Tag: economy

California’s Fast-Food Minimum Wage Hike Is Killing Jobs

In 2023, California adopted a law that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour. It also created a Fast Food Council with the power to further increase wages by dictate every year. Twenty bucks an hour is a nice, round number which is probably why state lawmakers picked it—though it’s not clear why they stopped there. After all, if you’re going to create prosperity by command, why not shoot for the moon and make all the Golden State’s fry cooks millionaires? But it’s just as well that they didn’t go further—that hike to $20 per hour is killing jobs as it is.

One Law Kills 18,000 Jobs

“On April 1, 2024, California raised its minimum wage from $16 to $20 per hour for fast-food workers employed at chains with more than 60 locations nationwide,” Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, and Jonathan Meer write in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that was first addressed by Reason‘s Peter Suderman in the November print issue. “Our median estimate suggests that California lost about 18,000 jobs that could have been retained if AB 1228 had not been passed.”

The authors initially calculate that “employment in California’s fast-food sector declined by 2.7 percent between September 2023 and September 2024 relative to fast-food employment elsewhere in the United States.” But they make the point that, prior to the passage of A.B. 1228, the bill hiking the minimum wage, fast-food employment was rising faster in the state than elsewhere in the country. Allowing for that, and for changes in the overall labor market, they estimated the real decline in California’s fast-food employment at 3.6 percent to arrive at 18,000 lost jobs.

That’s a lot of missing opportunities for Californians to get a foothold in the work world, make money, and pay their bills. It also squares with other estimates of the attempt to legislate prosperity.

In September, the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) drew on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data to estimate “15,988 fast food jobs lost since the law went into effect in April 2024.” The group added, “California’s fast food job loss rate (-3.3% of jobs lost) more than doubled the losses in fast food restaurants nationally (-1.6% of jobs lost) since September 2023.”

That EPI memo built on a November 2024 study that found “more than 4,400 California fast food jobs have been lost since January,” based on federal data. That study also found “10.1 percent menu price increases by April 2024 since the law’s passage in 2023.”

A February 2025 paper from the Berkeley Research Group (BRG) found the fast-food sector “lost 10,700 jobs (-1.9%) between June 2023 and June 2024.” The researchers added, “this decline sharply contrasts with the sector’s historically compounded annual growth rate of 2.5% and marks the only December year-over-year decline in fast food employment this century–excluding the Great Recession (2009) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020).” That report also found that “menu prices at California’s fast food restaurants increased by 14.5% between September 2023 (the month AB 1228 was signed into law) and October 2024, nearly double the national average (8.2%).”

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Unbanked In A Connected World

Financial exclusion remains high in many parts of the world. In several countries, more than two out of three adults are unbanked, yet the majority own a mobile phone. This contrast between connectivity and financial access highlights both the persistent gaps in global inclusion and the massive opportunity to close them.

Created in partnership with Plasma, this graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Jenna Ross, shows how ownership of financial accounts and mobile phones compares across countries. It’s part of our Money 2.0 series, where we highlight how finance is evolving into its next era.

The Unbanked Gap

In low- and middle-income economies, 84% of adults own a mobile phone, while 75% of people have financial accounts. This gap is much wider in some countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East.

For the most unbanked countries worldwide, here are the percentages of adults who own a financial account and those who own a mobile phone.

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Tariffs, Tobacco, and Policy Whiplash

When politicians talk tough on trade, they usually promise to protect American jobs. But sometimes those gestures do the opposite. The Trump administration’s proposed 100 percent tariff on large cigars imported from Nicaragua is a case in point. According to my latest research, the tariff would shrink US GDP by $1.26 billion, reduce total output by $2.06 billion, eliminate nearly 18,000 jobs, and cost state and local governments $95 million in tax revenue.

There is no domestic industry to protect. The United States produces almost no large cigars, which are rolled by hand from long tobacco leaves and sold through tobacconists, cigar lounges, and small brick-and-mortar shops. Roughly 60 percent of all 430 million cigars imported each year come from Nicaragua. Doubling landed import costs would devastate the 3,500 retailers and 50,000 workers whose livelihoods depend on that trade.

