Editor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the Pacific Research Institute. To read the entire article, click here.

A July 2025 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) concluded that the recent increase in the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour created “a loss of 18,000 jobs in California’s fast food sector relative to the counterfactual.” Not surprisingly, Gov. Newsom was none too pleased.

As the New York Post reported,

Newsom’s deputy director of communications Tara Gallegos disputed the findings of the piece, pointing out to Fox News Digital that the research paper was linked to the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank she claimed has published ‘false or misleading information’ about California’s minimum wage hike ‘that later had to be completely retracted.‘

Gallegos also shared a San Francisco Chronicle article from Oct. 2024, which stated that the results of the wage hike ‘defy a lot of the doom-and-gloom predictions made when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB1228 back in September 2023.‘

Often someone attacks the researchers rather than the research because the facts are not on their side. And this is the case with the impact of the minimum wage increase.

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