Minimum wage lunacy from California's Democratic overseers

The increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour in California is not only an outrageous tax imposed by our Democratic overseers on all the citizens of California (including the most vulnerable, for example, retired seniors living on fixed incomes), but also makes no economic sense. Increasing the minimum wage by such a large amount will merely serve to create an enormous incentive to replace unskilled workers in the workplace with robots and automation. Since highly skilled and highly compensated knowledge workers create these robots and automation, increasing the minimum wage will simply boost demand for those workers while driving down demand for low skill minimum wage workers, who now will become too expensive to employ relative to their skill level. This will inevitably result in higher unemployment for those low skill workers and a lower average wage, thereby actually increasing wage inequality.

If the Democrats had intentionally set out to hasten the spread of the kind of technological unemployment identified by Erik Brynjolfsson, they could not have chosen a better mechanism for doing so than by raising the minimum wage so dramatically. California Democrats claim to be acting on behalf of the little guy, when, in fact, they are driving the little guy right out of work.