If you are planning a trip to Seattle and want to eat at a nice restaurant, you might want to plan the trip now. Seattle’s restaurants are closing at an alarming rate.
What is driving these eateries to extinction? Could it be global warming? The Koch brothers? Actually, it is the Seattle city council.
That group of leftist ideologues, who have no concept of economics, decided it would be a great idea to mandate a minimum wage of $15 an hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Seattle decided to ignore the consequences of reality and the laws of economics and mandated a minimum wage that is more than double the federal mandate.
Now, as April 1st, the date the minimum wage is supposed to begin to phase in, Seattle’s restaurants are closing. Not all of them are closing, but a lot of them are.
Seattle Magazine lamented the loss of the eating establishments and in a stunning show of truth talked about the mathematics of the new law.
Restaurants’ largest cost is labor. On average that is about 36 percent of revenue. When it is all said and done, these restaurants make about 4 percent profit. The new wage law drives labor costs up to 42 percent. There goes the profit and now these establishments are in the red.
The minimum wage is supposed to help those at the bottom. Instead, these workers are losing their jobs. Those fortunate enough to keep their jobs are either being cut to part time or are losing benefits.
Liberals say, “well these businesses can just raise their prices.”
No, they can’t.
Every time a business raised its prices, it loses customers. Some people might be gullible enough to buy a Big Mac at $3, but the number who will buy at $5 or $6 drops dramatically.
Liberals are clueless as to how economics work: $15 an hour is not going to give everyone in Seattle a minimum income of $30,000 a year; it is going to create a lot of unemployed people.
Liberals don’t understand this.
Someone who has no skills is not worth $15 an hour. They are not worth $7 an hour. The way to get someone out of poverty is not to mandate a wage that is insane. The way to get people out of poverty is to provide opportunity and let the government get out of the way.
Anthony Anton from the Washington Restaurant Association said, “It isn’t a political problem; it’s a math problem.”
He is wrong.
It is a political problem. It is a problem created by left-wing politicians who have no clue how the real world works. These are far-left politicians who try the same ideas over and over again despite the fact they fail over and over again.
Albert Einstein once described insanity as trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That is the problem with liberalism and liberals.
No matter how many times their ideology fails, they never get it. They just keep repeating their mistakes over and over again. Unfortunately, the rest of us pay for their insanity.
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