Some statistics indicate a strong and growing jobs situation in our economy. Other statistics…not so much.
A couple of the latter, for instance.
The labor force participation rate has dropped for the second month in a row in the face of burgeoning inflation and wage growth that isn’t keeping up, so that real wages—what your money actually can buy in the grocery store and gas station and for your home in the form of electricity—are shrinking drastically.
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.
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?
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:
…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 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.
A State government is reaching into the business decisions of private enterprise, presuming to dictate to State-domiciled businesses what their business decisions must be in an otherwise competitive labor market. Here’s Pennsylvania House of Representative Jennifer O’Mara (D, Delaware):
The Healthy Employee and Healthy Workplace Act will help Pennsylvania’s families by requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to their employees. Workers would be able to use paid sick leave to seek treatment for an illness or a family member’s illness, in addition to treatment related to domestic violence or sexual assault.
…so they want more. And more. And….
President Biden made a renewed push on Monday to galvanize congressional Democrats to overhaul the nation’s tax code and dramatically raise rates on corporations and ultra-wealthy Americans.
… Under his proposal, taxes would rise by $2.5 trillion….
And
The higher taxes would largely be borne by Wall Street and the top sliver of US households, in the form of a steeper corporate rate, a modified wealth tax….
The Tenth Circuit has issued a temporary injunction against President Joe Biden’s (D) rule requiring outdoor recreational groups under contract to the Federal government or doing their business on Federal property to pay their employees $15/hr, whether the value of those employees’ work output is that valuable or not.
The “plaintiffs have demonstrated an entitlement to relief from the minimum wage order in their particular circumstances,” the court ruled, and enjoined the government from enforcing the $15-an-hour minimum wage mandate, which recreational companies said would force some of them out of business.
The court also granted the request because it found the plaintiffs were “likely to succeed on the merits” and “suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief.”
President Joe Biden (D) wants our Federal Reserve System to engage in economic social engineering, so he’s nominating as the Fed’s banking supervisor the climate activist Sarah Bloom Raskin. Among her lately remarks concerning credit allocation and climate change was her last-spring op-ed in The New York Times. She led off that piece with this:
Climate change poses the next big threat. Ignoring it, particularly to the benefit of fossil fuel interests, is a risk we can’t afford.
She had this, too, in the same piece:
The Fed is singularly poised to seed strategic investments in future economic stability.