Prop. 32: Have We Reached a Maximum for Minimum Wage?

Proposition 32 is a familiar proposal, as it seeks to raise the minimum wage in California – this time up to $18 per hour. This would place California as the state with the highest minimum wage across the country. But what economic effects would this increase have? And would it really help minimum wage workers?

Proposition Summary

Proposition 32 would raise the state minimum wage in California from $16 per hour to $18 per hour. The proposition would do this in phases. For 2025, it would raise minimum wage to $18 for employers with 26 or more employees, and to $17 for employers with 25 or fewer employees. By 2026, minimum wage would be raised to $18 for all employers.[1]

Under current law, minimum wage increases with inflation each year. If inflation is under 3.5%, then minimum wage increases by the same percentage as inflation. If inflation is over 3.5%, then the minimum wage adjustment caps at that percentage.[2] As of September 2024, the national inflation rate was 2.4%, and the annual core inflation rate was 3.3%[3], which means that if this inflation remained stable at year end, California minimum wage would most likely increase to close to $16.50 in 2025.

An increase to $18 per hour would represent a 12.5% increase from current minimum wage, clearly much higher than the 2-3% increase commensurate with inflation. This would also be a 38% increase in the state’s minimum wage over the past five years. Going back to 2018, minimum wage across the state was $11 per hour. Since then, minimum wage has increased every year by nearly a dollar each year, raising to $13 in 2020 and spiking up to $16 at the beginning of this year.[4] In fact, since 1996, there have been 28 ballot propositions to increase the minimum wage. Only 2 of these measures have ever been rejected, with voters passing 26 minimum wage raising initiatives.[5] It isn’t surprising then to realize that if Proposition 32 passes, it would also bring California to the first-place spot for the state with the highest minimum wage in the country. Currently, California is in third place, behind just Washington D.C. and Washington state.[6]

Support

Who supports this measure, and what are their reasons for it? Let’s take a minute to examine Prop. 32’s support and also the rationale behind the minimum wage hikes that have been common to our state.

Proposition 32 was written by Joe Sanberg[7], a wealthy entrepreneur, and is backed primarily by the Working Hero Action for the Living Wage Act Political Action Committee.[8] It is also supported by labor groups and unions, as well as the California Labor Federation, One Fair Wage, the Working Families Party of California, and the California Democratic Party. Supporters’ main argument for Proposition 32 is that the cost of living in California is so high that even a $16 an hour minimum wage is not livable, especially for those struggling just to get by in the state.[9] They cite the MIT Living Wage Calculator, which estimated that to afford basic standard of living in California would require an average hourly wage of $27.32. Additionally, if minimum wage workers are given a higher wage, then they can turn around and spend that money at other businesses, thus boosting the economy, and it may also help low-income individuals use less state benefits funded by the taxpayer.[10]

At the heart of it, the thrust of the argument is that California is a really expensive place to live in, and so to help minimum wage workers or low-income individuals provide for themselves and their families, the state should ensure that the minimum wage is considered livable in line with inflation and cost of living.

Opposition

On the other side of the argument, who opposes Proposition 32, and what are their responses to the proposition’s supporters? Proposition 32 is opposed by several business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, Restaurant Association, and Grocers Association, as well as the National Federation of Independent Business and the California Republican Party. These groups argue that raising the minimum wage puts greater strain on businesses, which are already facing increasing costs of labor in the state. They also cite a survey in the city of West Hollywood, which raised its city-wise minimum wage to just over $19. The survey shows that 42% of businesses had to either fire workers or cut their hours in response to the latest minimum wage increase.[11]

The main arguments of the opposition to Prop. 32 are that raising the minimum wage hurts businesses – especially small businesses – which, in turn, then hurts workers as employers are forced to lay off part of their workforce or reduce workers’ hours in order to afford the higher cost of labor.

So, we see that supporters of raising the minimum wage are highlighting a problem – high cost of living – which has yet to be solved and is affecting low-income families and individuals. We see on the other side of the argument that the solution being proposed – raising the minimum wage even further – threatens to have adverse effects on businesses and employers, as well as threatens to perpetuate the problem by also affecting workers and reducing jobs across the state. What do we do with these arguments?