Worse, this tariff reverses one of the administration’s genuine policy successes—its early effort to limit the Food and Drug Administration’s overreach into small-batch cigars and other low-risk nicotine products. It also repeats the same arbitrary logic behind the FDA’s recent warning letter to NOAT—a Swedish company selling mild, recyclable nicotine pouches already cleared for sale in Europe. In both cases, symbolic toughness trumps scientific and economic sense.

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The Climate Cult Fails Europe

The roadmap is already set: in the coming years, the EU and its member states will make both businesses and consumers pay even more for CO2 emissions. BASF CEO Markus Kamieth warns of the enormous destructive potential of this policy.

Truth comes on pigeon feet — Friedrich Nietzsche already knew that. And apparently, the same applies to European climate policy: slowly, but inevitably, the reality of the true costs of the green transformation and its impact on Germany’s industrial foundation is emerging.

On October 29, BASF’s CEO Markus Kamieth faced the press during the quarterly results presentation. What he announced was another cold shower for anyone still hoping for a new economic miracle.

Weak Results in a Stable Environment

The world’s largest chemical company reported a 3% decline in revenue in Q3 2025 compared to last year, while EBITDA fell by 5%. BASF is under massive pressure and has already cut 1,400 jobs to meet growing cost pressures.

BASF’s numbers have to be seen against the backdrop of a slowly recovering global economic cycle. The U.S. economy, growing nearly 4%, is driving strong demand. Economies in China and India continue to expand dynamically, particularly in sectors critical to the chemical industry.

While the global economy gains momentum, BASF — like much of Germany’s chemical sector and the broader industry — continues to lose ground.

The company’s main site in Ludwigshafen is hit hardest, leaving its 33,000 employees facing an uncertain future.

Criticism of the Climate Course

Kamieth was unexpectedly outspoken during the presentation. In addition to criticizing EU trade policy and rising energy costs in Germany, he struck at a rarely openly discussed wound: the EU’s climate policy.

Kamieth didn’t mince words, calling the European CO2 emissions trading system (EU ETS 2) what it is: an attack on Europe’s industrial foundation.

For BASF alone, if the current climate course within CO2 trading remains unchanged, annual additional costs of around €1 billion will arise from 2027 onward, when exemptions are removed — costs borne exclusively by European industry, while the rest of the world simply does not participate.

Kamieth hit a sore spot. EU industry is being financially squeezed by an ideologized CO2 policy. Deindustrialization is — whether unspoken or suppressed — the result of Brussels’ policies and their national enforcers, whose only response to their self-inflicted disaster is ever-new subsidies.

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The EU’s Green Ideology Is Crashing Europe’s Car Industry

The European Green Deal, launched in 2019, is an ecological pact that has been, unequivocally, an enemy of European taxpayers and innovation. Its declared goal is to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 through a dense web of regulations that reach deep into every sector of the European economy. More than any other sector, the automotive industry is being put at risk of an irreversible crash.

Pressuring companies and citizens alike, the pact promotes the renunciation of capitalism, an inevitable sacrifice in the name of green policies. Such binding commitments will have severe economic consequences for a European Union increasingly weakened by its own laws and regulations.

At the heart of the Deal, by 2035, all new cars sold within the European Union are expected to be electric, imposing a total ban on combustion and engine vehicles. The problem is that this goal, far from being an environmental triumph, represents a deeply ideological political intrusion, an act of social engineering with an anti-capitalist character, disguised as green progress but detached from economic reality. The consequences are serious for the European automotive sector.

It is important to recall that this industry is one of the pillars of the European economy, representing over 7% of the EU’s GDP and around 13.8 million direct and indirect jobs.

Yet the sector now faces the prospect of mass layoffs, relocation of production, and a loss of global influence as a direct consequence of this heavy-handed Deal. Core EU countries such as Germany and Italy have already voiced resistance, warning of the economic and social consequences of a forced transition that ignores the continent’s technological and energy realities.

