What You Don't Know About The Federal Minimum Wage

Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have placed a significant minimum-wage increase at the top of their agenda for the 110th Congress. President Bush has signaled his willingness to approve it, using the increase as a lever for tax relief on small businesses. One would imagine that this show of bipartisanship springs from a national crisis, but George Will explains that the effort will benefit only a few, and not even the few that the politicos assume:
Democrats consider the minimum-wage increase a signature issue. So, consider what it says about them:
Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor. Only one in five workers earning the federal minimum lives in families with earnings below the poverty line. Sixty percent work part time, and their average household income is well over $40,000. (The average and median household incomes are $63,344 and $46,326, respectively.)
Forty percent of American workers are salaried. Of the 75.6 million paid by the hour, 1.9 million earn the federal minimum or less, and of these, more than half are under 25 and more than a quarter are between ages 16 and 19. Many are students or other part-time workers. Sixty percent of those earning the federal minimum or less work in restaurants and bars and earn tips -- often untaxed, perhaps -- in addition to wages. Two-thirds of those earning the federal minimum today will, a year from now, have been promoted and be earning 10 percent more. Raising the minimum wage predictably makes work more attractive relative to school for some teenagers and raises the dropout rate. Two scholars report that in states that allow people to leave school before 18, a 10 percent increase in the state minimum wage caused teenage school enrollment to drop 2 percent.
Will makes a point which many on both sides have missed, which is that the Bush administration's spending spree makes it politically difficult for them to oppose the increase. After all, Bush signed the pork-filled farm bill in 2002 that benefitted the large farmers more than anyone else, and he signed a highway bill in 2005 that notoriously contained over six thousand earmarks. If the government wants to give away money, why not to the poor?
But that's precisely the problem. They aren't giving away money, not from their checkbook, at any rate. They're distorting a market for a short-term political benefit that will do nothing to raise the standard of living for the people they supposedly want to help. Arbitrarily raising the prices of services and goods in a marketplace causes inflation, not an increase in real value. They're forcing consumers of labor to pay more for the same service, from which they will get no increased benefit -- and that means that they will have to pass the costs along to the consumers of their goods and services, all through the distribution chain.
Whose money is getting given away? Yours and mine, and all 479,000 minimum-wage workers, that's who. i can absorb the incremental loss of buying power, but the people at the bottom rungs cannot. If they're lucky, all that will happen is that their buying power will remain the same as it was after a short period of adjustment. More likely, some of their jobs will get eliminated as businesses have to support the cost increase in some other fashion than price hikes.
And it's not even the working poor that gets helped in the increase. The working poor may have started at minimum wage, but they move up as they progress in their jobs. It is an absolute fallacy to argue that minimum-wage workers have not gotten a raise since the last federal increase of the minimum wage; they get raises as they increase their value to their employer, not from Uncle Sam. Anyone who has worked at the minimum wage since 1997 is either switching jobs too often to get a raise or is not very productive. The people making minimum wage are by and large temporary workers and people who make most of their living through tips, the latter comprising three out of every five minimum-wage workers. It's not an accurate reflection of their standard of living.
Will has it right -- the minimum wage should be zero. Unfortunately, the politicians don't get re-elected when they tell Americans that they can't solve their problems, and so we get these splashy systemic solutions to issues that either don't exist at all or only affect a narrow slice of the nation. The rest of us get to pay for it, and the people with the least ability to withstand the economic consequences pay the most for it.
Perhaps we should insist on an increase in the minimum common sense of Washington officials.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Free to Say What?
by Baron Bodissey
We have freedom of speech in this country, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution.We’re free to say anything we like, with notable exceptions carved out after 220 years of jurisprudence — direct incitement to violence and shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater.And we are about to add another exception: “hate speech”. A generation of college students has come to maturity under a regime in which free speech most emphatically does not include the right to say anything that might be construed as hateful towards minorities, women, gays, disabled people, animals, trees, etc.These students are in the revolutionary vanguard of the softened-up, so that by the time Congress slips through a law that actually criminalizes “hate speech”, the constant repetition of the mantra “hate speech is not free speech” will have taken its toll. Everybody will already be used to the idea, will accept it as a given, and, after the required Supreme Court decision, the new, leaner version of the First Amendment will become the law of the land.If you think I’m being paranoid or overreacting, then you haven’t seen Rep. John Conyers’ proposed kid-gloves-for-the-Koran resolution, H. Res. 288 (the full text is here):

Resolved, That the House of Representatives —
1.

condemns bigotry, acts of violence, and intolerance against any religious group, including our friends, neighbors, and citizens of the Islamic faith;
2.

declares that the civil rights and civil liberties of all individuals, including those of the Islamic faith, should be protected;
3.

recognizes that the Quran, the holy book of Islam, as any other holy book of any religion, should be treated with dignity and respect; and
4.

calls upon local, State, and Federal authorities to work to prevent bias-motivated crimes and acts against all individuals, including those of the Islamic faith.

