So I was driving all up and down the ninety nine. Yesterday, I
was doing different work for Right to Life Central California. So I was up
in I went down all the way to Bakersfield to give a presentation at Garsis
High School down there. And I went all the way up to Fireball to
give a presentation at a Catholic church there. So I was burning rubber all
up and down, all up and down the ninety nine yesterday. And when
I was in Bakersfield, I stopped to get a bite to eat. I
went to Taco Bell, and I realized it was my first time getting fast
food since the implementation of California Is New April first, twenty dollars per hour
minimum wage for fast food workers. And I thought I would share my experiences
with you, my beloved radio audience, now saying several of you have likely
gone through a fast food restaurant in that time. Now, I'll admit I
was not at Taco Bell probably at peak rush hour. I was there at
two o'clock, which I'd have to imagine is in the course of a Taco
Bell day has to be kind of one of the deader hours. Nonetheless,
not one employee at the register. It was all replaced by touchscreens, which
I hate. This is a thing my wife and I have laughed about,
especially with like books and stuff. Right, I said, hey, maybe
we could go to Barnes and talking about some book, and maybe I'll go
to Barnes and Noble see if I can pick it up for a present.
So I'll just get it on Amazon. I'm like, well, look,
both Barnes and Noble and Amazon are massive, evil left wing corporations. So
it's not like, you know, six to one, half a dozen the
other on the moral side of things. But there's a big part of me
that's like I would rather go to Okay, let's just say AH bookstore.
I would rather go to AH bookstore. I like going to bookstores. I
like going there myself. I like grabbing the thing. I like walking around.
I like looking at other books. I like doing that. And this
is my my whole thing with Christmas shopping has always been get in my car.
And I remember they used to exist in Fresno, these stores called sir
La Tabla. I would just go to ser La Tabla and I would look
around and I'd always find something awesome for my wife, something awesome for my
mom. I like going in person and doing things, and I don't really
love self checkouts. I begrudgingly do them. I don't like it. I
like interacting with a human being. I like that. Now, economic policy
and the construction of a fast food restaurant, I understand if it's not gonna
be tailored around my likes. But basically, I get to this taco bell.
It looks like there's two people working in the back. Two maybe three
people working in the back, nobody working the register. I walk in and
someone says, yeah, it's all at the touch screen. Just use the
touchscreen, okay, which she says, I'll come help you if you have
a difficult time with it, because obviously any older person is going to have
a difficult time with touchscreens, and especially like the one I went to.
The touchscreen wasn't working. One of the two touch screens was not working.
I kept trying to tap the things I could get a diet coke or whatever,
and it just would not enter, and it seemed like the whole thing
froze up on me. So I had to use the other screen. This
is the Gavin News. Some twenty dollars per hour minimum wage now I want
to sift through this because on the one hand, like I want to sift
through this because on the one hand, I do believe people should have the
right to earn a living wage. People should be able to earn a living
wage, and to have a totally laisse fair, unregulated labor market where people
are doing backbreaking work for almost no pay and can't support families is not good.
And so there's a part of me that sees this impulse to want to
increase minimum wage as motivated by well meaning people. But what is the outcome.
The outcome is instead of people making fifteen dollars an hour and having more
employees and cheaper food, you now have much fewer employees who were replaced by
touch screens that don't work as well, and the food's more expensive. That
was the other thing I noticed was, you know, Taco Bell was usually
like you're guaranteed go to Spot for you know, super cheap food, and
it was definitely like a solid dollar more expensive than I would have guessed.
I mean, Taco Bell is still probably the cheapest thing going, but definitely
a solid dollar or so more than I would have anticipated. And a lot
of the things that I usually like getting at Taco Bell. They had different
kinds of combo deals that I usually liked, were all of a sudden two
or three dollars more expensive than they had been. So so this is what
twenty dollars per hour minimum wage does the response that businesses have. I feel
like liberals have this sense that they will tinker with some economic tool and nothing
else will happen in response. Just the thing that they have increased will change,
the thing that they have tinkered with will change, and all the other
factors will remain stable. And that's just not how life works. What's happening
in all these fast food restaurants, and I could see it, you know.
