Seattle, which already as a $19.97 per hour minimum wage, passed a law mandating delivery driver minimum wage. Using a complicated formula, the law dictated that delivery drivers receive a living wage. The law caused delivery companies to pass the added costs on to the consumer in the form of extra delivery fees. The next thing you know, people in the Seattle area had to contend with $26 coffees and $32 sandwiches, with taxes and the neew delivery fees comprising nearly 30 percent of the total bill.
The free market responded, as it always does. They don’t call it the LAW of supply and demand for nothing.
Seattle residents started deleting their delivery apps from their phones in response to the spiking exorbitant delivery prices. Uber Eats experienced a 30-percent decline in order volume in the city, while DoorDash reported 30,000 fewer orders within just the first two weeks of the ordinance taking effect.
As a result, the income for drivers actually went down. A driver who made $931 in a week this time last year saw his earnings drop by half to $464.81. Small restaurants are hurting, delivery drivers are hurting, and people who depend on food deliveries are not able to get food because drivers are quitting in droves. So do the socialists in charge admit that they were wrong, and change the law? Of course not.
A spokesman for the mayor noted that “should the data show there have been unintended impacts for workers and small businesses, we are always open to making improvements”—a criterion which has clearly been met already—but nonetheless clarified that the mayor still “stands strongly in support” of the minimum wage ordinance.
Meanwhile, the president of the City Council claims she is “very worried” about the ordinance’s impacts so far—and even argues that “it’s not the role of policymakers to regulate the profit margins of companies”—before going on to say “I’m not going to redo the whole legislation.”
The law required that the city hire more bureaucrats to administer the law, and that is the point of most socialist laws- to increase the size and power of government and its officials. Just remember, the reason why communism and socialism fails is because the right people haven’t been in charge, and true communism hasn’t been tried yet.
16 Comments
tb · March 20, 2024 at 9:20 am
62 pgs. 16,000 words. Hundreds of references, both internal and external.
I shudder to think of the manhours this pile of dogshite took to create, write, and pass, and then the required hours for each of the affected companies to review, implement, comply. The hours the city will spend to enforce.
There’s no way that total is less than any conceivable benefit to drivers.
Extractive, destructive, useless administrative action in spades. We need to outsource government reform to Chainsaw Milei.
oldvet50 · March 20, 2024 at 11:24 am
Our country was founded on communism – the records prove it. Here’s a link to how Paul Harvey explained it (4 minutes long):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz2p7A9PESE
It's just Boris · March 20, 2024 at 11:50 am
Reminds me of what happened when Seattle started heavily taxing firearm and ammo sales.
D · March 20, 2024 at 12:28 pm
If someone were to create a book about our government, it would be titled “Goddamn these government employees are so fucking stupid: A story of unintended consequences that were extremely obvious, but the majority doesn’t pay attention because sportsball is on and xbox live is up”.
EN2 SS · March 20, 2024 at 2:56 pm
What’s on my mind? I f’n love it and hope the entire state gets more of it, gooder and harder until their noses and ears start bleeding them out. The braindead citizens voted for this, OH HAPPY DAY.
They didn’t all vote (seems like most conservatives don’t vote very often) for communism? Then they should have either stopped the insanity or moved out of that shithole.
Divemedic · March 20, 2024 at 5:13 pm
As I have been advising everyone to do for almost three years now.
Aesop · March 20, 2024 at 5:32 pm
Follow Up:
In a week or two, unlicensed delivery companies go underground, subcontract with restaurants, fast foods, and coffee shops, and things return to normal, except without any taxes or federal withholding.
BZ, Seattlestan!
Making government so big it can’t help but fail!
Nolan Parker · March 20, 2024 at 8:56 pm
Since we All Know that the businesses are sitting on millions of dollars and just greedily Barely paying their employees, it’s Really just a scam pushing for twenty dollars an hour. Truth be told, minimum Should be North of fifty bucks an hour. They can afford it. They are Independent Business Men. They are Richer than Six Feet up a bull’s Ass. And THAT is some Rich Schitt.
