Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Federally Mandated Wages

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Here’s another fiasco-in-waiting being manufactured by the Progressive-Democrat Party and its leader, President Barack Obama.

The Obama administration has advanced to the final stages a contentious rule that will make millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay….

The Labor Department sent its final version of the overtime-pay regulation to the White House Office of Management and Budget on Monday for review, according to an administration official.

This rule will force employers to pay overtime for hours worked beyond 40 in a week to salaried workers whose annual basic salary is $50,440 or less—an increase of more than 200%.

As any grade schooler who’s on an allowance knows, when the price of something goes up, the grade schooler buys less of that thing.  When the price of labor goes up….

This government interference in the private economy will have two effects: salaried employees who used to put in the overtime now will be barred from that—to the overall detriment of the company’s productivity and so competitiveness, and from that to the detriment of the jobs of that company.

Alternatively, the company, in an effort to maintain company-level productivity, will suck up and pay the overtime.  This will drive up the cost of the company’s products, reduce the funding available for R&D, and from that harm the competitiveness of the company to the detriment of the jobs at that company.

Alternatively, the company will hire fewer workers, replace fewer workers who depart for any of a variety of reasons, to the detriment of employment generally.

These folks of the Left know that; they’re some of the smartest people around, as they assure us.  But, hey—union votes.

Central Management

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China is having a harder time managing a property market that is diverging, the country’s housing minister said Tuesday.

“The differences are severe, and it is worsening,” Chen Zhenggao said at a news conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress on Tuesday.  “The situation in the first-tier cities and the third- and fourth-tier cities are different, which brings about challenges to our regulatory work, and is a major issue.”

[emphasis added]  And this:

“This is a trade-off,” said Rosealea Yao, an analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics.  “On one hand, you want rural workers to buy homes,” she said.  “But there is a need to prop up housing prices because Chinese people only buy homes when prices are rising.  Inadvertently, this then fuels sharp gains in home prices in first-tier cities.”

There’s a hint there about the utility of managing a large, complex economy from a center that’s far distant from that economy.  Maybe, just maybe, the PRC should lay off from those one-size-fits-all rules.  Or even lay off from regulating so much at all.

Of course, that would mean a lessening of personal power for the men of the PRC government….

The Truth

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…is beginning to come out.

At a CNN Ohio coal country Townhall involving Progressive-Democrat Party Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT), Clinton said, in all seriousness,

I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country, because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.

Her campaign then clarified, in a post-Townhall statement, that her plan “would also safeguard workers’ retirement and health benefits.”  But do nothing about their current jobs so they can get to retirement, apparently.

In an MSNBC-hosted Townhall, Clinton also said this with a straight face:

Now, is Libya perfect? It isn’t.  Libya was a different kind of calculation [from Syria] and we didn’t lose a single person….

Because #FourLivesDon’tMatter.

Hmm….

A Good First Step

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The Obama administration is considering providing an emergency aid package to the cash-strapped Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq after concluding that the KRG’s inability to pay Peshmerga fighters their salaries poses a threat to the US-led campaign against Islamic State, US officials said.

But we need to do two things more: we need actually to send the aid package (money for wages, food, and fuel for the soldiers)—money—rather than just consider it, and we need to ship them arms and provide the training and logistics with which to use them.  We also need to just do it.  Nominally, we’d need Baghdad’s permission for this, but they’re too slow and too much anti-Kurds for this sort of thing to be forced through the Iraqi government.

We also need to help them learn fiscal discipline; although maybe this administration isn’t capable of that.

Tax Dollars

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Yours, and mine, at work. The paper from which the following excerpt was taken (h/t The Wall Street Journal) was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Ice is not just ice. The dominant way Western societies understand it through the science of glaciology is not a neutral representation of nature. The feminist glaciology framework draws attention to those who dominate and frame the production of glaciological knowledge, the gendered discourses of science and knowledge, and the ways in which colonial, military, and geopolitical domination co-constitute glaciological knowledge. Even in a globalized age where the place of women and indigenous people has improved markedly in some parts of the world, masculinist discourses continue to dominate, in subtle and determinative ways. Feminist glaciology advocates for a shift of preoccupations in research, policy, and public perceptions from the physical and seemingly natural, to a broader consideration of “cryoscapes,” the human, and the insights and potentials of alternative ice narratives and folk glaciologies.

The critique and framework outlined here illuminate experiences and narratives that emerged historically but remain potent today. Public discourse on the cryosphere continues to privilege, quite explicitly, manly endeavours and adventures in the field, and those who conduct their science in the manner of masculinist glaciologists and other field scientists of decades and centuries past….

The call for a feminist glaciology is not limited to ice and glaciers, but is a larger intervention into global environmental change (and especially climate change) research and policy.

Those were your tax dollars, and mine. Yeesh.