This is pernicious on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. It asserts that one person’s right to be respected overrides another person’s right to speak freely. It singles out a single religion, Islam, for special treatment. It accords the holy book of the Muslims more respect than is owed the flag of the United States.This is a CAIR-sponsored Trojan horse, ready to be rolled through the gates into the First Amendment. And its sponsor is about to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
When I defend the right to free speech, what am I defending?The Founders weren’t thinking about the right to print gay porn. When they crafted the First Amendment, they most emphatically intended to protect political speech. A lot of what passed for political speech in those days was insulting, libelous, vicious, and mendacious, but the framers of the Constitution were determined to leave it unrestrained.But what about today? What words are so dangerous, so foul, so beyond the pale, that the force of law is required to protect them?

Good old lawsuits-

Lawsuit fears close two Omaha sled slopes

Omaha is banning sledding at the Zorinsky and Cunningham Lake dams, which are both popular sledding spots. It is also banning ice skating and ice fishing on frozen ponds and lagoons in city parks.

The move is in response to a court decision that resulted in public entities being liable for injuries that occur at public parks and other recreation facilities.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-appeals_28met.ART.North.Edition1.3dacd4e.html

That's one of our favorite George W. Bush turns of phrase, and we found a wonderful example in a Dallas Morning News story about Texas schools' excuses for low scores on standardized tests:

*** QUOTE ***
At Jane Long Middle School in Bryan, a fire alarm went off during the social studies TAKS exam. Bryan officials argued that the alarm had distracted the school's black students, whose scores had fallen short of the acceptable bar.
*** END QUOTE ***

We'd love to hear the explanation for why the alarm distracted only black students.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyjLESgQMnc&mode=related&search=

No, I did not see BSU beat OU. Yes, I have heard it was the best game of all time. I am not happy about it.

Here is the 2 point conversion.

Associated Press Spins in Two Directions at Once

It’s the same poll, but the AP’s two stories couldn’t be more different. On December 30: AP poll: Americans optimistic for 2007.

And on December 31, after the editors apparently decided their first take was too positive: Poll: Americans see gloom, doom in 2007.

Sure, they want “peace”—as long as that peace involves Islamist rule. And if the US won’t support that goal, it’s because we’re suffering from “Islamophobia.”

"More than a thousand Somalis gathered in Minneapolis on Saturday to call for Ethiopian troops to withdraw immediately from Somalia.
Their protest capped a week in which transitional government troops retook Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, with the backing of Ethiopian infantrymen.
The U.S. government “gave the green light” to Ethiopia to work in concert with the transitional federal government in Somalia, and that action was “totally wrong,” said Hassan Mohamud. He is the president of the Somali Institute for Peace and Justice in Minneapolis, which organized Saturday’s rally.
“We ask the president of the United States, Mr. Bush, and his administration to stop supporting the terrorists. Ethiopian troops are terrorists,” Mohamud said to a cheering crowd.
Somali men, women and children gathered Saturday morning in Peavey Park in Minneapolis, and they carried an array of signs. Some said “No more war” and “Islam is the solution.” ...
Somalia has not had a stable government in 15 years, but many attendees at the rally said that the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) had brought some peace to the country during the past six months.
When that Islamic group took over the capital in June, many people were optimistic about the future, said Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in Minneapolis.
“They brought back security,” Jamal said in a telephone interview. “We were all hoping that the moderates would be able to take the lead in the organization of the UIC. But unfortunately, the radicals hijacked the process.” [Funny how that always seems to happen. —ed.] ...
A member of the Somali Institute for Peace and Justice, Abdul Mohamed of Minneapolis, said the military advances last week by Ethiopian troops created “one of the worst moments in Somali history.”
Mohamed disagrees with U.S. policy in Somalia, which he said is driven by “Islamophobia.”