Posted on 11/02/2014 7:11:04 AM PST by Kaslin
Conventional wisdom says that Democrats wanted to campaign this year on jobs and the economy. They were supposedly thrown off message by ISIS and the Ebola scare. But if voters re-focus on jobs and the economy, do the Democrats have a credible plan to offer them? I tried to find out.
To begin with, the Democrats have a terrible record to defend. As former US Senor Phil Gramm and Mike Solon wrote in the Wall Street Journal the other day:
“The Obama recovery is the weakest in postwar history. If the Obama recovery had been as strong as the average of the previous ten postwar recoveries, 13.9 million more Americans would be working today and the average real per capita income of every man woman and child in America would be $6,308 higher.”
And remember, early on the Democrats not only controlled the White House and the House of Representatives, they had a filibuster-proof Senate. They could have passed any economic agenda they wanted.
So looking back, what do they wish they had done that they didn’t do? Or, going forward, what do they want to do in the future that they didn’t do in the past?
To answer these questions, I went to the web site of the Democratic National Committee. There I discovered under “Jobs and the Economy” that the two most prominent agenda items were raising the minimum wage and giving women equal pay for equal work. These are also the two issues mentioned most frequently by Democrats on TV talk shows. What do economists have to say about them?
Minimum wage. It used to be that a heavy majority of economists were opposed to minimum wage laws. A New York Times editorial in 1987 reflected that consensus when it called for the complete abolition of the minimum wage (See David Henderson’s description.) Today the profession is more evenly divided – in part because recent studies have cast doubt on the job destroying effects of small increases in the minimum wage. But there is one argument no economist is making. No one is saying that an increase in the minimum wage will create jobs. Making labor more expensive is not the way to encourage employers to use more of it. And for that matter, no one is saying that an increase in the minimum wage will boost economic growth either. At least no economist.
My opposition to the minimum wage law is based not so much on economics as on a more fundamental social problem. The law has a disproportionate impact on low-income minority youth. One commonly repeated estimate is that 10 percent of the work force got their first job at McDonalds. The estimate hints at a very fundamental truth: no one gets a second or third job until after he gets his first job.
People have to start somewhere. And it really doesn’t matter very much what wage teenagers are paid. What’s more important is that they learn to show up for work on time, follow orders and be respectful. If they don’t learn those habits, they will be unemployable forever.
A lot of young people aren’t getting to that first rung of the ladder. More than one in five back youths between the ages of 16 and 24 are neither working nor in school. And as Taco Bell and other fast food outlets substitute mobile ordering apps and other labor saving devices in response to the higher cost of teenage labor, more of them will be in that predicament.
Equal Pay for Equal Work. A lengthy essay by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz bemoans the fact that women on average make 77 percent of what men make and implies that this is the result of labor market discrimination. Nowhere does she acknowledge discrimination based on gender has been illegal under federal law for 50 years! And nowhere does she acknowledge that economists have studied men/women earning differences for decades and found that discrimination plays a negligible role. For example, June O’Neill, an economist who used to direct the Congressional Budget Office, and her husband Dave O’Neill have produced a comprehensive review of the literature. In my review of their book, I wrote:
“As for the wages of men and women, the O’Neill’s find no evidence that anti-discrimination policies have made a difference, including the actions of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP)…”
“In addition to years of schooling and test scores, men and women differ in the amount of work they do. Men are more likely to work full-time; and among full time workers, men work 8%-10% more hours than women. Also, men typically accumulate more continuous work experience and therefore acquire higher productivity in the labor market. The gender gap shrinks to only 3½ % when adjustments are made for work experience, career breaks and part-time work.”
So what would more legislation accomplish? It would lead to more lawsuits, more legal fees and more court costs. Would that encourage employers to hire more women? You decide.
Buy American.
NOBODY is saying this, as we send ever more jobs to communist China.
Someone will eventually get. And people will elect whomever it happens to be.
GOP be the ones who support American jobs.
By taking our tax payer money and funneling it to the sh## who chose to do nothing
The Democrat’s Job Plan is to burn the country to the ground, both literally and figuratively, under the theory that rebuilding the county their image will create many new jobs.
Well, it could create more jobs for lawyers and court employees, so that's something.
The Dems consider people receiving government benefits to be employed.
“Democrats wanted to campaign this year on jobs and the economy”
Baloney!
A few years ago before Christmas, I did a search for American made toys. I found very few, and they were too expensive for me. Same with clothes.
Democrats want to create jobs by growing government. There must be lords of the castle to keep the surfs toiling away to support them.
Shovel ready jobs guess how that turned out.
The democraps don’t know economics or business, only government. They do not know how to created jobs. They have had 6 years to do so and its gotten worse; more people out of the work force than ever before, real income down from 6 years ago, record number of people on food stamps, ghetto, ghetto, ghetto. etc.
1. Simplify business regulations. There are WAY too many laws "on the books" that are unneeded and/or obsolete and should be phased out. For example, we should have a single 50-state standard for air and water pollution control and definitely a single standard for cleaner-burning gasoline mixes.
2. Drastically overhaul our taxation system. The current income tax code based on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code plus additional rulings is around 75,000 pages long of code so complex that it makes James Joyce's famously unreadable Finnegans Wake almost readable in comparison. No wonder why the non-partisan Tax Foundation estimates the current tax code costs US$1 TRILLION per year in compliance and economic opportunity costs. A switch to the flat tax Steve Forbes proposed 14 years ago should happen as soon as possible, then in 3-4 years time we repeal the 16th Amendment and replace the income tax with a true consumption tax like FairTax (H.R. 25/S. 122).
In a free market, there is a tendency toward an equalization of wage rates for workers of the same degree of ability. The basis of the tendency toward equality is the fact that rational workers prefer to earn a higher income rather than a lower income, and therefore, seek higher paying jobs in preference to lower paying jobs. The movement of labor into the higher paying fields and out of the lower paying fields reduces wage rates in the higher paying fields and raises them in the owe paying fields. The stopping point is an equality of wage rates.So the solution of unequal pay for women is more freedom and not less.
Once the free economy reaches a state of full employment,when women with high ability and productivity start leaving the jobs that are too low paying, employers will have to start raising their wage rates to retain them and attract them.
Yes.
Almost anything would be better than the patched up mess we have now.
We have just about become the Soviet Union with lawa and regulations. In fact, some say we have eclipsed them and I believe that to be correct. After all, they did not have the DOE, HHS, OSHA, IRS, DOL and EPA.
Recovery!!!???????? Haha. Sorry no banana! The propaganda mass media can keep repeating that word all they want but it doesn’t change the fact we have never ever ever had do many unemployed people and 46 percent of those college grads that do somehow manage to find jobs are getting mcD burger flipping and other work that does not require a college degree.
Actually, the Dems have done a fabulous job of creating jobs already. Just not in the US.
The final 3.5% might be accounted for by the biological fact that on average male brains are about 10% larger than female brains. There is wide deviation at the individual level though so this generalization is only useful at the summary level, such as explaining the 3.5% pay delta.
Put everyone on Minimum Wage ? Then companies can hire tons of workers to nothing just like Government
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