Posted on 05/16/2015 5:18:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
Studies show there are three things you can do that will almost guarantee you will never live in poverty: (1) finish high school, (2) get a full time job and (3) get married, but wait until you are 21 and don’t have children until you are married. Do these three things and it’s very unlikely you will be poor. If you are, you won’t be poor for very long.
So how does public policy affect these choices? Inner city schools dominated by powerful teacher unions are not meeting the needs of poor minority students. The welfare state (185 federal/state means test programs) is designed from top to bottom to encourage single motherhood and penalize marriage. And virtually every public policy you can think of is making it more expensive to hire workers.
It is this last set of policies that I find most perplexing. In times past, the Democratic Party was the party of full employment. It wasn’t that long ago that The New York Times endorsed a zero minimum wage. Prominent Democrats once endorsed the idea of enterprise zones – places where there would be fewer regulations and lower taxes, so that job producing businesses would flourish. And although it originated in a Republican administration, Democrats have traditionally supported the Earned Income Tax Credit – under which low-income workers get a bigger tax “refund,” the more they work and the more they earn.
But these days we are witnessing backsliding. It’s as though the talking heads for the Democratic Party have not only forgotten what they learned in Econ 101, they positively reject it all. Hardly a week goes by without someone calling for a higher minimum wage on the editorial pages of The New York Times. In fact a recent Times editorial implied that employers have a duty to substitute for the welfare state. That is, if a Wal-Mart employee signs up for Medicaid or Food Stamps, that’s Wal-Mart’s fault!
The appetite for pricing people out of a job on the left is becoming insatiable – from minimum wages to paid maternity leave to paid sick leave to paid vacations to extending overtime pay to white collar workers to mandated employee benefits galore. Then there is ObamaCare.
Let’s be clear about what economic studies show. Equal pay for equal work laws have not reduced the men/women wage gap. Anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action requirements have not reduced the black/white wage gap. (Those gaps have narrowed, but not because of any law.) Minimum wage laws have not increased the income of low-income families. And employee benefit mandates are not paid for by employers or consumers or the tooth fairy – they are paid for by lower wages and a reduction in other benefits for the very workers these laws are supposed to help. Even health and safety regulations appear not to matter. There seems to be no evidence that OSHA has led to fewer worker accidents or deaths.
That doesn’t mean that government intervention in the labor market is benign. Every intervention raises the employer’s costs and discourages more hiring. As for ObamaCare, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan estimates that this one piece of legislation is leading to 4 million fewer full-time equivalent jobs.
As I wrote in a recent column at Forbes, summer jobs were often the first jobs for millions of teenagers in years past. They were the place where young men and women learned essential skills that let them climb the ladder of economic opportunity. After all, if you don’t get to the first rung, you are unlikely to achieve rung two or three. Yet last year, less than half of teenagers seeking a job were able to find one. Many aren’t even looking. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the July 2014 participation rate for 16 to 24-year-olds was 17.0 percentage points below the peak rate for that month 15 years ago (77.5%).
Here is what everyone needs to understand. It doesn’t matter what teenagers earn in their first job. Whatever they earn, they will likely spend on fun and frolic. But the skills they learn – showing up for work on time, following orders, being respectful – are skills that will pay off for a lifetime.
Meanwhile, employers are substituting capital for labor – including greater use of robots – just about everywhere in the labor market. For example, there is now a 14-arm, automated harvester that can wheel through rows of strawberry plants, distinguish the ripe from the unripe and pick the berries from the green leaves surrounding them. At $100,000, the robot is not cheap. But no one in Congress is insisting that farmers pay the robot more than it’s worth and there are no laws requiring farmers to provide the robot with Obamacare or other expensive benefits.
The Democratic Party is anti-anything that benefits Americans. Period.
And establishment Republicans are go-along, get-along. Period.
yep,that about sums it up...
At the same time, you have millions of voting Americans who are unemployed, and more all the time as ever-more jobs which were done in America are sent to every other country in the entire world.
GOP you are an elected party.
Your voters work. Start supporting American jobs. Not foreign companies, but companies who are hiring right here in America.
Bring back American jobs.
GOP you are supposed to be looking out for us.
You missed the most critical point about the strawberry harvester story. Those jobs are never coming back. Even if all of those foreign countries disappeared tomorrow and we had to produce all of those things here in the U.S., there wouldn't be anyone working in those factories because the workers have been displaced by robots.
As time has moved on, we have simply priced humans out of more and more jobs. I don't know what the answer is, but complaining about it isn't going to help.
The democratic party is pro-union boss and union hierarchy, and BOTH of those organizations are anti-worker.
Excuse me but ... bullcrap.
America needs to stand up for Americans.
It has always been anti labor and pro union, pro big corporations and big Finance. That’s where the money is.
Democrat policy is the systematic opposition to anything that makes the individual American less dependent on government.
While true, this confuses correlation with causation.
IOW, the type of people who do these three things are likely to not be poor for a host of reasons that aren't directly related.
Conversely, the type of people who don't do these three things are the type who are likely to become poor.
I’m happy to have a conversation with you about this, but “bullcrap” — followed by nothing of substance — doesn’t tell me anything.
Jesus Christ: You can’t impeach Him and He ain’t gonna resign.
Here is what I object to in what you wrote:
“Those jobs are never coming back. Even if all of those foreign countries disappeared tomorrow and we had to produce all of those things here in the U.S., there wouldn’t be anyone working in those factories because the workers have been displaced by robots.”
And I repeat. Bullcrap.
America needs to bring back jobs, right here to America.
GOP needs to bring back jobs, to America.
I’m sorry I used strong language, but that is exactly how I feel about what you said.
I feel it is nonsense. We can have discussions for a year, without end, and it will not change the fact that what you said is pure fantasy.
Bring back American jobs.
Bring them back to America, and GOP stand up for your voters, the American people.
How many Americans have you hired in the last ten years?
That is the absolute key to democrat policy.
The cry “Bring back American jobs” rings hollow when the economic structure for those jobs no longer exists. The problem faced by industry especially in major American cities is an inability to find workers who are trained and motivated. Countless good paying jobs are unfilled in Baltimore because no one is applying for them.
Motivated workers have little difficulty finding work. Unemployment compensation, disability, and a multitude of welfare programs all require the recipient to be unemployed. I know countless unskilled people who could not conceivably earn more than they receive in government benefits.
The Democrat party is nothing more than a criminalized front group that has sold their vote to the communists in exchange for free access to the treasury.
Here is a link to the strawberry harvester, with video: http://robotrabbi.com/2015/04/24/agrobot/
You said it
Very interesting. Thanks for the link
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