I was bopping back and forth between Fresno and Los Angeles over the course
of the last month or so will my dad was ill and he was being
treated at USC So I was going back and forth between here in LA and
I could see some of these restaurants, these fast food places when I would
make pit stops already sort of trying to get ready for the April first,
twenty dollars hour minimum wage. So I could see this coming. It's not
like they're just going to retain all their same workers and just bump up all
their wages, you know, from fifteen dollars an hour to twenty dollars an
hour and just keep the same staff, keep the same payroll. No,
they're all transitioning to touch screens all over California. They're firing, they're laying
off employees and putting in more touch screens. They're keeping the bare minimum skeleton
crew that they can maintain in the restaurant and they're putting in touch screens to
adapt. And some restaurants just can't even do that. I read a story
like on April second, that the Foster Freeze and Lamore just closed, just
shut down as soon as the April first twenty dollars per hour law came into
effect, that Foster Freeze had to close down. So everyone who works there
now is out of a job. Now, let's look at the counter arguments.
The counter argument to this would be, look, unemployment in California is
actually relatively low. We're okay with sacrificing some of that unemployment, with sacrificing
that having some people getting laid off in a strong labor market where there are
probably other opportunities for those people to get work in order for the people who
stay at fast food restaurants to get a better wage twenty dollars per hour on
the macro. Yes, on the micro level, it's very sad that the
Foster freeze and Lamora closes down. It's sad that, you know, Frank
and Gloria get fired from Taco Bell because they were the cashiers and now we
don't need the cashiers, so we laid them off. That is sad as
a human thing on the micro level. But at the macro level, Gloria
and Frank are going to be able to find another job somewhere else, and
the other people who you know, Teresa and Tiffany and Mike who are working
in the back of Taco Belt, their pay is all going to go up.
So at the end of the day, everything's actually going to work out
better. By us increasing the minimum wage for fast food at twenty dollars an
hour. That would make sense were it not for the inflationary impact of increasing
minimum wage specifically for that industry for fast food. Fast food is has been,
probably always will be as long as it exists in America, a barometer
for what is entry level unskilled work. This is the standard of what you
pay entry leveled, unskilled workers, the people who work at McDonald's, Burger,
King, Taco, be Well, et cetera. If anyone in this
state is being offered a job and the hourly wage is under twenty dollars per
hour, they can't do it anymore. Twenty dollars has become the de facto
minimum wage for all industries in California, not just fast food, not just
fast food restaurants that don't have a bakery, the Panera exception. Who's gonna
want to work for an employer who is paying you less than I can make
flipping burgers at taco, you know, flipping burgers at McDonald's. Also,
it's the fast food industry. When you increase the minimum wage for fast food
workers, what does that do. It increases the cost of food. It's
going to increase the cost of what people pay out for food over the course
of an average month. Yeah, I know, fast food's not good for
you. Fast food does, though, provide a certain important role of feeding
people, people who are on the go, people who are traveling, people
who are working. That is a somewhat useful role that fast food plays in
the American economy. So it's going to have an inflationary impact on the whole
job market and on food costs in general. And you might think, well,
if everyone has to make more than twenty dollars per hour, isn't that
just a good thing. No, this is inflation. This is the kind
of thing that makes inflation. If everyone's going to be making twenty dollars per
hour, well the value of the dollar just isn't what it is. It's
going to come along with higher food costs, higher grocery costs, probably higher
gasoline costs. People figure, well, if everyone's getting twenty dollars per hour,
I'll bump up the cost of this. I'll bump up the cost of
that. So it's not like a rising tide lifts all boats. It's almost
like it's almost like the Greek myth about Tantalus. He was the guy who
his punishment in the nether world was standing in a lake that's up to his
middle, except whenever he tried to bend down to drink the water, the
water would recede. And then he had a you know, an apple tree,
some kind of fruit tree above his head, and every time he would
reach up his hand to grab it, it would go farther away. It's
where we get the word tantalizing. It's kind of like that, Yeah,
you're you're reaching. Everyone's reaching up like tantalis to grab the fruit, but
the fruit just gets farther away. Yes, you're gonna make Yes, fast
food workers are going to make more money, but it's going to be accompanied
by inflation across the board. So I I just I mean, it was
just a very And there's also sort of this human element, like do we
really want economic policy where we are telling major corporations it is better for you
are one percent directly incentivized to replace your human beings with machines. And what
an advantage that gives some mega corporate fast food chains over and against you know,
for example, Fosterphree, I mean Posterphe's is a bit more of a
localized chain. It's not a small business, but it's not a national chain.
