The Governor’s Lie That Won’t Die
Californians deserve better than a gaslighter-in-chief
By Tom Manzo, December 17, 2024 6:19 am
California Governor Gavin Newsom is grasping at straws.
Without question, new quarterly government (QCEW) data shows that California has lost thousands of jobs since the Governor’s $20 fast food minimum wage law was signed into law. The data doesn’t lie, but for six months Newsom’s team has been working overtime to deny the obvious.
Let me walk you through it.
Since the signing of the fast food minimum wage law, my organization – the California Business and Industrial Alliance (CABIA) – has been vocal about how the law hurts businesses and workers, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Back in June, CABIA ran an ad in USA Today showing massive job losses and business closures due to the $20 wage law. The ad cited information from the Hoover Institution that said an estimated 10,000 jobs had been lost, according to BLS non-seasonally adjusted dataset (the type of data set becomes important later). The ad gained national attention and clearly rattled Newsom.
The Governor went after outlets that covered our ad, including the California Globe, begging for retractions and arguing that the data we referenced painted an inaccurate picture. Instead, the Governor’s office only wanted to use seasonally adjusted data from BLS to get a sense of how many jobs had been lost. Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times, who’s seemingly never met a mandate he didn’t like, even wrote a column decrying the use of non-seasonally adjusted data as “baloney.”
So began the battle of non-seasonal versus seasonally adjusted data. (Spoiler alert, both are statistically valid data sources to reference.)
To address the Governor’s retort, we decided to hone in on seasonally adjusted data. After all, it was the Governor’s preferred metric. But as it turned out, seasonally adjusted data also didn’t tell a good story for the Governor’s minimum wage law. In fact, the state has seen the worst fast food job growth rate since the Great Recession (barring COVID losses).
But don’t tell that to Newson. Shortly after the LA Times column ran, the Governor’s flip-flopping office put out a press release touting the success of the law using non-seasonally adjusted data. (Remember – that’s the same data the Governor had recently dismissed!) He even had the nerve to cite the very data he criticized CABIA for using in a Fox News op-ed, calling his law “modest” and a win for workers.
But we knew the truth, and CABIA did everything we could to make sure we educated the public. We cited credible research from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) that consistently used Newsom’s preferred seasonally adjusted dataset. The findings were damning: Thousands of jobs were lost, businesses had cut hours, and workers were suffering.
Newsom’s own favored researchers at Berkeley agreed we would have our answers when the most recent BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data was released. Well that day has come, and a recent EPI analysis shows over 6,000 jobs have been lost in the fast food industry since Newsom signed the minimum wage hike into law.
Admitting defeat is clearly not an option for Newsom, even if it means risking the jobs of thousands of Californians. Instead, the Governor’s team continues to push a false narrative, desperately clinging to his image of a benevolent warrior for workers. (We’re calling him out for his job-killing ways this week in an ad in USA Today headlined Gavin Grinch.)
If the last six months have proven one thing, it’s that the Governor can’t stand the fact that his fast food minimum wage was a total flop. For the sake of workers across the state, we will continue to hold Governor Newsom accountable.
Californians deserve better than a gaslighter-in-chief.
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Yes, the governor is lying when he falsely touts the success of the fast food minimum wage.
But it is not the first or only time. He consistently lies about CA issues and seeks to gaslight the citizenry about how he has successfully addressed whatever the problem is. Problems that he clearly wants to continue (e.g., homeless-vagrancy) because he and his ilk believe they benefit politically from them. It’s obvious to most of us and when it is brought to his attention he —- without fail —- quadruples down on his whoppers to the point of complete absurdity. It’s who he is and what he does and he apparently can’t be shamed or stopped no matter how obvious the lie or how foolish and out of touch with reality he seems.
Apparently the goal in this case is to shut down, as much as possible, the small business sector. This is always the goal of tyrannical leftists such as Newsom, because small business owners and others in the “real” middle class are the one truly independent entity in the state. They are not beholden to government “largesse.” Thus they are a threat to Newsom and his clones and must be shut down and driven out by any means necessary.
I’m sure there are other perks of killing the small business sector for totalitarians such as Newsom that don’t come immediately to mind this early in the morning.
There you have it. Another 6000 jobs lost, this time in the fast food industry. Newsom and the Democrats are buffoons. They have killed the job market in this state. It’s DEAD. The state’s unemployment rate is the second worst in the nation. California has been left behind while the rest of the nation is creating jobs.
Newsom is a total failure as a governor. All of his ideas are failures. He’s totally incompetent. He blames all his failures on “climate change”. Newsom is the worst governor this state has ever had. People need to stop electing these idiot Democrats. They couldn’t run a lemonade stand.
Maybe Gavin “Hair-gel Hitler” Newsom and his criminal Democrat mafia cronies in the legislature are deliberately killing jobs as part of the globalist agenda to destroy the state’s economy and replacing workers with robots made in communist countries like China? Formerly productive workers will then become dependent on big government in order to survive?
An article in Breitbart today details how Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright is “modernizing” the restaurant with robots working in the kitchen. Chipotle introduced a “digital makeline” from a company called Hyphen which involves assembling a burrito bowl or salad on a conveyor belt while the system automatically dispenses each ingredient that is currently being tested at Chipotle locations in Southern California. In September, Chipotle began locally testing a robot known as Autocado, which peels and cores avocados for guacamole.