CEO of Mercedes-Benz, Ola Källenius, stated that the EU’s plan to eliminate combustion engines by 2035 would drive the sector “full speed into a wall.” His words, though strong, capture the growing sense of unease among Europe’s leading manufacturers.

The pressure is twofold. Internally, profit margins are shrinking as companies divert billions into forced electrification. Externally, they face fierce competition from China, with brands such as BYD and NIO, backed by an aggressive industrial policy, consolidated supply chains, and technological dominance in batteries. This combination allows Chinese manufacturers to produce at lower costs and scale faster.

Meanwhile, European brands struggle to survive between the high costs of transition and Asian price dumping, which has already led Brussels to impose additional tariffs of 30–40% on Chinese electric vehicles. 

The interventionist posture of Brussels remains unchanged, failing to understand that regulation only breeds more regulation, and inevitably creates market distortions that harm both businesses and consumers.

Europe is imposing a single path on manufacturers—electric cars—while the automotive sector itself argues that it is possible to meet environmental goals through multiple technological solutions. Brands such as Mercedes, Porsche, Ferrari, and Stellantis maintain that the transition can and should be technologically neutral, allowing electric, hybrid, e-fuel, and hydrogen vehicles to compete on equal terms. The goal, they say, must be to reduce emissions, not to eliminate technologies for ideological reasons. Instead of encouraging innovation, Brussels dictates by decree what may exist and what must disappear, ignoring the knowledge and experience of those who actually build the industry.

Synthetic fuels, produced from green hydrogen and captured CO₂, are the clearest example of a more appealing alternative: they drastically reduce emissions without leading to the destruction of engines, factories, and jobs, demonstrating that true innovation arises from freedom of choice, not political imposition.

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When A Train Wreck Is No Accident

“In spite of all the rhetoric, we will go deeper in debt, the Fed will print more money, and the value of the dollar will continue to plummet.”

– Ron Paul

Never in history have the economic and political structures been so manipulated by those who are responsible for their safekeeping; never has so much been at stake, in so many countries, and facing collapse, all at the same time.

The great majority of people in the First World recognise that the world is passing through an economic crisis. However, most are under the impression that there are some pretty smart fellows running the show and all they need to do is tweak the system a bit more and we’ll return to happy days.

Not so. The “smart fellows” who are in charge of fixing the problem are in fact the very same people who created it.

Understandably, this a hard concept for most people to even consider, let alone accept, as the very idea that those in charge of the system might consciously collapse it seems preposterous. So, we might wish to back up a bit here and present a very brief history of the system itself, in order to understand that the eventual collapse of the economic system was baked in the cake from the very beginning.

Creating a Central Bank

From the very earliest days of the formation of the American republic, bankers (along with inside help from George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton) sought to create a banking monopoly that would create the country’s currency and become the central banking system.

The first attempt at a central bank was a failure, and strong opponents, including Thomas Jefferson, prevented a second central bank for a time. Later, further attempts were made by bankers and their political cronies, and each central bank was either short-lived or defeated in its planning stages.

Then, in 1913, the heads of the largest banks met clandestinely on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to make another try. Having recently lost yet another bid to create a central bank, due to the public’s understandable concern that the big bankers were already too powerful, a new spin was placed on the idea. This time, they decided to present the idea as a government body that would be decentralised and would have the responsibility of restricting the power of the banks.

However, the new bill was in fact the same old bill, with a new title and some minor changes in wording. But this time, it would be presented by the new president, who was a liberal.

The president, Woodrow Wilson, had in fact been handpicked by the banks. The banks then scuttled their own conservative party’s candidate, got the Democrat Wilson elected, then installed a secretary of the Treasury whose job it would be to ensure that the Federal Reserve was created.

The bill was widely supported by the public, even though, in truth, it was not a federal agency, but a privately owned conglomerate, controlled by the banks. Neither was it a reserve. It was never intended to store money; it was intended to give the biggest bankers control of the economy. They followed the central principle of uber-banker Mayer Rothschild: “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”

From the start, the new institution peddled itself as the protector of the people’s interests, but it was quite the opposite. Its purpose from its inception was to control the economy and the government by controlling the issuance of the currency. In addition, it was to be a system of taxation.

