I keep seeing things like this, and it really bugs me:
Since 2013, I have been warning those pushing for an increase in minimum wage that it will simply cause higher prices. I, along with others, have been shouted down and told how stupid and wrong I am.
Seattle and California have a $20 per hour minimum wage. The answer is “real communism hasn’t been tried.” People in the Seattle area now have to contend with $26 coffees and $32 sandwiches, with taxes and delivery fees comprising nearly 30 percent of the total bill. Instead of listening, the left is now demanding $33 an hour as a new minimum wage.
If $20 is good, and $33 is better, why stop there? Why not make the minimum wage $250 an hour? Then we can all be rich!
Next month, Florida’s minimum wage will increase to $14 per hour, a 61% increase from the $8.56 minimum wage in the state back in 2020. Not coincidentally, the median home price in Florida went from $306,000 in 2020 to $436,600 in 2025, which represents a 43% increase in house prices.
Rents saw similar increases. Rentals were costing a median of $1187 in 2020, and now are running about $1752 in 2025, a 67% increase.
Increase the minimum wage, and prices will increase to match. Economics, it’s a thing. The socialist blames a free market, but it’s market manipulation that is causing a huge chunk of this.
It isn’t just housing. As long time readers are aware, my Denny’s Grand Slam scale is a great example of this. That breakfast has 2 strips of bacon, two link sausages, two eggs, and two pancakes. A good cross section of food products. I have been using the price of this breakfast in the same Denny’s location since 1997 as an indication of costs.
- Here we are in 2025, and the cost of that breakfast is now $14.19.
- In 1997, that breakfast cost $1.99
- In 2009, it cost $4.99
- In 2021, it cost $9.29
- Just a year later in 2022, it was $11.59
- In 2023, the rate slowed a bit. The breakfast was $11.99 in April
- By November of 2023, the price was up again, to $12.99
So the breakfast in 2021 was $9.29, and it is now $14.19, a 65% increase. It’s almost like prices across the board are increasing to match wages. It’s a simple rule- more money (demand) chasing the same goods (supply) equals higher prices. Now there is a bit of a mismatch, because population (which is also part of demand) has increased a bit, but it still illustrates the point.
Before any of my readers respond with “well, technically…” please understand that my relatively short posts are not an exhaustive treatise on the issue. Books have been written about this, and I am not writing a book here. I had one reader respond to a recent post that mentioned income taxes with a comment that stretched into more than 600 words, explaining that I had calculated the taxes incorrectly. This post went into details about exemptions, credits, and other factors that made my numbers incorrect. My posts aren’t meant to withstand an IRS audit. I use public sources and usually post links to them, but they are still meant to be quick examples to illustrate the point. Responding with an over 600 word comment to explain one insignificant sentence in a 450 word post is just silly.
17 Comments
Steve · August 5, 2025 at 5:59 am
I saw this in person working Dominos. The minimum wage went from $4.00/hour to $4.15/hour and the price of pizzas increased a corresponding number. Customers complained, and I answered the minimum wage went up. Unicorn farts and rainbows didn’t cover the wage increase.
Bo · August 5, 2025 at 6:11 am
I dont think your math is right…
50% of 306 is 153
so 459 would be a 50% increase.
436 cant be a 70% increase it has to be smaller than 50%. How much smaller I got no idea, this kind of math has always been voodoo to me but the ‘common sense’ side of my brain just says those percents are off.
Divemedic · August 5, 2025 at 6:15 am
They are. 436,600 divided by 306,000 is roughly 1.43, which indicates a 43% increase.
Bo · August 5, 2025 at 6:19 am
Sorry, should have cogitated a bit longer…
Subtract the original amount from the new amount first, then divide that answer by the original amount.
Home Prices are up 42.6%
Grand Slam is 52.%
I always hated this kind of math problem, it’s never as straight forward as it seems.
I just don’t want people to ignore an otherwise good post with good points because they get distracted by this.
Honk Honk · August 5, 2025 at 6:57 am
Seize the means of production comrade.
To each according to his need workers of the world unite
It sounded good in the faculty lounge after a few bongloads?
Noway2 · August 5, 2025 at 7:06 am
This voodoo economic system is destined to fail. However, we’ve rounded the curve in the hockey stick and are starting to see the accelerating effects. I read, many years ago, that any economy that is dependent upon continuous growth will fail. I read something recently about how the system was designed to fail. Of course it’s designed to fail in such a way that sucks all the wealth out of the common people. I wish I could recall what it was.
In the (uber leftist – champions of the $20 minim wage) town where I work, there is a McDonalds. It has no drive through. Only a couple of employees. You order at a kiosk and it takes 5 times as long as telling them what you want as you slog through a bunch of picture menus and prompts trying to get you to buy more. Then you wait for them to call your number (4 times as slow as a conventional McDonald’s). Everything packaged as a to go order, but the kiosk tells you to take a number placard and they’ll bring it to you; nope. That’s the effect of these wage mandates.
A coworker, just retired last week, liked to stop there. He would use their app (another nope), and we’d pull into the parking space and wait 15 minutes for someone to bring out our order. If it weren’t a college town that place would be out of business.
The real minimum wage is always, ALWAYS, $0.
Pat H. Bowman · August 5, 2025 at 7:41 am
You see similar forces at work with “higher education.” When people had to work all summer to pay for the next year of schooling, it cost roughly what someone could make in a summer, a couple thousand dollars per year. Then along comes government to help lazy people get edumacated. Suddenly, people can borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for college, and that’s what it costs.
Aesop · August 5, 2025 at 8:28 am
So 700% inflation in 26 years for that breakfast?
Would that my income had gone up 700% in that span of time.
POINT OF ORDER:
However, it needs be pointed out that the vast majority of that is not wages driving prices, as much as the fiat dollar becoming more worthless with each passing year.
