Tag Archives: regulation

An Excuse to Stall?

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In a city with a history of denying Americans their gun rights?

[Washington, DC] does not know how long it will take to process those requests [for concealed carry licenses].

“There’s no internal guideline for how long the process should take at this point,” DC police Lieutenant Sean Conboy told a Free Beacon reporter today.

Yeah. Because in the six years since DC v Heller and the four years since McDonald v Chicago and the two years since the Seventh Circuit’s Moore v Madigan gave a strong hint, it’s unreasonable for the DC cops to figure out how to assess and issue CCWs.

And there’s this:

There is still confusion about how people will complete the required 16 hours of classroom training and two hours of range training. Conboy said that the city is still working to officially license a trainer….

And there’s the matter of public firing ranges in DC: there aren’t any.

Hmm….

The 2nd Amendment is quite clear. In light of the erosion of it, it’s time to give it back its teeth. I don’t like Federal laws in general, but here’s one I could get behind: all police departments—every single one of them—must issue concealed carry licenses absent a compelling reason(s) (e.g., the applicant is a felon) for not. There must be a deadline on the application’s favorable ruling, too: if no necessarily derogatory information is turned up (that felony conviction, for instance) within a reasonable time frame—say 28 days, or 42 days—the department must issue the license.

Questions Republicans Should Be Asking

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Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified before the House Homeland Security Committee earlier in the week on, among other things, the subject of immigration. Johnson, by the way, also is a fully licensed and accredited lawyer as well as a politically appointed politician.

A reader wrote to Power Line with some questions for Johnson and others. [emphasis added]

So Jeh says with a smug knowing wink-and-nod “just go to any restaurant here is DC” to see illegal aliens working “under the table.” So is he saying that the employers in DC fill jobs now with illegal aliens? That he knows and the employers know that they are openly, brazenly breaking our immigration and labor laws? So why isn’t he for enforcing our democratically enacted laws? Isn’t he sworn to do so? Isn’t he an attorney? Why isn’t he advocating against the state of affairs that he implies obtains? Why is he advocating open non-feasance of his duty to enforce the laws?

It’s especially rich when he talks about their “coming out of the shadows and STARTING to pay taxes”. Got that? He knows that there are thousands of illegal immigrants and their employers—let’s not forget these scofflaws—who are not paying taxes! OK…so why isn’t he going after them?….for criminal tax evasion?….instead they’re explicitly offering something way beyond amnesty of tax evasion—and a deal that American citizens normally would never get.

Usually a tax amnesty is the government’s waiving the assessed fines, penalties and interest accrued from failure to pay taxes in full and on time—but you still have to pay the actual taxes owed. So the illegal immigrants who have not paid taxes—payroll taxes, most likely since their incomes are low—not only get a tax “amnesty”, i.e., forbearance of fines, interest and penalties—they get outright forgiveness of the actual taxes owed! It is a better deal than any citizen would get if guilty of evading income or payroll taxes. Furthermore it is outright forgiveness for the EMPLOYER’s share of arrears payroll taxes as well…even IF they knowingly hired illegals and failed to pay taxes, it’s outright forgiven.

Republicans should be asking President Barack Obama, Johnson, Democrats generally, and quite a few of their own these questions loudly: in House—and Senate, starting in January—hearings; in townhalls and neighborhoods, especially the rural and poorer ones where unemployment is high and endemic; in newspaper, radio, and television interviews; in letters to the editor.

There are lots of ways to encourage immigration into our country, and we should; we benefit greatly from that immigration. The present way isn’t one of them; on the contrary, it’s highly destructive of our nation.

 

h/t Power Line

Another Disregard for Congress

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Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, and it last was amended in 2007. Among other things, the FLSA allows the Labor Department to define who, in a business, is a manager and who is not.

There are two problems with this, either of which alone is sufficient to demonstrate the need for a further amendment. One problem is that it lets government dictate to business owners—private citizens—how they will run their businesses by dictating to them who they may have on their management teams.

The other problem, the one of interest in this post, is that Labor’s definition of who can be a manager is determined by the man’s salary and not by what he does. This definition matters because managers are “exempt employees,” that is, businesses do not have to pay them overtime for working more than full-time hours (nominally, 40 hours per week or 80 hours per two-week periods; although Obamacare muddles that definition).

Sean Higgins, of The Washington Examiner, had some thoughts on that earlier. I’ll just comment on a couple of them here; RTWT.

