Kevin D. Williamson National Review.
Recommended.
As George Washington said to the slaves he held at his plantation on Mt. Sinai, "You cannot teach a zebra new tricks and leopards never change their opinions" so you can just forget about those two radio guys, Andrew Leonard, the Los Angeles Times, and others, ceasing their repeating the falsehood that Ford raised workers' wages in order to sell them more cars.
And if you ever hear that nonsense again then you can repeat this somewhat extended explanation why that isn't true, a takedown so thorough that listeners get lost in its presentation and reject it halfway to comprehension. It amounts to, "He did no such thing."
And that's a problem with truth and with facts, they're not always pithy as their opposites so all that is left when patience is exhausted both ways is, "that is profoundly ignorant."
This bears on the discussion of minimum wage that is the new word for "living wage." Today, the minimum wage must be a living wage or there is no point in bothering to be employed. The term "minimum wage" gobbled up the term "living wage" in the last discussion of the this perennial problem, the difference between them no longer exists, no longer makes sense. This is the tacit admission that all that federal economic jacking causing so much disruption must require also a new national jack to minimum wage. And a big one. Now ask, if policies foisted on us are going so well then why the demand for raise to entry-level work? How is it so certain that the work is worth it? Once again, cause and effect are reversed by poor comprehension and hopelessly false premises. The argument is wrong. Premises false. Ford did not say that, did not do that. Yet people keep saying he did. Forever.
This is your economics discussion forever.
It's on the radio, it's is books, in in prefaces to books, it's axiomatic among economically ignorant. And that is your starting point on any discussion about robots taking over convenience food sector displacing so many of those entry-level workers that the people writing such nonsense actually see. They will not see the connection between demand for increased minimum wage and increased demand for automation of convenience food sector. That's all they know about entry-level workers, what they imagine about the people serving their meals. Their apparent single point of intellectual contact.
It is the one example that cleaves. The one single example examined. Like WMD being the one single item on a litany of items demanding action the entire argument rests on a single line item, all emotion invested in that and all additions all remembering of all other items are dismissed. They simply don't count. It is of paramount importance that single thing be addressed, hamburger servers make minimum wage and then the next single thing, hamburger servers be protected from robots. At street level that is the extent of Democrat economic concern. It's a far as you'll ever get, as far as you can go and it's wrong. Forever.
9 comments:
Williamson is one of the best writers around. He can dissect and crush, with ease, all the illogical, wasteful librul ideas.
And btw, Clinton has now come out with a very reasonable sounding position on the trade bill. She is in favor of protecting American workers. It will get her votes IMHO. The Repubs got played once again.
So she's going against what Obama wants?
No, April, she is acting as if she is opposing Obama until the redistribution pot ]that is what TAA essentially is] is sweetened. And for all we know, Obama was in on it too and now the Repubs will support it and fund it by increasing taxes [per Breitbart].
I hire some people - over 1200 in my career so far. Hiring, training, and advancing people in my own way has been the key mission of my work and my company for many years now. We not only like doing it and believe in it as a social benefit, but it has developed into what we believe is a key to our success as a business which has been included in the INC 500 a couple times and was small business of the year last year. We hire people at or slightly above minimum wage who have no skills and often no experience. Some are high school graduates, but many are drop outs who have decided they finally want to make an effort at life. We train them in welding, machining, CAD drawing, and other computer skills, and then we advance them as far as they can go within the company, or they leave and find a job elsewhere with their new skills. They also learn to show up at a job and work with a team. This works for us as a company in that we get loyalty, and we quickly get trained people with less attitude and less wrong ideas about work, and we save money by starting them near minimum wage, which has been about $9/hr plus quarterly bonuses that usually add about $1 per hour to their pay.
New mandated increases to $15/hour and higher will simply kill our ability to do this work, and unless we figure something out or move, which we just did at great expense, they will probably kill our business completely. Most of our customers are not in California, but in states where the labor is cheaper and better educated. Our competition has mostly been from China with pay at 20 cents per hour, but now even domestic companies will beat anyone in L.A. with labor at half our mandated starting rate. Many jobs will be lost here, one way or the other. It's simple math. Democrats are either dumb or evil - you decide.
The nearby city of Irvine just eliminated their "Living Wage" ordinance after having it for years. They dumped it not so much because it was costing jobs (which is was), but mostly because it was costing government too much through contracts inflated to cover the higher wage. There are things they care about enough to change their mind. Vote was 4:1
I don't care what the minimum wage is, but unless it's global, it's gonna cost jobs in the place where it lives. The people voting for these things imagine them only affecting service jobs like McDonalds which have no choice but to stay local. People who manufacture or serve customers outside your utopia just leave or go out of business. There is no other option with wages near double what your competition pays.
I'm against a minimum wage hike above $10/hr.
If they want to enact a $10/hr wage minimum and then require at least 25 cents a year increase for 8 years, I could understand that - as it would make a living wage more likely without trickling it down onto the fucking high school and college kids who don't need it and are said to make up the bulk of its recipients.
But to start at $15 - nearly double the current, I think it's entirely understandable to criticize as too disruptive. It's probably bound to be inflationary, not that that would kill us, but just saying.
It's a total bone to throw. I think it will help some, but not in any kind of a sustainable way.
She's a shape-shifting hack, AJ.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/15/politics/45-times-secretary-clinton-pushed-the-trade-bill-she-now-opposes/index.html
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