We’ve documented how Newsmax columnist Michael Reagan believes that fast-food workers — particularly in California — don’t deserve a living wage because it will make his food cost too much. When a ballot initiative in the state to raise the minimum wage failed in November, Reagan was doing cartwheels over its failure in his Dec. 3 column:
Imagine our surprise last month when we discovered California residents can vote just like Oklahomans when they become fed up with leftist promises.
Here we wrote that evidently California residents are tired of the soft-on-crime policies favored by Democrats, because they voted by a 70% margin to make crime illegal again.
The passage of Proposition 36 last November reversed the lax enforcement policies that unleashed the current wave of shoplifting that’s inundating the state.
There was another noteworthy proposition on the ballot in November: Proposition 32.
This lefty bright idea would have raised the minimum wage in California for entry level jobs to $18 per hour.
Normally, we would have thought this proposal would have passed with flying colors.
Many Golden State residents are all about spending someone else’s money.
Combine that with the moral exhibitionism of “fighting for the poor” and it’s time to go ahead and order the champagne for the victory party.
Only that’s not what happened.
It took two weeks for California’s corrupt and incompetent election system to determine the result, but Propostion 32 . . . Lost!
To help justify his cheering, Reagan called on the lobbying group for the state’s restaurant owners, whose clients has no interest in paying their employees any more than they absolutely have to:
Why did California voters reverse 30 years of wage increases?
We think it’s because California residents are finally grasping rudimentary economic concepts. Namely when a business encounters rising costs that can’t be avoided, the customers get to take up the slack through higher prices.
Jot Condie, the president and CEO of the California Restaurant Association, agrees with us. He “called voter’s rejection of Proposition 32 ‘historic’ and argued it represented a rejection of laws that Condie said added to the state’s high cost of living.”
“It is important that policymakers hear the message being sent by the voters — stop using California consumers as guinea pigs for public policy experiments that make life more expensive for everyone,” Condie said.
Reagan concluded by declaring that “The results have been what sane people expected,” adding:
“Fast-food consumers are very frustrated by the price increases that they’re seeing,” said Condie. “They were just connecting the dots and saying, ‘This $18-an-hour minimum wage is going to increase prices across the board.'”
Yes, Condie is correct. And the result is rudimentary economics. Higher wages equal higher costs and higher costs must be passed on to the consumer.
And at some point, even guinea pigs get tired of expensive social experiments.
When did it become a “social experiment” to pay restaurant employees a reasonable living wage? Neither Reagan nor Condie offered an answer.