Seattle Restaurant Boom After $15 Minimum Wage Confounds RWNJs

I am starting to have myself a backlog of what I call blogging fodder which I don't get around to blogging, due to not feeling much like doing so, due to being in about week three of feeling miserable due to an allergic reaction to the air that I breathe which has been overstocked, of late, with too much pollen from weed, grass and trees.

Too much pollen which has been manifesting itself in a daily headache.

So, yesterday, or was it the day before, I saw that which you see here, on the front page of the Seattle Times online. I guess this falls into the category of things I see in west coast news sources, usually the Seattle Times, which I would never expect to see in the Fort Wort Star-Telegram, about something similar in Fort Worth.

But, that is not what amused me.

Way back a couple years ago when Seattle opted to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, RWNJs (Right Wing Nut Jobs) like college dropout, Rush Limbaugh, and his ignorant hate mongering ilk, spread propaganda lies about four Seattle restaurants being forced to close the very week this minimum wage increase was announced, but well before even the first stage became reality.

And now, a couple years later, with Seattle restaurants paying their help the $15 an hour minimum, even before the final mandated raise to that level, not only has this pay raise not resulted in an epidemic of restaurant closures, apparently the Seattle restaurant scene is booming.

Of course the RWNJs have all sorts of explanations, just like they always seem to do, for once again being wrong about something.

Last summer, August 14 to be precise, David, Theo and Ruby took me to downtown Seattle, to Dick's, where I got to eye witness experience the damage done to Seattle's restaurant businesses by the liberal socialist madness that raised the minimum wage.

Below is a photo I took whilst waiting in line at Dick's....

Dick's starts at $15 an hour, with $25,000 college scholarships, childcare assistance, free health insurance, paid community service, along with regular merit raises.

Now, Dick's has long been known for being a great fast food place to work, with a highly evolved, progressive social conscience.

Meanwhile, in a Texas town like Fort Worth, in what is known as a "right to work" state, which basically means such a state is a union busting state, I don't think there are any fast food places in existence of the Dick's sort.

Working in a right to work state, a restaurant worker in Fort Worth is not even paid the paltry Texas minimum wage of $7.25. If a Texas restaurant worker receives at least $30 a month in tips their employer can get away with paying a minimum wage of only $2.34 an hour. Supposedly the tips are supposed to amount to what results in a $7.25 minimum wage, allowing the employer to pay that paltry minimum. In Texas you can probably guess how well this is regulated and enforced.

So, a month or so ago someone, I think it was Elsie Hotpepper, verbalized about being surprised what a ghost town downtown Fort Worth was on a Saturday. And that the service her group received in one of downtown Fort Worth's few restaurants was atrocious.

Is it really that hard to see the link between how much one pays ones restaurant workers and how well that restaurant operates?

It is not just restaurants. When I am in Washington the quality level of just about everything, store wise, and other wise, is noticeably way more competent and better run than the craptacularness I experience in Texas. Just the difference between a Texas Walmart and the Walmart I went to in Tacoma was surprising. Or any other store, or restaurant.

And another thing. At Dick's I got a Dick's Deluxe, Cheeseburger, Fries and Strawberry Shake. The price of each was about what I remembered them being way back when I lived in Washington late in the previous century. If I remember right, on August 14 a Dick's Deluxe was $3.45. That seems close to what I remember such costing long ago. But, I have to admit, the Dick's Deluxe seemed smaller than I remembered it being.

But, that seems to be the case with just about every thing I remember....

Fort Worth Has Most Cranes In Country 2nd Year In A Row?

I have been severely distracted for a month or two, hence slacking on some of my favorite hobbies.

Hobbies such as pointing out something I read in a west coast online news source that I would never expect to be reading in Fort Worth news sources, if Fort Worth actually had real, legit new sources, about something similar happening in Fort Worth.

Such as one would never expect to see a headline in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram informing its few readers that for the 2nd year in a row Fort Worth has more construction cranes constructing than any other town in America.

