If only we could figure out the mysterious relationship between "price" and "demand."

Of course, our incompetent elites have totally figured out the relationship between "moral posturing" and "feeling good."

//More than 260,000 people who will find themselves out of work in 2018 because of new minimum wage laws, according to a study reported on by The Daily Caller:

The  study, conducted by the free market advocacy group American Action Forum, found that incremental minimum wage increases implemented in 2018 alone will cost the nation roughly 261,000 jobs. Once the minimum wage increases are fully phased in, they are expected to cost approximately 1.7 million jobs, using each state’s official employment projections as a baseline. The number is significant in light of the Bureau of Labor Statistics  2017 projection that the entire U.S. economy will add 11.5 million jobs over the next decade.
So far, only 12 states and the District of Columbia have jacked up the minimum wage, which is what the study noted above focused on. A rise in the national minimum wage would have even more dire ramifications.//

Is there anything that well-meaning, compassionate, social justice leftists can't....

...completely screw up?

More filth AND less money:

"A new study has determined that the higher minimum wage in Seattle doesn't just have a negative impact on jobs, it also has a negative impact on restaurants' hygiene.

The study, conducted by professors from Indiana University, Ball State University, and Villanova University, measured the effects of the minimum wage each time Seattle increased it and concluded that every dollar increase in the minimum wage resulted in total health code violations increasing by 6.3%.

The reason: a higher minimum wage results in higher costs for restaurants, but they don't want consumers to bear the brunt of the cost through higher prices, so they resort to reducing hours for employees while increasing the amount of work required for these employees, thus taking away from the attention necessary for hygiene.


Most of the increases in health codes infractions are for minor violations, known as blue-code violations, rather than red-code violations which would result in restaurants being shut down altogether. But blue-code violations do affect public health, as they constitute "things like — insect, rodents, animals, employee cleanliness and hygiene; toilet facilities — whether they were properly constructed, supplied and cleaned; the garbage has been properly disposed of," according to co-author Srikant Devaraj.

National Public Radio (NPR) Social Science Correspondent Shankar Vedantam cautioned that the study didn't necessarily suggest that these health code violations would continue in the long run:

It could be that over five years, this is going to look very different as the effects of the minimum wage shakeout. It could also be this is the effect of raising the minimum wage.

And one implication is if cities are going to raise the minimum wage, one thing they might want to do is step up inspections of these more minor violations because you can expect that businesses that face higher costs might sometimes seek to cut corners.


This is all just basic economics: wages are the cost of labor. If that cost of labor artificially increases, then companies have to offset costs elsewhere. That's why a study in June found that Seattle's $13 per hour minimum wage resulted in a decline of $1,500 in yearly income for employees earning lower wages."

Unexpectedly!!!

Raising the minimum wage causes the closure of restaurants that wealthy liberals don't eat at.

So much of the leftist program is about making being a wealthy leftist more exclusive.

This is so unexpected.

I was thinking that we could make everyone rich by raising the minimum wage to $200 per hour, but apparently not.

//Their results aren’t as rosy as some minimum wage proponents might have hoped, and they largely paint a picture of the minimum wage as an ineffective tool at increasing the earnings of workers. They found that the minimum wage had increased wages, as expected, but also that their “best estimates find that the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance appears to have lowered employment rates of low-wage workers.”
When the costs and benefits of the minimum wage were taken into account, the authors wrote that “the effects of disemployment appear to be roughly offsetting the gain in hourly wage rates, leaving the earnings for the average low-wage worker unchanged,” and that “Seattle’s low wage workers would have experienced almost equally positive trends if the minimum wage had not increased.”
Their final verdict was that: “The major conclusion one should draw from this analysis is that the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance worked as intended by raising the hourly wage rate of low-wage workers, yet the unintended, negative side effects on hours and employment muted the impact on labor earnings.”