Newsom’s minimum wage hike jeopardizes public school food services for needy children

 Who doesn’t care about the tots and their school lunches now?

Gavin Newsom’s little minimum wage hike for certain restaurants (just not his and not those of his political donors) is having quite the negative ripple effect—menu prices are rising, people are losing their jobs to automation, and small businesses are closing their doors after being community fixtures for decades—but according to a report by Craig Bannister at Media Research Center, there is another major “unanticipated consequence” of the new legislation:

But, one unanticipated consequence of the mandated wage hike is the negative impact it will have on California’s school food services.

School districts, which are already dealing with tight budgets and food service staff shortages, will have to compete for employees with fast food chains paying a minimum of $20 an hour.

Here’s this, from Associated Press via a local California outlet:

Lost in the hubbub surrounding California’s new $20-per-hour minimum wage for fast food workers is how that raise could impact public schools, forcing districts to compete with the likes of McDonald’s and Wendy’s for cafeteria workers amid a state budget crunch.

The minimum wage law that took effect Monday guarantees at least $20-per-hour for workers at fast food restaurant chains with at least 60 locations nationwide. That doesn’t include school food service workers, historically some of the lowest-paid workers in public education.

[T]hese [cafeteria] jobs typically have lots of turnover and are harder to fill. The minimum wage boost for fast food workers could make that even more difficult.

‘They are all very worried about it. Most are saying they anticipate it will be harder and harder to hire employees,’ said Carrie Bogdanovich, president of the California School Nutrition Association.

Well, well, well.

Whenever the politicians in Congress want to pass a massive spending bill, always with a price tag in the trillions, the reliable yes-votes are routinely met with dissent by the reliable no-votes (like Senator Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie). Naturally, adding trillions more to a record-high debt (cruising toward $35 trillion as I write this) is the very opposite of the fiscal conservatism promoted by people like Paul and Massie; and like clockwork, the Democrats (lockstep yes-votes) will hurl tried-and-true slander against the Republican holdouts, accusing them of withholding food from needy school children, unconcerned if innocent little poverty-stricken kindergarteners go hungry, all so Republican politicians can score a cheap political point on uncontrolled spending.

Now the numbers don’t actually matter to Democrats, because school lunches are a fraction of one percent—literally. For instance, if we look at FY 2022, we see that federal outlays totaled “nearly $6.3 trillion” per the CBO, and, if we look at what the federal government spent on the national school lunch program for the same year, that number came in right around $28.7 billion, per Statista. (I’m not a math whiz, but I think that works out to be .46%.) If only our annual budget were less than $30 billion! Congressmen like Paul and Massie aren’t no-voters because of a school lunch program, they’re no-votes because of almost everything else!

And of course, it doesn’t matter that Democrats do not care about children whatsoever: How many fight to protect babies in the womb from the instruments of the abortionist? How many stand in between the salivating perverts in drag and precious children? How many rip into the racial divisions sown by the Obama cabal that are now consuming our youth? Zero.

File this story under the “more Democrat hypocrisy” tab.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/newsom_s_minimum_wage_hike_jeopardizes_public_school_food_services_for_needy_children.html