On September 30, Florida's minimum wage reaches $15 an hour, the last step of a phase-in Florida voters approved by constitutional amendment back in 2020 — a dollar a year, on a predictable schedule, ending exactly where it was designed to end. Tipped workers move to $11.98. After this year, future increases index to inflation automatically instead of requiring another ballot fight. It's about as clean a piece of policy design as minimum wage law gets: voters decided, it phased in on schedule, and nobody had to relitigate it year after year.
I'd normally have more reservations about a state-mandated wage floor than this — price controls on labor have real employment effects at the margins, and I don't think that concern disappears just because the number sounds good in a headline. But Florida's version is the least objectionable form of it: gradual, telegraphed years in advance, indexed going forward instead of subject to political whim. Businesses had six years to plan around it. That's not a wage floor sprung on anyone.
Here's the catch, and it's the same one running through everything I've written about wages this week: I've already shown you the numbers on real wage growth this year — four straight months of inflation eating the entire nominal gain. A minimum-wage worker going from $14 to $15 gets a 7.1% raise on paper. If food, fuel, and housing costs have moved anywhere close to the pace they've moved for everyone else this year, a meaningful chunk of that raise is gone before the first paycheck clears.
This is why sound money isn't a side issue to wage policy — it's the whole game. You can mandate a higher number on the paycheck, and Florida just did, responsibly, with real lead time. But if the dollar behind that number keeps losing value at the rate it's been losing it, you're not raising anyone's standard of living. You're just changing which number gets printed on the check while the government's own spending and monetary choices quietly claw the difference back.