How is that bridge construction going at the north end of Fort Worth's downtown? Anyone see anything happening yet with the Trinity River Central City Uptown Panther Island District Vision's bridges?

Recently we learned, via embarrassing J.D. Granger propaganda, that after he and "his team" built a scale model of one of America's Biggest Boondoggle's bridges, and then sliced the model in two, supposedly proving the controversial design was viable, and thus the long stalled bridges could supposedly return to construction mode.

I don't think cranes are involved in holding up J.D. Granger's little bridge V-piers whilst concrete is added.

I got the headline about most cranes in the country from this morning's Seattle Times.

Obviously I altered the headline for sarcastic irony purposes.

A few days ago the Seattle Times had an article speculating on what came next after Seattle's latest boom ran its course, as all previous booms had, such as the Klondike Gold Rush boom, the post WWII Boeing boom, or the Dot.com boom.

Several years ago Seattle raised the town's minimum wage to $15, phased in over several years. I believe that phasing in is now completed.

Regarding Seattle, and other town's minimum wage increase, troglodytes around the country spewed troglodytic knuckedraggery regarding the economic foolishness of increasing the minimum wage.

One can not help but wonder how much bigger Seattle's current boom would be if the town had not enacted that minimum wage increase? (that is sarcasm for those who are not able to detect such)

I wonder if Fort Worth phased in a minimum  wage increase to $15 an hour if that town would experience something it has never experienced.

Boomtown Fort Worth!

I can't imagine sleepy Fort Worth as a Boomtown.

Well, there was that short period of time when Fort Worth thought it was booming due to being the location of the world's biggest experiment in urban gas fracking. That "Boom" did not end well.

I wonder if J.D. Granger and the minions responsible for America's Biggest Boondoggle pay their vision workers the minimum wage? Is that the reason why the Boondoggle can't seem to build simple little bridges connecting Fort Worth's mainland to an  imaginary island? Disgruntled low paid workers?

I suspect that even with a worker wage increase America's Biggest Boondoggle will still continue boondoggling along, well into the foreseeable future....

Seattle Billionaire Nick Hanauer Explains Why Raising Minimum Wage Causes Booming Economy

On Facebook, and in other locations, I find myself getting annoyed at some of the  nonsense spouted by right wing reactionaries whose unevolved, uneducated, wrong-headed, economically stupid claims about raising the minimum wage bear no relationship to economic reality.

But, they are just so darn sure of themselves.

One of Seattle's billionaires, Nick Hanauer, speaking to the New York City wage board about the economic reality of raising the minimum wage, explains in simple easy to understand language what actually happens in towns and states which have raised the minimum wage to a level much higher than states like Texas and towns like Fort Worth.

Below I excerpted part of  how Billionaire Nick Hanauer Explains How Higher Wages Create Jobs, for your economic education enlightenment....

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “a review of 64 studies on minimum wage increases found no discernible effect on employment.” And contrary to popular belief, relatively large minimum-wage hikes like those recently passed in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are not unprecedented. For example, the federal minimum wage jumped 88% in one year, from 40 cents an hour in 1949 to 75 cents in 1950. Yet despite the usual warning from the Chicken Littles at the National Association of Manufacturing that the hike would prove “a reckless jolt to the economic system,” unemployment plummeted, from 5.9% in 1949 to 2.9% in 1953.

Likewise, my home state of Washington raised the minimum wage for tipped workers by 85% between 1988 and 1990—yet over the following decade restaurant employment growth somehow managed to outpace the nation as a whole.

I live in Seattle, the first major city in the US to enact a $15 minimum wage. But a high minimum wage was not a departure for us or something new. Seattle already had the highest minimum wage in the country. Rather, $15 was a continuation of an economic strategy that already was allowing our city to outperform yours.

Our current state minimum wage is $9.47—30% higher than the federal minimum. Seattle’s minimum wage is now $11.00, 52% higher than the national minimum. But we have no tip penalty in our state, so our tipped workers make $11 plus tips, 513% higher than the federal tipped minimum of $2.13, and more than twice the $5 still paid here in NY.

