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Bernie Sanders has some well-earned egg on his face after he cut campaign employees' hours in order to meet their demands for a $15 an hour wage.
The move isn't surprising to anyone with a basic grasp of how economics works. Mandating a higher wage doesn't mean that the resources to pay for it are magically going to appear. It's the same reason why the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the recent $15 minimum wage bill passed by the House could kill almost 4 million jobs. (It also might just be why a 2017 report found that pro-wage-hike politicians still like using unpaid intern labor.)
But this debate isn't just theoretical or contained to Washington, D.C.; jacked-up forced minimum wages have cost people their jobs all over the country in recent years. Here's just a small sample of the mountain of evidence that could have saved Sanders from this latest embarrassment:
- Earlier this month, Restaurants Unlimited filed for bankruptcy, citing new wage costs.
- Back in March, an upstate New York bartender said that Hollywood actresses "need to butt out" of New York's wage debate while another explained that "immigrant support staff will be the first to be fired" if wages go up.
- In 2018, Red Robin fired all of its busboys in order "to address the labor increases we’ve seen.”
- When Seattle's minimum wage went up to $13 per hour, a report found that it actually lowered low-wage earners' income. A Seattle pizza guy loved the new $15 wage, right up until it cost him his job.
- It's already expensive to eat out in New York City. It got more expensive when they hiked up the minimum wage.
- Walmart responded to the minimum wage campaign by adding a fleet of robots.
- McDonald's announced that it's increasing kiosk use at its restaurants while giving up lobbying to keep wage costs low.
- A former McDonald's CEO warned back in 2016 that "it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries."
- Back in 2016, then-California Governor Jerry Brown admitted that raising the minimum wage to $15 "may not make [economic] sense,” given the evidence against it.
"Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws," economist Thomas Sowell famously explained in "Basic Economics," "and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they either lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force."
Then again, if self-described socialists were to heed the economic lessons of history, they probably wouldn't be socialists in the first place.
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