CBO Says The Obama Plan To Raise Minimum Wage...

[JohnnySavage]

I don't agree with increasing the Federal minimum wage (I have no problem with raising it for Federal contracts). I think the cost of living across the nation has too many peaks and valleys for a one-size-fits-all approach.

Here in the DC Metro area, DC and the surrounding counties have raised their minimum wage well above the Federal level... Here in MoCo, Md I think it's $12. But the cost of living here is pretty high. $12 here still won't get you and apartment, but in Hayseed, Ks you'd be the Boss Hogg with that kind of money.

I'm inclined to either leave the Federal standard where it is and let the states and local jurisdictions set a floor that is right for them. OR - I'd support a regional approach to raising the Federal level.


All the arguing about job loss, doom and gloom about companies going under, oppressive government thugs with their jack-boot on the neck of commerce... that's all just nonsense. If you don't like the government regulating commerce take it up with your beloved founding fathers who gave congress that power.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Actually, when the court ruled upon the idea that raising wheat for your own consumption could be considered interstate commerce, the Founders rolled over in their graves...





It is not the Constitution; it is the abandonment, fostered from Harvard, or original intent for interpretation of precedent. Now we have a little-c Constitution which leads to the rule of man (as envisioned by the President when decrying that charter of negative liberties).

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Low wage earners, those who the minimum wage will affect, tend to spend the additional money. Generally an increase in spending by people results in an increase in jobs.

But, only 31% of them will get it and those now denied the job market will suck up benefits which will more than offset any seen gains; the CBO even says this. Their increases in spending will also be offset by the increase of prices for the goods and services that they are purchasing, so there is no great additional influx of monies to create jobs. One must consider the unseen in any market intervention instead of merely touting the benefit of what they think they see. (Bastiat's "Broken Window")

 

[RobDownSouth]

Lets see now, the CBO is a non partisan government agency that reports to congress and The New Republic is a .... (someone please finish this for me... I need some coffee).

Yes, the CBO has a long history of non-partisan reports.

That's why I'm curious that this particular report seems to make assumptions almost entirely in line with Republican talking points.

Seems a bit of deviation from established policy, know what I mean?

 

[RobDownSouth]

I don't agree with increasing the Federal minimum wage (I have no problem with raising it for Federal contracts). I think the cost of living across the nation has too many peaks and valleys for a one-size-fits-all approach.

Here in the DC Metro area, DC and the surrounding counties have raised their minimum wage well above the Federal level... Here in MoCo, Md I think it's $12. But the cost of living here is pretty high. $12 here still won't get you and apartment, but in Hayseed, Ks you'd be the Boss Hogg with that kind of money.

Actually, it doesn't any longer, if I read the report correctly.

I think that is the whole impetus behind raising the Federal minimum wage, is that it now falls below the 10th percentile of wages in America, meaning even those in Hayseed, KS can't live any longer on the current wage level without public assistance.

I agree with the rest of your post, btw....and kudos to the states that recognize they have a higher cost of living and set their own minimum wage accordingly.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Actually, when the court ruled upon the idea that raising wheat for your own consumption could be considered interstate commerce, the Founders rolled over in their graves...





It is not the Constitution; it is the abandonment, fostered from Harvard, or original intent for interpretation of precedent. Now we have a little-c Constitution which leads to the rule of man (as envisioned by the President when decrying that charter of negative liberties).

Sour grapes. The drafters should have been more concise. The Commerce Clause, as written, gives the federal government the power to do just about anything. Like it or not, every (Supreme) Court for the past 90 years has ruled that way.

 

[dan_c00000]

1) Employers of minimum-wage workers object to it for obvious reasons.

2) Conservatives call it a job-killer, on the assumption that the above will no longer be able to afford as many workers.

3) There is no 3).

It's the same principle as the health care job lock. Since people won't have to work 5 jobs to make ends meet if they get a raise they'll dump some of them. Just like how if you get health insurance at 30 hours instead of 40 you'll work less hours.

Of course racists who can't do math see this as a bad thing.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Sour grapes. The drafters should have been more concise. The Commerce Clause, as written, gives the federal government the power to do just about anything. Like it or not, every (Supreme) Court for the past 90 years has ruled that way.

I don't see any reason to believe the Drafters didn't do that very much on purpose.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[contrifan32]

Yes, the CBO has a long history of non-partisan reports.

That's why I'm curious that this particular report seems to make assumptions almost entirely in line with Republican talking points.

Seems a bit of deviation from established policy, know what I mean?

Could it be that they are both factually correct?