So, if the good people from the industry were right, that a higher minimum wage killed jobs, then we should have no restaurants in Seattle, right? You would have to bring food and cooking equipment when you came to visit us in the hinterlands. How could it not be otherwise, with these stratospherically high wages?

But here’s a really odd thing. Not only do we still have some restaurants in Seattle, we have a lot of them. In fact, we have more of them per capita than even—wait for it—New York City. According to a Bloomberg analysis, of all major cities in the US, Seattle ranks second in restaurants per capita. New York is number four. Read it and weep, New York. OK, so surely the number one spot will be held by some low-wage paradise, right? Not hardly. The number one spot is San Francisco, the only place in America that pays restaurant workers $12.25, even more than Seattle. Why? How can this be? They told us that high wages killed jobs!! And business! And the economy!

Nonsense.

Seattle has more restaurants than New York because that’s how capitalism works. The fundamental law of capitalism is: when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need to hire more workers. In places where wages are high, business is good—particularly for restaurants.

Let me say that another way. When restaurants pay restaurant workers enough so that even they can afford to eat in restaurants, that isn’t bad for the restaurant business—it’s great for it, despite what the good folks at the National Restaurant Association may tell you.

With the highest minimum wage in the country, my state somehow manages to outpace the rest of the country in small business job growth.

_________________________________________________

Go to Billionaire Nick Hanauer Explains How Higher Wages Create Jobs to read all of what Nick Hanauer had to tell the New York City wage board.

FOX News Is Once Again Spewing Falsehoods About Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage

I saw that which you see here on Facebook today. A lot of what I see on Facebook appalls me.

I really think Obama should come up with a 21st century version of John Adams' Alien & Sedition Act and use it to shut down spewers of corrosive misinformation.

Like FOX News.

Back when Seattle passed its $15 minimum wage hike, FOX News came up with a totally bogus story which quickly spread to all the conservative nonsense purveyors of the talk radio sort, such as Rush Limbaugh.

FOX News claimed that four Seattle restaurants had closed due to the new minimum wage.

There were two problems with this piece of FOX propaganda. Number one was the fact that when contacted by legitimate journalists all four restaurant owners said their restaurant closures had nothing to do with the new minimum wage, and, in fact, they supported the $15 minimum wage.

Whoops.

It gets worse.

It was not possible for the new $15 minimum wage to cause a Seattle business closure because the new minimum wage had not yet gone into effect. The increase to $15 is being phased in over a three year time span.

Whoops again.

And now a new bogus FOX News story about Seattle's $15 minimum wage has become fodder for the doddering right wing chattering chicken head types.

The new claim is that Seattle's $15 minimum wage is causing minimum wage workers to ask for fewer hours because making more money will cause them to lose their welfare handouts, like food stamps and rent subsidies.

The reality is the Seattle minimum wage is currently around $4 shy of that $15 mark. Legitimate journalists were again unable to find any worker who was asking for fewer hours so as to be able to keep getting food stamps.

And, as was the case with the first bogus FOX News story about this subject, the Seattle minimum wage has not yet been raised to $15. Yet the FOX "news" story falsely makes the $15 claim.

FOX News online has now pulled their latest Seattle $15 minimum wage story.

Doesn't anyone at FOX News ever get embarrassed at some of the garbage they spew? Shepard Smith seems like a decent fellow. Why does he continue working for FOX News? They must pay him a lot.

And another thing. Right wing conservative naysayers opine that Seattle's $15 minimum wage is economic idiocy. And that Seattle is a socialist hell on earth.

Well, Seattle does have a socialist mayor, along with one or two socialist city council members. Seattle is one of the most liberal, if not the most liberal city in America. Along with being one of the most progressive.

Socialist Seattle also has the fastest growing economy in America. I read today that there are so many construction projects under way in Seattle that there is a shortage of construction workers.

I suspect construction workers in Seattle are paid a wage much higher than the minimum.

Maybe towns like Fort Worth should try the socialist, progressive approach and see if that produces better results than the current construction crane free skyline of downtown Fort Worth....