We Beat de Blasio...But Not For Long: NYC Raises Minimum Wage to $15

Right Wing (in Emeryville & Elsewhere) Faces Rising Tide of Concern Over Wealth Inequality

E'Ville Eye/Businesses Argument Fails

News Analysis/Opinion

Progressive
minimum wage law:
She beat...

In 2016, Emeryville's status as highest in the nation minimum wage is being challenged from all sides; after Califonia Governor Jerry Brown announced Monday the entire state will henceforth be a $15 per hour minimum wage zone come 2022, now New York, not to be outdone, announced Thursday is also raising its minimum wage in New York City to $15 but they're instituting theirs in 2018, same as Emeryville.  Additionally, NYC will provide for more guaranteed paid sick days than Emeryville making for a more progressive minimum wage law than Emeryville all in all.
And so the rising tide of rising minimum wages all around us is seen as a boon for wealth equality and a blow to the intransigence of the right wing on its core principle of market piety.

After years of stagnation on the minimum wage nation-wide, Republicans controlling the debate, municipalities and now an entire state are fairly tripping over themselves to raise their lowest wage to $15.  The dramatic turn around represents a rise in general anxiety that's been precipitated by a intractable increase in wealth inequality over the last few decades but really picking up in intensity after the Great Recession.
The trend, as would be expected has been vigorously contested by the right wing around the nation and specifically here in Emeryville.

...him (but only temporarily).

Right Wing Looses Key Arguing Point
The right wing in Emeryville is losing its prime, albeit never cogent arguing point; the simple uniqueness of our Minimum Wage Ordinance serving as a stand in for failure itself.  Our (soon to be former) highest minimum wage in the nation status has been used by its opponents as a straw man argument; something sold as unreasonable and outrageous on its face.  However the new paradigm of $15 minimum wage arising everywhere around us will serve to discredit that argument leaving only the tactic much used by Emeryville's right wing blog, the E'Ville Eye; that being the chalking up each business failure as somehow proof of the destructive effect of raising the minimum wage.  The fact that the minimum wage of every other city around Emeryville will now also be $15 tends to dilute that arguing tactic but also an endless repetition of reporting on new businesses opening as that blog likes to do, will subvert its own ideological goals of keeping the the minimum wage low.  People will find it difficult to see new businesses opening as proof Emeryville's high minimum wage is a failure.

And we all beat this guy
(allied as their ideas are with
the Republican Party).

Emeryville business closings, now reported wall-to-wall and credited with the MWO at the E'Ville Eye, of course leaves out the possibility that businesses come and go in any market, irrespective of any minimum wage law.  As common to zealots everywhere, the E'ville Eye presents a tautology: business failures reported are held up as a straw man proof of its ideological bound worldview but also in the hermetically sealed world at that opinion blog, each new business opening happens in spite of the MWO.  Meanwhile the inconvenient truth as reported on the six month anniversary of the MWO by the Tattler is that business openings are up when compared to the era before the MWO while business closures are actually way down.

As the $15 minimum wage becomes the norm around the country, those tilting at windmills, positing it must be rolled back will be relegated to the status of Birthers and Flat Earthers.