I had no idea Scott Walker was so popular

[kentonio]

Raise Minimum Wage, NY Business Leaders Urge Cuomo, GOP

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1542984.html

Oh, lol.

[DinoDoc]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1542984.html

Oh, lol.

If they wish to pay their employees more, they don't need the federal government telling them to do so.

[giblets]

If they wish to pay their employees more, they don't need the federal government telling them to do so.

They probably want to fund the higher minimum wage by increasing prices for consumers.

[Imran Siddiqui]

If they wish to pay their employees more, they don't need the federal government telling them to do so.

Costco already does.

And where is the federal government in this article?! Your post is full of Oerdin-like fails.

[DinoDoc]

Costco already does.

And where is the federal government in this article?! Your post is full of Oerdin-like fails.

If I had said State would you feel better and be less whiny?

[DaShi]

Costco already does.

And where is the federal government in this article?! Your post is full of Oerdin-like fails.

DD is more often wrong that Oerdin. But because he cowers away when challenged, there's less attention called to it.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I guess that's true. If you hit and run, your errors are combatted but not dwelt one.

[The Mad Monk]

3 Reasons Why the Scott Walker Wisconsin Recall Election Matters
May 25, 2012 RSS Feed Print Political junkies are watching the June 5 recall election in Wisconsin very closely, but what about the rest of us? The subject of the recall campaign, Republican Gov. Scott Walker, is ahead in the polls and is looking like he'll survive. Democrats are now doing everything they can to convince voters that there's nothing here to see. But here are three good reasons why the recall election should matter to those of us who live outside of the Badger State:

Walker is proving that struggling states can turn their economies around, and that fiscal conservatism works.

Walker eliminated a $3.6 billion deficit and balanced the budget without raising taxes. He did it by asking public employees to contribute, like the rest of us do, to their healthcare costs and pension funds—a move which prevented teachers, firemen, and police from being laid off. Unemployment in Wisconsin is below 7 percent for the first time since 2008, and joblessness there is now below the national average. Plus Wisconsin's public employee retirement system is now fully funded. Unfunded pensions are a big deal in many states, and could cost taxpayers in many states millions in new taxes.

[Read Peter Roff: Scott Walker's Union Fight Helps Mitt Romney Against Barack Obama]

Reason Magazine and the Rupe Foundation recently polled Wisconsin voters and found overwhelming support for many of Walker's policies:

•72 percent favor asking public sector workers to increase their pension contributions from less than 1 percent to 6 percent of their salaries.
•71 percent favor making government employees pay 12 percent of their own healthcare premiums instead of the previous 6 percent.
•Police and firefighters were exempted from the pension and healthcare adjustments but 57 percent of taxpayers say they should not have been.
•65 percent say public sector workers receive better pension and health care benefits than private sector workers.
•When asked what state and local officials should do if pensions and health benefits are underfunded, 74 percent favor requiring government employees to pay more for their own healthcare and retirement benefits. In sharp contrast, 75 percent oppose cutting funding for programs like education and 74 percent oppose raising taxes to help fund government worker benefits.
If Walker wins the recall, Wisconsin's fiscal policies could become a model for other states. People get this. They realize that fiscal responsibility is not extremist.

The recall election spells big trouble for unions, especially public employee unions.

When recall supporters first garnered nearly a million signatures in order to get on the ballot, the unions were ecstatic. They've poured millions into the state and bussed in thousands of volunteers, but as the issues in the race became clear, the union position came across as greedy and unreasonable. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell told Politico that if Walker wins, it will be "a significant blow to the labor unions," and will definitely embolden other Republican governors to take on labor unions in battles over collective bargaining. There's a chance Democrats will win one of four state Senate recalls, which will give them control of the state Senate and a way to put the brakes on Walker. But no matter what happens in the Senate, Walker's success has already sparked a round of recriminations between union leaders and top-level Democrats, who are avoiding the state. Obama endorsed Walker's opponent the night he won the primary, but other than that has remained silent; the Democratic National Committee has refused to give the state party any money for the cause.

[See pictures of the protests in Madison, Wisconsin.]

"I think this is a national campaign," the head of the International Association of Fire Fighters, Harold Schaitberger told The Hill. "Wisconsin is another important test to establish the tone and mood of what is to come in November." When asked about the DNC's support for the recall, another union official wasn't so happy either: "Labor has always been there for the national Democratic Party. The national Democratic Party should be there for labor in this instance. They're not." There's trouble in paradise.

The recall fight exposes the flaws in the Obama campaign strategy.

Here's how Kelly Steele, a strategist for We Are Wisconsin, the leading union-backed anti-Walker coalition put it a few months ago to Politico: "Scott Walker lied his way into office, and has since launched unprecedented attacks on Wisconsin's working families, dividing the state like never before," Steele said in an E-mail. "This historic recall is a ... victory for Wisconsinites united to take their government back from wealthy special interests who bought and paid for Scott Walker and are dictating the terms of his extreme agenda."

