It would be awfully expensive to make the minimum wage in Oakland $30 an hour, which is what progressives are proposing. But not to worry! Babs and the wokes on the City Council have a plan!
The plan is—nothing. After all, they’re not going to have to pay it. It would be large corporations, those with more than 100 employees and annual revenue of more that $1 billion, who would foot the bills. So let’s imagine a future when the minimum wage is actually $30 an hour.
First of all, only 4 corporations would be impacted: PG&E, Block, Clorox and elf Beauty, a cosmetics brand that reached the $1 billion threshold just a year ago. So it’s not like every nail parlor, 7Eleven and tattoo shop would have to raise their minimum wage.
But the proposed minimum wage increase would have a ricocheting impact on inflation. We know where PG&E raises money when it needs it: from us, the ratepayers. The utility has 23,000 employees. Not all of them work in Oakland, and it’s not clear if the new minimum wage would apply to all its employees, or just those in Oakland. Block is a financial services and technology company with 11,300 employees. Again, we don’t know if all of them would get the new minimum wage. Ditto for Clorox, with 7,600 employees, and for Elf, with an estimated 500 employees. But I think we can safely assume that somehow these 4 corporations will figure out a way to pass their additional costs on to us, the consumers. They always do.
What other implications does the $30/hour dream entail? There will be enormous pressure on companies to raise their own minimum wage, even companies that aren’t required to. Their own employees will demand raises; they will be supported by the labor unions and the media. Eventually, all companies in Oakland would be compelled to give hefty raises to their employees: BART, Dreyer’s, Kaiser Permanente, Oaklandish, Pet Food Express, Yoshi’s, OneCalifornia Bank, Mother’s Cookies, and so on down the line. Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re all part of an economic ecosystem in which what happens in one corner of the web impacts the whole system.
Anyone who thinks Oakland can simply raise its minimum wage to $30 an hour and the rest of us won’t have to pay the price is living in lala land. Everything will go up: if you think a $5.60 cold brew is expensive, just wait.
Barbara Lee, of course, loves the prospect of a higher minimum wage. It checks most of the boxes on her ideology list. She can brag that she improved the quality of life for Oakland’s poorest residents; that will further endear her to the unions and the professional poverty pimps. It will also increase the business tax income of Oakland: more money into the general fund, to pay for the extravagant giveaways the City Council, at the behest of the unions, has created, and will continue to create, into the indefinite future.
If nothing else, this fantastic scheme should teach average citizens that every penny spent by a city, or caused to be spent by companies in that city, comes from the pockets of residents. For too long the Democratic Party has convinced voters that, when things like the minimum wage, or healthcare or spousal benefits, are increased, it’s greedy billionaires who foot the bill. That’s a lie.
Look, everybody is sick and tired of the inflation. But how many voters in Oakland have the intellectual ability to connect the dots and understand that every time the minimum wage is raised, the cost is added to every cup of coffee, pair of socks, loaf of bread, kilowatt of electricity, gallon of gas? Most Oakland voters vote with their magical fantasies, not with the frontal lobes of their brains. Progressive politicians depend on this infantile instinct to get elected. But as a glance at downtown Oakland proves, voting with one’s heart often results in an irreversible downward spiral. We all love our workers, but the plain and simple truth is that our love for them, and God’s love for them also, don’t pay the bills. We do.
Steve Heimoff