It's I think a kind of California exclusive deal. Yeah, they can't
afford to have elaborate touch screens in all their restaurants, so they had to
Basically they were like, this is not a sustainable business anymore. We got
to close the Foster Freeze and Lamore so there's a lot of aspects of this
that are I think just gonna be disastrous all around when we return how California
only seems to focus on one side of the spectrum when it comes to combating
poverty, increasing almost the supply of money side without actually lowering the cost of
anything. Ever, that's next on the John Girardy Show. I've noticed this
trend among liberals in California. Hear me out, follow me along if you
will. There's a problem in California where stuff is too expensive. Housing is
too expensive, gas is too expensive, food is too expensive. There's never
an energy costs in general are too expensive. There's never a sense from our
powers that be, the Democrats who control the state legislature, that we should
look at it, that we should address it from the perspective of what are
the things making it more expensive, and how do we get rid of those
things to actually bring the price of the thing down. It seems like that
is never explored, certainly never affected effected. What we always see happen is
some attempt to subsidize, either direct state subsidy or a mandate for other people
to pay more funds out. We subsidize the ability to pay for the cost
of the expensive thing, but we never do anything to make the thing less
expensive. It's crazy expensive to build in California, to build houses, So
what do we do. Well, we give a bunch of state subsidies to
help builders build so called quote lower income housing, and as a result,
like the only things that are profitable for builders to build anymore are are high
end construction, so very fancy schmancy apartments built in kind of around like Copper
River area or out in fancy parts of Clovis, where you know, the
only people who can afford to live there is like, you know, a
single nurse making you know, six figures, or a single lawyer making six
figures something like that, a divorced lawyer. But a lot of times I'm
looking at those condoms, I'm like, who can possibly afford to live?
Is this all just divorced lawyers and doctors or you know, high income like
nurses, Like who all is living here? Because it isn't like, you
know, it's not a guy who's driving an Amazon truck around delivering stuff,
Like I just am not sure there's no family living here obviously, Like I
just don't I cannot fathom who lives in these things. But basically that's what's
happened with californ An environmental law, the ability of lawsuits to stop new construction
projects through sequa. The only things that are profitable to build are really high
end things or California certified lower income housing where the state will give you subsidies.
So housing is too expensive, we subsidize stuff. Cost of living is
too expensive. We force the minimum wage to go up. We don't make
the things less expensive. We just force minimum wage to go up. Gasoline
is expensive, well, we'll give subsidies for lower income people for PG and
E will give subsidies for buying electric cars. But we're not going to do
anything to make the cost of gas go down, to make energy costs go
down, we just kinda give you. Basically, we're only attacking it from
one side. We're absolutely never attacking the problems that we see in our state
from the perspective of make the thing less expensive. Food costs just keep skyrocketing
up and up and up. So what's the solution, Oh, more food
stamps. I'm sure that's the proposed solution. I guess, I guess I
haven't heard anything definitive about that. But it's certainly not in the realm of
Hey, maybe we should repeal that law that's making pork prices so much more
expensive because of regulations about selling pork in California that the piggies need us all
that's you know, x amount of square footage, you know, Maybe we
should you know, these environmental regulations that we're putting on farms that make the
sale of different kinds of produce more exp Maybe we should do this to No,
we never address the actual things driving cost Our gas is super expensive in
California. Maybe we should roll back some of these California specific taxes and the
California specific you know mix for gasoline that California itself has a other states don't
have, which makes the refinement caught, the refinery process more expensive for California
specifically. Uh, maybe we should address that. No, we just said,
oh, no, one hundred percent of all new car sales will be
electric vehicles by twenty thirty five, so we don't even need to address it,
and we'll just keep subsidizing electric vehicles, which only super rich people can
afford. It's this insane pathology that California has where we never actually try to
address the actual cost of the thing, because guess what, we can never
actually catch up. We can never actually catch up. The left basically has
these sacred cows for why stuff has to keep being more expensive. We're not
gonna buck the environmental movement. That's chiefly the reason why so much stuff is
expensive, and we're not gonna buck organized labor who wants higher minimum wage,
higher minimum wage, rather than addressing well, why is fifteen dollars an hour?
