May 17, 2015

Is the Democrat Party Becoming Anti-Labor?

Studies show there are three things you can do that will almost guarantee you will never live in poverty: (1) finish high school, (2) get a full time job and (3) get married, but wait until you are 21 and don’t have children until you are married. Do these three things and it’s very unlikely you will be poor. If you are, you won’t be poor for very long. So how does public policy affect these choices? Inner city schools dominated by powerful teacher unions are not meeting the needs of poor minority students. The welfare state (185 federal/state means test programs) is designed from top to bottom to encourage single motherhood and penalize marriage. And virtually every public policy you can think of is making it more expensive to hire workers. It is this last set of policies that I find most perplexing. In times past, the Democratic Party was the party of full employment. It wasn’t that long ago that The New York Times endorsed a zero minimum wage. Prominent Democrats once endorsed the idea of enterprise zones — places where there would be fewer regulations and lower taxes, so that job producing businesses would flourish. And although it originated in a Republican administration, Democrats have traditionally supported the Earned Income Tax Credit — under which low-income workers get a bigger tax “refund,” the more they work and the more they earn.

Studies show there are three things you can do that will almost guarantee you will never live in poverty: (1) finish high school, (2) get a full time job and (3) get married, but wait until you are 21 and don’t have children until you are married. Do these three things and it’s very unlikely you will be poor. If you are, you won’t be poor for very long.

So how does public policy affect these choices? Inner city schools dominated by powerful teacher unions are not meeting the needs of poor minority students. The welfare state (185 federal/state means test programs) is designed from top to bottom to encourage single motherhood and penalize marriage. And virtually every public policy you can think of is making it more expensive to hire workers.

It is this last set of policies that I find most perplexing. In times past, the Democratic Party was the party of full employment. It wasn’t that long ago that The New York Times endorsed a zero minimum wage. Prominent Democrats once endorsed the idea of enterprise zones — places where there would be fewer regulations and lower taxes, so that job producing businesses would flourish. And although it originated in a Republican administration, Democrats have traditionally supported the Earned Income Tax Credit — under which low-income workers get a bigger tax “refund,” the more they work and the more they earn.

But these days we are witnessing backsliding. It’s as though the talking heads for the Democratic Party have not only forgotten what they learned in Econ 101, they positively reject it all. Hardly a week goes by without someone calling for a higher minimum wage on the editorial pages of The New York Times. In fact a recent Times editorial implied that employers have a duty to substitute for the welfare state. That is, if a Wal-Mart employee signs up for Medicaid or Food Stamps, that’s Wal-Mart’s fault!

The appetite for pricing people out of a job on the left is becoming insatiable — from minimum wages to paid maternity leave to paid sick leave to paid vacations to extending overtime pay to white collar workers to mandated employee benefits galore. Then there is ObamaCare.

Let’s be clear about what economic studies show. Equal pay for equal work laws have not reduced the men/women wage gap. Anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action requirements have not reduced the black/white wage gap. (Those gaps have narrowed, but not because of any law.) Minimum wage laws have not increased the income of low-income families. And employee benefit mandates are not paid for by employers or consumers or the tooth fairy — they are paid for by lower wages and a reduction in other benefits for the very workers these laws are supposed to help. Even health and safety regulations appear not to matter. There seems to be no evidence that OSHA has led to fewer worker accidents or deaths.

That doesn’t mean that government intervention in the labor market is benign. Every intervention raises the employer’s costs and discourages more hiring. As for ObamaCare, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan estimates that this one piece of legislation is leading to 4 million fewer full-time equivalent jobs.

As I wrote in a recent column at Forbes, summer jobs were often the first jobs for millions of teenagers in years past. They were the place where young men and women learned essential skills that let them climb the ladder of economic opportunity. After all, if you don’t get to the first rung, you are unlikely to achieve rung two or three. Yet last year, less than half of teenagers seeking a job were able to find one. Many aren’t even looking. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the July 2014 participation rate for 16 to 24-year-olds was 17.0 percentage points below the peak rate for that month 15 years ago (77.5%).

Here is what everyone needs to understand. It doesn’t matter what teenagers earn in their first job. Whatever they earn, they will likely spend on fun and frolic. But the skills they learn — showing up for work on time, following orders, being respectful — are skills that will pay off for a lifetime.

Meanwhile, employers are substituting capital for labor — including greater use of robots — just about everywhere in the labor market. For example, there is now a 14-arm, automated harvester that can wheel through rows of strawberry plants, distinguish the ripe from the unripe and pick the berries from the green leaves surrounding them. At $100,000, the robot is not cheap.

But no one in Congress is insisting that farmers pay the robot more than it’s worth and there are no laws requiring farmers to provide the robot with Obamacare or other expensive benefits.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.