I need a few days off every so often and my family likes to travel, so we have fun discussing where to go.
Without going into gory detail, we weigh the pros and cons, run searches on Internet travel sites, perform cost analyses and generally beat the subject to death before deciding to just go visit relatives in Grants Pass.
I’m kidding – well, sort of, but planning The Trip is a big deal. Soon, though, it will get less complicated because we’ll scratch Seattle off our list.
In case you haven’t heard, Seattle’s City Council has decided that it’s going to mandate a new minimum wage of $15 an hour, nearly 50 percent higher than any other minimum wage in the United States except in SeaTac, where it was introduced six months ago. We’ve already nixed staying anywhere in the SeaTac area.
Why? Because it’s already costly enough to pay for a night’s stay in a decent hotel. Then you figure that the hotel is paying its domestic staff and its restaurant wait people and dishwashers half again what it did a few years ago – let’s see, $5 times eight hours is $40 more per day – and you know who’s going to be footing that bill.
One can have a good GPA in school and still be a fool. I think that’s what we’re seeing here. Funny how we don’t really think about this until we have to pay people to do things we need done. Paying staff is extremely important if one wants to stay in business, and any smart business owner is going to carefully calculate what he or she can afford to pay on a consistent basis.
Do-Gooder politicians are concerned about their constituents’ ability to make money, which is commendable. Thanks to Franklin D. Roosevelt and all the well-meaning politicians who have come after, the minimum wage has provided a base for low-income workers that forces employers, at least those who obey the law, to pony up whatever the going rate is. Sounds good, especially if you’re a kid looking to buy a car or pay for gas. Oregon’s minimum of $9.10 is certainly a lot better than $5 an hour.
The problem is that, as an employer, those are bills you have to pay. Consequently, if you own a string of pizza restaurants in the Puget Sound area and you can get employees in, say, Kirkland or Bellevue, who are perfectly willing to work for $9.32 an hour (the Washington state minimum wage) and you’re thinking of adding a new restaurant, are you going to put it in Seattle and pay $15? According to news reports, business owners are already slamming the brakes on plans to expand or hire new workers. Some are even planning to move existing businesses to neighboring cities. In a state with sales tax, that’s a bad thing for Seattle and a great thing for the neighbors.
Again, according to news reports, businesses are considering cutting back on health benefits for all employees because, by federal law, they have to offer equal benefits to all who meet their qualification threshhold, such as those who work a certain number of hours per week.
As Erin Shannon, director of the Center for Small Business at the Washington Policy Center in Olympia points out, if a company is forced to increase the threshold to qualify for health benefits in order to offset the new high wage of employees in Seattle, it must increase the benefit threshold for all employees, including those earning a lower minimum wage in other cities.
So why do we care here in Sweet Home, Oregon?
Well, we’ve got plenty of politicians in our state who see themselves with a mandate to make other people’s lives better and are not hesitant to force us to do what they think is good for us.
One we deal with every day is crosswalk laws that force pedestrians to trust that drivers will obey the law, and run counter to any kind of common sense. While the rest of the nation drives merrily down their freeways, we’re putting along at 65 (if we’re obeying the speed limit). While millions (other than in New Jersey) across the nation pump their own gas, we Oregonians, otherwise known for our rugged individualism, are forced to have an attendant do it for us. We can’t use canned corn as bait for fishing. In Portland it’s illegal to own bolt cutters or wear roller skates in restrooms. Oh, and wedding ceremonies may not be performed at skating rinks. In Hood River one may not juggle without a license.
Or how about the stop I made recently at an auto parts store in Corvallis, when my daughter’s car was on the fritz. I walk to the counter with a couple of handfuls of small, loose packages and pay the bill. The clerk runs my credit card, hands me a receipt and smiles.
“Uh, could I have a bag? “
“This is Corvallis,” he says. “Bags are illegal.”
OK, so some of those are just stupid. But the point is, there are plenty of serious laws that are onerous. I won’t go into detail on Oregon’s land-use regulations that prevent rural property owners from dividing their land, since we’ve assailed that one previously on this page, but it’s another good example. It may solve one problem (urbanization) but it creates others (violation of basic ownership rights).
Those who support higher minimum wages may have good motives, such as prohibiting a few tightwad business owners from taking advantage of hapless employees.
But good motives don’t justify bad policy that drives job creators out of our communities and ultimately hurts the very people they intend to help.
That’s just foolish.