Sound familiar? Might as well be a page out of an Obama speech about Mitt Romney. Instead of defending the public employees unions' position, We Are Wisconsin's website now has talking points about the GOP "war on women." Good grief.

[Read the U.S. News debate: Is There a Republican 'War on Women'?]

The left in Wisconsin is pitching an angry, populist message to voters. So is Obama. Rather than emphasizing fiscal responsibility coupled with a growing economy—which is what Walker is selling—the Obama campaign is also doubling down on voter anger. "I feel like they are overly relying on the have-nots out-voting the haves," one well-known Democrat close to the Obama campaign told Politico. "The economy has gotten a lot better for a lot of people. Instead of making those people feel good about growing businesses, the campaign seems to assume that angry people will prevail. There were successful business leaders in the 2008 coalition, who wanted to use their success to do good. We're losing that inspiration."

Scott Walker is a canary in a coal mine. If he wins, we'll know that at least one state's voters now view budget-balancing as something reasonable that needs to be done right. And we'll know how they feel about the unions' intransigence and angry rhetoric on entitlement reform. We'll all be watching that canary on June 5 to see if it flies.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/mary-kate-cary/2012/05/25/3-reasons-why-the-scott-walker-wisconsin-recall-election-matters

[Ben Kenobi]

72 percent favor asking public sector workers to increase their pension contributions from less than 1 percent to 6 percent of their salaries.
71 percent favor making government employees pay 12 percent of their own healthcare premiums instead of the previous 6 percent.

So private sector workers are paying for health care and pensions that they themselves will not receive?

[Ben Kenobi]

Ie, exactly the same damn argument, which hasn't held to up examination whenever the minimum wage is implemented.

There's a difference between unemployment and cutting back people's hours.

[Ben Kenobi]

That argument doesn't sound like it'd go very far even in the abstract; the owner of the Seven-Eleven or other crap-job-provider needs to have a certain minimum number of warm bodies to keep his store running a certain number of hours. If he can cut back staff hours without sacrificing too much service quality, he'll do it regardless of how much they were making (Lord knows they do IRL). If he can't, he won't, because a poorly run store will drive away customers. And if he cuts so many employee hours that he can't operate the store during profitable times, what has he gained? That's just a crappy way to run a business, or so it seems to me.

Yes, but the real question is which hours are actually profitable in his business? 6-8 and 4-10? That's 8 hours during the day that he would need staff other than himself. He can go with one other worker to fill the 8 hour shift, and lay everyone else off. Or go with 2 people, one who gets 6 and one who gets 2.

Now, I do sometimes wonder if the minimum wage might not cause some sort of inflation by increasing the value of crummy labor, which feels (to my terrible economic intuition) like it ought to happen. I mean, if all the McDonald's workers are making X + 1 where they would normally be making X, doesn't that get passed on to the final product? And given the number of minimum-wage jobs, does that have some kind of final effect on the value of a dollar? If someone can explain to me, using the economic equivalent of "See Spot Run" language, why it does or doesn't, that would be awesome.

That's exactly what does happen. Increasing the compensation for wages, decreases the value of the dollar, and inflation effects would negate the increase. The real problem is those who work for unions who have their compensation at multiples of the minimum wage also see their wages increased far over and above those of the actual minimum wage workers. So the minimum wage workers actually end up behind.

[Ben Kenobi]

Okay. My argument is that they will have their hours cut back to 35 hours a week and so they will be earning $245 a week working 35 hours instead of earning $200 a week working 40 hours. Extra money and free time. So far we've provided an equal amount of evidence for our positions (zero evidence) so it looks like our arguments are equally valid.

Heh, I thought you'd never ask.

A recent study published in the journal Labour Economics found that a 10% increase in the minimum wage causes the number of families living below the poverty line to increase by 4%-6%. A Fraser Institute report released in April surveyed 15 Canadian academic studies on the subject and concluded that a 10% increase in the minimum wage, reduces youth employment between 3% and 6%.

[giblets]

You just provided evidence that the price elasticity of demand for low-wage labor is less than 1. Congratulations, I guess.

[giblets]

http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663.pdf?new_window=1

Scroll down to the tables at the bottom and look at the estimated elasticities.

[Dinner]

Walker is proving that struggling states can turn their economies around, and that fiscal conservatism works.

What a load of horse crap. Walker has the single worst jobs record in the COUNTRY for a governor. His attempts to bust the unions is nothing more than an attempt to destroy the Democrats single largest source of campaign funds and that's why Republicans are trying it across the country. Once the unions are destroyed there is no other big money group to counter balance the massive corporate money which disproportionately goes to the Republicans thus their constant demonetization of unions and their attempts to destroy them at every turn.

Big spending cuts really do mean less money in the economy and thus a decrease in economic activity and a lose of jobs which is exactly the OPPOSITE of what you want in a recession. Pension reform is really the only long term fix needed at the state level but that's a long term problem where as Walker is simply trying to bust all unions in an attempt at a partisan political power grab; he was even video taped saying so. It never had anything to do with the economy and his policies have destroyed tens of thousands of jobs in Wisconsin making the recession that much worse.