I want persuade you of my response to this issue by proving out three concepts:

1.     Raising wages artificially contributes to inflation, which exacerbates the cost-of-living issue,

2.     Employers and small businesses are affected by minimum wage, which does pass down to workers and consumers alike, and lastly,

3.     Increasing the minimum wage is a band aid fix that sounds good on the surface but has not proven historically to be effective in any capacity.

Let’s go through and breakdown each point.

Inflation

First, we need to discuss once again the building blocks of basic economics, because raising the minimum wage does have a very real economic effect.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which is a non-partisan institution, conducted a study on the effects of raising minimum wage on both the goods market and the labor market. In the case of the market for goods, their report found that when the minimum wage is increased, “The minimum wage increase makes labor more expensive, and as a result, firms must charge higher prices at any given level of demand for their products.”[12] The study includes the Phillips curve, which shows the relation of labor to inflation, and when the minimum wage is increased, the curve shifts as producers increase their prices. Researchers found specifically within the restaurant industry that prices to consumers rose in line with the increase in their labor costs as a result of new minimum wage legislation, and in terms of timing, these prices rose right when the minimum wage increase went into effect.[13]

This increase in inflation makes sense when you think about what is happening. If an employer has to pay higher costs in any spending category on their business, then they will look for ways to continue making a profit. Business is about profit; business owners don’t watch their profits fall and just shrug and accept that they’ll be making less money. Instead, they have one of two choices: either cut back costs, or if that isn’t possible, then generate higher revenue to cover rising costs. How do they generate higher revenues? They can expand the goods or services that they offer to hopefully bring in more sales, or alternatively, if their business model is already fixed, then they can raise their prices to the consumer. The Federal Reserve itself has proven this concept to be true from a pure economic standpoint. They assert that when minimum wage is increased, then prices within the market for goods will rise, thus increasing inflation. That is accepted by economists as fact. Where the debate can come in is whether the economy can handle increased inflation, if and how the federal government should step in – especially related to interest rates, and if a minimum wage increase will end up being contractionary or expansionary based on the monetary policy that follows. But those debates all concede the baseline fact that increasing the minimum wage will cause increased inflation – and increased inflation means that the prices of goods will go up.

I would argue that in a state like California, where the very problem that the supporters of Proposition 32 are pointing out is the high cost of living, passing a measure that just factually will end up increasing the cost of living even further is not an effective solution. California has the third highest cost of living of any state across the nation. Housing costs are double the national average. Transportation costs are second highest in the country.[14] Our state is in a cost-of-living crisis, and I don’t disagree with the sentiment of those who are supporting Proposition 32. I agree that it is really hard to live here and that it’s ridiculous that the living wage for a family of four in California is $130,000, compared to other states like Texas where it is $81,000 or Alabama where it is $75,000.[15] But, if our issue is that prices have become so inflated here that it’s difficult for people to raise their families, or to afford a house, or gas, or groceries – then we have to be careful that the legislation we are voting for is not going to add to the crisis by increasing inflation even further. Unfortunately, that is exactly what raising the minimum wage does.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office has an inflation tracker where they look at inflation in the state over the past five years and can trend both long-term and short-term inflation among different product and service lines. Core CPI, which looks at the changes in prices of goods, was at an average of 2% from years 2013 to 2019. This spiked up to its peak in 2022 at a staggering 6.6%[16], which was largely a result of federal spending.[17] While Core CPI has dropped since 2022, it still is well-above the average 2% figure from before the pandemic. The inflation tracker shows that prices to the consumer have grown over 20% in the past five years, which is more than across the country as a whole.[18] It is no surprise that residents of the state are struggling to pay their bills! Even my husband and I feel the insane rise in the cost of groceries, and we have been trying to eat cheaper forms of protein like chicken because the cost of beef is just so expensive compared to what it was just a few years ago. The reality is that the government, the legislature, and the governor should all be focused on getting this inflation DOWN, so that we can bring the cost of living back to a reasonable place across our state, NOT passing policy that continues to drive inflation up while just attempting to keep up with it.

Employers & Employees

Next, we turn to the second component of my argument, which is the effect that raising the minimum wage has on both employers and employees. Going back to the study conducted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, when it comes to the labor market, “As the minimum wage is set above the prevailing wage, the minimum wage increase naturally reduces employment.”[19] This reduction is due to what we discussed earlier: the higher cost of labor. Just how much employment decreases is up for debate based on the demand for the goods or services of the businesses affected, as well as the flexibility of businesses to absorb higher costs; but if employers want their businesses to survive, then it is a likely and proven scenario that the outcome of increased wage costs is a decrease in labor.

