Seattle Approves Highest Minimum Wage in the U.S.

Barista

Seattle employees making the minimum wage will see a mandatory raise starting next year, making them the highest paid minimum wage workers in the country.

Starting at the beginning of 2025, all employers regardless of size will be required to pay their employees at least $20.76 an hour.

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Commentary: America’s ‘Social Justice’ Nightmares Have Only Intensified

Pills

Seattle is in King County, Washington, where Joe Biden got 75 percent of the vote in the 2020 election. King County had more than 1,000 drug overdoses involving fentanyl in 2023. These two facts are almost certainly related, but which is the cause and which the effect? Or could it be that both (a) the tendency to vote for Democrats and (b) the addiction to dangerous drugs are caused by some unknown factor? Without a careful analysis of the available data to identify that unknown background factor, is it wrong to hazard a guess that the overdosing dopeheads and Democratic voters in King County are just plain stupid?

Beyond sarcastic put-downs, it behooves those interested in public policy to take a look at what’s going on in places like Seattle, where Democrats dominate and “progressive” ideas therefore advance unhindered by any effective opposition. In the case of King County’s skyrocketing drug overdoses — which increased nearly 50 percent in just the past year — local officials have declared the problem “a public health crisis.” However, fentanyl is illegal, which means that the overdoses are also indicative of a crime problem, and progressives are against putting criminals in prison.

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Seattle Shuts Down Last Remnants of CHAZ Protest Area

On Wednesday, the city of Seattle finally reclaimed the last portions of a downtown area that had first been claimed by far-left protesters in an infamous effort to create an “autonomous zone.”

Fox News reports that the city’s Parks and Recreation Department and police department destroyed a so-called “community garden” that had been planted in Cal Anderson Park back in 2020, at the height of the nationwide race riots carried out by anarcho-communist and black nationalist agitators. The city declared that the destruction of the garden was due to concerns for public health and safety, as the site continued to draw undesirable people to the park, including homeless people and drug addicts.

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