Copyright 2020 Tony Lima. All rights reserved.
Change.org is a website famous for hosting petitions for all sorts of causes. My serious advice is to never, ever sign a petition on that site. It happens that the wording of petitions can be changed at any time without giving up any of the current signatures. Change.org petitions are rife with fraud.
This first came up with a petition asking a member of the city council to resign. Imagine my surprise when I read the petition a few days later. Suddenly the ask was for an apology, not a resignation.
An Experiment
I started a petition asking California Governor Gavin Newsom to support raising the minimum wage to $25 per hour. Here are my posts.
You read that correctly. The original petition called on the governor to raise the minimum wage.
After collecting 22 signatures, I made a few changes to the petition:
The revised version asks him to oppose raising it and to also start the process of repealing the current law. For reference, the full revised petition is a pdf at the end of this article. Here are summaries. Note that the number of signatures did not change. In fact, I downloaded the signature list after making these changes..
For the record here’s the full text of the revised petition.
As economists we know that raising the minimum wage has many