We don’t have to guess at how businesses are affected, because we have watched it happen time and time again with each wage hike. Just this past April, Assembly Bill 1288 took effect, raising the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 per hour. Since then, there have been cost increases as well as restaurant closures cited as being directly related to the increased wage cost. For example, Rubio’s Baja Grill, a restaurant with 115 locations across California, announced the closure of 48 of its locations specifically because of the increase in operating costs in the state after the bill took effect.[20] That’s just under HALF of all their locations. The closure of so many Rubio’s locations resulted in about 1,200 job losses just from this one chain alone. But it doesn’t end there, because Rubio’s was hardly the only business impacted by the new $20-dollar minimum wage. Foster’s Freeze, a business chain well-loved across California towns, had to suddenly close its Lemoore location without notice after the wage hike. The owner of the location said they wouldn’t be able to “absorb the wage hike,” and so they had to close their doors suddenly. Employees showed up to work only to find out the location had been closed. They told news outlets that they would have preferred keeping their jobs at the previous wage, and that even those who found new jobs at the new wage had severely cut back hours compared to what they were working previously.[21]

The New York Post found that several restaurant chains in the Los Angeles area specifically immediately increased their prices following the new wage law. Burger King increased several menu items by anywhere from 25 cents to 4 dollars – an increase of 12% to as much as 53% on product prices. Hart House, another fast-food chain, increased their prices by 25%. Even In-N-Out, which is known for its cheap prices increased burgers by 25 cents. A franchisee owner of 18 McDonald’s locations reported that with a 25% increase in the cost of labor due to the new minimum wage, he has had no choice but to increase prices at his locations.[22]

Other strategies restaurants have been taking outside of closing down locations and increasing prices have included mass layoffs, reducing employees’ hours, halting hiring leading to staffing shortages, slashing benefits such as paid time off, and increasing automation through the use of order kiosks.[23] These are all examples of how employees are affected by the increases in minimum wage due to employers’ reactions to managing higher labor costs forced upon them, and they aren’t good. This has just been for the food industry; is this the model we want for all types of businesses across California?

I think this highlights a key assumption that proponents of raising the minimum wage are making: the assumption is that businesses can just absorb the higher costs of labor without real threat to their operations because they have wide profit margins, are insanely greedy, and are always looking for ways to underpay their employees to take more money for themselves. If you operate under this assumption, then of course you make the argument to just raise the wage further, because you think the businesses already have the money to pay their workers more and are just withholding it for personal gain. This is highlighted in an article written to argue for Proposition 32. The author is a food worker who shares his experience in minimum wage jobs and his arguments for why raising the wage is good for employees. In his explanations, he mentions the concerns the opposition have about employers having to lay off employees or reduce hours. He writes:

“After the increase of minimum wage to $15 passed, my boss reduced our hours. Some of my coworkers felt guilty for advocating for the increase. Others were worried about their livelihoods. But very soon, my boss restored everyone’s hours because he needed us. Workers are critical to California’s businesses. These arguments are intended to confuse and suppress people who are struggling financially, working themselves to the bone while facing the threat of retaliation if they speak up for their interests.”[24]

This highlights the very assumption I just explained – it assumes that employers slash hours to prove a point, but at the end of the day can just continue with the same number of employees working the same hours even after a wage hike because, well, they need the workers. This fails to consider the reality that most small businesses and business franchises do not operate with the profit margins and financial cushion of big box stores or retail giants. In fact, the average profit margin for small businesses across all industries is between 7% to 10%.[25] When we zero in on specific industries, these margins are even lower, with small retail businesses averaging a net profit margin as low as 0.5%.[26] If we compare these small retail businesses to large retail chains, we see that small businesses just can’t compete with name brands. Home Depot, for example, has a net profit margin of 8.4%. Walgreens has a net profit margin of 3.6%.[27] These are still low compared to other industries but compare those percentages to the 0.5% margin that small businesses make, and they seem astronomical. This just goes to show that the reality for most small businesses is that a drastic increase in the cost of labor does threaten their operations. When you are working with a net margin of just 7%, or 0.5% if you are in retail, then a 12% increase in the cost of labor like what is being proposed by Proposition 32 means that many business owners are faced with the choice to reduce their staffing or go out of business. Trying to sustain a profit to keep your business alive and successful is not greedy, it’s common sense.

