Brewtown Gumshoe: minimum wage

Showing posts with label minimum wage. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

A Vote For Trump Is A Vote For Project 2025

Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained

Project 2025: The myths and the facts

1) Concentrating power in the presidency: Trump’s allies believe that his first term failed because he couldn’t get enough “loyal” appointees in place and because the “deep state” bureaucracy sabotaged him. So a main recurring theme of Project 2025 is how to bend the executive branch to a conservative president’s will.

2) Longtime conservative priorities: The vast majority of Project 2025’s policy plan is focused on longstanding conservative priorities — with some tweaking and elisions for the Trump era. Though some are indeed quite extreme, they’re not all that new or specifically tied to Trump.

There are far too many to list here, but just as a flavor:

Education: Eliminate the Department of Education, give every parent a voucher-like option they could use to send their child to private school, zero out federal funding to low-income schools over the next decade, greatly cut “wasteful” school meal programs, and end Biden’s student loan forgiveness programs

Energy and environment: Deprioritize fighting climate change, repeal Biden’s clean energy subsidies, further unleash oil and natural gas production, roll back various environmental regulations

Health care: Majorly cut and overhaul Medicaid, roll back the recent law banning surprise medical billing

Immigration: Deny loan access to students at “schools that provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens,” ban non-citizens from living in federally assisted housing (even if they live with a citizen), reinstate and expand the horseback-mounted Border Patrol

On a few issues — trade, antitrust, the Export-Import Bank — the plan states that the conservative movement is divided, and lays out the thinking of two different sides on each issue. On the question of Social Security and Medicare, which Heritage has long supported overhauling but Trump does not, the document is basically silent.

3) A hardline religious-right agenda: There are also parts of Project 2025 that, while not exactly surprising for conservatives, are quite extreme in ways that are politically problematic for Trump. The plan calls for:

Revoking FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which is used in about half of US abortions (“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” the document states)

Using an old law known as the Comstock Act to prosecute people who send abortion pills through the mail

Ending the mandate for insurance to cover the “week-after” contraceptive pill Ella (which the document argues is a “potential abortifacient”)

Crack down on “abortion tourism” in liberal states by requiring states to report where women seeking abortions live and cutting federal funds if they refuse

Ending subsidies for stem cell or fetal cell research

In a fiery introduction by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, Project 2025 also calls for banning porn:

Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

Roberts also adds that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” suggesting that he may define “pornography” much more broadly than is typical — that he may view any attempt to explain or teach about trans people as worthy of outlawing and imprisonment.

This is reflective of a broader push from religious and cultural conservatives. (The demand for porn prohibition does not show up in the document again after Roberts’s introduction, making it unclear how it would be implemented.)

What Trump doesn't want you to know about Project 2025

Project 2025

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Friday, March 19, 2021

Weekend Reading

Republican lawmakers refuse to approve any building projects in Evers' $2.4 billion plan

Wisconsin Senate approves Limbaugh resolution, Dems object

Kleefisch Spokesperson Compares Evers to Dahmer

Milwaukee expects $405 million from stimulus bill with first half arriving by May

New Support for Friedman's Plucking Model

The “Plucking Model” of recessions and recoveries

Announcer for high school basketball game uses racial slur after team kneels during anthem

Ten years ago, when Wisconsin legislators drew voting maps in secret, it cost taxpayers $3.5 million. We need a more open process.

Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene

Republicans Mock Rescue Plan While Pushing A Tax Cut For The Richest

Pelosi says GOP will vote against COVID-19 relief and then take credit for it

Grothman accuses Black Lives Matter of disliking the 'old-fashioned family,' drawing rebuke from Democrat on House floor

A $60 billion surprise in the Covid relief bill: Tax hikes

Rep. Tim Ryan Demonstrates Proper Level of Anger Toward Republicans in Congress

Pandemic Bill Would Cut Taxes By An Average of $3,000, With Most Relief Going to Low- And Middle-Income Households.

