Category Archives: jobs

Another Venue for Private Education

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In a piece about Amazon.com’s decision to drop $700 million on retraining/educating its work force, The Wall Street Journal‘s editors closed with this forlorn hope:

And dare to dream, maybe colleges will cut their prices to compete with Amazon U.

Sad to say, it is a dream: colleges have no need to compete, and so have no interest in cutting prices, as long as the Federal and State governments keep throwing money at them.

Watch, instead, the hue and cry from the Left to develop in opposition to Amazon’s (and others—dare I hope?) schooling, just as they actively oppose existing competition in K-12, the charter and voucher schools that put to shame the public schools.

Progressive-Democrats’ Minimum Wage Push

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Progressive-Democrats want to raise the national minimum wage to $15/hr.  Here are some back of the envelope numbers that could result.

The CBO says that the new minimum would cost 1.3 million Americans their jobs (in the optimistic scenario; their more pessimistic scenario had 3.7 million Americans put out of work): their current wage would go from $10.10/hr (CBO’s 2014 minimum wage which formed the core of their that-year outcome analysis) to $0.00/hr. The CBO also says that the $15/hr minimum wage would lift 1.3 million American workers out of poverty.

So, 1.3 million, or many more, Americans would lose their jobs so 1.3 million, at best, could get above poverty.

There’s more to it than that, though.

Based on that same $10.10/hr prior minimum that the Progressive-Democrats tried for just five years ago, the currently proposed job losses would result in a bit over $26.25 billion dollars lost to our economy per year through lost wages.  That’s based on only 1.3 million American workers being fired, mind you.  Balancing that would be that $4.9/hr raise (because, by CBO assumption, $15/hr is a non-poverty wage) for the lucky 1.3 million, or a skosh under $12.75 billion inserted into our economy each year.  That’s a net loss to our economy of some $13.5 billion per year.

If we adjust all of that for the actually extant minimum wage of $7.25/hr, the numbers shift to $19.5 billion per year lost to our economy in lost wages from those 1.3 million being fired, and a gain for the lucky ones of $20.2 billion per year.

That makes the Progressive-Democrats’ latest proposal a wash on wages in our economy.  Tell that wash business to the fired workers, though, and hear what they think of break-even.  Oh, and what was that, again, about “livable wages?”

The Progressive-Democratic Party

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…in microcosm.  Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for a Denver, CO, city council seat says openly that she wants to replace our capitalist economy and “usher in” “community ownership” of all property by any means necessary.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is silent on her goal, and by that silence demonstrates quite clearly that Party favors this push.

Keep this in mind in November 2020.

Votes or Humans?

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Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposed legislation Friday that would allocate $7 billion in federal grants to help minority entrepreneurs start businesses.

This is just more of the soft bigotry of low expectations inherent in Progressive-Democrats. They simply don’t believe that minorities can compete without special treatment, so they regulate the hell out of our economy and then generate handouts to prop up those most damaged by their regulations.

On the other hand, it’s a way to keep minorities trapped in Progressive-Democrats’ welfare cages, because votes.

And in the end, that’s all Progressive-Democrats see minorities as.  Blacks, Hispanics, women, these aren’t actual human beings, they’re just votes to be harvested.

No Fair

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The United Auto Workers lost another attempt to “organize” Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, TN, factory; its latest move was voted down last Friday 833-776.  Tennessee is a right-to-work State, and those factory workers rudely exercised their right to work free of union interference.

Naturally, the UAW has its collective panties in a collective twist.  The loss is unfair, you see, because it’s always unfair when a union (or any faction of the Left, come to that) loses a contest. Brian Rothenberg, a UAW spokesman, made this nonsense plain:

Our labor laws are broken[.]

Well, they must be—they don’t guarantee a union victory.

Rothenberg went on:

Workers should not have to endure threats and intimidation in order to obtain the right to collectively bargain[.]

Certainly.  And they are, for the most part, free of threats and intimidation in Tennessee, as they are in every right-to-work State.  Workers also, though, should not have to endure threats and intimidation in order to maintain their right not to have a union “represent” them.

These workers have spoken, quite clearly, twice on this matter, now, and similarly situated workers throughout right-to-work States have been loud and clear with the same message to unions trying to interfere with their work environment: “Go away, and leave us alone.  Quit bothering us.”

Will the unions listen to the workers?  Do they ever?