Response

This brings me to my last point and my response to Proposition 32. While I agree that the cost of living is expensive throughout the state, raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflationary cost increases and the overall expensive nature of living here is a band-aid fix that doesn’t address the root causes of the issue. It sounds good to give workers more money; it especially sounds good to give low-income workers more money. However, as we have examined together, historically it hasn’t achieved the goal of making life more affordable in the state; rather, it has always led to a push for a higher and higher minimum wage. Even proponents of Proposition 32 are already saying that the $18 dollar per hour minimum wage isn’t high enough, but is a good start – which means they are already planning to push for even more increases. Ultimately, it all feels like a hamster cycle of raising the wage, thus raising inflation and the cost of labor for businesses, thus then demanding an even higher wage to keep up with the new inflated costs – and on and on it goes, without actually solving the problem.

Our government leaders and representatives need to be honest with the economic data and real outcomes of their policy positions if they want to effect real change in our state. They need to move beyond propositions that just sound appealing to the people they immediately benefit, but actually harm the economy, the average employee, and businesses across California. Raising the minimum wage just spins us into further inflation, and it puts both employers and employees alike in a worse position.

There is another assumption here that needs to be addressed, which is that supporters of a minimum wage increase continually say that it is only fair to raise the minimum wage to make it a living wage, and that people cannot support their families off the current hourly wage. However, this assumption fails to consider that we should be encouraging working individuals to move past minimum wage jobs. Minimum wage positions were never designed to give people a living wage, or to be the sole career supporting a family of four and up. Minimum wage jobs require little specialized skill or advanced knowledge, and they do not require those things for the sole purpose that anyone should be able to get the job. This is so that teenagers, or individuals who need to develop skills, can gain experience through having responsibility and working a job that isn’t intended to be their forever career. However, the data has shown that as minimum wage has increased, less and less teenagers have been able to enter the workforce. Increasing minimum wage hurts low-skilled workers, teenagers and others, because if a business has to pay an expensive price for labor, then it will look for more skilled employees who will require less training and will be more proficient at the job. In fact, as it relates to teenagers, in 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics, there were 45% of all teenagers were employed across the country. By 2008, that number had dropped to just 33 percent. In 2009, just after the 2007 to 2008 recession hit, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote on this topic:

“Good jobs were hard to find for most categories of workers… One of the results has been that older men and women have been taking and holding onto jobs that in prior eras would have gone to young people. There were not enough jobs to go around before the current recession took hold. So, the young, the poor and the poorly educated were already suffering. Now that pool of suffering is rapidly expanding.”[28]

However, by continually raising the minimum wage, we are not only taking away jobs from individuals like teenagers who need the experience, we are incentivizing and rewarding it. We reinforce the idea that it’s a basic human right to feed your family and your children off of a job working at McDonalds or any other minimum wage job. But the beauty of America is that just because you may start out working a job like that, there is so much opportunity through hard work and ambition to move up, take on more responsibility, and move out of being a minimum wage, hourly employee. There are so many people who start out as a cashier at a place like Walmart, and then through time and hard work move into a management position. Or alternatively, there are people like myself, who worked several minimum wage jobs when I was a teenager and attended community college before transferring to a four-year university and graduating with a degree and a license to be able to move away from fast food jobs to jobs in accounting and finance. We should be encouraging stories like those, and helping workers to both have dreams and to achieve those dreams, not reinforcing the idea that workers will live on minimum wage, will never move up to better positions, and therefore need the minimum wage to be higher.

