Harvard: California Minimum Wage Hikes Have Led To Major Restaurant Closings

Via Red Alert Politics:

A study from Harvard examined the effects of minimum wage hikes in California — and it’s sobering news for the #FightFor15 crowd. The study found restaurants are more likely to close when the minimum wage is increased.

In particular, restaurants scoring a 3.5 rating on Yelp are 14 percent more likely to close for each $1 increase in the minimum wage. The study found that the lower the Yelp score, the more impacted restaurants were to the minimum wage increase. Overall, they found a “4 to 10 percent” increase in the likelihood of closure for every $1 increase.

“We find suggestive evidence that a higher minimum wage leads to overall increases in restaurant exit rates – depending on the specification, we find that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of exit,” Dara Lee Luca and Michael Luca wrote in the study.

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Amazing how they just don't get it.  Guess they don't teach Economics 101 in High School anymore? Got replaced with Social Justice 101, Globull Warming 102, Gender Studies 103, and Happy Faces/Safe Places 104. Didn't see that coming right? Let's double the salary of people with limited experience, skills and education, and still keep the product affordable. Right. Absolute everything the libs touch turns to shit.  Not only will there be more people losing their jobs, the people who employed them will also lose their livelihoods. Those poor souls who conserved and saved, and put everything they had into their dream business just to have it crushed by some libtard government overreach. Shameful. And Governor Moonbeam and his cohorts just got another 3% pay raise. Well done, citizens of California! You just keep screwing yourselves into the ground.

Wow. These professors and grad students at Harvard are sure smart. It took a full-blown study to figure this out. Thank goodness we have the brilliant minds at Harvard to discover that raising wage raises prices. Wow, the sheer genius of those people at Harvard.  I mean, who would have ever imagined that increasing labor costs affects restaurant profitability? I'll say it again, sheer genius. How much did these super geniuses earn for working on this study? They'd better have received at least $15.00 per hour. Too late now but I could have told them this would happen, and I would have charged them nothing. Now Harvard can take their study and file it under: Shit we knew all along. But you can look at the bright side, now all those unemployed people are worth 15 bucks per/hr.