New Hampshire Gubernatorial candidates Steve Marchand and Molly Kelly are both dedicated Democrats with designs on using government to limit your potential for prosperity. They both support a New Hampshire minimum wage of $15.00/hour; which we know will result in job losses and less monthly income for the very people they claim to want to help.
Nothing new about that. But this is new.
Seven of the Thirteen Democrats on the Democrat D.C. City Council in a super-duper-majority Democrat enclave just voted for legislation to repeal the results of a ballot initiative that forces employers to pay tipped-staff $15.00/hour.
From Investors.com,
Under Initiative 77, the workers would see their minimum wage climb from the current $3.89 an hour to $15 an hour by 2026, erasing the difference between tipped and nontipped workers.
This is about waitstaff, bartenders, folks who often make more than $15.00/hour with tips, and whose jobs are more at risk from forcing costs on business owners who might cut staff, hours, or even close.
Democrats on the DC city Council suspect that this will be bad for their livelihood.
We’ve shared plenty of stories from both the mainstream press and new media about the effect these arbitrary intrusions have on pay and employment. Earlier this week I directed you to reports in the New York Times about decades-old profitable food-establishments closing because of arbitrary wage policy forced on them by virtu-signally narrative pimping progressives.
These intrusions are destructive in precisely the places advocates claim it will help. First time unskilled or low-skill labor get the shaft. Even in DC.
But the D.C. council members came to understand what economists — and D.C. restaurant workers themselves — already know. Sharp increases in the minimum wage will cost lost hours, lost jobs and lost income. (The unemployment rate is over 9% in D.C.’s poorer wards.)
Unemployment nationally is 4%, but in the poorer wards of the Nation’s capital, these minimum wage policies have created unemployment rates more than double that.
Maybe we should rename it The Fight for 15% unemployment?
When you artificially drive up the cost of labor employers stop hiring, reduce hours, or have to fire staff – in every enlightened meddling liberal metropolis in which it has been tried.
What do you think will happen in a state like New Hampshire?
The same damn thing.
I know, maybe Marchand & Molly want to use the fight for 15 to address our labor shortage?
We currently have more jobs than bodies to fill them. And that includes just about every sector of employment. But there is an aching need for new workers in positions that will give you job skills and train you to earn more at the right starting price. Retail and service industry employers are looking to make a deal but if New Hampshire Democrats get what they say they want it will have the immediate effect of making those opportunities disappear.
Labor shortage problem solved!
Crafty Democrats.
Of course, that comes at a big price. We lose any benefits that “revenue” would have provided to the rest of the state and local economy including business tax revenue generate off payrolls.
And we are doing very well in that department even with successive reductions in state business taxes.
But it would be crazy if Democrats started crafting policy that considered that sort of thing. They’d be like, Republicans.
Most Republicans.
