California's new minimum-wage law hadn't even gone into effect before it was declared a disaster. Business groups and Republican politicians have argued for decades that minimum-wage increases harm the very workers they are supposed to help, and this one'passed in September 2023 and setting a salary floor of $20 an hour for fast-food workers'appeared to be no different. Headlines such as 'California Restaurants Cut Jobs as Fast-Food Wages Set to Rise' and 'California's Minimum Wage Woes Are a Cautionary Tale for the Nation' proliferated. The story seemed to fit into a familiar theme: naive California progressives overreaching and generating a predictable fiasco. 'Let me give you the downside,' Donald Trump responded when recently asked whether he would agree to raise the federal minimum wage during his second term. 'In California, they raised it up to a very high number, and your restaurants are going out of business all over the place. The population is shrinking. It's had a very...
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