Drop Site News: The Minimum Wage Claims You Keep Hearing Are Totally Fake. We Can Prove It.
By Ka (Jessica) Burbank
In September 2023, California passed a law to bring fast food workers’ minimum wage up from $16 to $20 an hour. A flurry of reports predictably followed from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, Employment Policies Institute, and the Hoover Institution claiming that restaurants and other businesses were already laying off workers based on the new law.
The Hoover Institution, a think tank with $879.8 million in total assets, continued to dig in against AB 1228, publishing multiple articles over the past year attempting to pin “lost jobs” on rising wages. At the heart of the research are three major claims made by Lee Ohanian, an economist at UCLA and senior fellow at The Hoover Institution:
- Government jobs account for 96.5% of job growth in California over 2.5 years,
- California lost 410,000 jobs from February 2020-February 2024, and
- California lost 10,000 jobs in the fast food sector since the minimum wage law was signed in September 2023.
All three claims are false, and the Hoover Institution has now had to retract six articles based on faulty research by Ohanian. The claims were first debunked by Invictus, an anonymous poster—using the same publicly available data that Ohanian used as source for his analysis. In reality,
- Between January 2022 and June 2024, private-sector jobs accounted for the majority of job growth in California, at 77.8%
- California did not lose any jobs between February 2020 and Feburary 2024; it actually gained 290,000 jobs
- California’s fast food sector has seen consistent growth, both in terms of jobs and the total number of establishments, outpacing national averages.
Why is the Hoover Institution so committed to publishing articles they end up needing to retract? The think tank, which is part of Stanford University and is headed by former Secretary of State under George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, describes its economic research as, “aimed at developing solutions that foster economic freedom”—a euphemism for unbridled capitalism that leaves workers underpaid and overworked. Being part of the university shields the Hoover Institution from needing to reveal the amounts given by individual donors, but its board of overseers includes some of the biggest names in corporate America, including Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Mercer, and Harlan Crow—known for his relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
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Source: Drop Site News