Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 1/19/24): “The history of debates over the minimum wage is filled with claims about the detrimental effect of raising the wage floor that have repeatedly flopped in the face of empirical evidence.”

In September 2023, California passed a law requiring fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $20 an hour, affecting more than 700,000 people working in the state’s fast food industry.

Readers will be unsurprised to hear that corporate media told us that this would devastate the industry. As Conor Smyth reported for FAIR (1/19/24) before the law went into effect, outlets like USA Today (12/26/23) and CBS (12/27/23) were telling us that, due to efforts to help those darn workers, going to McDonald’s or Chipotle was going to cost you more, and also force joblessness. This past April, Good Morning America (4/29/24) doubled down with a piece about the “stark realities” and “burdens” restaurants would now face due to the law.

Now we have actual data about the impact of California’s law. Assessing the impact, the Shift Project (10/9/24) did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”

Judd Legum (Popular Information, 12/3/24): “The restaurant industry provided a distorted picture of the impact of the fast food worker wage increase.”

In June 2024, the California Business and Industrial Alliance ran a full-page ad in USA Today claiming that the fast food industry cut about 9,500 jobs as a result of the $20 minimum wage. That’s just false, says Popular Information (12/3/24).

Among other things, the work relied on a report from the Hoover Institution, itself based on a Wall Street Journal article (3/25/24), from a period before the new wage went into effect, and that, oops, was not seasonally adjusted. (There’s an annual decline in employment at fast food restaurants from November through January, when people are traveling or cooking at home—which is why the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers seasonally adjusted data.)

The industry group ad starts with the Rubio’s fish taco chain, which they say was forced to close 48 California locations due to “increasing costs.” It leaves out that the entire company was forced to declare bankruptcy after it was purchased by a private equity firm on January 19, 2024 (LA Times, 6/12/24).

As Smyth reported, there is extensive academic research on the topic of wage floors that shows that minimum wage hikes tend to have little to no effect on employment, but can raise the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers (CBPP, 6/30/15; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 5/2/19). Media’s elevation of anecdotes about what individual companies have done, and say they plan to do, in response to the minimum wage hike overshadows more meaningful information about the net effect across all companies in the industry.

The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) said last year that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers.” Since that hasn’t happened, does the Journal need better economists—or more sense?

And what about agency? The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) contented that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers” in response to the new law. But why? Is there no question lurking in there about corporate priorities? About executive pay? About the fact that consumers and workers are the same people?

The question calls for thoughtfulness—will, for example, fast food companies cut corners by dumping formerly in-house delivery workers off on companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats, which are not subject to the same labor regulations? How will economic data measure that?

That would be a story for news media to engage, if they were interested in improving the lives of struggling workers. They could also broaden the minimum wage discussion to complementary policy changes—as Smyth suggested, “expanded unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a job guarantee, and universal basic income.”

The narrow focus on whether a Big Mac costs 15 cents more, and if it does, shouldn’t you yell at the people behind the counter, is a distortion, and a tired one, that should have been retired long ago.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

As most compare Putin to Hitler, turn a blind eye to the U.S. sending cluster bombs to Zelenskyy the grifter, and witness the latest madness about Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), please remember:

During the 1990 discussions to re-unify East and West Germany, the Western parties sought to defuse Moscow’s fears that a reunified state in the heart of Europe would present a threat to the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev only accepted German reunification — over which the Soviet Union had a legal right to veto — because he received assurances that NATO would not expand after he withdrew his forces from Eastern Europe.

These assurances came from folks like President George H.W. Bush, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the CIA Director Robert Gates, French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister John Major, and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner.

In February, Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, assured his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, that in a post-Cold War Europe NATO would no longer be belligerent — “less of a military organization, much more of a political one, would have no need for independent capability.”

Nonetheless, Baker promised Shevardnadze “iron-clad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward”. On the same day in Moscow, he famously told the Soviet General Secretary that the alliance would not move “one inch to the east”.

The following day, February 10, 1990, Helmut Kohl, the future chancellor of a united Germany, repeated the same thought to Gorbachev, even as they disagreed on other issues. “We believe that NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity. We have to find a reasonable resolution. I correctly understand the security interests of the Soviet Union, and I realize that you, Mr. General Secretary, and the Soviet leadership will have to clearly explain what is happening to the Soviet people,” Kohl said.

The promises not to expand NATO only lasted until 1997, however, when Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were invited into the alliance. In total, 13 Eastern European states have become NATO members since then.

Remember when this happened, in the name of public health [sic]?

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice quietly removed content on child sex trafficking from its website earlier this year.

More details here:

The Conservative Compass
DOJ Removes ALL Mention of Minors on Human Trafficking Website and Documentation
In a recent development that has sparked concerns and raised eyebrows, the Department of Justice (DOJ) made significant revisions to its webpage on child sex trafficking, specifically removing sections related to international and domestic cases. These changes, which occurred in late May, have drawn attention amid discussions surrounding President Joe B…
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2 days ago · 1 like · Dallas Ludlum

Dude looks a like a lady?

It’s a form of reality collapse to incrementally discover that no one in power can be trusted and they’ve been lying to you about everything.

But it’s also a source of incredible self-empowerment.

In other words, each and every one of us is well-positioned to take part in creating the most important social changes ever imagined.

How lucky are we? We’ve been trusted with the most vital mission of all time: survival and redemption.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..