Tag Archives: regulation

Minimum Wage Law Consequence

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Recall that California has enacted one of the highest minimum wage laws in the nation, a $20/hr minimum wage inflicted on fast food restaurants operating in the State.

Now come the consequences, which any schoolboy limited to an allowance could have predicted.

Rubio’s Coastal Grill, a California Mexican restaurant chain, announced the closure of 48 restaurants in the Golden State amid rising business costs.

That’s one-third of the chain’s total operational restaurants in the Southwest, including a few left in California.

Earlier, in anticipation of the labor cost explosion, Red Lobster auctioned off—moved out of—5 California locations, albeit these were among a total of 50 nationwide of which the chain was divesting itself.

In other moves to cut labor costs, Pizza Hut franchises, especially Southern California Pizza Co, has discontinued most delivery services from its California-based restaurants, laying off nearly a thousand drivers.

Can Progressive-Democrats anywhere understand that a high minimum wage requirement—or a requirement at any level—prices unskilled job holders and unskilled job seekers out of those jobs? Can they understand that a wage at any level is vastly superior to no wage at all?

Or is it that Progressive-Democrats are cynical enough to seek to transfer unskilled workers out of jobs where they can gain experience, skills, second incomes, and upward economic mobility and into dependency on Government welfare—where they would represent votes to keep the handouts coming?

There’s a Hint There

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The farm bill just passed out of the House Agriculture Committee contains a provision barring the Secretary of Agriculture from increasing, on his own alleged authority, SNAP spending above the amounts provided for in the legislation:

[c]orrects egregious Executive branch overreach and disallows future unelected bureaucrats from arbitrarily increasing or decimating SNAP benefits.

Austin Scott (R, GA):

The Farm Bill includes protective language that prevents extreme changes to SNAP benefits without Congressional input and continues the cost-neutral status that the TFP [Thrifty Food Plan] has maintained for over 40 years.

The Progressive-Democrat Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack claimed, though, that

the proposal would amount to a roughly $27 billion cut to SNAP[.]

This is the AgSec’s confession that he fully intended to spend—on his own and without any Congressional spending authority to do so—at least those $27 billion above his authorized level. He’s not alone in this. Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo (D, CO):

…it is necessary that we go back to the negotiating table and remove this provision[.]

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D, MI):

It…does not have the votes to pass on the House floor. And certainly not in the Senate[.]

This is the budgeting and spending paradigm of the Progressive-Democratic Party: Congressional appropriations and allocations are mere suggestions, and they are to be disregarded whenever inconvenient to Party. After all, it’s only your and my money they’re spending.

There’s an election coming up. Maybe us average Americans should vote our tax dollars.

“Should AI Have Access to Your Medical Records? What if It Can Save Many Lives?”

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The Wall Street Journal asked that question last week. And their subheadline:

We asked readers: Is it worth giving up some potential privacy if the public benefit could be great?

A good many of the published answers centered on Yes, with oversight by, among others, medical professionals.

This reader (unpublished in the WSJ) says, resoundingly, No. Not now, and not for the foreseeable future, say I. Personal data aggregators, whether government or private enterprise, have shown no ability to protect our personal data, whether from hackers or from organizational carelessness, incompetence, or ignorance. With our medical data especially, very good protection, even six sigma-level protection, isn’t good enough. This is one of the few areas where perfection must be the standard. Since that’s an unachievable standard, AIs must not be permitted any access to our personal data, including our personal medical data.

There are additional reasons for saying no. One is the inherent bias programmers build into AIs. Alphabet’s overtly bigoted Gemini is an extreme example, but the programmers build their biases into AIs through the data sets they use and have their AIs use in training.

There’s also the just as overt bigotry too many medical training institutions apply through their emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion claptrap at the expense of training actual medicine. Those institutions are producing the doctors that would the second generation of “medical” professionals doing the oversight.

In the current state of affairs, and for that foreseeable future, it’s not feasible to let AIs into any aspect of our personal lives. The blithely assumed public benefit is vastly overwhelmed by the threat to our individual privacy—the “public,” after all, is all of us individuals aggregated.

The Veterans Administration Fails Again

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A 22-year USAF veteran has nightmares, the attitude, withdrawal as a result of his experiences while deployed to a plethora of foreign locales. [Emphasis added.]

[H]is wife begged him to get help from the local Veterans Affairs medical facility in West Palm Beach, Florida. [The veteran] said he tried, but after many years and multiple VA therapists who could not see him on a regular basis, he decided to pay out-of-pocket for private care. He would like the VA to pay for his therapy through community care—a program designed for eligible veterans to receive care from a community provider when the VA cannot provide the care needed.

Nor is he alone in this strait. It’s getting worse, too. Now,

the West Palm Beach VA Healthcare System is no longer approving their requests for community care, cutting them off from their longtime mental health providers, with potentially devastating results.

And

Congressman Brian Mast (R, FL), a former Army bomb technician who lost both his legs and a finger in Afghanistan, represents the Palm Beach area in Florida’s 21st Congressional District. He said his office has been contacted by over 70 veterans, relatives, and mental health providers who have complained that the VA will no longer refer patients to community care.

OF course, the VA denies that, claiming to have hired many more doctors and expanded facilities. Never mind the facts provided by our veterans in that district, who know empirically otherwise.

The veterans who spoke to Fox News Digital dispute the VA’s view of its quality of care. [The veteran cited at the top of this post] described how his previous attempts to see a VA psychiatrist were “counterproductive” and “ridiculous.” In a “typical interaction,” the VA would tell him, “we’re going to have somebody call you. This is the date and time,” he said. “Nobody calls.”
When he went back to schedule another appointment, the same thing would happen.
“You’re telling me I missed the appointment, I said. But nobody called me. I have no number to call. This was the norm. It was always a lot of deflection to where I just say, this is beyond ridiculous,” he said.

Even Mast has been denied effective care by the VA at least once.

Mast related that he had to see his primary care doctor, a physical therapist, and a lab technician before VA approved him to receive a new cane—with two-week intervals between each appointment.
“That was the bureaucratic process for getting a guy with no legs a cane,” he said.

Just one more reason why

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Too Bad, So Sad

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Ford is having trouble peddling all the battery cars and trucks it has committed itself to manufacturing in response to Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s functional battery car mandate, a mandate centered on ruinous tailpipe emission limits he’s put together via his EPA. So far this year alone, Ford has lost $1.3 billion, or roughly $132,000 on each battery car or truck it has sold.

Ford’s competitors aren’t in such dire straits, having eschewed such a foolish commitment. Ford’s answer, though, isn’t to wise up and walk away from that commitment. Instead, it’s intervening in a 25-State law suit in the DC Circuit that’s trying to eliminate the rule forcing those tailpipe limits. Ford is defending the limit in its effort to force its competitors into the Ford boat. In its filing, Ford claims that

Ford has taken steps to transform its business to ensure compliance with stricter emissions standards. Ford is investing billions in electrification efforts [and it] has a critical interest in ensuring that a level regulatory playing field applies to the entire industry.

Never mind that the regulatory playing field would apply levelly across the entire industry if the tailpipe emission limits were rescinded.

No. Too bad. Ford’s bad choices in no way obligates its competitors to follow along, nor does it obligate us average Americans to pay for Ford’s folly.