DORI MONSON

Dori: I told you so — $15 minimum wage costs restaurant jobs in new survey

Apr 19, 2019, 4:03 PM | Updated: Apr 20, 2019, 12:21 am

$15 minimum wage...

Councilmember Kshama Sawant was one of the biggest advocates for the $15 minimum wage. (KIRO Radio)

(KIRO Radio)

Do you think government cares about you as an individual? I guarantee you I know the answer. Government couldn’t care less about you. And that’s never more apparent than when you have a bunch of “snake oil salesmen” like Kshama Sawant and the rest of the socialists on the Seattle City Council touting the $15 minimum wage “because they care about the workers.”

It was not because they cared about the workers. They cared about having a slogan so that they could fundraise off of it, and — in Sawant’s case — to build a national profile, because Seattle is too puny for a great socialist thinker like her.

I told you when they were first debating the increased minimum wage that they would hurt the very people they were trying to help. I was proven correct when one of the elements of the $15/an hour wage was to get a University of Washington study to see if it’s helping people. The professors realized that the raise is actually hurting people more than its helping — they got an hourly raise, but they’re losing even more in hourly cutbacks.

RELATED: $15 wage activist Pramila Jayapal wasn’t paying her interns

So, what did the Seattle City Council do? Did they get rid of the $15 minimum wage? No. They disregarded the UW study that they commissioned, and then found a $15/an hour zealot professor from Berkeley who concocted a survey to show that it’s helping people.

There’s more proof today. In one of the largest surveys of restaurants and restaurant workers — 4,000 restaurants and 112,000 employees — they found that 43 percent of the restaurants have cut jobs in areas where the minimum wage has been hiked — 43 percent. And that’s in a healthy economy.

In addition, 64 percent of those restaurants have reduced employee hours, 26 percent have replaced people with technology, and almost 10 percent have closed altogether.

The net effect is that the minimum wage increase has hurt minimum wage workers far more than it has helped them. I told you so. It’s more proof that the socialists do not know much about economics and they do not care about you.

I think we are in an eternal struggle for control over our lives. Government and corporations want to control us, and we have to fight with all of our might to be free from that control, to be independent, to be sovereign. That’s why I want smaller government. That’s why I’m always fighting back against the lunatics who seem to be increasing in number here in the Puget Sound area.

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Dori: I told you so — $15 minimum wage costs restaurant jobs in new survey