Obama’s War

Posted on 16 April 2014 by eehines

…on women and on minorities in general continues apace.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would kill off 500,000 jobs…57% of those jobs are held by women.

Women would be disproportionately harmed: those 57% work out to a loss of 285,000 jobs for women. I suppose, though, that given this administration’s current buzz, President Barack Obama and his coterie view this as a general good.

Obama’s war is just as devastating on other groups of Americans whom his mouth holds in high favor, but his actions plainly disdain. The Employment Policies Institute has some of the sordid details.

This is a preview of Obama’s War. Read the full post (149 words, estimated 36 secs reading time)

Standards and Government Mendacity

Posted on 12 April 2014 by eehines

Some of you are familiar with EEOC v Kaplan, a case in which the EEOC sued Kaplan Higher Education Corporation for the crime of using background checks to screen job applicants prior to hiring them. EEOC’s case centered on the nonsense of disparate impact: in the present case, since blacks have more bad debts than whites—for reasons wholly unrelated to the questions at issue in Kaplan—they were more often disqualified from hiring by Kaplan than were whites.

This is a preview of Standards and Government Mendacity. Read the full post (374 words, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)

Helping the Low Wage Worker

Posted on 8 April 2014 by eehines

There are lots of sources for this help; I’m only going to talk about how government can help (yes, we can and should help the least among us, and yes, Conservatives, government does have a role, if limited: there are things government can do, even here, better than the private sector). The trick here is to prevent government mission creep and an ever-increasing government role—a difficulty that in itself makes a powerful, and not entirely illegitimate, argument against any government role at all.

This is a preview of Helping the Low Wage Worker. Read the full post (902 words, estimated 3:36 mins reading time)

Jobs Mandates

Posted on 5 April 2014 by eehines

Nearby is a post concerning the jobs impact of Obamacare costs being imposed on employers. Two other labor costs being considered for imposition by our Know Better, Progressive administration are minimum wage increases, and now an increase in the “minimum” wage of salaried managers.

Never mind what such a thing would do to productive company cultures:

…making more people eligible for overtime pay could remove the inherent incentive for lower-level managers to hustle to earn a promotion.

This is a preview of Jobs Mandates. Read the full post (281 words, estimated 1:07 mins reading time)

Obamacare Jobs Impact

Posted on 4 April 2014 by eehines

The American Health Policy Institute has some data [emphasis in the original]. Although their study concerned itself primarily with the cost impact of Obamacare to large employers—those with 10,000 or more employees—the study’s outcome has implications for our economy’s jobs picture.

The cost of the ACA…is estimated to be between $4,800 to $5,900 per employee.
These large employers will see overall ACA-related cost hikes of…4.3 percent in 2016 and 8.4 percent in 2023 over and above what they would otherwise be spending.
The total cost of the ACA to all large US employers over the next ten years is estimated to be from $151 billion to $186 billion.

This is a preview of Obamacare Jobs Impact. Read the full post (404 words, 1 image, estimated 1:37 mins reading time)

Unionizing College Sports

Posted on 30 March 2014 by eehines

In light of the NLRB’s ruling that Northwestern football players can join a union, I have a number of questions and concerns.

How many other college semipro sports will unionize? Will athletic departments survive the costs of unionization? Will ticket sales?

What will the NLRB’s ruling do vis-à-vis Title IX?

How will the vast majority of college and university programs that don’t make money from their athletic departments will survive? How will those programs within athletic departments that don’t make money survive–will the “football” union be willing to subsidize them? Even were they willing, will they have the money to do so for all?

This is a preview of Unionizing College Sports. Read the full post (324 words, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)

False Premises

Posted on 19 March 2014 by eehines

Bill Gates had a thought on how to help workers, especially low-skilled workers facing automation. However, he’s operating from a number of false premises.

This is a preview of False Premises. Read the full post (929 words, estimated 3:43 mins reading time)

More Governance by Diktat

Posted on 13 March 2014 by eehines

Rule by law, not rule of law. Here‘s the latest Obama installment.

The president plans to make the announcement [ordering Labor to expand overtime pay requirements to include millions more workers] on Thursday at the White House, a senior administration official confirmed to Fox News. Though the administration has claimed previous executive actions had bipartisan support, officials are acknowledging that this particular move [does not.]

These aren’t blue-collar jobs covered by “collective bargaining” agreements—union contracts—either. Now, managers and executive officers of companies will be…covered: fast-food restaurant managers, loan officers, computer technicians, and more.

This is a preview of More Governance by Diktat. Read the full post (276 words, estimated 1:06 mins reading time)

Jobs

Posted on 12 March 2014 by eehines

Here’s where we are, five years into the Obama “recovery” from the Panic of 2008:

4.1 million fewer full-time workers today than in November 2007
81% of workers are full-time now vs. 83% prerecession—and that per centage is of a smaller labor force than extant in 2007
per CBO, employment at the end of 2013 was about 6 million jobs short of where it would be if the unemployment rate had returned to its prerecession level…”if the participation rate had risen to the level it would have attained without the current cyclical weakness”

This is a preview of Jobs. Read the full post (143 words, 2 images, estimated 34 secs reading time)

Speaking of Out of Touch

Posted on 7 March 2014 by eehines

Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) demonstrated the depth of his condition of out of touchness in a Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. Although Sanders’ out of touchness is amply demonstrated by his full-throated defense of the dinosaur that is the United States Postal Service, I want to look at a couple of other things he said in his piece.

First, there’s this:

There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service. They see an opportunity for Wall Street and corporate America to make billions in profits out of these services….

This is a preview of Speaking of Out of Touch. Read the full post (502 words, estimated 2:00 mins reading time)

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