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Muskegon County wants to build a new jail, and the county's prevailing wage law means local taxpayers could be on the hook for an extra $2 million for the project. Prevailing wage laws mandate that union-scale wages be paid on construction work funded by taxpayer dollars, regardless of the winning bidder. Local governments can do nothing about federal prevailing wage laws, which apply if federal dollars are used for a project. However, local governments only have to pay the prevailing wage on local projects if they have a local ordinance that requires it. Most of Michigan's 83 counties do not...

I post this item not to mock Mika Brzezinski. But her comments this morning were so illustrative of the liberal mindset--in ignoring fundamental principles of economics--that they are worth highlighting here. An entire Morning Joe segment had been devoted to discussing the wage dilemma in America. In the context of analyzing the right-to-work law soon to be signed in Michigan, the panel—apparently excepting Mika—agreed that we face hard choices here. We can artificially preserve high wages for a relative few, or let wages seek their natural level, providing more jobs at lower pay. As Joe Scarborough put it, we have...

Full Zero Hedge Article At This LinkIn the recent past we noted [6] the somewhat startling reality that "the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045." While mathematics is our tool - as opposed to the mathemagics of some of the more politically biased media who did not like our message - the painful reality in America is that: for increasingly more Americans it is now more lucrative - in the form of actual disposable income...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Pamela Waldron makes $7.75 an hour as a cashier at the KFC in New York's Penn Station, where she has worked for eight years. That's just 50 cents above the New York state minimum wage. The 26-year old nursing student, and mother of two, says she has asked for a raise but her pleas have gone unheeded for weeks. Finally, on Thursday, around lunchtime she joined a protest of about 40 fast food workers who walked out of their shifts, carrying placards and shouting slogans to bring attention to their cause of fighting for higher wages...

With more than 15 million workers in in the sector, and leverage over workplace standards across the supply chain, retail wields enormous influence on Americans’ standard of living and the nation’s economic outlook. It connects producers and consumers, workers and jobs, and local social and economic development to the larger US economy. And over the next decade, retail will be the second largest source of new jobs in the United States. Given the vital role retail plays in our economy, the question of whether employees in the sector are compensated at a level that promotes American prosperity is of national...

The rise in the consumer confidence rose more than expected. Despite real GDP growth hovering barely above 1% and the crash in durable goods orders, this is indeed a surprise. Or is it another Fed induced bubble? According to University of Michigan, consumer confidence has risen to Bush-era levels of September 2007. Just to put it into context, I put a yellow line through the 100 level. We still have a long way to go to get to 100 from 83.1. Here is a chart of wage income divided by GDP. Why are consumers more confident? Perhaps consumers are reacting...

If you guessed "renewable energy," you'd be wrong ... so wrong. Sure, the green-energy industry may have created some 28,000-odd jobs (a very far cry from the 5 million we were promised, cough cough), but it's important to remember that even those few "successfully" created green jobs are not necessarily productive jobs.The green-energy industry is only as big as it is because it's on the receiving end of a whole heap of different types of subsidies, from tax credits to loan guarantees to direct payments, and subsidies are always and necessarily designed to distort free-market signals. All the money poured...

The latest California community to face bankruptcy is Atwater, just down the Golden State Highway from Modesto and next to Merced. Atwater, like its neighbors Modesto and Merced, are still reeling from the crash of the housing market where prices have fallen about 70% from their peak. And unemployment rates are roughly twice the national average. Since I don’t have the house price indices for Modesto, Merced and Atwater, I will use the Case-Shiller Las Vegas house price index as a proxy. Like many communities during the housing bubble, expenditures were made based on increased property tax revenue. When the...

The U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 10% in October 2009 and has since slowly improved, flirting with 8% earlier this month. Despite the downward trend, the rate is still more than double prerecession levels. As the economy continues to recover and more people return to the workforce, many are trying to find the right career—one that is hiring and pays well. Knowing which jobs will be in high demand and pay the most is a good place to start. To serve as a guide, 24/7 Wall St. identified the best paying jobs of the future. These jobs will grow the...

Unemployment ebbs and flows, but one measure of the nation's economic health, average weekly wages, rarely dips. Until now. In the latest demonstration of the struggling economy that threatens President Obama's reelection, average weekly wages fell in 2011, one of only five declines since the category was created in 1978 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In a just-released review of employment in the nation's largest 322 counties, BLS found that weekly wages dropped over the year by 1.7 percent to $955 in the fourth quarter of 2011 from a high of $971 in the fourth quarter of 2010. That...