Why is sixteen dollars an hour? Why has that not become a livable
wage anymore? Why don't we do stuff to address that? No, instead
we just say higher minimum wage, twenty dollars per hour for fast food workers.
Obviously that's going to have an inflationary effect on the entire labor market.
Obviously, that's going to have all kinds of I mean, anyone in California
who's making under twenty dollars an hour right now is probably gonna be able to
go to their boss and say, you're paying me less than fast food.
You give me a raise, or I'm out of here. I'm sure that's
happening all up and down this state right now. When we return is Valley
Children's short changing its nurses. This is the latest accusation that's next on the
John Girardi Show. It's now seemingly in local media open season on Valley Children's
Hospital. After the story came out about Valley Children's CEO Todd's Cunrapac that he
had certain years where he made a large amount in executive compensation. Valley Children's
tried to explain that this is because in certain years he was getting they sort
of had two years worth of bonuses happening in one year. It's actually,
though, his pay is really not that far outside the norm for executive compensation
for a large children's charitable hospital. And in part it's because Centrapac has met
a lot of these really significant benchmarks and people are not wanting to see that.
It's sort of turned into this open season. The Fresno Bee is very
all in on this story of Valley Children's as bad. They're all in on
this. I think Fresno b is all in on this, and there are
a lot of other sort of there are local politicians all in on this.
Gary Brettefeld, Miguel Arius painting this picture that Valley Children's Hospital is paying its
executives too much all right. I've talked about it a couple of times on
the show, and there are a couple of things about this that I think
are silly. So even in this attempt at there's a column in The Bee
by Merriic Worzowski talking about how, oh, they're bilking nurses, But then
he actually goes through the job listings and notes, well, it's actually not
yeah, I mean salaries for nurses that children is offering, it's not that
much less really, or in fact, kind of a little better in some
respects some ways of looking at it than community hospital. Yes, it's less
than what you'd make in Sacramento, but it's a different market. Like you
know, Fresno is a different market from Sacramento. Cost of living is different.
So even his attempt to sort of make that, oh, the Valley
Children's is bilking all these poor nurses while the fat cat executives are making tons
and tons of money. And it's like, well, nurses who do a
good job and work a long time at Children's do just fine. Right,
they're making good salaries. Let's not act as though a nurse working at Valley
Children's Hospital is living in the poorhouse here, all right, first of all,
and this is a thing, This is a narrative I just hate.
There's this idea. You'll notice this the more you see it. Nurses are
all wonderful superheroes. Doctors are bad. Nurses are all wonderful superheroes. Hospital
executives are bad. Paralegals are powering through and doing their best. Lawyers are
mean and evil. There's this sort of attitude that the mid like teachers are
superheroes and wonderful, the college professors like. There's this idea that mid level
professionals who can do what they do with a bachelor's degree or a master's somehow
are a more virtuous, noble calling than the person with the doctoral level experience.