Donald Trump (Unironically) Requests a Mail-In Ballot Ahead of Palm Beach Municipal Election

Helping Wisconsin Voters Would Be Harder—or Even a Criminal Act—in Some Republican Proposals

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

Here Are the 8 Democrats Who Just Joined GOP to Vote Down Sanders' $15 Minimum Wage Amendment

Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren quietly releases massive social media report on GOP colleagues who voted to overturn the election

Saturday, February 13, 2021

Weekend Reading

Kenosha Judge Shrugs Off Kyle Rittenhouse’s Admitted Bond Violations, Denies Higher Bail And New Warrant

Breathing device sobers you up by hyperventilating the alcohol out

Sanders Responds to CBO Report on $15 Minimum Wage

Don’t Believe the Bad Press About the Economic Impact of a $15 Minimum Wage

CBO analysis confirms that a $15 minimum wage raises earnings of low-wage workers, reduces inequality, and has significant and direct fiscal effects

CBO attacks plan for higher minimum wage — or does it?

GOP senators criticized for appearing to pay half-hearted attention to trial

GOP senators discover their discomfort with intemperate tweets

Majority Of Those Arrested In Capitol Siege Had History Of Financial Trouble

Michigan's top GOP lawmaker: Jan. 6 Capitol attack was a 'hoax'

As DeJoy Readies New Assault on Postal Service, Pressure Grows for Biden to 'Clean House'

The Congestion Con

Further Means Testing of the Stimulus Will Be Disastrous for Suffering Americans

Resolution Cuts Pot Possession Fine to $1

Did UW-Whitewater send Robin Vos and Steve Nass to Madison to act like grade schoolers?

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Sunday Reading

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Minimum Wages Around The World

[source]

Saturday, July 13, 2019

Weekend Reading: Economics Edition

Society-Wide Benefits of Raising The Minimum Wage
The Puzzle In The Labor Data
The Trump Tax Reform, As Seen In The U.S. Balance Of Payments Data
Why The 'Free-Market' Economy Is A Myth And How To Rebuild Public Power
The Failures of Neoliberalism Are Bigger Than Politics
What Kansas's Rebounding Economy Tells Us About The Farce of Republican Tax Cuts
How The Federal Government Rigs The Game Against Small Businesses
Make Corporations Pay For The Green New Deal
Rich Get Richer, Everyone Else Not So Much In Record U.S. Expansion
Unions Did Great Things For The Working Class

Saturday, March 23, 2019

Weekend Reading

Shopko Creditors: $117 Million In Dividends Paid To Owners 'Fraudulent,' 'Illegal'
401(K)s Versus 403(B)s
Sigh....No, Tax Cuts Won't Boost Growth
Supreme Court Sides With Union Giving Milwaukee County Employees $6.8 Million Pension Benefit
Make Corporations Pay For Green New Deal
The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change
Study Finds Racial Gap Between Who Causes Air Pollution And Who Breathes It
Here's What Republicans And Billionaires Really Mean When They Talk About 'Freedom'
Wisconsin Judge Blocks Republicans' Lame-Duck Power Grab
Study Cited In Wisconsin Debate On Expanding Medicaid And Taking Federal Money Called 'Garbage'
Make America Great Again By Raising The Minimum Wage

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Sunday Reading

Why Private Equity Firms Like Bain Really Are The Worst Of Capitalism
Supply-Siders Still Push What Doesn't Work
The U.S Is The Sick Man Of The Developed World
Celebrating Greenspan's Legacy Of Failure
More Minimum Wage Distraction, Stuart Varney Edition
John McCain Is The Perfect American Lie
30 Firms Earn Half Of The Total Profit Made By All U.S. Public Companies
S&P 500's Biggest Pension Plans Face $382 Billion Funding Gap
Democrats Are Finally Waking Up To The Monopoly Problem
A New Deal For Wall Street

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Weekend Reading

Raise Wages, Kill Jobs? Seven Decades Of Historical Data Find No Correlation Between Minimum Wage Increases And Employment Levels

The results were clear: these basic economic indicators show no correlation between federal minimum-wage increases and lower employment levels, even in the industries that are most impacted by higher minimum wages. To the contrary, in the substantial majority of instances (68 percent) overall employment increased after a federal minimum-wage increase.

Filing Taxes Could Be Free And Simple. But H&R Block And Intuit Are Still Lobbying Against It

The makers of TurboTax and other online systems spent millions lobbying last year, much of it directed toward a bill that would permanently bar the government from offering taxpayers prefilled filings.

Fearing Germs Is Making Us Sick

We need to reconnect our kids with the microbes they need and, more generally, with the wild they need, however tiny that wild may be.

