Free Republic

The average salary in the U.S. is not $7.50 an hour, as Mr. Obama seems to think, but $23 an hour — or triple the minimum wage. The jobs report told us something else that is crunching the working class. Workers are having a harder time than ever finding a full-time, 40-hour-a-week job. Employers we talk to tell us this is partly due to ObamaCare rules that are holding many new positions below 30 hours a week. (Since when is 30 hours a week a full-time job anyway?) The White House's new proposed overtime rules are another misdirection play: Mr....

When Maryland governor Martin O’Malley signed a minimum wage of $10.10 an hour into law this week, U.S. labor secretary Tom Perez argued that a higher wage would help growth in Maryland, saying “it’s good for the economy.” The governor’s press release supplied the context: Maryland needs help so badly because the state has “faced the worst national recession since the Great Depression.” Nor are Maryland politicians alone in working the Great Depression angle. Vice President Joe Biden likes to hold up for ridicule current critics of the minimum wage by pointing to the foolish negative reaction to the formal...

"............................Educated, articulate and well versed in the recitation of neo-Marxist agitprop, [Seattle Council Woman Kshama Sawant]clearly has read many books and been taught many things that aren’t so.Such is the case with Sawant’s core mission of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour because she believes it helps poor people. She is convinced that she can, by decree, override the laws of economics from her perch on Seattle’s city council. “Victory in the fight for $15 an hour will mean a substantial improvement in the standards of living of working people in Seattle,” Sawant...in a recent interview[,]“A real class...

President Obama used a recent weekly address to once again call for an increase in the minimum wage up to $10.10 per hour. The President urged Congress to pass legislation making this change, and praised similar minimum wage hike efforts underway in states and localities. He criticized some in Congress for standing in the way and promised to “keep up this fight” because “our economy works best when it works for all of us – not just a fortunate few.” Perhaps, before he again employs his lofty rhetoric in defense of this perennial liberal cause, the President should consider the...

One of the most liberal Representatives in Congress wants California to raise its minimum wage to $26 an hour. Appearing on Crossfire on Friday, co-host Newt Gingrich asked Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) whether it was a good idea for the mayor of Seattle to propose a minimum wage of $15 an hour. Lee said, "good for him." "In California, more than likely from what I remembered, a living wage where people could live and take care of their families and move toward achieving the American dream was about $25, $26 an hour," Lee said. When pressed further, Lee said she...

California Democratic congresswoman Barbara Lee expressed support for a $26 minimum wage in her state — a move Republican congressman Andy Harris encouraged, assuming jobs would rapidly flee California to his state of Maryland. Lee and Harris appeared Friday on CNN’s “Crossfire,” hosted by former Obama advisor Van Jones and former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The panel discussed the proposed increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour. “Let me ask you this question, you’re a good advocate for this,” Gingrich asked Lee. “The mayor of Seattle is proposing that the minimum wage...

That’s why I’m going to take action on my own wherever I can. To grow our economy from the middle-out, not the top down. To give every American who works hard a chance to get ahead.

If Seattle succeeds in raising its minimum wage to $15, the city will suffer.

Last November, Seattle elected a straight-up socialist to their City Council who, among other economic/social-justice aspirations, included the already popular idea of a minimum wage hike to $15/hour in her campaign platform. Evidently, the fact that that is now very likely going to happen in a gradual phase-in over the next few years isn’t quite good enough for her, via the NYT: Mayor Ed Murray presented on Thursday what he described as an imperfect but workable plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage and one of the highest anywhere...

The president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, announced a 30% increase in the minimum wage and pensions to protect Venezuelan people from an inflation that reaches an annual rate of almost 60 %. “Now, on the occasion of May First, I have decided to increase the national minimum wage and pensions of 30 % to bring the salary and pension levels for a proper life demand of our people,” said the president in a meeting with union leaders in Caracas. Maduro blames for the rising prices of consumer products to an “economic war” of enemies of the socialist government, and often...