For the first time in four years in Michigan, the gap in compensation between public sector employees and private sector employees declined, according to research by James Hohman, fiscal policy analyst with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The average compensation of public sector employees (state and local government, public schools and universities) dropped from $60,620 in 2010 to $58,400 in 2011. At the same time, private-sector workers had an increase in average compensation from $55,922 in 2010 to $56,234 in 2011. “Throughout the decade, Michigan’s state and local government workers enjoyed robust increases in the value of their wages...

Rep. Joe Graves has been in the Michigan House of Representatives for a week but doesn’t mince words when asked about Michigan’s prevailing wage law. “I absolutely won’t support increasing any fees or taxes (for road improvements) as long as we have prevailing wage in Michigan,” he said recently at an Independent Tea Party Patriots Meeting in Clarkston. The Argentine Township Republican, who won a special election to fill the term of Rep. Paul Scott after he was recalled, vowed to work to eliminate the law that mandates that union-scale wages are paid on state construction projects. Prevailing wage laws...

Is Mitt Romney a Liberal?By: Larry Walker, Jr.As Economist Thomas Sowell relays, in his piece entitled, A Defining Moment, "Mitt Romney has come out in support of indexing the minimum wage law, to have it rise automatically to keep pace with inflation."But according to Dr. Sowell,"We have gotten so used to seeing unemployment rates of 30 or 40 percent for black teenage males that it might come as a shock to many people to learn that the unemployment rate for sixteen- and seventeen-year-old black males was just under 10 percent back in 1948. Moreover, it was slightly lower than the...

Get ready for the next big financial bubble—the growth of America’s homeless population. The biggest boon for the homeless was President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, that appropriated $1.5 billion to the Homeless Prevention and Rapid-Re-Housing Program that temporarily aided homeless and near-homeless households. According to a report issued Wednesday by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the program has helped more than one million impoverished individuals find housing, but it is set to end this fall. “The resources provided by [the program] have run out in many communities … and the debt and deficit at the federal level have already...

During the past 11 months, the Michigan Legislature and Gov. Rick Snyder have gone to great lengths to economize, taking considerable political risks to make tax dollars stretch further at the state level, in counties, municipalities and schools. But a major policy reform that would restore fairness and save taxpayer money has been overlooked. The state's prevailing wage law is ripe for repeal. The prevailing wage law requires that every time state money is used on a construction project (or even when the state guarantees bonds, which frequently happens on school construction projects), all workers must receive a compensation that...

Right-to-work legislation has been introduced in Indiana and may actually win Gov. Mitch Daniels’ signature by the time Super Bowl Sunday arrives on Feb. 5. The Great Lake State may need to follow suit to compete economically. Before it does, however, the people of Michigan should note that one city — Bay City —leapt headlong into the labor fray Monday night. Its city commission voted to amend the city’s prevailing wage ordinance to exempt contracts under $100,000 in value. The previous threshold was only $10,000. It also — quite significantly — eliminates the prevailing wage mandate when Bay City shares...

According to an IBD review of various economic data, while corporations and Wall Street investors have made significant gains under Obama's economic leadership, average Americans have seen their fortunes steadily decline. Since the start of the Obama administration, corporate profits have climbed 68%, and are now 19% above their pre-recession peak, according to the latest Commerce Department data out Tuesday morning.

Lawmakers in several states have vowed to pass undocumented employer sanction laws after the Supreme Court upheld Arizona's this year. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) has drummed up some support to pass a federal version in Congress that would require all employers to use the government's E-Verify database to ensure their employees are authorized to work--or risk losing their business license. Arizona provides a case study for the effects of a tough E-Verify law on the labor market. According to a study released this year by the Public Policy Institute of California, about 92,000 or 17 percent of the Hispanic non-citizen...

Over 100 Colleges and Universities Charge $50K or More a YearOctober 28, 2011 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I don't mean to harp on the subject of college tuition, but CNNMoney.com is reporting this: The number of colleges and universities with tuition and fees totaling more than $50,000 for a single year rose to 123 for the 2011-2012 year -- up from 100 institutions in the previous year." So 23 new colleges where it cost 50 grand minimum for a single year. Now, they point out in the story that this is more than the average United States salary. Do you know...

It's not a recession, it just feels like one. Industrial activity keeps rising, but other reports out Thursday showed real wage declines are accelerating and that job woes continue. Industrial output rose 0.2% in August as manufacturing activity expanded amid broad, auto-led gains, the Federal Reserve said. Wall Street expected no change. "It's still consistent with the idea that we're in a period of subpar economic growth," said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James.