 

[about_average]

The CBO report is not factually correct. It's a premise, a possible outcome.
If you actually read it, they say there could be anywhere from almost no job losses, to nearly one million losses. They arbitrarily chose the midpoint figures.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Sean Renaud]

The CBO report is not factually correct. It's a premise, a possible outcome.
If you actually read it, they say there could be anywhere from almost no job losses, to nearly one million losses. They arbitrarily chose the midpoint figures.

Because that's what you do when you're non-partisan. You choose the answer that helps nobody. In some cases that might be slightly dishonest but for them maintaining their non-partisan status is probably more important than being right. Not that their estimates are worth a damn if they aren't accurate.

You have all the facts, right?

The facts aren't available. This is a best guess. One that I don't find any serious fault with but it's still a guess.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

"b-b-buh-but the black teenagers!!!"

repeat

BLACK TEENAGERS!!!

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http://media.tumblr.com/7f49af67374e45355d02de2fe0c44bac/tumblr_inline_mus7bztC1J1rpbzy6.gif

 

[RobDownSouth]

Could it be that they are both factually correct?

Theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely.

 

[KingOrfeo]

There is economic law, and then there is left wing ideology.

And then there is right-wing ideology, which accords no better with economic law, and usually worse. E.g., Keynesianism works, supply-side doesn't.

 

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

There is, where?

"only on Fox"!

 

[KingOrfeo]

There is, where?

Dwelling in the mean and narrow minds of certain heartless and willfully ignorant persons, most of them involved with or supportive of the GOP and/or TP.

 

[Wrong Element]

It's only a matter of time before some conservative think tank suggests that eliminating all wages will lead to full employment.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

Quote the ideology.

It has various forms. Here's a good summary by by conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America:

The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of "conservative" offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are "adverse to rapid change" and "moderate, avoiding extremes." Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. "Conservatism" -- no less than its foes "liberalism" or "communitarianism" -- has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.

But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, "preferred the past to the present and the present to the future."

To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke's principles and contradiction of the last three. The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in "schemes and speculations" like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not.

If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don't know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right -- unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another.

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a "prophet of the past." Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.

As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated "clerisy" of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the "silent majority." In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president's son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots -- on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold.

See also the TVTropes UsefulNotes page on Political Ideologies:

Conservatism

Problems immediately arise when attempting to define "conservatism" because the term does not refer to any specific single ideology. The word has been used by many different political groups in many different ways, usually peddling wildly-divergent and often flatly-contradictory political programs. Of course, this has to do with the fact that "conserving" the current state of society does mean a different thing in different countries and, more important, different times. Restoring society as it was in the past is a different thing altogether; that would be reactionary.

Historically, in British political philosophy, conservatism does have a fixed definition, although it doesn't refer so much to a political ideology as much as it refers to a skeptical attitude towards political ideologies.

Conservatism is in many ways more about knowledge than about politics. The French Revolution was philosophically motivated by very strong Rene Descartes-style rationalism (i.e. the belief that all truth can be worked out by making logical deductions from first principles). Conservatism, a product of the Counter-Enlightenment, is based on a rejection of this philosophy. Rather, conservatives tend to be very cautious about new ideas. They tend to focus on practical matters and "what has worked before" rather than what would necessarily be the "best" thing to do. Conservatism is very suspicious of ideologies that claim to have all the answers. In short, conservatism is skeptical and cautious about novelty, and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies.

This translates into a reverence for tradition. Tradition is seen as something that has survived a very long time because it has been useful. It is also seen as vital to the maintenance of order and social stability. It is order and social stability that are the key values of British-style conservatism; this is a great contrast to liberalism's prioritization of human freedom above all else. Edmund Burke has often been called the father of conservatism (although he has not always been classified as a conservative and there is still some dissension about whether he qualifies as one). While maintaining liberal goals, he was very concerned with maintaining social stability. Traditions and social institutions should not be summarily cast aside, according to Burke, as they prevent society from descending into chaos. A society is a partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn, and they must all be considered when dealing with national policy. It may surprise many that Burke was actually a Whig (the liberal party in Britain at the time), but he was a staunch supporter of British liberties because they were ancient national traditions, rather than universal rights of any sort.

Another British philosopher that exhibited this attitude is Michael Oakeshott. His work is much more obviously conservative (in the British sense) than even Burke (Burke, for one, can be read as a liberal and arguably had significant influence on the very classically liberal economist Friedrich von Hayek; perhaps even more surprisingly to modern readers, he has been an influence on the proto-anarchist William Godwin and on Marxists such as Harold Laski and C. B. Macpherson). Arguably, Oakeshott is the Trope Codifier for British conservatism; he was anti-rationalist, staunchly empiricist to the point of outright skepticism, and as a result argued that our traditions were the only things we had in order to guide our social organizations.