The president and administration officials have indicated they plan to increase the $23,000 minimum amount a worker must make before his employer can opt to exempt him from federal overtime rules….

Groups such as the liberal Center for American Progress, which has close ties to the White House, have called for the threshold to be raised to $50,000.

That’s the set up.

Higgins then quoted Joshua Parkhurst, a New York labor rights lawyer:

A fast-food restaurant can slap an “assistant manager” title on someone and…that exempts them from overtime. The white-collar exemption is far and away the most litigated issue under the act.

I’ll ignore the fee-generating litigation Parkhurst alluded to; the “error” is his implication that being an assistant manager is, of necessity, a bogus status. How many managers does a fast-food restaurant (or other small business) need? Exactly one. Who’s in charge on the shifts where the manager isn’t working? Somebody? Anyone? Answer: the assistant manager. Businesses doing 24-hour operations need at least three assistant managers—one for each shift (because the day shift’s manager would benefit from the help, and so the business would), plus one (or more) to fill in when someone gets sick or goes on vacation. How many more properly is a business decision, not a government one.

Doubling the threshold, the Center for American Progress argues, would force businesses to pay workers the overtime they are due or force employers to raise salaries to meet that level. “The average worker works 11% more hours than he or she did in 1975. If we as a nation could afford overtime rights then, we can afford them now,” center policy analyst Brendan Duke wrote….

This, of course, is nonsense. Raising the threshold (not even doubling it) would not at all force businesses to pay overtime or to raise wages. Businesses also have the option of restricting their business hours. They also have the option of restricting those workers’ hours and hiring temporary, part-time help. The former could harm the business, but it’s a business decision whether the higher labor costs or the reduced business hours would be the less harmful. The latter would be good for the temporary hires, albeit their hours and income would be uncertain. It would harm the existing workers, though, by capping them, ending their upward mobility and limiting their ability to build resume material for later, better jobs. This is what most of the workers in this sort of business are doing anyway—getting work experience and looking to improve themselves.

Or, the businesses could (and this is the most likely alternative) simply cut back on the benefits provided in order to compensate for the increase in labor cost from government’s redefinition of “manager.”

And the pseudo-logic that, just because “we as a nation could afford overtime rights” 40 years ago when we worked less, we surely can afford to pay increased costs today is breathtaking to hear from an “analyst.” Or maybe not.

Finally, here’s Parkhurst, again:

The point is, if you are shifting someone back and forth from administrative tasks to manual labor, they aren’t a manager. And slapping a title on them doesn’t change that.

This, too, is nonsense. By Parkhurst’s logic, “if you are shifting someone back and forth from administrative tasks to manual labor, they aren’t a” laborer. And calling him that doesn’t change that.

This gets to the crux of the matter. What makes a man an assistant manager is what he does, not how much he’s paid. And what he does is a matter for business to determine, not government. Or a “labor rights” litigator.

The FLSA would benefit from one more amendment, and so would the country.

EU Immigration

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British Prime Minister David Cameron may be starting to stand strong on the matter of immigration into Great Britain. It sounds like he’s beginning to agree with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said four years ago

We kidded ourselves a while, we said: “They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone”, but this isn’t reality.

And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other…has failed, utterly failed.

Cameron announced measures Friday:

[M]igrants from the EU should have to wait at least four years before receiving benefits such as tax credits or access to state-subsidized housing. EU migrants also no longer would be eligible to receive state child welfare payments unless their children have moved with them to Britain, a measure which he said is designed to stop the practice of using handouts to support family in their home countries.

He also said that his proposals would be “an absolute requirement” in any renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s continued EU membership that he’s promised to conduct with the EU if he wins a second term in the elections next spring.

Britain isn’t alone in starting to take such a firm position, either. Apart from Germany, the conservative parties of France (despite President François Hollande’s words to the contrary), the Netherlands, even Sweden, are starting to demur from easy border crossing and easy access to government-funded welfare.

If it gets hard for immigrants to go there, though, where else might they go? What other western nation has notoriously porous borders?

Hmm….

The PRC and Language

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

So says the People’s Republic of China government, too. Here’s the State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, on banning puns from news media, other programming, even advertising:

Radio and television authorities at all levels must tighten up their regulations and crack down on the irregular and inaccurate use of the Chinese language, especially the misuse of idioms[.]

After all, puns and idioms could lead to “culture and linguistic chaos.” Can’t have that. Order, dammit. Especially the government’s definition of order. The PRC government’s incumbents do clearly understand that language is thought.