California governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state’s minimum wage will rise to $17.40 next year, a ay floor set to become the highest of any US state.
The pay bump will go into effect starting 1 January, Newsom announced on Friday. The state’s current minimum rate is $16.90. In a news release, Newsom touted the move as a salve for working families amid high living costs and took a jab at the Trump administration.
“For years, Donald Trump and Republicans have blocked efforts to raise the federal minimum wage while handing tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” Newsom said.


Tie it to inflation motherfucker, stop claiming this as some kind of huge win
Oregon does this. At 16.80 in their metro areas atm. Different levels the further outside the bigger cities too.
https://www.oregon.gov/boli/workers/pages/minimum-wage.aspx
It’s okay to be aggressive, and it’s also okay to be wrong. But one must not be both aggressive and wrong.
California’s minimum wage is tied to the Consumer Price Index. It increases every year according to inflation.
Edit: To be more specific, it is indexed to CPI-W.
The core CPI that most politicians and media use or the All Items CPI?
Because the former excludes food and energy costs, making it all but worthless for measuring the ACTUAL cost of living.
The CPI-W used for wage increases includes food and energy. It includes all household spending weighted by the amount spent in that category.
Edit: comment made to be less aggressive
Core CPI disregards food and energy prices. It’s right here: https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/definitions/core-cpi-vs-cpi.html/
The California minimum wage is not indexed to core CPI. It’s indexed to CPI-W which does include food and energy.
Just to provide a number, in the 2017 update to CPI-W weights, energy was given a weight of 7.85 in the updated index, indicating that the BLS thinks the average urban worker spends 7.85% of their money on energy. Or about $196 a month if you make $2,500 a month. It may be higher now these past couple months due to recent geopolitical events, but it is within the right ballpark.
Edit: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/
There are many variations of CPI. Perhaps spend less time typing angry comments, and more time learning the basics on issues before commenting.
Correct, and the type of CPI used to index California’s minimum wage is CPI-W, which includes fuel and food weighted according to the portion of income that urban workers typically spend on them. So yes, I do encourage one to spend more time learning the basics on issues before making irrelevant notations.
I like the way you completely rewrote (not merely made less aggressive) the comment I replied to so that this seems like a reasonable response.
God forbid a person remove unjustified remarks to correct past errors
And now you’ve made yourself the victim. If you were interested in honest discourse you wouldn’t have changed the entire meaning then left an edit line claiming something different.
Not just inflation - Lock it to purchasing power.
How is inflation calculated?
Inflation is supposed to be a calculation in changes of relative currency value. The way that it is calculated depends on the government and the day.
Generally they create an index of goods that they track. Changing what goods to track is the easiest way to manipulate the results… and boy do they ever manipulate the shit out of the results. What you choose to put into the index and what you exclude greatly influences the results. Common things that are left out of indexes include rent/mortgage amount, taxes, utilities, medical cost, education cost etc. small things that account for more than 75% of people’s income…
Pruchasing power calculates how much goods a person’s wage can purchase after all their “basic necessities are out”. . It includes all the costs that the good price indexes leave out.
Or just GDP - but honestly, the focus should be on getting a proper system of unions up and going
Dude fuck unions.