The Generation Of Nonsense In The Boston Globe

The main economic story of the last four decades is the massive upward redistribution of income that has taken place. The top one percent's share of national income has more than doubled over this period from roughly ten percent in the late 1970s to over twenty percent today. And, this is primarily a before-tax income story, the rich have used their control over the levers of economic power to ensure that an ever larger share of the country's wealth goes into their pockets. (Yes, this is the topic of my book, Rigged [it's free].)

Anyhow, the rich don't want people paying attention to these policies (hey, they could try to change them), so they endlessly push out nonsense stories to try to divert the public's attention from how they structured the rules to advance their interests. And, since the rich own the newspapers, they can make sure that we hear these stories.

How Stephen Colbert Finally Found His Elusive Groove

On Nov. 8, Stephen Colbert was hosting a live election night special for CBS’s sister cable network, Showtime. A program that was built around an expected Hillary Clinton victory went off the rails almost as soon as it went on the air at 11 p.m. As election returns came in, audience members, who had been asked to shut off their phones an hour earlier, gasped as it became clear that Donald J. Trump could very well become president. Mr. Colbert looked dumbstruck.

Sensing the gravity of the moment, Chris Licht, the executive producer of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” walked over to Mr. Colbert’s desk during a musical performance.

“Stop being funny and go and just be real,” Mr. Licht told the host.

Record-Breaking Public Subsidy Lures Hated Football Team To America's Gambling Capital

Clark County taxpayers will contribute $750 million to the new arena, a record for a sports facility—about $354 per resident, taken from an increased tax on hotel rooms. That tax currently pays for schools and transportation, in addition to tourism-related expenditures.

Stanford economist Roger Noll said it was the “worst deal for a city” he had ever seen.

That it came together at all is remarkable.

Here's The Real Rust Belt Jobs Problem - And It's Not Offshoring Or Automation

Many struggling U.S. cities and states compete fiercely with one another to attract and keep firms that offer jobs. Unfortunately, these are not the “good” jobs that Americans are looking for, jobs with middle-class pay, benefits and security. This race to the bottom drains public coffers, preoccupies local leaders and fuels voter cynicism. “America First” sidesteps the problem.

Friday, September 16, 2016

Americans Got Raise Last Year For First Time Since 2007

Americans Got Raise Last Year for First Time Since 2007

In a long-awaited sign that middle-class Americans are finally seeing real economic gains, U.S. households got a raise last year after seven years of stagnant incomes. Rising pay also lifted the poorest households, cutting poverty by the sharpest amount in nearly a half-century.

Higher minimum wages in many states and tougher competition among businesses to fill jobs pushed up pay, while low inflation made those paychecks stretch further. The figures show that the growing economy is finally benefiting a greater share of American households...

Still, median incomes remain 1.6 below the $57,423 reached in 2007. The median is the point where half of households fall below and half are above...

Even so, it follows years of tepid pay gains that contributed to widespread political turmoil, driving insurgent presidential candidacies from GOP nominee Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Median household income remains 2.4 percent below the peak it reached in 1999.

Good news, but no need for policy-makers to get carried away. The Fed doesn't need to raise interest rates just yet. And, with income inequality still near record highs, there's plenty of room for much more wage-growth below the top 1 percent.

Saturday, June 4, 2016

Shortage of Skills or Abundance of Excuses?

As most Wisconsinites know, Scott Walker has overseen anemic economic performance for Wisconsin. Job growth has continually lagged the national average.

Once again, Wisconsin job growth trails national pace

Of course, none of this, according to Scott Walker, is Scott Walker's fault. (Regardless that he was elected based on his claims that he could grow 250,000 jobs for the state.) It's the dreaded skilled worker shortage. The jobs are here just waiting for the right workers.

The laughable link between the two - jobs and the right skills for those jobs - is job training. Another overblown talking-point of economic development hucksters.

As Marc Levine informed,

As Gordon Lafer, one of the country's foremost researchers on job training, puts it: "Whatever the problem, it seems job training is the answer. The only trouble is, it doesn't work, and the government knows it. . . . Indeed, in studying more than 40 years of job training policy, I have not seen one program that, on average, enabled its participants to earn their way out of poverty."

This, directly debunking the recent drivel being peddled in a Journal Sentinel opinion piece.

Levine continued,

Work force development policy is based on the fallacious premise that Milwaukee's core employment problem is a shortage of skilled workers (a "jobs-skills mismatch"). ...

The jobs are already here? Hardly. Indeed, taking metro Milwaukee as a whole, there is a gap of 88,000 between the number of jobless (working-age residents unemployed or out of the labor force) and the number of job vacancies reported by employers. It is a job shortage, much more than a skills shortage, that plagues the region. ...

