LOS ANGELES – Democrats across the nation are eager to make increasing the minimum wage a defining campaign issue in 2014, but in California a proposal to boost the pay rate to $12 an hour is coming from a different point on the political compass.
Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley multimillionaire and registered Republican who once ran for governor and, briefly, U.S. Senate, wants state voters to endorse the wage jump that he predicts would nourish the economy and lift low-paid workers from dependency on food stamps and other assistance bankrolled by taxpayers.
A push for bigger paychecks for workers at the lower rungs of the economic ladder is typically associated with Democrats – President Barack Obama is supporting a bill in Congress that would elevate the $7.25 federal minimum to more than $10 an hour.
Unz would increase the minimum wage in two steps – to $10 an hour in 2015, and $12 the following year, which would be the highest among states at current levels.
Unz says taxpayers for too long have been subsidizing low-wage paying businesses, since the government pays for food stamps and other programs those workers often need to get by. He posits that the increase – at $12-an-hour, up from the current $8 – would lift millions of Californians out of poverty, drive up income and sales tax revenue and save taxpayers billions of dollars, since those workers would no longer qualify for many welfare benefits.
He dismisses the notion that countless jobs would evaporate, noting that most of the state’s lower-wage jobs are in agriculture and the service sector, which can’t be easily automated or transported elsewhere. He believes higher wages would make the jobs more attractive to U.S. residents, curtailing a lure for illegal immigration.
But it could become a tricky issue for Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who is seeking another term and just signed a law that will raise California’s minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2016. Businesses are unlikely to welcome another boost.
“This is the essence of insanity,” said John Kabateck of the National Federation of Independent Business in California, who said every bump in the wage threatens jobs created by mom-and-pop businesses also struggling with a new national health care law.
