Longmont Wants to Fight Inflation with Unicorn Dust

The city of Longmont—where logic goes to die—is kicking around the idea of hiking its minimum wage above the state level. The brain trust behind this experiment in economic malpractice comes courtesy of the fine folks on the Longmont City Council, who’ve clearly decided that pretending to control markets is more fun than actually understanding them.

The Bullet Point Brief

• Because nothing says “economic genius” like pricing entry-level jobs out of existence.
• Longmont thinks small businesses are cash-printing machines instead of barely surviving post-COVID.
• The city government believes it can fix inflation by throwing more fuel on the fire.
• Ignoring what happens in cities like Seattle and Oakland? Bold strategy, Cotton.
• Minimum wage hikes sound cute until your favorite coffee shop goes belly up—then reality hits harder than their rent increase.

My Bottom Line

Here we go again—another liberal fever dream involving fairy dust economics in one hand and a hammer for small business in the other. You wanna see how to strangle a local economy? Watch Longmont put mom-and-pop shops in a chokehold so they can virtue signal about “lifting people out of poverty.” Hey geniuses—it doesn’t help someone if you raise their wage only to eliminate their job entirely. You’re not fixing poverty; you’re just distributing unemployment evenly across zip codes.

Let me say this slowly for the politicians in the back trying to turn Colorado into California Lite: Government should not—and cannot—replace the free market. Artificially hiking wages isn’t compassion, it’s inflation with lipstick on. Businesses aren’t ATMs for your social experiments. They’re real people with real payrolls trying to serve real customers… until bureaucrats swoop in with a clipboard and tank their margins faster than you can say “price ceiling.”

Raising minimum wage without addressing training gaps, cost-of-living disparities, or employer strain is like duct-taping a leak and calling it plumbing—it looks good until everything floods. And Longmont? Well, it’s about to get soggy real quick if they keep up this nonsense. But hey, when city leaders are married to ideology instead of practicality, failure becomes policy—proof that common sense ain’t that common anymore.