“This is the lesson to be learned. Seattle, and other government entities, should not try to force better living conditions for people. People need to make their own living conditions, based upon hard work and strong values.”
In the military, I learned to look objectively at data and use the facts to guide my decisions, no matter what my personal feelings were. It took many painful years to be able to learn how to do this. That is not to say that I do not hold powerful views on certain things, politics being one of them. It simply implies that when presented with irrefutable facts (of which climate change is not one), one must either reevaluate their position or admit that they are unreasonably biased.
With this being said, I enjoy spirited discussions with people who can logically challenge my ideas. According to my wife, these conversations would be classified as an argument. I classify them as entertainment. In either case, however, I almost always walk away enriched from the discussion, even when the information presented has forced me to reevaluate my opinions.
It can be difficult, however, when someone attacks the core of your belief system, especially when it was held with a religious conviction. It becomes very strenuous at this point to accept whatever is presented to you, no matter how scientifically based the data is. This is where the city of Seattle recently found itself.
Liberalism is a funny beast, more akin to a parasite, really. It is welcomed into a system on the promises of more freedom and shared economic benefit. Once it invades the system, people discover that the word “share” means “forced” and “freedom” means “freedom to believe in their values.” Once the system has had its resources plundered, the parasite moves on. This is what happened on the West Coast—once California was firmly in the grip of socialist policies that were destroying the state, the parasite moved on to Washington.
Forcing the redistribution of wealth is where their power comes from.
One of the fundamental values of liberalism is the belief that we can legislate away poverty. This is often why the left plays at people’s emotions through the lens of minimum wage laws. Instead of focusing on job training and specialization, which would allow people economic mobility and control, they instead want entry-level jobs to pay the same wages as what an engineer would make. This is their most important ideological tenet. Really, if you think about it, the entirety of their philosophy comes from this fact. Forcing the redistribution of wealth is where their power comes from.
In order to help promote this view, Seattle recently hired an independent research firm to evaluate its newly adopted minimum wage hike law. Over the course of three years, Seattle will increase its minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour. The belief was that this would help raise the standard of living for those who were attempting to make a living at these positions.
So, Seattle hired the University of Washington to conduct a study of the effects. Unfortunately for the city, the UW study found that the income decreased for low wage workers. It is true that workers were making more per hour, but many found their hours substantially cut or were let go due to the increase in cost. This would seem to make sense. After all, unlike the government, businesses can only pay out what they are taking in. When you are talking about a business with a limited profit margin, there are only so many options to trim your expenses. If the government is mandating that the cost of labor increase, then the only option is to cut those hours or personnel.
As would be expected, the left immediately came out to attack the validity of the study. The easiest way to do so would, of course, be to find another university to conduct a study but with the knowledge that the findings would match the desired outcome. So they went to a source that has never met a liberal policy it would not support: UC Berkley. Not surprisingly, the results of the Berkley findings matched up to exactly what the city was wanting to receive.
Here is what I am confused about. This rollout was done to specifically address the issue of a living wage for entry-level job positions. This frustrates me, as I believe that these jobs should be primarily filled by teenagers who should be using this time to learn the responsibility of holding a job, not adults believing that this is a career. In any case, the minimum wage in Seattle was $9.47 an hour and was raised ultimately to $15.00. That is an increase of $5.53. The average fast food restaurant, as reported by statista.com, has 16 employees.
Finally, entrepreneur.com stated, “You have tiny margins and can’t afford to make mistakes. According to a report on food franchising by Franchise Business Review, 51.5 percent of food franchises earn profits of less than $50,000 a year; roughly 7 percent top $250,000, with the average profit for all restaurants coming in at $82,033.”
People, not the government, need to start taking responsibility for their living conditions.
So I simply did the math: $5.53 raise x 16 employees x 30 hours weekly x 52 weeks in a year. The total came to an increase of $138k in employee costs. That number is 40% higher than the average profits a fast food restaurant will bring in. I am not an economist. In fact, I cannot seem to do the simplest of math problems (I did the above calculations in Excel), so I will not pretend to understand the intricacies of our financial system. However, the math on this one seems pretty simple.
If the costs of the increase are going to be greater than what you bring in, then something has to change. The costs for the overhead are fairly fixed. Many restaurants are turning to automation so they can cut the cost of labor. The only other option is to raise the price of the product. However, as most conservatives like to point out, this in turn negates the entire point of a wage increase, as it creates a snowball effect.
This is the problem with the government arbitrarily raising the minimum wage. Don’t get me wrong, I want everyone to make lots of money and have a fantastic standard of living. The problem is the government cannot legislate this into existence. People, not the government, need to start taking responsibility for their living conditions.
I would not want to have a job where I was making only $9.47 an hour. When I was in high school, I did not want to have a job making $7 an hour. That was one of the reasons I enlisted into the Army. I wanted to make money, learn a job skill, and jump out of airplanes. Two of the three were for my future, at least. The point is, I made a choice to improve my conditions.
Within the first week of arriving at my first duty assignment, I was at the education center signing up for college classes. While in Somalia, I read in the Military Police Magazine that the MP Corps needed Spanish linguists. The day I returned back to the States, I was arranging to take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, which was a requirement to get into the language school.
After graduating from that course, I found myself in Panama, where I heard that the Army was looking for enlisted members to go to college and become officers. So I applied to the Green to Gold program and was accepted. No one made me do these things. I saw the opportunity to improve myself and I took it. I volunteered for everything I could and earned the respect of those above me. This gave them the confidence to risk their reputation by endorsing me for each step along the way.
This is the lesson to be learned. Seattle, and other government entities, should not try to force better living conditions for people. People need to make their own living conditions, based upon hard work and strong values. The most incredible speech I ever heard on this came from the most unlikely of sources. In 2013, Ashton Kutcher gave a speech at the Teen Choice Awards. It was amazing. He had this to say about work ethic:
“I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work. When I was 13, I had my first job with my dad carrying shingles up to the roof. And then I got a job washing dishes at a restaurant. And then I got a job in grocery store deli. And then I got a job in factory sweeping Cheerio dust off the ground. And I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. And every job that I had was a stepping stone to my next job and I never quit my job until I had my next job. And so opportunities look a lot like work.”
