The hidden history of the minimum wage in America

Mark J. Perry is concurrently a scholar at AEI and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan's Flint campus. He is best known as the creator and editor of the popular economics blog Carpe Diem. At AEI, Perry writes about economic and financial issues for American.com and the AEIdeas blog.

Don [George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux] has emphasized a very important, but usually overlooked or neglected reason that some empirical studies fail to find negative employment effects following increases in the minimum wage government-mandated wage floor that guarantees reduced employment opportunities for America’s teenagers and low-skilled workers (especially minorities). That reason has to do with the fact that the minimum wage has been in effect for almost 80 years since the Fair Unfair to Unskilled Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938, and it’s been increased 27 times since then. Therefore, the government’s mandated market-suppressing, artificial wage for low- and un-skilled workers has been around for such a long time, and it’s been raised so many times, that the distortionary effects of the minimum wage have long ago been “internalized” by employers who hire unskilled workers.

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Remember the stimulus?

Obama promised his failed Stimulus plan would create 3 million jobs. He lied. The stimulus ended up costing taxpayers $278,000 for each job created.

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Immigration Reform: Who benefits?

Sad news about Ted Cruz...

Middle class workers and the working poor are clearly getting hammered by the current importation of foreign workers. In life there are winners and there are losers. If American workers — especially middle class workers — are losing, and losing big, someone must be winning. The question is simple, “Who benefits from open borders and failures to enforce the immigration laws?

What is generally not known is that among the provisions of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the legislative betrayal of American citizens, is that it would provide for a huge increase in the number of H-1B visas for high tech workers and a provision that would, for the very first time, permit the spouses and adult children of H-1B visa holders to be granted Employment Authorization Documents (EAD’s) that would give these nonimmigrant family members as much right to any job as an American worker.

Senator Ted Cruz, however, is truly leading the charge against American high-tech workers. He provided an amendment to Comprehensive Immigration Reform (S.744) referred to as “Cruz 5.” The goal of his amendment was made crystal clear in the video of statements by Cruz at a Senate hearing on this issue. His amendment provides for a 500% increase in the cap for H-1B visas, increasing the current annual cap of 65,000 such visas to an outrageous 325,000 Science, Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) professionals.

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Michael Cutler is a retired Senior Special Agent of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) whose career spanned some 30 years. He served as an Immigration Inspector, Immigration Adjudications Officer and spent 26 years as an agent who rotated through all of the squads within the Investigations Branch. For half of his career he was assigned to the Drug Task Force. He has testified before well over a dozen congressional hearings, provided testimony to the 9/11 Commission as well as state legislative hearings around the United States and at trials where immigration is at issue. He hosts his radio show, “The Michael Cutler Hour,” on Friday evenings on BlogTalk Radio. His personal website is http://michaelcutler.net/.

The real data on illegal immigrants and U.S. jobs

If you like charts and graphs, there are some good ones here:

Immigrant Gains and Native Losses In the Job Market, 2000 to 2013

BTW, Loretta Lynch is just saying that, although she is up for the top law enforcement job in America, she doesn't intend to enforce the laws. That would only entitle you to a position in Obama's world, but not the United States of America as founded.

The ACA’s overall impact on employment, however, will arguably be larger than that of any single piece of legislation since World War II.

Much of the ACA’s tax effect resembles unemployment insurance: both encourage layoffs and discourage people from returning to work.

Starting this year, the United States’ working population will face three major employment disincentives resulting from the very benefits the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides: (1) an explicit tax on full-time work, (2) an implicit tax on full-time work for those who are ineligible for the ACA’s health insurance subsidies, and (3) an implicit tax that links the amount of available subsidies to workers’ incomes.

A new study published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University advances the understanding of how much these ACA taxes will reduce overall employment, and why. It concludes that the reduction will be nearly double that projected by previous analyses. Labor markets ultimately will reduce weekly employment per person by about 3 percent—translating to roughly 4 million fewer full-time-equivalent workers.

Below is a brief summary of this important update. Please see “The Affordable Care Act and the New Economics of Part-Time Work” to read the entire study and to learn more about author Casey B. Mulligan, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

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Social progress?

The old employer sponsored system forced people to stay in jobs they didn’t like because they needed the health insurance coverage. The new Obamacare system will force people to stay out of jobs they do want because they need to maximize their subsidies. And this is social progress?

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Bad news for business owners

Reality is beginning to sink in.

So, the Romney's are selfish for keeping a horse?

* And employing a groom with a family to support

* And paying for feed that's sold by someone with a family to support

* And transported in trucks by someone with a family to support

* And manufactured in a factory by people with families to support

* From stuff that's grown by farmers with families to support

* And having a barn built by construction workers with families to support

* With materials trucked by drivers with families to support

* From factories with workers with families to support

Sounds to me like that one horse has done more to put Americans to work than the horse's ass that's in the White House!

Unemployment Rate Dropped In Every State That Elected A Republican Gov. In 2010

On the other hand, the unemployment rate in states that elected Democrats in 2010 dropped, on average, as much as the national rate decline and, in some states such as New York, the unemployment rate has risen since January of 2011.

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9-0

Re: Supreme Court
I can’t remember the last time a major decision on a hot-button issue went 9-0.

“The fact is that to many in the Obama administration, as to many in modern legal academia, employment discrimination law is itself pursued with the intensity of, well, a religion. And when someone else’s religion comes into conflict with theirs — well, it’s only human nature for them to want theirs to prevail.”

And from Hugh Hewitt: A Huge Victory for Religious Liberty, and a Huge Defeat for the Obama Justice Department

MOTHER JONES: Relative to population growth, we've been generating no new jobs at all.

So yes: "Any sane person should look at these numbers and conclude that the economy desperately needs a boost." Even the not especially sane ought to have figured that out by now.

Employment Picture Even Grimmer Than You Think

More jobs were created by President Bush’s pro-business policies and tax cuts than by the Obama-Pelosi “spend your way to hell” Keynesian failure!

Now we know the truth...

Is Obamacare really worth the loss of millions upon millions of jobs?

YOU'RE JOB IS NEXT!

PS: As one caller said to Rush Limbaugh today: If they'd just focus on jobs, we could all actually afford to buy health insurance!

Obama Promised 600,000 Jobs This Summer--Lost Nearly 1 Million Instead!

Back on June 8th Barack Obama promised to speed up the Stimulus projects over the summer and to "create or save" 600,000 jobs.

16,000 Jobs Lost Each Day Since ‘Stimulus’ Became Law!

Seeing is believing

Then...and now

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Honest Citizens Line Up For Jobs Illegal Aliens Held

Jobs Americans won't do, my ass!

It's bad enough that our legislators make laws and then a whole lot of people decide that it's ok just to ignore them--since when was anarchy a constitutional right?--but to put salt on the wound, no one seemed to care that our countrymen were being cheated out of jobs that could feed themeselves and their families! And if you are rooting for these people, you are helping them to commit one of the most devastating crimes in modern society, that of Identity Theft (and you will have no one to blame but yourself if and when you wake up to thousand of dollars, even millions, that you are supposed to owe to credit card companies for things you never purchased--and that's just the beginning of the nightmare).

Here is the proof that Americans will take the jobs the illegal aliens steal. The line was out the door—that says something.

Loss for one is another’s gain: Applicants line up to fill jobs left empty by Swift plant raid

UPDATE: Raids On Illegals To Continue