No matter who controls job training programs in Milwaukee, they are doomed to failure unless this economy produces enough family-supporting jobs.

This isn't to say we shouldn't be offering some job training efforts. This also doesn't mean that at some time during the business cycle, the economy won't experience some structural unemployment. But these supposed panaceas of skills-improvement and job-training have proven largely uneventful over the last few decades.

The continued call for increased skills also ignores the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the majority of new jobs over the next few decades will require only a high school education or minimal on-the-job training. Secondly, its also implies that we, as a nation are becoming less educated; this, also, is false.

This skill-shortage talking-point merely allows most of the decision-makers to take the hands-off approach of blaming the victim. "We've got some tools out there. If individuals don't take advantage, that's their problem."

More effective policies include increasing the earned income tax credit, unionization, increasing the minimum wage and increasing job programs (directly employing individuals).

As long as we keep pretending the market has all the answers and our workforce is so woefully inadequate that we can't do or learn the majority of vacant positions, charlatans and other hucksters will continue to sell job training, skills shortage and other bumper sticker policies that do little to address the issues they claim to be so concerned about.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Sunday Reading

What Is A "Good Job?"
The Quiet, Vicious Racism Of Scott Walker's Wisconsin
The Real Lesson From $15? America's Trickle-Down Experiment Has Failed
Remembering Milwaukee's Socialist Party History
Let's Dispel Once And For All This Fiction That Sanders Doesn't Know How To Break Up Banks
Outraged By Kansas Justices' Rulings, Republicans Seek To Reshape Court
Republicans And Voter Suppression
Don't Dismantle Government - Fix It
Republicans Lied In Wisconsin: Here's How You Know The State's Voter ID Law Is A Complete Sham

Friday, April 17, 2015

Bill Maher Interviews Elizabeth Warren

Saturday, November 15, 2014

More Skills Gap Crap

The Milwaukee Business Journal entered the "skills gap" discussion with 5 things employers and job seekers need to do to bridge skills gap.

Why the media continues to push this manufactured drivel is beyond me. There is no skills gap.

The money-quote that captures the ridiculousness of this:

The reason companies are taking longer to hire is that they are getting more specific about the talent that they are looking for and a "great employee is game changing," and potential hires need to focus on "bringing greatness into the workplace," said Jamie Fall, vice president for workforce and talent sustainability for a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit called the HR Policy Foundation.

So, Milwaukee can't find welders (the oft repeated example) because not enough "game-changing" and "great" employees are out there? Whatever that ever means.

Sure, most employers want smart, responsible and talented employees. But the main reason they aren't filling these jobs is because of the pay. You can't employ a great, game-changing employee for a minimum wage.

All jobs require some on-the-job training. The idea that an employee walks into the door knowing everything is pure fantasy.

This isn't a worker or a training problem, it's a pay problem.

[source]

This anemic-pay epidemic also explains our current record-level income inequality. When people only have enough to get by, they don't consume enough to consistently grow the economy. Our media has been a compliant messenger in the skills gap mythology and, thus, enablers of increasing income inequality.

The story goes:

The Haves want nothing more than to employ the Have Nots. Its just the Have Nots aren't pulling their weight. They just can't quite get it done.

Maybe if the public sector paid more for training, maybe if the public sector did more to educate potential workers, maybe if the public sector gave subsidies to private companies...

Got that? You're stupid and unskilled...and its the government's job to fix things, or at least shovel money at it.

All hail the free market!

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Weekend Reading

As Divider-In-Chief, Gov. Scott Walker Is A Roaring Success
Everything You Think You Know About The News Is Probably Wrong

Around the world, people have a pretty good sense of the life expectancy of their country’s inhabitants.

When it comes to most other social statistics, they have no idea.

That’s the conclusion to be drawn from a study of public perception in 14 countries by Ipsos MORI, a UK-based market research firm. Ipsos polled over 11,000 residents in total about a range of social factors—from immigration to teen pregnancy to religious demographics. Here is the overall “Index of Ignorance,” from least to most informed:

1. Italy
2. US
3. South Korea
4. Poland
5. Hungary
6. France
7. Canada
8. Belgium
9. Australia
10. Great Britain
11. Spain
12. Japan
13. Germany
14. Sweden

Southwest Airlines Transforms Air Service In Milwaukee