Bush, Pelosi, and Reid Deserve Scorn for Destroying Jobs for Teenagers

Anybody with an IQ above room temperature understands that companies only hire workers when they expect to generate net revenue (i.e., the total receipts associated with a new worker are expected to be higher than the total costs). That's why it was so reprehensible for Congress to approve a 40-percent hike in the minimum wage - a step that was guaranteed to kill jobs. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page reports on new research showing 100,000-plus jobs were wiped out. This awful legislation was approved in 2007, and all politicians associated with that choice should be ashamed of themselves.

Economic slowdowns are tough on many job-seekers, but they're especially hard on the young and inexperienced, whose job prospects have suffered tremendously from Washington's ill-advised attempts to put a floor under wages. In a new paper published by the Employment Policies Institute, labor economists William Even of Miami University in Ohio and David Macpherson of Trinity University in Texas find a significant drop in teen employment as a direct result of the minimum wage hikes. The wage hikes were implemented in three stages between 2007 and 2009, and not all states were affected because some already mandated a minimum wage above the federal requirement. But for the 19 states affected by all three stages of the federal wage increase, "there was a 6.9% decline in employment for teens aged 16 to 19," write the authors. And for those who had not completed high school, "we estimated that the hikes reduced employment by 12.4%," which translates to about 98,000 fewer teens in the work force. After isolating for other economic factors and broadening their analysis to include all 32 states affected by any stage of the federal wage increase, the authors conclude that "the federal minimum-wage hikes reduced teen employment by 2.5% translating to approximately 114,400 fewer employed teens."

What the Left Really Wants in Health Care

A Denver Post column hits the nail on the head regarding the Obama-Reid-Pelosi healthcare strategy. They will make lots of fake concessions and offer whatever bribes are necessary in order to put in place an infrastructure that inevitably leads to complete government control of the health care sector:

Once Washington gains a toehold — and considering government controls 49 cents on every health care dollar spent, by toehold I mean "bear hug" — it is an inescapable reality that whatever they come up with will be expansive and expensive. That's the message Pelosi was telegraphing to her allies when — in addition to pointing out how itty bitty the bill would be — she added that it would be "big enough" to put the country on a "path" toward sustainable health care reform. The righteous "path," naturally, ends at the gates of a single-payer system. The infrastructure to reach this objective — price controls, new entitlements and wide-ranging mandates — will be set in place once Democrats use reconciliation to pass the bill, deal with the short-term electoral consequences, and let history work itself out. ...Remember that Congress estimated Medicare's cost at $12 billion for 1990 (adjusted for inflation) when the program kicked off in 1965. Medicare cost $107 billion in 1990 and is quickly approaching $500 billion. Who's going to stop it?