And you'll notice this attitude like this in a lot of different fields and
across society, across the economy. I noticed this as a lawyer, where
people say, well, the paralegal, she knew more of what was going
on than the lawyer. And I don't know if there's some gender stuff there,
that paralegals were mostly women and attorneys were historically mostly men, although that's
very much change nowadays, just as likely to find a female attorney as a
male attorney just likely to find female doctors you are a male doctor. The
nurses knew more of what was going on then the doctors. I don't know
if there was some historic, sort of gendered thing to that, but I
will tell you, as a lawyer, I knew a heck of a lot
more than the paralegal. And all the paralegals at my office were good in
their lane. And that's good. They didn't go to law school, and
the attention to detail and the willingness to work hard was obviously much higher among
the attorneys. I'm not saying all paralegals suck. I'm not saying paralegals are
all lazy. I'm not saying paralegals are dumb. They are good for their
job. And I think, though it's a common sort of it's a common
sort of sappy argument to make that, well, the nurses, they're the
ones who really know what's going on. They're the real superheroes, not the
doctors. Why aren't we paying nurses more? Well, Well, because nurses
didn't go to medical school for four years, nurses didn't do a residency for
however, many years they were doing twenty hour shifts and busting their brains and
blah blah blah blah, like, yeah, we pay doctors more. They
have more education, more experience, more knowledge. The stuff they're doing is
more difficult. Yes, the CEO of the hospital needs to make more than
a nurse. It's a much more difficult job. It's a much more complicated
job. It's a much more high stress job. It's a much more high
money going one way or another job. Yes, critical executives at the hospital,
some of whom have worked there for thirty years, should make more than
a nurse. They are a lot more critical to the functioning of the hospital
than any one individual nurse. That's not to say nurses are unimportant. Nurses
are very important. Nurses are very good at what they do. Good nurses
are a godsend. But they're not the CEO of the hospital. They're not
administrators who run whole departments of the hospital. So this attack from the present
will be like, oh, look at how they're not compensating nurses. From
what I can see from their own story, nurses and children's are compensated pretty
much middle of the pack for the for the presne market. It doesn't seem
like it's that bad. A lot of hospitals are being bled dry because they
can't recruit nurses. They have to get travel nurses. And possibly that's because
they're in more rural parts of the state. Madeira community had that problem.
They couldn't get nurses, so they were bleeding money spending all this money on
travel nurses. Now there's this last point I sort of want to make about
the valued Children's controversy, and then I think i might shut up about it
because I think I've talked about it a couple of times over the course of
the week. And look, I've my dad worked a valid Children's for thirty
one years. I'm you know, you might argue John's biased. Okay,
yeah, maybe I am a little. Let me just point this out.
The accusation, which has no current evidence for it, that Children's was misusing
medical funds to fund executive compensation for its executive staff is silly. Medical For
those who don't understand this, okay, medical is state funded, state slash
federal funded health insurance for lower income people, people who are under a certain
income threshold. It's paid for with tax dollars. It covers a lot of
people. So you want to take medical to help people, but it doesn't
pay out very much because they don't have enough tax revenue to really pay for
totally covering the cost of care. Lots of doctors don't want to take medical
because medical is an absolute nightmare to work with. They never want to pay
out, and when they do pay out, often what they pay isn't really
even covering the cost of care. And this is a point that Children's made
in their response, that everyone seemingly is just blowing by because they don't really
understand how healthcare economics work. The idea that Valley Children's is rolling in California
state medical dough and that that is what they're using to pay Todd Cuntrapak a
five million dollar home loan is absurd. They don't get that kind of money
from medical. Money from medical. Obviously, you can make the argument all
money is fungible. They get this much money from medical, it's being directed
towards this value. Children's is probably losing money on their medical patients. On
the whole. Medical reimbursement for services provided to patients often is not even covering
the cost of the care. You're losing money. So the idea that they
are so flush with medical cash that they're going to use it to inappropriately overcompensate
their CEO. It makes no sense. The reason Valley Childrens can pay their
executives so much is for a couple of factors. One. Okay, so
the arguments in the coverage here have been not just that Todd Centrapack, the
CEO, is making so much money. And by the way, I haven't
necessarily agreed with Todd Centrapack on several things. I think during COVID he was
I thought he was a little over I thought he was kind of over conscious
about vaccines, and I think time has indicated that he would wound up being
incorrect, especially about school closures and things like that. I don't you know,
I'm not saying Todd CenTra Pack is above any criticism as a public figure.