Besides British conservative thought, there was also a notable Continental trend, known as French or Latin conservatism and developed by the other father of conservatism, Joseph de Maistre. Both varieties put an emphasis on tradition and are skeptical of 18th-Century rationalism. The difference, however, is in how far they are willing to go. While Burke's conservatism can roughly be boiled down to a doctrine of political skepticism, Maistre's variety is much stronger. Originally a cautious supporter of the French Revolution, Maistre grew to despise it, and after the revolutionary French army invaded his native Savoy, he began to advocate a strictly counter-revolutionary doctrine of hierarchic order, religion (specifically, Catholicism) and monarchism.

Maistre reasoned, backing himself with Biblical references, that traditional order is not just "good because it works" but it is good in itself — instead of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", he went for "if it was meant to be broken, God would do it by now". His stance on monarchy was that any attempt to derive the right to rule on rational ground leads to discussions over the legitimacy of government, and to question the government is to call for chaos. Thus, a government should be based on non-rational grounds, e.g. religion (through the Divine Right of Kings, and papal recognition — after all, you can argue what best serves the common interest, but how can you disprove "because God said so"?), which the subjects wouldn't be allowed, or even able to question.

By now, it is a good time to return to Burke: because his branch of conservatism allows for change, as long as proper caution is exercised, it is known as evolutionary. Maistre's branch, on the other hand, considers even a small change too much; it is also willing to actively fight to restore the old order where it's been removed, a thing Burke's conservatism would rarely if ever advocate. For this reason, Maistre's conservatism is called reactionary.

It is when we look at American conservatism that things get confusing. "Conservative" as used in the US is not an ideology, but rather a coalition of many different ideological groups. Many self-proclaimed conservatives are ideologically classical liberals! There are also self-proclaimed Oakeshottians in American conservatism as well, such as Andrew Sullivan.

Religious conservatism is a strong element in American conservatism, but it differs from any of the previous subgroups of conservatism (it is probably closest to Maistre's branch). Like British-style conservatives, religious conservatives argue that specific traditions are vital for social stability and thus deserve State protection. However, unlike British-style conservatives, they argue that it is adherence to a specific set of religious traditions and moral beliefs that keep society together, and they also (very much unlike British-style conservatives) are not skeptical about the possibility of knowledge. Rather, they argue faith is a means to perfect knowledge. This attitude is neither Enlightenment nor Counter-Enlightenment; it is a pre-Enlightenment attitude.

Another American phenomenon is the infamous neoconservatism. Developed during the Seventies, it has been initially described as the ideology of "socialists for Nixon" or a "[US-style] liberal mugged by reality" — former leftists who have moved to the conservative camp after becoming disillusioned with their own. As such, neoconservatism shares tenets of US-style conservatism, such as democracy and free markets, with the progressive attitude and revolutionary tendencies of the Left. Thus, neoconservatives have been known for their approval of welfare and big government. In the economy, they support capitalism but endorse state interventionism. However, neoconservatism has garnered most of its criticism from its foreign policies, where these progressive tendencies resulted in doctrine of belligerency, a disdain for diplomacy, and aggressive promotion of capitalist democracy. Altogether, this might've been forgettable, but then the terrorist attack of 9/11 happened, and...

Of course, American conservatism is still fundamentally a coalition of varying ideological groups. Thus, there have been many attempts to bridge these philosophical differences. For instance, Frank Meyer of the conservative National Review magazine argued classical liberals (known as "libertarians" because in the US, "liberal" refers to an electoral coalition of social liberals and social democrats) should argue for the use of classical liberal policies as means to conservative goals. William F. Buckley Jr, also of the National Review, argued in a very Oakeshott-like manner that conservatism is fundamentally based on skepticism and caution about new ideas, and thus a preference for tradition and against ideology. However, he also argued for the incorporation of both religious conservatism and classical liberalism, primarily because they all faced the common enemy of Soviet-style communism.

In short, British-style conservatism is characterized by an aversion to rationalistic and/or ideology-based political programs and instead a preference for proven, pragmatic policies in the pursuit of maintaining social order by protecting established traditions from radical change. Latin-style conservatism is British-style taken Up to Eleven with a strong religious and optionally monarchist element. American-style conservatism is based on an unstable coalition of British-style conservatism, religious conservatism, and classical liberalism, in varying proportions depending on numerous variables.