Friday, April 13, 2012

Government for sale

Democratic senators comprise 13 of the top 15 recipients of lobbyist cash in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Couple that with the strong likelihood that the same senators will be lobbyists in just a few years, and you have a political climate that is ripe for corruption.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Choosing to make life harder for young workers

Karl Smith is the Assistant Professor of Public Economics at UNC-Charlotte, and he has studied retail employment over the past 20+ years. Given that retail sales have, in real dollars, risen nearly 40% since 1990, he posits that retail employment of teenagers (age 16-19) should be higher than it is.

In his article, What the 'End of Retail' Means for Young Workers, Dr. Smith ignores the fac that the minimum wage has gone up over that same period. Young people first entering the workforce are the least productive and least valuable workers in the world. Yet, the government has made it more and more expensive to hire them. Hiring less of them is a perfectly rational and predictable response by retailers.

The fastest way to get young people int the workforce and contributing to society is to eliminate the minimum wage. But the unions won't allow that to happen.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Obama rewrites history

Pres. Obama has once again attempted to revise history. Here are his remarks to reporters during his meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada and the president of Mexico.

"Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary event by overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected congress."

Only in Obama's world does a vote along strictly partisan lines constitute a "strong majority". November can't come soon enough.