But let's also note this. You know, what's the only hospital that's
being run pretty darn well right now is Valley Children's. But Derek Community went
out of business, it's closed, Saint Agnes is not doing great all right
in a number of respects. Valley Children's is clearly the best run. Valley
Children's, I think is the best run hospital in the Fresno market, and
they're able to pay their executives a bunch of money. One because they're sitting
on an incredibly successful investment portfolio. Well why do they have such a big
old investment portfolio. What's a children's charitable hospital to it? What would you
rather them be going out of business and be broke? You know, Madera
Community is seeing a whole bunch of medical patients too, just like Valley Children's
is they're out of business. I'm sure Mideric Community, which is they have
the investment portfolio Valley Children's does so that they could stay afloat What would you
rather have a nobly closed Valley Children's hospital or a successfully run Valley Children's hospital
that gets a lot of investment income. And that's why they're able to compensate.
That's why they're able to compensate, mister back at the level that they're
able to do so, and other executives, which, by the way,
some of those other executives they've been at Valid Children's for like thirty years.
They're doing a great job. They're not just going to artificially fire those people
to reset their pay scales. You want to retain those people. They have
thirty year history, some of them with valid Children's. I know a lot
of them came in around the same time my dad did. So this notion
that all of the valid Children's, you know, well they could have dialysis
systems, they have to refer people to stand for for dialysis. The fact
that they're paying the CEO one million dollars more than you think he should make,
that's not paying for a dialysis system. Sorry, you know, the
tens of millions of dollars year over year over year that that would take to
sustain certain of the kinds of services that Children's doesn't happen to have because it's
this level of a hospital. So in short, I just think this is
such a non story. It's a non story about the one very successful,
very successfully run hospital in Fresno. I just think it's I think it's unfair
and I when we return a troubling survey that indicates that most Christians in America
are complete morons who don't understand Christianity. Next on the John Gerardy Show,
So Christianity Today had a survey which they surveyed American Christians and asked them certain
doctrinal points. So this will be just a little bit of Christian doctrine but
kind of a pretty basic one here. First, they asked, and this
was actually just looking at evangelical Christians. Okay, so I guess Catholics are
not part of this, but I'll cross to the evangelical side of the street
to make some criticism here for the proposition that Jesus is a created being.
Seventy three percent of evangelicals agreed that Jesus is the first and greatest being created
by God. That is not right. Literally, the very fundamental Christian dogma
that Jesus is not created created, He's begotten, not made. That's what
we say in the Niceen Creed, the Apostles Creed, the Athenasian Creed.
This is a very fundamental idea that Jesus is God, God from God,
Light from light, true God, from true God. So he's not created.
His human body and soul were created. And maybe that's what evangelicals mean.
That's my hopeful looking at it. Well, then we get to this
other question that Christianity Today asked. Actually, this was from Ligandier Ministries and
LifeWay Research. I guess it was published by Christianity Today. Percentage of Evangelicals
who agree with the proposition that Jesus was just a teacher. Jesus was a
great teacher, but he was not God. Forty three percent of Evangelicals think
Jesus was a great teacher but was not God. I got bad news for
the forty three percent of evangelical Christians who do not think that Jesus was God,
just think he was a great teacher. You might be Evangelical by a
certain way of looking at it, but you're definitely not a Christian anymore.
You're kind of an arian at this point if you think Jesus was just a
great guy, just you know, kind of Socrates, Buddha kind of equivalent.
Great guy, super nice dude, not God though, Sorry, you're
an arian. That'll do it for John Girardi show. See you next time
on Power Talk.