A study done by the National Employment Law Project has some troubling results on wages.
Hmm….
As a matter of law, Dodd-Frank ended the notion that any firm is “too big to fail.” Banking will always involve some-degree of risk-taking…. But now, if a financial firm fails, taxpayers will not have to bear the cost of that failure.
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said that with a straight face at a New York financial conference earlier in the week. Never mind that, under Dodd-Frank, not only is “too big”—systemic risk—defined by Government and not by our economy, “failure” is defined by Government and not by our economy, and the outcome of “failure”—what creditors will be allowed to recover, and by how much—will be defined by Government and not by our existing bankruptcy system. That last, especially, means that, of course we taxpayers will be on the hook, especially to fill any gap between what Government-determined creditors will be allowed to recover and what the failed institution’s assets will support.
Lew also made a very Pelosi-esque demand in those same prepared remarks, when he got to the matter of Congressional dissatisfaction with Dodd-Frank. While addressing the fact that three years after the law’s enactment, many (most?) implementing regulations, including highly critical ones (from the perspective of the law), have yet to be written, Lew admonished Congress not to meddle with the law.
[T]here will be time to see what is working and what is not [once regulators are finished with outstanding rules].
Treasury has to write the regulations so that we can see what is in the law…away from the fog of the controversy.
Hmm….
…or, in this case, Obamacare, or maybe just generalized government meddling in people’s lives through our free market.
Ken Adams has been turning to more part-time workers at his 10 Subway sandwich shops in Michigan….
He added approximately 25 part-time workers in May and June as he reduced some employees’ hours and replaced other workers who left. The move showed how efforts by some restaurant owners and other businesses to remake their workforces because of the Affordable Care Act may be turning the country’s labor market into a more part-time workforce.
And
For the entire U.S. workforce, employers have added far more part-time employees in 2013—averaging 93,000 a month, seasonally adjusted—than full-time workers, which have averaged 22,000. Last year the reverse was true, with employers adding 31,000 part-time workers monthly, compared with 171,000 full-time ones.
Because delays in enforcing Obamacare notwithstanding, businesses need both to get their full-time numbers down in order to reduce their Obamacare cost baselines, and absent repeal, those delays will come to an end in just 12 short months. Indeed, the practical effect of the delays is simply to prolong and enhance the hiring of part-timers rather than full-timers.
Here’s a more direct example:
Rod Carstensen, owner of 11 Del Taco restaurants around Denver, began in April converting his mostly full-time workforce into one comprising mostly part-time help to minimize his health-care costs. He estimates the costs could have climbed by as much as $400,000 a year without the change.
Attorney General Eric Holder said this at the annual NAACP convention on Tuesday:
There has always been a legal defense for using deadly force if—and the “if” is important—no safe retreat is available. But we must examine laws that take this further by eliminating the common sense and age-old requirement that people who feel threatened have a duty to retreat.
Say what!? What age-old requirement? Whence this? Has he never read John Locke? Does he think Locke wrong? If so, based on what?
Has he never read US law? Does he think US law is wrong? Oh, wait….
What logic of his underlies this outlandish claim?
If we retreat when we have the means to resist, all we do is reward the criminal for his crime. Our right to our lives and our property create in us no obligation at all to retreat, or to cede them to another solely on the basis that another wants them more than do we.
On the other hand, if “we” have a duty to retreat when threatened, surely “we” includes that threatener: he has a duty to retreat if we threaten him.
We ain’t got no jobs. We don’t have to give you any stinkin’ jobs. Never mind that a feckless, if not outright dishonest, administration keeps claiming that there’s a strong, robust recovery in place. For four years, now.
I wrote here about our new (and hopefully relatively temporary) national work force structure. Mortimor Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report, has some more information.
Keep this in mind during the 2014 and 2016 elections.