Atlas Shrugging in Santa Fe-How the "living wage" campaign is killing local economies.

City Journal ^ | August 15, 2003 | Ed Tinsley

[Regulator]

Who cares what Ed Tinsley thinks. Most of his employees are illegal aliens, so he's a goddamn criminal. Tell him to go whine somewhere else.

[Woahhs]

I love the "wage compression" argument. All the assistant managers are gonna "force" him to raise their salaries to maintain the 75% spread.

[blanknoone]

You are right about incremental effects, but this is a big incremental. This is big enough that it will likely have serious, obvious negative effects on Santa Fe and its tax base...made all the more obvious by the fact that the surrounding areas will probably boom.

While I appreciate skepticism as much as the next guy, I don't think everyone needs to suffer through a living wage experiment to learn the lesson. After an economic blow up or two, the lessons will obvious enough that it will stall the growth of ACORN's movement.

[riri]

I am not saying I agree with the liveable wage law. I am just dumbfounded that anyone could live in Santa Fe, NM on less than, say, $850.00 a hour.

[TaxMe]

You hit the nail on the head. My father lives in Santa Fe -- a town inhabited by trust fund babies who have never worked a day in their lives.

[riri]

Yep, Santa Fe is one of those towns you go to visit and you say "Wow, this is a great place, I could live here" And looking around you say, "Wow, I could probably get a really nice spread here for a decent price"...

So over lunch you grab a couple of local real estate magazines (your first clue is you can't find any place that serves anything without goat cheese and sun dried tomatoes) and you start glancing through.

Hurry!This one won't last!, bright 3 BR, 1 bath, saltillo tile, 1,200 square feet. $4,500,000.

It happens to me all the time.

[Old Professer]

I did a quick search on apartment rentals on Google; the cheapest 1 bedroom was $599/mo.

[wildbill]

Hey, if $8.50 is a good starting wage, then $100 an hour would be even better, wouldn't it? Just pass a law and the laws of economics disappear.

[FreeLibertarian]

You are worthless scum who doesn't have a clue what you are talking about.

[CedarDave]

Tell him what you really think!!

[FreeLibertarian]

I did!

[armydoc]

The question to be asked to the people who pushed for this wage law is obvious: Why the exemption for small businesses? Do the employees of small businesses not deserve the same "living wage" as those of larger businesses? How are they going to live?? One simply can't "live" if they're not getting a "living wage", can they? I'm sure the tapdancing and "harruumphing" would be quite entertaining. The answer, of course, is that these people don't really care about the employees. If they did, they wouldn't have the exemption. The real goal is to penalize large businesses for being successful. Analagous to the progressive income tax scheme. Fortunately, the free market is way to smart to be hurt for long. Large corporations will find a way to do get under the 25 employee cutuff, either by parsing their individual businesses up into smaller operations or by "investing" in the newly successful mom-and-pop operations in such a way that they don't qualify as owners of the business. For larger businesses like Wal-mart, they will just move outside city limits. Trying to manipulate the free market is like trying to stop a river with a dam. Yes, you can stop the flow for a short time, but the water WILL eventually get by, and now there's a whole lot of people upstream that are pissed off because you've flooded them out.

[anton]

The only crime of the weekend:

Thief strikes laundry

Making change at the Solana Laundromat was made more difficult after someone stole the West Alameda Street business’s cash register and $480 cash late Friday or early Saturday.

A worker arrived Saturday morning to find the front window broken. Missing were the cash register, cash and a gumball machine that dispenses temporary tattoos.

After the break-in, a 19-year-old man stopped by Bureau of Indian Affairs police on southbound Interstate 25 was found in possession of a cash register and cash. The man was released, according to Santa Fe police, and details were unavailable.

Efforts to get a BIA comment were unsuccessful.

The whole thing mystified Solana Laundromat manager Ted Bryan, who learned of the traffic stop but couldn’t understand why it didn’t result in an arrest.

“From a legal standpoint, maybe they did all they could legally,” he said. “Or chalk it up to a farce — I don’t know.”

[anton]

Camel Rock Casino is a toilet. The casino has, on a good day, 25 truckers nursing beer and a few senior citizens losing their laundry money. The Indians have given the area four casinos and 3000 mobile homes (mostly in serious need of repair).