Category Archives: jobs

Income Inequality

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The Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party like to bleat about this and to complain further about how it has only gotten worse.

They know better.

Here’s a little tidbit, from Phil Gramm’s and John Early’s op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:

While the disparity in earned income has become more pronounced in the past 50 years, the actual inflation-adjusted income received by the bottom quintile, counting the value of all transfer payments received net of taxes paid, has risen by 300%. The top quintile has seen its after-tax income rise by only 213%. As government transfer payments to low-income households exploded, their labor-force participation collapsed, and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

That bit is disguised, as Gramm and Early point out, by the Census Bureau’s decision to not count taxes paid and Government transfers—welfare payments—paid when it measures income.

Of course the Left and their Party want to ignore actual facts—that’s demonstrated by that last part: [low-income household] labor-force participation collapsed, and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

Those are carefully created Government dependents—and votes collected in payment for those handouts.

Minimum Wage and “Must Pass” Bills

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Congressional Progressive-Democrats are looking for ways to pass a national minimum wage law through Congress.

Progressive House Democrats are rapidly searching for ways to revive the $15 minimum wage increase after a stinging loss in the passage of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus law.

Congressman Mark Pocan (D, WI):

We will get at least 50 votes in the Senate, and we will find a way to finally do what Congress has been negligent to ask for too long; whether it’s adding it to a must-pass bill or pushing it around those arcane Senate rules or some other measure, America will get the raise that is long overdue that we are committed to[.]

Along strictly Party lines and/or by being buried in a bill that Congress and the President will decide the nation can’t exist without.

Not that anyone in the Progressive-Democratic Party cares about bipartisanship. Here’s Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN):

We should not allow any obstacles to get in our way as we push for this policy. It’s imperative that we explore every avenue, every strategy, that will allow us to push through[.]

And here’s the utter contempt for those ordinary Americans who run the small and mom-and-pop businesses that will be most damaged by a nationally mandated minimum wage. Congressman Donald Norcross (D, NJ), Co-Chair of the Progressive-Democrats’ Congressional Labor Caucus insists that:

small business owners opposed to a $15 minimum wage hike are crying “crocodile tears,” arguing that “they should be happy because it levels the playing field with competition; across the street will be paying the same thing….

Yeah—those whiners should be satisfied that all of them are being equally damaged. Never mind that they aren’t only competing against those “across the street;” they’re also competing against the major businesses and chains—who can handle a mandated increase in wage.

But hey—the Progressive-Democrat knows far better, from the august heights of his Beltway bubble, than do actual business owners and operators what the situation is on the ground.

There’s a hint buried in there, though, somewhere. If the concept of a Federally mandated minimum wage can’t pass through Congress as a stand-alone bill, maybe it’s just barely possible that a Federally mandated minimum wage is a terrible idea, a bad law, and something that us Americans—and us actual business owners—don’t want.

Do It Our Way

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…or else.

The Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled the [minimum wage] increase cannot be included in the effort to pass the [Wuhan Virus] relief package through a procedure known as budget reconciliation….

The Progressive-Democrats can’t get their way legally, within the boundaries of our Constitution, so

Ilhan Omar @IlhanMN
Abolish the filibuster.
Replace the parliamentarian.
What’s a Democratic majority if we can’t pass our priority bills? This is unacceptable.

Get rid of anyone and anything that gets in our way.

This is what Government looks like under a Progressive-Democratic Party reign of any duration. This is the fate of individual liberty under a Progressive-Democratic Party reign of any duration.

This is the damage that can be done, and is being done, to our republic in only a couple of months, much less the two years of a session of Congress with Progressive-Democrats controlling each house of Congress and the White House.

“Troubled by the Strikes”

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Recall the duration of school closures due, allegedly, to the Wuhan Virus situation in our nation. Not everyone is on board with the teachers unions’ attitude toward reopening our schools and getting our children back to in-person learning—where they actually could learn and where they, and school staff, would be far safer than either are cooped up at home.

Tommy Schultz, Vice President of Communications and Marketing for the American Federation for Children:

For the past year, there has essentially been a national teachers union strike that has left tens of millions of families without access to an adequate education[.]

And

This will haunt our country for decades to come, and the teachers unions’ blatant refusal to [follow] science in the name of political extortion is outright shameful[.]

You bet. And the unions’ strike demands? A guarantee of perfect safety. Oh, and more money. Billions of dollars more money.

It’s not just the unions, though. Here’s a teacher, Rebecca Friedrichs.

Most good teachers are deeply troubled by the strikes. We never want to deny the children even one day of learning, and we understand that we are servant leaders to those children.

That is, to use the technical term, a crock; it’s just porch dog yapping. If “good teachers” actually were troubled by the strikes, they’d tell their union bosses to take a hike, and they would go back to the classroom.

Friedrichs also used to be a union official, and she was the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v CTA, through which she and some of her colleagues tried to get the right for teachers, et al., to decide for themselves whether or not to fund unions. That makes her empty rhetoric all the more useless.

Moreover, although Friedrichs’ suit failed at the Supreme Court when the short-handed Court voted 4-4, nothing in that failure forced union members to stay union members. They were, they are, they always have been free to stop being card carriers, to leave the union, and thereby to regain their right to decide.

There’s also the meme that teachers are afraid to cross their unions. They may be, but they’re only afraid of their own mental creation of union responses—which in the end, are only words. And so we have more crockery.

Still, if teachers really are so timid, it’s time for adults to step up: school boards and local and State governing jurisdictions need to move to decertify the unions, fire the teachers who won’t go back to work, and redirect the funds originally allocated to closed schools to private, parochial, voucher, and charter schools that are open. After all, if a school isn’t operating, it doesn’t need any money.

‘Course, that takes the true adults—We the People, particularly us parents—to do our jobs and fire reluctant board members and politicians and elect those who will take prompt, decisive action.

“Working Off” Student Debt

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section posited an alternative to student debt: trade it for community service.

I would readily support loan forgiveness if the beneficiary were required to do community service for the forgiven debt.

Only so long as the community service work is low-skill, low-education work, with the student debt scofflaw—because that’s what he still would be—working directly under the controlling supervision of a low-skill, low-education person who’s had that job for a while.

Let the scofflaw see who he’s displacing with his preciousness and his debt-ducking.

Let him see the college student, during the school year, trying to earn some night shift money with which to pay for some college without “borrowing” money.

Let him see the high schooler trying to earn some summer job money and to obtain some initial, entry-level work experience for his future use in working his way up the employment and economic ladders.

On that last, especially, I employed a high school sophomore last summer to mow my lawn, edge it, and clean the sidewalk of the mowing and edging detritus. I ordinarily do my own yard work, but this enterprising young man, by his enterprise, earned the job. A student debt scofflaw would get this sort of work from me only if he worked under the hiring and firing authority of my high school sophomore contractor. Which would give the sophomore some valuable supervisory experience, too.

Which supervisory experience also would benefit those other low-skill, low-education workers for whom the community service debtors would be working.