“In 2023, California passed a law requiring a $20 per hour minimum wage for all fast-food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide.
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New research suggests that the mandate has also resulted in fewer jobs for struggling entry-level workers.
The law went into effect in April 2024 and increased the hourly pay of an estimated half a million workers across the state. But without the law in place, thousands more workers would likely have been employed.”
“Not even shutting down the government can stop Republicans from forcing their way into corporate boardrooms these days.
The federal government is, at the moment, incapable of completing its most basic and routine task—passing a budget—and yet it is simultaneously expanding its portfolio to include a 10 percent ownership stake in an Alaskan mining company.”
“New York’s experiment with delivery driver wage mandates hasn’t gone well. Pay went up after the 2023 rule kicked in, but so did prices—and many drivers left the market altogether. The city saw an 8 percent drop in its delivery workforce, while food delivery costs rose 10 percent, including a 12 percent jump in restaurant prices and a staggering 58 percent spike in app fees. Tips, meanwhile, plunged 47 percent. Platforms even started capping drivers
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Seattle followed suit in 2024 with a $26-an-hour minimum wage for delivery drivers—and immediately watched the system collapse. Apps tacked on a new $5 delivery fee, and with taxes added, customers were soon paying bills with nearly 30 percent of the cost unrelated to the food itself. DoorDash saw 33,000 fewer orders in just the first two weeks, wiping out about $1 million in restaurant sales.
Counter to the law’s intention, many Seattle delivery drivers saw their earnings slashed by over half. “Demand was dead,” according to one such driver. A recent report from gig companies found that, following the ordinance taking effect, delivery orders dropped 25 percent, and driver pay fell 28 percent per hour logged on.”
“”The most persuasive case against protectionism is not the standard one that undergraduate students are taught in their introductions to international economics, which goes like this: Tariffs distort the allocation of resources and impose a ‘deadweight burden,'” Mokyr wrote in the June 1996 issue of Reason. “The standard argument is certainly correct, but somehow it has failed to persuade many people since it was first enunciated by Adam Smith and David Ricardo.”
The better argument, instead, is that “protectionism and insularism impede innovation, depriving our children of the comfort and security that progress and economic growth bring,” he said. “Free trade and international competition not only lead to a better allocation of resources; they ensure that countries do not lull themselves into the technological lethargy that is the archenemy of economic growth.””
Deploying the National Guard isn’t just costly in the direct costs of the deployment, but in how it takes workers and students away from work and school.
Many private data sources rely on BLS data. BLS data is extremely important for knowing what’s happening in the economy. It needs more resources to improve its processes. Instead, it’s being politicized by Donald Trump.
“President Donald Trump is considering imposing a 100 percent tariff on semiconductors to incentivize chipmakers to invest in domestic manufacturing, a move that would make it harder to build out American chip fabrication.
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The Chamber of Commerce warns that a 1 percent increase in tariffs on chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment will increase the construction costs of all announced domestic semiconductor fabrication plants (valued at $540 billion) by as much as $3.5 billion. A 100 percent rate increase, then, could increase construction costs for these projects by $350 billion. Moreover, “additional costs will reduce demand for end market products [and] reduce investments in semiconductor R&D,” diminishing American semiconductor dominance instead of enhancing it.
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Intel, “the only American company [that is] capable of producing leading-edge logic semiconductors,” warned that “Section 232 tariffs could increase U.S. manufacturing costs for essential materials and components.” The Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade association and lobbying group, said that “removing trade and other barriers to U.S. chips in overseas markets,” which account for 70 percent of revenue to the U.S. semiconductor industry, is key to making the expansion of domestic capacity economically viable. Right now, “the complete onshoring of all semiconductor supply chain elements is not feasible, much less in a short period of time,” because “supply chains have evolved over decades and cannot be rearranged overnight or even within a decade””