Everyone loves a three-day weekend. When a holiday falls on a Monday or a Friday, that extra day of rest seems heaven-sent. But even when a holiday falls on a Wednesday, we don’t complain. Four-day workweeks are fantastic. And if you live in California, Democratic lawmakers along with their socialist comrade in Sacramento, Governor Gavin Newsom, want you to enjoy such leisure every week.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? There’s just one small detail that the Golden State’s legislature seems intent on ignoring. Who is going to pay for all that newfound time off?
A bill currently being debated in the California Assembly would require any business with 500 employees or more to pay their workers time-and-a-half (or 150% of their normal pay) for all time worked beyond 32 hours in a week. State law currently requires such compensation after 40 hours. Furthermore, companies that are affected by the bill would be prohibited from lowering an employee’s hourly wage to cover the increased costs.
On its face, the idea sounds great… to a teenager, anyway. As always, taking the idea to the extreme illustrates its absurdity. Why is the legislature merely stopping at 32 hours? Why not give everyone a three-day workweek by making overtime mandatory after 24 hours? Or why not 16 hours? In fact, why don’t we just give everyone a 50% raise and be done with it?
This is the point at which teenagers, and adult Democrats, begin scratching their heads and furrowing their brows.
If you’re a California Democrat, money grows on trees, unicorns are the state animal, and John Lennon’s Imagine is your ideological anthem. Reality be damned, and to hell with economists. Naiveté is bliss. But reality isn’t going anywhere; it never does. Reality is going to punch you in the face, and it doesn’t matter how many times you close your eyes, click your heels, and say, “There’s no one like Barack Obama. There’s no one like Barack Obama.”
The irony is, of course, that the ones who will ultimately pay for California’s war on business owners are the workers themselves. Businesses have fixed costs, known (continued)
This post originally appeared on The Blue State Conservative.
