Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Bogus Beef

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Congressmen don’t pay their interns.  Who knew?

At least 174 of the 184 lawmakers who support legislation raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour do not pay their interns, according to a recent Employment Policies Institute analysis.

It’s a bogus beef, though.  Folks employed in minimum wage jobs are low-skill workers doing low-value work, and they’re doing it to build general work experience and ethic, to earn summer spending money, to earn money for college, to build a resume, to supplement an existing family income.

Interns do very little of that.  They’re in the position in order to gain specific experience in the particular job, to build a resume, for college/graduate school course credit, and in many cases with an expectation of being hired by the company for which they interned after graduation.  The “compensation” of expectation for an intern isn’t a dollar income; it’s that particularized experience.

Stuart Varney, a Fox News contributor and host of Fox Business News‘ Varney & Co, added this:

If you don’t pay them anything, then you’re simply giving jobs to the sons and daughters of the rich.  You’re giving opportunity to the rich so that they can get in on the ground floor.

That may be true, but it’s not inherent to the concept of internships; it’s specific to the employers—in this case, the politicians.

We’ll See

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In an unprecedented move against North Korea, China on Monday issued an order to carry out the United Nations sanctions imposed on the rogue regime earlier this month.

Of course, in the days immediately following the first meeting between President Donald Trump and the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, just after Trump’s inauguration, the PRC acted like it was going to start honoring then-existing sanctions against northern Korea.

That turned out to be just an act.  Is the present “order” serious, or is it just another empty gesture?

We’ll see, indeed.

Yucca Mountain

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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted 2-1 Tuesday to restart and resurrect the licensing process for the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site project.

The decision gives the go ahead for the “information gathering” stage that will eventually allow the Department of Energy to secure the license to build a nuclear waste facility more than 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Finally.  We need a repository for our accumulating nuclear waste, and the bottom of a salt mine is one of the best places extant: given the easy solubility of salt, the existence of this much salt in one place strongly implies a geologically stable area that’s also stable over geologically long time periods.

Hopefully, two things will occur.  One is that we’ll finally get a large, long-lived place in which to sequester all the nuclear waste that has accumulated at our nuclear power plants and other facilities.

The other is that the Yucca Mountain facility will be named the Harry Mason Reid Memorial Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain.

Technology Theft

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In a piece on American CEOs’ (and Apple’s in particular) cowardice in their dealings with the People’s Republic of China’s government—censor your stuff or you can’t operate in the PRC, give up your technology to or you can’t operate in the PRC, and these worthies meekly comply—comes this reminder on the latter bit:

Just about everybody in the US capital is complaining about how China forces foreign companies to give up technology in return for market access.

In truth, the PRC isn’t alone in this: willing participants are those American CEOs who acquiesce in the name of short-term profit rather than long-term gain.

This collusion (is that a word?  Can I use it?) is especially irritating in the Apple case given CEO Tim Cook’s willingness to stand up to the US government over decrypting an Apple smartphone used by the San Bernardino terrorists.  Cook is willing to collude with the PRC, but he’s not willing to collaborate with our own government.  He was right in the terrorist case, too….

It’s time to inject some backbone into these CEOs.  The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is used to pass on or to block acquisition of American companies by foreign investors if the resulting technology transfer would harm our national security.  CFIUS needs to be broadened with the authority similarly to pass on American companies doing business in foreign jurisdictions if the resulting technology transfer would harm our national security.

Worried about other nations’ companies getting in in place of American ones?  We’re proud of our technology lead over the rest of the world, and justifiably so.  Even were those other nations’ companies actually able to fill the vacuum of the absence of ours, that would just leave the PRC to extort access to second best.

Labor Law

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Recall the 2015 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that said, via Browning-Ferris Industries v NLRB, that a joint employer was not an employer that shared direct control over a temp agency’s employees with that temp agency, as the long-established 1984 standard held, but that such a joint employer is one that exercises merely tenuous control.

The case is before the DC Circuit on appeal from the ruling.  The Wall Street Journal is properly skeptical of the permanence of a favorable court outcome, as it is with the possibility of a reversing ruling by an NLRB populated with President Donald Trump appointees.

The WSJ is hopeful regarding another path, the Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act, which would codify that earlier standard.

That certainly would be a step in the right direction, but there’s no reason to believe a later NLRB wouldn’t simply ignore that or find a way to work around the standard—by creatively reinterpreting it to match it to then supposed social imperatives, as judges do too often with their own rulings.

No, the longer term and more effective solution is for Congress simply to abolish the NLRB altogether and not replace it.