A regulation directly affecting 8 million Americans that is yet another instance, as the WSJ put it, of “U.S. tax and regulatory policies that hamper the entire U.S. economy.”
Read my post, Fatca: Discrimination with no representation
Minimum Wage Laws Kill Jobs
Prof. Steve Hanke explains Minimum Wage Laws Kill Jobs
In the 21 countries with a minimum wage, the average country has an unemployment rate of 11.8%; whereas, the average unemployment rate in the seven nations without a minimum wage is about one third lower – at 7.9%.
Read the whole article.
Monday night Mike Rowe @mikeroweworks
Nick Gillespie interviewed Mike Rowe,
Rowe recently sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie to discuss his bad experience with a high school guidance counselor (3:20), why he provides scholarships based on work ethic (6:57), the problem with taxpayer-supported college loans (8:40), why America demonizes dirty jobs (11:32), the happiest day of his life (13:14), why following your passion is terrible advice (17:05), why it’s so hard to hire good people (21:04), the hidden cost of regulatory compliance (23:16), the problem with Obama’s promise to create shovel ready jobs (33:05), efficiency versus effectiveness (34:17), and life after Dirty Jobs (38:24).
Don’t miss also Mike doing a QVC almost-ad for gourds. Rowe worked at QVC years ago,
The $9/hr unemployment act
This is what teen unemployment has been for the last six years:
With that dismal number, the President proposes a 25% increase in minimum salary to $9/hr. The result? The least educated, experienced and skilled will be priced out of the market.
In today’s WSJ:
The Minority Youth Unemployment Act
A higher minimum wage will hurt Obama’s most loyal supporters.
The damage from a minimum wage hike depends on the overall labor market. If the job market is buoyant, as it is in the fracking boomtown of Williston, N.D., fast-food workers may already make more than $9 an hour. But when the jobless rate is high, as it still is in California and New York, the increase punishes minority youth in particular.
That is what happened during the last series of wage hikes to $7.25 from $5.15 that started in July 2007 as the economy was headed toward recession. The last increase hit in July 2009 just after the recession ended, and as the nearby chart shows, the jobless rate jumped for teens and black teens especially. For black teens, the rate has remained close to 40% and was still 37.8% in January.
A study by economists William Even of Miami University and David Macpherson of Trinity University concludes that in the 21 states where the full 40% wage increase took effect, “the consequences of the minimum wage for black young adults without a diploma were actually worse than the consequences of the Great Recession.”
William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, says that after the July 2009 increase 600,000 teen jobs disappeared in the next six months even as GDP expanded. In the previous six months, when the economy was still shrinking, half as many teen jobs were lost. The overall teen jobless rate was still 23.4% last month, which means demand for unskilled workers is low even at $7.25 an hour. Demand will be lower at $9.
As for that family Obama referred to,
But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong.
He left out that most minimum-wage earners are not the primary bread winner. Nearly 40% live with a parent or relative. The average family income of a household with a minimum-wage worker is about $47,023—which is far above the poverty line of $23,550 for a family of four.
Mr. Obama didn’t even tell the whole story about parents raising a family on a minimum-wage income. A full-time minimum-wage worker earns roughly $15,000 a year. But that worker also receives a cash supplement from the earned income tax credit of roughly $5,000, and many states provide benefits on top of that to reward working. That doesn’t count government benefits like food stamps, Medicaid, child care and more. According to data from the Employment Policies Institute, about two of every three minimum-wage workers also get a raise within one year.
There’s also the erroneous premise that people are forever stuck at minimum wage, when, in fact, minimum wage jobs are entry-level jobs where workers gain the experience they need to advance. More on that in the video:
THIS I could support: Entrepreneur visas
A New Push for Entrepreneur Visas
The Startup Act 3.0, a bipartisan Senate bill expected to be introduced this week, aims to get 75,000 new “entrepreneur visas” every year to founders who raise $100,000 for new ventures that hire at least two employees within a year and at least five in the following three years.
The measure also would create 50,000 visas per year for foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, and spend at least five years pursuing careers in those fields.
But those are not the kind of immigrants the Dems want:
Last November, the House passed a stand-alone bill that would have given visas to immigrants in high-tech fields. Mr. Obama opposed the bill, and the White House said at the time it “does not support narrowly tailored proposals that do not meet the president’s long-term objectives with respect to comprehensive immigration reform.”
Obama’s SOTU’S call for “comprehensive immigration reform” is not going to add any jobs to the economy, and it won’t create opportunity for Americans, nor would it provide incentives for integration and assimilation.
Bringing in highly-skilled entrepreneurs who will hire Americans (born or naturalized) will.
It’s always darkest before it goes pitch black
More #post-election info: 28% Latino poverty rate
Latino Poverty Rate Climbs to 28%
The numbers released Wednesday
a week after the election
by the Census Bureau are part of a newly developed supplemental poverty measure. Devised a year ago, this measure provides a fuller picture of poverty that the government believes can be used to assess safety-net programs by factoring in living expenses and taxpayer-provided benefits that the official formula leaves out.
Based on the revised formula, the number of poor people exceeded the 49 million, or 16 percent of the population, who were living below the poverty line in 2010. That came as more people in the slowly improving economy picked up low-wage jobs last year but still struggled to pay living expenses. The revised poverty rate of 16.1 percent also is higher than the record 46.2 million, or 15 percent, that the government’s official estimate reported in September.
Again, after the election, we’re told that
Hispanics and Asians also saw much higher rates of poverty, 28 percent and 16.9 percent, respectively, compared with rates of 25.4 percent and 12.3 percent under the official formula.
Related,
Hispanic Straw Men
Cross-posted at Liberty Unyielding.
It’s Friday afternoon, time for unemployment numbers!
Does that make James Pethokoukis and me “jobs truthers”?
How about Jack Welch?
Rick Santelli saw it coming,
How about these economists: Unemployment drop ‘implausible … a statistical quirk’?
Perhaps the unemployment figures are based on a poll.