Voters no doubt had good intentions when they went into the ballot box and backed a $15 minimum wage. But those good intentions will provide little solace for the Floridians who find themselves unemployed in the coming years as a result.
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Companies Are Preparing to Cut Jobs and Automate if Biden Gets $15 Minimum Wage Hike, Reporting Shows
Let’s hope that Joe Biden’s minimum wage fantasies never become law or workers will pay the price for his economic naiveté.
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman once said that “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” When it comes to the $15 minimum wage hike supported by Joe Biden and many of his fellow Democrats, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the results will be ugly.
New reporting reveals that Chief Financial Officers at top American companies are “considering raising prices, cutting workers’ hours and investing in automation to offset a potential rise in labor costs.”
Dear Member of Congress,
On behalf of millions of taxpayers across the country, we urge you to reject proposals to increase the federal minimum wage at a time of unprecedented economic calamity, including President Joe Biden’s push to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour, more than doubling the current minimum wage of $7.25/hour.
President Biden’s recent $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” calls on Congress to more than double the federal minimum wage to $15/hour and eliminate the “tipped” minimum wage for servers. The Biden proposal likely mirrors legislation passed by the House in 2019 and reintroduced in 2021, the Raise the Wage Act, which increases the minimum wage to $15 by 2025, indexes it to inflation, and repeals the tipped minimum wage for servers.
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“Far too many restaurants will respond by laying off even more workers or closing their doors for good. As the pandemic has highlighted, the economic realities of each state are very different,” said Sean Kennedy, National Restaurant Association executive vice president of public affairs.
Kennedy added, “A nationwide increase in the minimum wage will create insurmountable costs for many operators in states where restaurant jobs are most needed for recovery.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also has concerns over the economic damage a $15 minimum wage could do in the middle of “this K-shaped recovery, where so many of the jobs that have been lost are those jobs that tend to be on the lower end of the wage scale,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the Chamber.