Typically, a population accepts a certain amount of direct taxation but has its limits of tolerance. Yet, the bankers understood that a less direct method of taxation was infinitely more profitable and infinitely safer from criticism.

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American Household Debt at Record Levels, However Americans Continue to Spend

Household debt continues to rise as Americans keep spending. Increases in the cost of living have outpaced salary growth, while elevated interest rates have added to the strain.

The elimination of Biden-era benefits and loan forgiveness programs has also weighed heavily on many households that had grown accustomed to government relief and easy credit.

Total U.S. household debt reached a record $18.59 trillion in Q3 2025, an increase of $197 billion from the previous quarter. Household debt is distributed across several categories, with mortgages making up the largest share.

Mortgage balances rose by $137 billion to $13.07 trillion, while credit card balances climbed by $24 billion to $1.23 trillion, an all-time high, nearly 6% higher than a year earlier.

Student loan debt also reached a record $1.65 trillion, while auto loan balances remained steady at $1.66 trillion.

By category, total household debt includes $13.07 trillion in mortgages, $1.66 trillion in auto loans, $1.65 trillion in student loans, $1.23 trillion in credit card debt, $0.55 trillion in other debt, and $0.42 trillion in home equity lines of credit (HELOCs).

While the debt itself is problematic, a more worrying economic indicator is the rise in delinquencies.

About 4.3% of total debt is now more than 30 days past due, the highest level since early 2020 but still well below the 11% recorded during the 2009 financial crisis.

Nearly 10% of all student debt has been reported as 90 days or more delinquent, marking a record high for student loan delinquencies.

Liberal Democrat policies are partially to blame, as the spike stems in part from missed federal student loan payments that were not reported to credit bureaus between Q2 2020 and Q4 2024, which are now appearing in credit reports following the end of the pandemic payment pause.

Currently, 7.7% of aggregate student debt was reported as 90 or more days delinquent, compared to less than 1% in Q4 2024.

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Newsom’s Latest Anti-Trump Talking Point Just Got DESTOYED by Facts

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s latest attack on Donald Trump is a masterclass in political distortion. 

He claims Trump has “betrayed the American people,” citing rising prices for beef, coffee, cars, utilities, and healthcare as proof. But when you look past the rhetoric and examine the actual data, every one of those claims falls apart. 

Inflation and supply issues exist—but they stem from long-term global pressures, not Trump’s economic policies.

Take beef, for example. The average retail price of ground beef reached $6.32 per pound in September 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s higher than in previous years, but the cause isn’t government mismanagement—it’s the smallest U.S. cattle herd in seventy years. 

Droughts, high feed costs, and export disruptions have all contributed to increased prices. Coffee prices tell a similar story. 

Weather disasters in Brazil and Vietnam, two of the world’s largest coffee-producing countries, caused crop shortages and sent global prices soaring. These trends are tied to supply chain and climate issues, not to anything Trump has done.

Car prices are another misleading talking point. The BLS consumer price index for new vehicles rose just 1.3% over the past year, a fraction of the massive spikes Americans saw in 2021 and 2022. 

Those earlier surges stemmed from pandemic-era supply chain disruptions and chip shortages—issues that had taken root well before Trump returned to the White House. 

Utility bills have also climbed modestly, up about 2.8% year-over-year, primarily due to higher natural gas costs and state-level regulations. 

In California, which has the highest energy rates in the country, those costs are driven by Newsom’s aggressive renewable mandates and bureaucratic inefficiency, not federal energy policy.

The most outrageous claim from Newsom is that “healthcare is about to triple.” In reality, the medical care index rose only 3.3% in the last 12 months—steady, but nowhere near a tripling. 

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Killing the Canada Goose

Canada’s conservative outlet Juno News depicts Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as an incompetent, narcissistic leader who has done nothing to improve our country’s image on the world stage or to legislate for solvency and freedom of expression in the domestic realm. He is now at the helm of a faltering country that has little hope of struggling back on its feet.

Indeed, it is hard not to suspect that Carney and his Liberals, like the sinister Democrats in the U.S., are driven by a double agenda against the welfare of their own citizens: to deprive them of their political rights and freedoms via legislative and policy initiatives on the one hand, and to render them destitute by eviscerating the economy on the other. These actions are almost certainly deliberate.

As United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Carney crafted global carbon-pricing initiatives, describing carbon taxes as the “linchpin of responsible climate governance.” His book Value(s) leaves no doubt respecting his globalist and green-industrial objectives at the cost of national sovereignty. 

Now he is bruiting several market-driven changes to his preferred agenda to ensure popular support, but still claims “I’m the same me. I’m focused on the same issues…What we need to do is to be as effective as possible in terms of addressing climate change while growing our economy.” It has been proven worldwide that you can’t do both. The dogma of climate change kills not only the climate, the environment, the water table, and the avian cohort. It destroys the economy as well.

As a Western Standard commenter writes, “Despite Canada slipping into third world economic status, Carney’s first proposed bills deal with censorship and control of people’s speech/internet posts. That really says where his priority lies. Carney will go down in history as the last Canadian prime minister presiding over 10 provinces and 3 territories.” Or the first Canadian prime minister ruling over a garrison regime.

Carney, the technocratic, oxymoronic, inept globalist banker, who capered into the Liberal leadership, is thus serving up reheated Trudeau goop — more debt, more bureaucracy, more excuses, more anti-pipeline propaganda, more affordability crunch, more Keynesian spending-and-borrowing, and more anti-Trump invective, all of which has led to what plainly appears to be intentional national failure. Canada is merely his laboratory to test his theories for national implosion. Regarding Carney’s first six months in office, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has summed up the outcomes thus far, posting that “after six months, everything is worse. Crime, tariffs, inflation, deficits, immigration, housing — all spiralling out of control.” The plan is working. 

The key element in his program is to strip away individual rights so that Canadians will be censored and restrained in “a digital gulag” where a series of bills he is proposing—Bill C-8 on cybersecurity, Bill C-9 on combating hate, and Bill C-2 on presumably secure borders—are currently making their way through parliament.

The intention is made to sound noble but is really as black as an old kettle’s arse. Bill C-8 can cut off phone and internet service to political dissidents and opponents of the realm without a court order, depriving them of personal and political access to information and leaving them effaced from “the conversation.” Bill C-9 allows the government to prosecute for “hate crimes,” which have no strict definition and are completely arbitrary, erasing freedom of expression in the public square; people can be arrested for something that hasn’t yet been said or for hurting someone’s feelings. Bill C-2 enables government to open mail parcels and computer files without a warrant. John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has argued that  “Canada will be a police state by Christmas if Parliament passes Bills C-2, C-8, and C-9 in their current form.”

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America’s Power Bill Crisis Rages In Democrat-Run States

The epicenter of America’s power bill inflation crisis stretches across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where far-left state and city leaders have swallowed the globalist “climate crisis” pill, which even Bill Gates admitted last week that the climate crisis narrative was fake news.

The result of these leftist extremist “green” policies has been the systematic degradation of regional power grids in Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states, as reliable fossil-fuel generation was prematurely retired in favor of unreliable, intermittent solar and wind. These nation-destroying green policies have gutted spare grid capacity (read here) just as demand surges from data centers, onshoring, and the broader electrification push (read here), culminating in today’s power bill crisis. 

A recent Goldman Sachs report by analyst Carly Davenport found that “higher power bill inflation has been the most pronounced in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and California in the past three years.”

It’s no secret that the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and California are governed primarily by Democratic leaders who have pushed at least a decade of climate crisis hoax narratives to justify massive “green” funding, some of which was funneled into NGOs, and to advance the progressive utopia narrative that solar and wind power would deliver clean skies and save, most importantly, planet Earth from immient climate catastrophe. Yet this fantasy was far from reality. There was never going to be a green utopia, only what millions of Americans across these states are now realizing: unaccountable Democrats have left them with a power bill crisis.

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