Tag Archives: jobs

Ignorant Voters

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Recall the erstwhile tax on job creation that the Seattle city government passed a while back, and then repealed.  The tax would have charged businesses making more than $20 million in annual revenue a per employee tax of $275.  Although, in response to business and public outcry, the city repealed the tax a couple months later, the commentary of the tax’s chief supporter is illuminating.  Seattle City Councilwoman Lorena González, the lead proponent of the jobs tax:

Sadly the policy is right.  Our timing, however, was off. It’ll occur but we need to socialize people to what we’ve done, what we could do, the need and the real lack of resources.
A replacement may be in the cards but not now. We need to get rid of this albatross and then quietly work to figure out what takes its place. I’m thinking this is a November 2019 strategy.

Yep.  Business owners are just being greedy when they object to being taxed for hiring people. Those people are just too ignorant to understand that having their jobs taxed out from under them is good for them; they need to be socialized.

And the Progressive-Democrats on the Seattle City Council now will work secretively to slip this…tax…by the city under cover of a noisy city election.

Jobs

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French President Emmanuel Macron had the effrontery to say to a heretofore unsuccessful job seeker that, were the latter not absolutely set on a job in his chosen career field, the man easily could find work in France.  And the man wouldn’t even have to relocate very far.  The Left is in an uproar over Macron’s arrogance in saying an obvious truth.

The jobseeker, an aspiring gardener, said to Macron at an Elysee Palace open house,

I’m 25 years old, I send resumes and cover letters, they don’t lead to anything[.]

Macron’s terrible advice?

The president responded: “If you’re willing and motivated, in hotels, cafes and restaurants, construction, there’s not a single place I go where they don’t say they’re looking for people. Not one — it’s true!”

Macron went on to suggest that young gardener go to Paris’ Montparnasse district, an area brimming with cafés and restaurants, assuring him he would easily find work. “If I crossed the street I’d find you one,” Macron said.

How terribly thoughtless.  Society—or Government—owes the man a job because he wants to follow his bliss.  The fact that his bliss is very limited in value is of no import.  None at all.

He Didn’t Build That

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Our economy had the awe-uninspiring growth rate of 2% per year during ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) time in office.  Now, the Census Bureau has reported that

  • [r]eal median household incomes rose 1.8% to $61,372 between 2016 and 2017
  • the overall poverty rate dropped 0.4 per centage points to 12.3%
  • poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics fell to 21.2% and 18.3%, respectively, the lowest in more than 45 years
  • the share of people earning less than $15,000 declining 0.3 per centage points

Obama didn’t build that.  Those folks also think they’ve reached the point where they’ve made enough money.

On the other hand, Obama, his Progressive-Democrat cronies, and his regulators did create the very low economic baseline against which those per centages are being measured.

Government Diktat

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California style.  That state has passed a law.

The law requires a company to appoint one woman to its board of directors by the end of 2019. By the end of 2021 a five-member board would need to have two women, while boards with six or more directors would need three. The Legislature, always alert to possible micro-aggressions, defines female as “an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.”

(One wonders whether the law would be satisfied by a male Board member self-identifying as a woman for the purpose of Board-related activities.  [/snark])

The number of women selected for Board membership has much to do with the lack of women with actual qualifications for those positions.  Forcing quotas onto private enterprises won’t produce qualified women out of thin air.

The lack stems from two major sources (among others).  One is the way we teach our girls and young women throughout K-16.  Our “educators” generally don’t push them as hard or in the same direction as they push our boys and young men.  This is an example of the bigotry of low expectations.

The other major source is in our various corporate cultures.  Women don’t get the same support, encouragement, or kicks in the fannies to do better that men do, so they don’t develop, over the course of their careers, the qualifications needed for Board seats.

Along these lines, women employees don’t spend the same continuous time on their careers as do men: many women take significant time off from their careers to have and raise children.  As a nation, we still haven’t worked out a way around this difference in time commitment.  Paid parental leave might be a step in that direction, but even were it, it’s wholly inadequate.

This law does not address any of these.

A Minimum Wage

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David Neumark, an Economics Professor at the University of California, Irvine, thinks he has an idea on how to implement “fairly” a minimum wage.  Unfortunately, his idea isn’t even good enough to be bad satire. He wants to

provide a tax credit of 50% of the difference between the prior minimum wage and the new minimum wage for each hour of labor employed. It would phase out at wages above the new minimum wage and, as wage inflation erodes, the value of the new minimum wage.

Thus, taxpayers would pay a significant fraction of each minimum wage—folks in New York would pay into the minimum wage of Seattle’s residents, for instance.  Worse, the employer in question would no longer be fully engaged in the wages of his own work force.

With this, Neumark thinks he can

transform the minimum wage into a more sensible redistributive policy.

This, of course, is a nonsensical oxymoron (excuse the redundancy). The only sensible redistributive policy, the only moral redistributive policy, is a voluntary payment of value for value received. That’s an exchange that can only be determined by the participants.  It’s also an exchange that keeps the employer and his workers fully and solely answerable to each other.

Voters think income inequality is too high, and politicians who want to keep their jobs must respond.

No, we don’t, and politicians who want to keep their jobs must recognize that.  Politicians must stop treating their poorer constituents like inanimate tools whose sole purpose is vote harvesting, and instead them like the human beings they are.