I can’t believe the Stewpid that so many believe. Of Course men can get pregnant. Follow the science, dumbass
Divemedic · March 21, 2024 at 6:35 am
It’s the same idiots who are saying “See? Trump isn’t a billionaire- he can’t even come up with $500 million to pay the court!” As if rich people have a swimming pool full of gold coins that they swim in like Scrooge McDuck.
Socialists/Communists don’t understand economics or money. If they did, they wouldn’t be socialists or communists.
SiG · March 21, 2024 at 7:24 am
Did you see that Biden’s proposed budget includes taxes on unearned income? That is, income you don’t actually have? It will make you pay taxes on investments that haven’t paid you anything but had their market value increase.
They must really think of anyone not on welfare as being Scrooge McDuck, swimming in gold coins.
Divemedic · March 21, 2024 at 8:13 am
That isn’t what unearned income means under Federal law.
Unearned income includes investment-type income such as taxable interest, ordinary dividends, and capital gain distributions. It also includes unemployment compensation, taxable social security benefits, pensions, annuities, cancellation of debt, and distributions of unearned income from a trust.
Income from appreciation of an asset is referred to as unrealized gains.
oldvet50 · March 22, 2024 at 6:36 am
SiG mis-typed. Unearned income is already taxed. Those idiots really do want to tax unrealized gains which would immediately cause unrealized losses (or actual losses) when everyone had to sell their asset to pay the taxes on the asset. Its the same as using an electric fan to create a force to drive a wind turbine to make the electricity to run the fan.
Divemedic · March 22, 2024 at 6:58 am
I know. The funny thing is that Trump would finally see his Mar A Lago estate valued higher than the $18 million that NY claimed.
Jester · March 20, 2024 at 11:07 pm
Eh, the bigger issue is that most of these fools that vote for this BS are the same drivers or folks serving in restraunts. They see the goal that’s right there as their salvation an don’t understand further than that. So they will perhaps go underground or start riots or protests blaming the middle class or larger cooperations about their long suffering instead of having a real grasp on inflation, economics or just plain give the .gov even more power and they will continue to produce.. this..
Why not 50.00 dollar an hour indeed? Why not 1000? Why not any of this indeed to them.
Noway2 · March 21, 2024 at 7:05 am
Been noticing that around here the price of McDonald’s is close to rivaling that of a full service sit down restaurant. That might explain why the drive through line is so short these days.
In economics class, the teacher kept saying that the consumer will always work to maximize their “utils” or satisfaction units. There are a lot of different dynamics, including diminish returns, competition, opportunity costs, etc. On the production side he would also show curves representing price versus profit correlated to the number of units sold. The short answer is that raising prices can lower profits. On both sides the math has a lot to do with derivatives and marginal costs. When something comes along and disrupts the market, e.g. govt., a new stability point will form, but it may be less profitable and less satisfying for the consumer.
tfourier · March 21, 2024 at 4:26 pm
The law was passed by the left wing nutcases who were a majority in 2022. All but one of them either quit or was voted out in the last city elections. The current city council has to go through the motions but expect this really stupid law to be shut down sooner rather than later.
The main sponsor of the law is a woman from India who looks like she engaged in some kind of immigration fraud to stay in the country and wont be going back to India any time soon due to her bad mouthing of India locally getting back to her home country. She also recently become unexplainedly wealthy (just like AOC). The other big backer of the law was an anchor baby of illegals from Mexico. An equally sleazy political grifter.
As for who ruined Seattle. The 200K people who arrived in town from elsewhere the last two decades. People not from Seattle. Just like in Portland and San Francisco pretty much all the people responsible for turning nice cities into utterly dysfunction hell-holes (both voters and politicians) moved recently from elsewhere. They are rarely locals. Except for the Trust Fund Babies and the Wannabes.
And the people who vote for the politicians who destroy cities rarely stick around after ruining the city. If they had a 5 year city residency reequipment for voting in local elections almost none of this would ever happen. The Ten Year Tourists being the cause of all these problems. Weren’t living in the city ten years ago. Wont be living in the city in ten years time. Never stick around for the consequences of their votes.
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