do that, you ask?  Because organized labor unions, which support Democrats in greater amounts than any other lobbying group, tie their wage demands upon the minimum wage rate plus X dollar amount above that minimum hourly wage rate.  The higher the minimum wage rate, the higher the union wage demands that can be made for union jobs.  In other words, unions are using typical nonunion workers and their jobs to increase their own union job wage rates.  The unions are increasing their member incomes on the backs of the young and the poor receiving minimum wages.  So much for organized labor unions supporting the most vulnerable workers in the greater labor force.

The California legislature has decided to enact the raise in the minimum wage from $10 per hour to $15 per through legislation, rather than taking it to the voters of California, which have previously rejected such efforts through the ballot box on several statewide propositions.

California already has the highest poverty rate in the nation, at 23.5%. This deal will ensure that it keeps that crown, and will take away opportunities for people to escape poverty through hard work.

 

 See American Thinker for more details on this issue of raising the minimum wage.

And how can the California legislature be certain that such legislation will pass?  The answer is that the California legislature has a super liberal Democrat majority in both the state Senate and the state Assembly, which cannot be overridden even by a veto of its liberal Democrat governor, Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown, an octogenarian right out the 1960's "Flower Power" generation of liberals centered around the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco.