Is your usual breakfast spot a location with more than 60 locations? The minimum wage increase here only applied to chains with more than 60 locations.
A lot of what you're describing is nation-wide. Food is more expensive everywhere. Cost of living in California is up significantly. Rents for restaurants is significantly higher as well (at least anecdotally, my wife's family restaurant has to close because they doubled the rent after their lease was up, I have heard this is incredible common).
This study by UC Berkeley attributed a 3.7% increase in food price because of the minimum wage changes. It's quite likely that food overall getting more expensive is responsible for a lot of what you're seeing.
If we can't afford to pay people in California a wage where they can live here, then maybe the economy overall isn't sustainable? A $20 minimum wage is like $2800 take home per month and in many places that can barely cover rent.
You are correct that I was unable to summarize an incredibly complex tangled web of economics, sociology and politics in a few hundred words on a forum. I don't think any of us can do this. Of course it's an oversimplification. Is the comment I'm replying to also not doing this? Are you also not doing the same thing?
My only point is that this seems like an awful lot of confirmation bias. Something everyone suffers from.
Not all people suffer the same level of confirmation bias, especially across all topics. And, for most topics, broad consensus of experts is better and less biased than individuals.
A better example would be Los Angeles and the new $30 per hour minimum wage for hotel and airport workers. Conceptually it makes sense. The crux of the issue and some opposition is there are more people now who use those jobs for primary income for a family, where in the past it may have been perceived as jobs for supplemental income and no health benefits.
The problem is a California tax law that lets home owners pay the tax rate from when they bought the home despite the value increasing. It disincentives selling. Which leads to retirees sitting on family homes rather than relocating and releasing them back into the market.
How am I supposed to plan my retirement? Plan to leave my home of years, where I have built a life and have all my things? If you think that, you are a sick person and I have to imagine you are younger and only thinking "but I want that nice house, so f*k off old person, take some money and go die somewhere else."
Old people should not be prioritized over the young.
A 600% increase in property taxes over 7 years is an extreme outlier. Zero of my friends or family have ever once experienced such a thing happening.
I certainly am not a fan of how heavy my property taxes are in one of the heaviest taxed cities in the US - but I would absolutely vote down anything resembling something like Prop 13. It's an immoral bit of tax code that favors old people over the young and productive - like seemingly most of our current policy.
I should not be paying a different rate than the young couple moving in next door to me simply because I got here first. The services need to be paid all the same regardless of my age.
> How am I supposed to plan my retirement? Plan to leave my home of years, where I have built a life and have all my things?
Yes, obviously. I have this giant asset called property I can sell and downsize to something reasonable in retirement. Or in the worst case - move. I could also use the equity in my home to pay for living expenses if I must. This was considered normal and expected just a couple generations ago.
This whole "let the old eat their young" streak of society needs to die off sooner than later.
Letting some old person stay in their lifelong home is not the old eating the young. Kicking that old person out of their home literally is the young killing off the old.
Old people don’t need to monopolize real estate the way they have over the past 40ish years.
At least when being subsidized by the young via tax rates. The old voted themselves in a benefit at the expense of those taking care of them - it’s not sustainable. They cannot have their cake and eat it too. I say this as someone far closer to “old” than young. I should be paying exactly the same amount as my young neighbors for the same house value. Anything different is immoral at best.
The young productive couple with kids has far more utility being located closer to work and other economic opportunity than a retired couple, so retirees sitting on the most productive bits of real estate is a problem beyond even taxes. That we forced young couples to buy places out in the exurbs and spend hours a day commuting while also trying to raise kids would be laughable to an alien species looking at us from a big picture standpoint.
We have an inverted sense of priorities at the moment - likely due to demographics and voting power. These will rapidly shift as demographics change, hopefully without too much backlash over what we have done to the young.
If we want to make a point that overall property taxes are too high in general I’m much more receptive to that idea. No (residential) property owner should be privileged over another due to age.
The price is the price. Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten avocado toast so much and saved more for retirement?
Renters have to move all the time, regardless of where they built a life and have all their things, many times because their income is being taken to subsidize people living on large lots (earned income tax is stupid, it’s working people paying for the rent seekers who get to enjoy living and profiting from larger spaces).
Another option is to have multiple kids, and bet that a few might support you in your old age.
Also, I would like to see which region nominal property taxes increased 6x in 7 years. I research real estate all around the US, and I have never seen anywhere close to that increase. You can link to a Zillow link of any random home in the broader region, as they all would have experienced the same rise.
Property tax rates are usually 0.5% to 2.5% of market value, and you would be in very rarified company if the market value of your house went up 6x from 2017 to 2024.
This comes across as if you want people to work for your convenience but without paying for it. You are not obligated to the output of other peoples' work. The subway isn't open that early? It wasn't cost effective to pay the people according to that store based on the amount of business they got.
You are utterly dependent on complex supply chains and would find it extremely difficult to continue to survive if something ever happened to most or all of those chains.
It is rich of you to support a law that interfered with one kind of supply chain and then to lecture someone who gave a detailed description of harms that probably are effects of the interference.
Although it is true that a person is "not obligated [you meant entitled] to the output of other peoples' work," that does not mean that enough interference by ham-handed governmental policies won't make everyone significantly worse off -- because we all make extensive use of complex chains of economic transfer.
It's been a long time since I worked in the SoCal fast food scene, but it's been decades since it was true that a majority of the workers were students.
This study by UC Berkeley attributed a 3.7% increase in food price because of the minimum wage changes. It's quite likely that food overall getting more expensive is responsible for a lot of what you're seeing.
If we can't afford to pay people in California a wage where they can live here, then maybe the economy overall isn't sustainable? A $20 minimum wage is like $2800 take home per month and in many places that can barely cover rent.