Additionally, we should also be working with small businesses and employers to help them to stay in business and remain profitable. California is home to many small businesses. In 2022, just under half of the businesses in the state, 41.5%, were businesses that employed fewer than 50 employees.[29] Yet, in 2024, the State Business Tax Climate Index ranked California the 48th state for business friendliness.[30] Additionally, Chief Executive Magazine put California in last place for the best and worst states for business.[31] For the men and women who have worked hard to get their business off the ground, and who appreciate their employees, we should make it easier, not harder, to run their businesses and serve their communities within California. Continually raising the wage into oblivion is just one way that the state government makes it harder and harder for these business owners to see success, and instead destroys small business as a whole while ensuring that only large corporations and chain brands can survive the costs. But small businesses are the very heartbeat of the American economy and the American dream, and we have seen that they are an integral part of the California economy. Small businesses are what drive real competition in the free market, as they prevent the market from becoming run by a select few monopolies or oligopolies. Small businesses create the seedbed for innovation and new ideas. Have you ever seen the Reality TV show Shark Tank? That show alone proves just how creative the human spirit is when given incentive and opportunity to innovate and market new ideas. There are 16 seasons of that show, with each episode featuring several new business ideas. That goes to show how endless the market for new ideas and new businesses is in America! However, through policies like raising minimum wage, big box retailers and large companies have begun to increase in market share over small businesses. Just from 1998 to 2014, there was a 5% decline in the small business share of gross domestic product, and that was before all the inflation and small business closures we are seeing today.[32] This is sad, because it is showing that our government doesn’t really care about promoting and supporting the entrepreneurial spirit of the American people, and instead is promoting policies that stifle that ability to create new businesses and contribute to the economy in California.

Overall, I believe that proponents of Proposition 32 have identified an important issue, but have fallen short in their estimated solution. There is no greater illustration of this than former mayor of Oakland, Barbara Lee’s position of minimum wage. She cites affordability as a huge issue in California, with an annual income of $127,000 being barely enough for a family of four to survive. She also says that she was a small business owner, and that she understands the challenges of running a small business and taking care of your employees. What is her solution to these issues? She proposed a $50 dollar per hour minimum wage.[33] Talk about identifying all the right problems and proposing all the wrong solutions! We need effective solutions to actually bring down inflation and the cost of living in our state, and to empower small businesses and employees to work hard, be rewarded for their hard work, and achieve the American dream right in their own communities.

To that end, vote NO on proposition 32!

References:

[1] Legislative Analyst’s Office, “Proposition 32 [Ballot],” 2024, https://lao.ca.gov/BallotAnalysis/Proposition?number=32&year=2024.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Trading Economics. “United States Inflation Rate,” September 2024. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi#:~:text=US%20Inflation%20Rate%20Slows%20Less,but%20above%20forecasts%20of%200.2%25.

[4] Official Website of Long Beach California. “Minimum Wage.” Longbeach.gov Financial Management, 2024. https://www.longbeach.gov/finance/business-info/compliance/minimum-wage/.

[5] Ballotpedia. “California Proposition 32, $18 Minimum Wage Initiative (2024) - Ballotpedia,” n.d. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_32,_$18_Minimum_Wage_Initiative_(2024).

[6] Law, Bloomberg. “These States Have the Highest and Lowest Minimum Wages - Bloomberg Law.” Bloomberg Law, May 7, 2024. https://pro.bloomberglaw.com/insights/labor-employment/these-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-minimum-wages/#:~:text=rate%20of%20$7.25.-,Which%20states%20have%20the%20highest%20minimum%20wage?,Connecticut:%20$15.69.

[7] Ibarra, Ana B. “California Prop 32: Raise Minimum Wage to $18.” CalMatters, October 18, 2024. https://calmatters.org/california-voter-guide-2024/propositions/prop-32-minimum-wage/.

[8] California Proposition 32, $18 Minimum Wage Initiative (2024) - Ballotpedia.

[9] Ibarra, “California Prop 32: Raise Minimum Wage to $18.”

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Glover, Andrew, and Jose Mustre-Del-Rio. “What Happens When the Minimum Wage Rises? It Depends on Monetary Policy.” Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, n.d. https://www.kansascityfed.org/Economic%20Review/documents/8351/EconomicReviewV106N3GloverMustredelRio.pdf.

[13] Ibid.

[14] “Cost of Living Index by State 2024,” n.d. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/cost-of-living-index-by-state.

[15] Jassin, Liz. “What’s the Living Wage a Family of 4 Needs in Every US State?” News Nation Now, September 12, 2023. https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/whats-the-living-wage-a-family-of-four-needs-in-every-us-state/#:~:text=Connecticut,Your%20Money.

[16] Legislative Analyst’s Office, “Inflation Tracker [EconTax Blog],” December 20, 2022, https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/766.

[17] MIT Sloan. “Federal Spending Was Responsible for the 2022 Spike in Inflation, Research Shows | MIT Sloan,” July 17, 2024. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/federal-spending-was-responsible-2022-spike-inflation-research-shows#:~:text=Inflation%20is%20difficult%20to%20control,blamed%20on%20high%20interest%20rates.

