Category Archives: jobs

Lawlessness

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Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is busily mandating prevailing-wage requirements for contracts let by the State’s government. Never mind that she’s defying the will of the legislature—and in the present case, the will of the citizens of Michigan—in doing so.

…a citizen initiative under the Michigan Constitution. We collected tens of thousands of signatures, sending the issue straight to the Legislature. Lawmakers overwhelmingly stood with taxpayers, bypassing the governor [then-Governor Rick Snyder (R)] and ending prevailing wage for the whole state.

It hardly matters, though, since Progressive-Democratic Party politicians like Whitmer think petty laws don’t apply to their august selves.

Jimmy Greene, Associated Builders and Contractors of Michigan President, who spearheaded that citizen initiative, isn’t done, though, and neither are the good citizens of Michigan.

So with the help of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, we’ve filed a lawsuit asking state courts to throw out the prevailing wage.

The fight still won’t be done, though. The suit is a necessary step, but even with a victory in the courts, there’s no reason to believe Whitmer’s bureaucrats won’t tacitly enforce the union wage business simply by which companies they select for contract award and the weasel-worded pseudo-rationales those bureaucrats provide.

It’s necessary to take the next couple of steps, also: vote the Progressive-Democrats out of office en masse in Michigan, and then the newly installed Executive Branch politicians will need to follow through and fire the bureaucrats, also en masse.

Biden Paying Interns

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In a first for our Federal government, Presidential interns will be paid, per current President Joe Biden (D).

The White House will offer a $6,000 stipend to its interns, beginning with the summer class which will work from June 20 to August 12.

$6,000 for seven weeks. But will they be good-paying union jobs?

I have another question, too. We’re two summers into Biden’s term, and he’s only just now getting to this. Why? Did he not know his interns have been unpaid? Is he only now getting told this, like he was “slow” to get told about baby formula problems?

A Bit More on Student Debt

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I wrote a bit ago about what colleges and universities should be required to do regarding student loans and student debt.  Here’s a bit more concerning why college and university management teams’ feet should be held to the fire. Mike Brown, writing for lendedu, has some data that compares, by school, student salary expectations with salary reality. In general,

median expected salary after graduating was $60,000, but the PayScale data showed that the typical graduate with zero to five years experience makes $48,400.

Brown published salary expectation vs reality for 62 schools; here are those data for the first 15 schools in his table:

School Actual Early Career Pay (0-5 Yrs. Experience) Expected Median Salary (0 Yrs. Experience) Percent Difference
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale $49,100 $70,000 70%
Washington State University $54,600 $70,000 78%
Central Michigan University $47,000 $58,500 80%
University of Louisville $48,800 $60,000 81%
East Carolina University $47,200 $58,000 81%
University of California, Riverside $54,000 $65,000 83%
University of Tennessee, Knoxville $50,200 $60,000 84%
Binghamton University $58,900 $70,000 84%
University of Illinois at Chicago $55,000 $65,000 85%
Temple University $50,800 $60,000 85%
University of Alabama $51,200 $60,000 85%
University of Colorado Boulder $55,600 $65,000 86%
University of California, Los Angeles $60,000 $70,000 86%
Kansas State University $51,600 $60,000 86%
Oklahoma State University $51,700 $60,000 86%

 

Who sets these expectations? That’s not clear. Who allows these expectations to stand uncorrected? The management teams at those colleges and universities.

Allowing this distortion to stand uncorrected is one more reason colleges and universities should be required to publish

  • graduation rates for their students given
    • 1 year of attendance
    • 2 years of attendance
    • 3 years of attendance
    • 4 years of attendance
    • 5 years of attendance
  • by major, the average and median salary for their graduates one year after graduation and five years after graduation—note that these data are not for one and five years of employment

The data from Brown also demonstrate why colleges and universities should be required to play the decisive role in lending money to their students and prospective students. Colleges and universities should be required, with respect to borrowings taken in order to attend the college/university, to

  • be the lender for the majority of the money borrowed by each student or student’s parent/guardian and not allowed to sell or otherwise transfer the loan, or
  • be the co-signer with the borrowing student or student’s parent/guardian on loans the student or student’s parent/guardian originates, or
  • be the loan guarantor of such loans, or
  • any combination of those three

Colleges and universities must absorb the risk of students’ or parents’/guardians’ borrowing in order for the student to attend their school. It’s the colleges and universities that are misleading the students concerning the value of the degrees gained, whether that misleading is overt through their setting inaccurate expectations, or passive through their silence regarding inaccurate expectations.

Corporate Tax Rate Cuts

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…must lead to Federal government tax revenue reductions. Or so Progressive-Democrats claim. Say it ain’t so, Joe. President Joe Biden (D) won’t say it, though, so I will. It ain’t so, as this table from The Wall Street Journal illustrates.

When you leave money in the hands of private economy operators—individual or corporate—they do productive things with their money. That productivity leads to more R&D, more innovation, more physical capital improvement, physical capital expansion, wage increases, more jobs (which represent the mothers of all wage increases, for many, from zero wage to an actual paycheck), the latter two leading to human capital improvement, which leads to greater private economy demand for goods and services, which leads to greater production of those goods and services, expanding the economic virtuous circle.

In comparison, Government merely redistributes from one operator—individual or corporate—to another its collected revenues, producing very little. Even the redistributions to noneconomic operators—individuals on welfare, for instance—the resulting production has less value than the transferred funds. The recipients of those redistributions have very small demand increases from the redistributions since they start out with small demands: they’re unemployed or employed only in low-wage, low-value jobs, and all those redistribution payments do is trap those folks in those two statuses.

All of that is even before any discussion of any need for the tax revenues Big Government Progressive-Democrats claim exists.

Inflation and Wages

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In a Tuesday Wall Street Journal editorial, the editors talked at length and some depth about President Joe Biden’s (D) lies regarding today’s—actually, the last 15 months, the term of his Presidency—inflation as being all the Russian’s, Vladimir Putin’s, fault.

There’s an aspect of the Biden inflation that’s of particular interest though, and that’s the damage Biden is inflicting on us American workers.

[T]he overall price news is terrible for American workers and consumers. The March surge means that real wages fell 0.8%, or a decline of 2.7% in the last year. (See the nearby chart.) Real average weekly earnings fell a striking $4.26 in March alone, and they’ve fallen nearly $18 during the Biden Presidency.

The graph below illustrates the matter since March a year ago.

This is a lot like the previous Progressive-Democrat administration, that of ex-President Barack Obama (D). Real wages declined (though not as dramatically) during most of his time in office, also due to his and his Party cronies’ anti-business policies—which amounted to anti-worker policies.