Mayor Ed Murray delivered a major May Day victory for Seattle’s low-wage workers on Thursday, with a plan that will move big business and small business to a $15-an-hour minimum wage, over a sliding scale of three to seven years. “In seven years, the minimum-wage worker in Seattle will earn $6,200 more than a minimum-wage worker elsewhere in Washington, assuming a 30-hour week,” Murray said. He described unveiling of the plan as an “historic moment for Seattle.” A social gospel Catholic, Murray quoted Pope Francis on social justice and income inequality. He was followed shortly to the podium by ultra...

Hiking the minimum wage is exceedingly popular and a top economic priority of the current administration. And yet students who attend colleges in Illinois might be breathing a sigh of relief now that the proposed Senate bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 is going nowhere. But they’re not off the hook just yet. To wit, a bill is currently making its way through the Illinois state legislature, which if adopted would raise the hourly minimum wage to $10.65. Some universities, however, are warning that if the proposed law does take effect, many of their students would...

A emocratic bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 was met with overwhelming Republican opposition in the Senate today, where it failed to garner the 60 votes needed to move past a key procedural hurdle. The bill, which was introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), would have raised the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour over the next 30 months, after which automatic annual increases in the minimum wage would be executed to account for inflation. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee was the only Republican who voted in favor of letting a debate...

<p>A bill to increase the federal minimum wage stalled Wednesday in the Senate, in the latest setback for Democrats pushing a set of election-year economic bills.</p> <p>Republicans argued that the change would be too expensive for employers and would backfire by costing jobs. Fueling their argument was a Wednesday morning Commerce Department report showing the economy grew at just a 0.1 percent rate in the first quarter.</p>

Senators are expected to vote tomorrow on a bill that would raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, a well-intentioned though economically irrational policy change that few Democrats realize has a troubling racial history. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently reported that artificially inflating wages to this extent would cut about half a million jobs in the short run (though CBO concedes the figure would be higher in the long-run beyond their mid-2016 projections). Economists note those workers most likely to be cut are lowest-skilled, young, minority workers, who, as Reihan Salam of Reuters writes, need these roles to...

French economist Thomas Piketty's book "Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century" has been inspiring a lot of comment and controversy. The English translation published last month zipped to No. 1 on amazon.com. It has given a lift to economists on the Left who have cheered on Barack Obama's flagging attempts to make income inequality a voting issue. They have hailed it as "truly superb" and "extraordinarily important." Others, not all on the Right, have taken a jaundiced view. "All wrong" was the verdict of one. "The main argument is based on two (false) claims," concluded another. Piketty's title echoes Karl Marx's...

... And now, a bill by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, boosting today's $7.25 hourly minimum in three steps until it hits $10.10 as soon as 2016. His minimum wage bill is widely expected to join that list Wednesday, when the Senate seems poised to vote on it. Though it should win backing from nearly all of the 53 Democrats and two Democratic-leaning independents, few if any Republicans are expected to join them, leaving them shy of the needed 60 votes. ...

Yesterday I was interviewed for a student radio show, I believe from the USC Annenberg school. I have no quarrel with the staff I worked with, they were all friendly and intelligent. What depressed me though, as I went through my usual bullet points describing the "lukewarmer" position that is increasingly common among skeptics, was that most of what I said seemed to be new to the interviewer. It was amazing to see that someone presumably well-exposed to the climate debate would actually not have any real idea what one of the two positions really entailed (see here and here...

One of the many ironies surrounding President Obama is that for all his harping on income inequality -- his most recent obsession designed to stir Americans against one another -- his policies have exacerbated it. Obama, the self-professed bipartisan uniter, is never content to seek remedies to improve opportunity for all Americans. He has to have villains. His community organizing training and his disposition compel him to pit us against one another. No matter what the stated reason for his latest policy craze, almost everything he does is in service to his quest to fundamentally transform America from a society...

SEATTLE — Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has scheduled a news conference for Thursday to announce a plan to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. **SNIP** Committee members representing business and labor could not agree on issues like crediting tips and benefits against the $15 minimum. And council member Kshama Sawant revealed another hurdle -- she said there has been little talk of automatically increasing the minimum wage with inflation. “If going forward the new minimum wage does not have a cost of living increase attached to it every year of the phase in it's not going to...