In 1999, that dollar was worth 7¢ in constant terms, and in 2025 it’s worth ½¢ in constant terms. This against $1 in 1932, which had nearly the same actual value going back nearly 130 years from then to the nation’s founding. (Gold was $19.39/oz from 1791-1833, and $20.67/oz from 1839-1932.)
So dollar slippage represents 1400% inflation from 1999-2025, with gold at $3600/oz.
An ounce of gold is always an ounce of gold. A dollar is finely-engraved toilet paper.
So in reality, Denny’s is actually holding the line, and wages’ effect is negligible, largely because people are being paid more worthless dollars and still massively losing ground, unless their earning have climbed by 1400% in the last 26 years.
The minimum wage in 1999 was $5.14.
To hold earning power with inflation since just 1999, it should be north of $70/hour today.
Instead, buying power at minimum wage has shrunk by 80% in those same 26 years, even after it goes to $14/hr. in FL.
This is fiatbux being the problem, not minimum wage.
Minimum wage is merely a symptom, and arguing about that rather than against the increasingly worthless fiatbux is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
As intended.
It’s to get people watching the moving shells, instead of the hands, or looking up the magician’s sleeve, let alone knowing that the pea was gone before the shells started moving.
QED
Your argument is sound only if the currency is.
It’s patently not, nor has ever been in our lifetimes.
Once again, exactly as intended.
By inflating the currency, the government has stolen 99.5% of all money in the last 93 years.
We’re all working for ½¢ on the dollar compared to our grandparents.
The entire government top to bottom should have been swinging alive from lampposts for this decades ago, and been used for piñatas by people swinging hookaroons until the targets expired, and then the corpses nailed to the city gates in perpetuity as a warning to others.
The minimum wage is a fart in a hurricane by comparison.
Some Rando · August 5, 2025 at 8:56 am
Keep shining the light on ‘em and the cockroaches will scatter. Appreciate you, DM
Steve · August 5, 2025 at 9:31 am
Yep. Mostly agree right down the line.
Housing, like all markets, is priced by supply and demand. I have a hard time with the doomers telling young people they won’t ever have a house of their own. In the US, we make about a million fewer homes every year than we did in the ’70s. Of course prices are going up. There are two ways for the young to fix this themselves — get skills to earn a paycheck big enough to cover the price increases, or put down the game controller, get out of dad’s basement, and get a job building houses.
McChuck · August 5, 2025 at 9:43 am
I agree with the basic premise, but the logic of most of your examples seem backwards. You quote massively rising prices being followed by a rise in the minimum wage, not vice-versa. What am I missing here?
Divemedic · August 5, 2025 at 1:03 pm
The minimum wage in Florida was $8.56 in 2020, when the Democrats got a Constitutional Amendment added to the ballot that raised the minimum wage to $10 per hour immediately, then added $1 per hour to that wage every October for the next 5 years. We have two more $1 raises to go- October of 2025, and October of 2026.
SoCoRuss · August 5, 2025 at 10:45 am
So true, I have been eating at IHOP’s for decades and have seen the same thing.
The funny thing is I have been at various legislators forums and have asked these people to just stop with the bullshit and pick a number, EXACTLY what is the number you want for MIn. wage that will make you happy and they refuse to answer, Its just another little push to get to the collapse they want to bring on PURE communism why because no one has ever got to the “REAL FAIR” for All version of communism…..
And frankly I’m fine with that, everyone should do their parts to bring it all on and lets settle this shit once and for all…..
SoCoRuss · August 5, 2025 at 10:51 am
Whats truly amazing is all these morons getting paid 3-5 times what they are worth STILL don’t do any better quality work.
And they they want more, why? Because they have been trained since birth that THEY are special and everyone gets a trophy.
This country deserves everything that’s happening and whats coming because it was allowed to happen….
C · August 5, 2025 at 12:44 pm
I’ve always asked anybody who called for a higher minimum wage to find me a job listing in town for $7.25. No has so far. The lowest paying job in town, besides waiting tables, is $10 an hour for a hostest at the local family diner. Mickey D’s is paying $11-13 last time I checked. Looks like the market raised minimum wages here without dot.Gov interference. Which is how I think it should be everywhere.
Don’t like your pay? Either bargain collectively, go somewhere else, or start your own business. I’m pro-union, but I’m against using the government to twist somebody’s arm. My fellow employees and I have only unionized twice. It wasn’t for pay. The first time it was over a job schedule. We were twelve hours for years. The company wanted to cut us to eight hour shifts over two hours of overtime per employee. We said fuck that. We’d give up the two hours OT however they wanted us to do it, but we were not going to eight hours. We got it after all of threatened a mass resignation on the same day. Company caved because we couldn’t be replaced in less than two weeks. Second time was over a uniform change. All of us just said that it was too hot to wear long sleeves. We purchased our cut resistance sleeves to cover the lower part of our arms. Crisis averted. No government needed.
Divemedic · August 5, 2025 at 1:07 pm
I am OK with and actually support unions- in theory.
There are two problems that I have with them,
1 they just turn into vote machines for the communist party by sending money to large national organization whose sole purpose is an incestual scheme of kickbacks and bribes.
2 The union spends a lot of time and dues money protecting lame, stupid, and lazy employees while insisting that everyone be paid the same, basing pay on seniority rather than actual skill and work ethic.
That’s where we part ways.
Steady Steve · August 5, 2025 at 8:57 pm
In the mid 60’s the minimum wage was $1.25. If you take 5 of the pre 64 quarters weigh them and take 90% of that figure times the current spot price of silver you would probably be close to or over that $28 figure. We never needed a constant rise in the minimum wage. What we needed was sound money. Here’s hoping we get back to that.