From the Contra Costa Times:
California's lowest-paid workers are in store for a 25 percent raise after lawmakers late Thursday boosted the Golden State's minimum wage to the highest of any state in the country. In the final hours of its 2013 regular session, the Legislature voted to hike the minimum wage from $8 an hour to $9 next July and $10 by January 2016 -- a move Democrats praised as a boon to struggling workers and Republicans lambasted as a "job killer." "I think the evidence is overwhelming that there is a job loss from these things," said David Neumark, director of the UC Irvine Center for Economics and Public Policy, who's studied minimum wage proposals. "It's a badly targeted policy."

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