[18] Sumagaysay, Levi. “Californians Face Higher Costs for Goods and Services Than Before the Pandemic Despite Inflation Slowing.” CalMatters, March 5, 2024. https://calmatters.org/economy/2024/03/california-inflation/.

[19] Glover and Mustre-Del-Rio, “What Happens When the Minimum Wage Rises? It Depends on Monetary Policy.”

[20] Ohanian, Lee. “California’s New Fast-Food Minimum Wage Law Destroys Another 1,250 Jobs.” Hoover Institution, June 4, 2024. https://www.hoover.org/research/californias-new-fast-food-minimum-wage-law-destroys-another-1250-jobs#:~:text=June%204%2C%202024-,I%20remember%20my%20first%20fish%20taco%20from%20Rubio's%20Baja%20Grill,fast%2Dfood%20law%20took%20effect.

[21] Altus, Kristen. “California Minimum Wage Shocks Fast Food Workers as Restaurant Closes: ‘Only the Beginning,’ Ex-manager Warns.” Fox Business, April 4, 2024. https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/california-minimum-wage-shocks-fast-food-workers-restaurant-closes-only-begining-ex-manager-warns.

[22] Wong, Genevieve, Andy Tillett, and Steve Helling. “California’s $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage Balloons Menu Prices -- With Some Chains Increasing Costs by Nearly $2.” New York Post, April 2, 2024. https://nypost.com/2024/04/02/us-news/californias-20-fast-food-wage-raises-prices-by-up-to-1-80/.

[23] Synergy Restaurant Consultants. “The Aftermath of the $20 Minimum Wage Increase in California,” April 9, 2024. https://www.synergyconsultants.com/blog-posts/the-aftermath-of-the-20-minimum-wage-increase-in-california.

[24] Moreno, Victor. “Many California Workers Can’T Ask for Better Pay. Prop. 32 Lets Voters Speak for Them.” CalMatters, October 15, 2024. https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/10/worker-minimum-wage-prop-32/.

[25] McArthur, Laura. “Small Business Profit Margins: What You Need to Know.” Vcita (blog), August 8, 2024. https://www.vcita.com/blog/payments/small-business-profit-margins#:~:text=Average%20profit%20margins%20by%20industry%20for%20small%20businesses,-It's%20important%20to&text=The%20average%20net%20profit%20margin,profit%20margins%2C%20averaging%20around%2017%25.

[26] EMPLOYERS Insurance. “What Profit Margin Can Small Retailers Expect to Earn? - EMPLOYERS Insurance,” August 4, 2023. https://www.employers.com/blog/employers-news/2020/whats-a-good-profit-margin-for-retailers/#:~:text=Vend%20found%20that%20the%20average,CVS:%203.0%25.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Employment Policies Institute. “Minimum Wage: Teen Unemployment - Employment Policies Institute,” March 7, 2013. https://epionline.org/minimum-wage/minimum-wage-teen-unemployment/.

[29] Ring, Edward, and Steve Hilton. “From Worst to Best: How California Ended up With the Worst Business Climate in America, and What It Will Take to Turn Things Around.” California Policy Center, May 3, 2024. https://californiapolicycenter.org/reports/worsttobest/.

[30] Walczak, Jared. “2024 State Business Tax Climate Index | Tax Foundation.” Tax Foundation, February 23, 2024. https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/state/2024-state-business-tax-climate-index/.

[31] Ring and Hilton, “From Worst to Best: How California Ended up With the Worst Business Climate in America, and What It Will Take to Turn Things Around.”

[32] Office of Advocacy, and Jason Dore. “Small Businesses Generate 44 Percent of U.S. Economic Activity.” Office of Advocacy (blog), January 30, 2019. https://advocacy.sba.gov/2019/01/30/small-businesses-generate-44-percent-of-u-s-economic-activity/#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.%20%E2%80%93%20Small%20businesses%20are,business%20GDP%20data%20are%20available.

[33] Crowley, Kinsey, and Kathryn Palmer. “Rep. Barbara Lee in California Senate Race Says Minimum Wage Should Be Raised to $50.” USA TODAY, February 15, 2024. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/02/15/barbara-lee-minimum-wage/72611446007/.