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thinkahol *

Employment and the Minimum Wage-Evidence from Recent State Labor Market Trends | Econom... - 0 views

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    Congress, a number of states, and even some cities will raise or consider raising minimum wages this year. Meanwhile, the economy is suffering what may prove to be the fourth consecutive year of a geographically widespread labor market slump, with most states facing uncertain economic situations. In this environment, the minimum wage becomes more important than ever, as a weaker labor market is unlikely to provide low-wage workers the bargaining power required to negotiate fair wages for their labor. Despite the necessity of a minimum wage that allows low-wage workers to meet basic needs, there is still strong opposition to minimum wage increases, especially from those who don't view the weak labor market as an imperative to raise minimum wages, but rather as a reason to oppose them. In particular, opponents of state-level minimum wage increases claim that these increases are the cause of weak labor markets, especially in the form of high unemployment rates. That argument, however, rests on the simplistic observation that some of the states with high minimum wages also have high unemployment rates. Without more examination, this observation is as useful in understanding state job markets as noting that joblessness has been on the rise in New York since the last time the Yankees won the World Series. It might be true, but it doesn't mean one is causing the other.
thinkahol *

Massachusetts County Claims 75% Of Mortgages Assignments Are Invalid And Ineligible For... - 0 views

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    The Register of Deeds of South Essex County, Mass. is waging war on the banks over predatory lending and mortgage fraud (via Total Mortgage). John O'Brien's case hinges on the fact that the MERS system set up to expedite the bundling of mortgage backed securities skirted numerous local transaction fees. O'Brien figures his town lost as much as $22 million in revenue since 1998. To get some of it back he commissioned an audit of 2010 mortgage assignments. 16% of the assignments were valid, 75% were invalid, and 9% were deemed questionable. Of those that are invalid, 27% were fraudulent, 35% showed evidence of robo-signing, and 10% violated the Massachusetts Mortgage Fraud Statute. The proper owner of the mortgages could only be determined 60% of the time. In a release by his office O'Brien said: "This evidence has made it clear to me that the only way we can ever determine the total economic loss and the amount damage done to the taxpayers is by conducting a full forensic audit of all registry of deeds in Massachusetts. I suspect that at the end of the day we are going to find that the taxpayers have been bilked in this state alone of over 400 million dollars not including the accrued interest plus costs and penalties. The Audit makes the finding that this was not only a MERS problem, but a scheme also perpetuated by MERS shareholder banks such Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan and others. I am stunned and appalled by the fact that America's biggest banks have played fast and loose with people's biggest asset - their homes.  This is disgusting, and this is criminal."
thinkahol *

Chris Hedges: This Time We're Taking the Whole Planet With Us - Chris Hedges' Columns -... - 0 views

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    Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. They become increasingly vulnerable. And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat by a terrified and confused population from reality, an inability to acknowledge the self-evident fragility and impending collapse. The elites at the end speak in phrases and jargon that do not correlate to reality. They retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court at Versailles, the Forbidden City or modern palatial estates. The elites indulge in unchecked hedonism, the accumulation of vaster wealth and extravagant consumption. They are deaf to the suffering of the masses who are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elites, after clearing their forests and polluting their streams with silt and acids, retreated backward into primitivism. As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do. They launch more wars, build grander monuments to themselves, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break th
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

The Death of Horatio Alger - 0 views

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    More blasphemy. This time, evidence of a relative absence of wage mobility in the present day US and the rise of a class hierarchy.
Skeptical Debunker

Les Leopold: Why are We Afraid to Create the Jobs We Need? - 0 views

  • 1. The private sector will create enough jobs, if the government gets out of the way. Possibly, but when? Right now more than 2.7 percent of our entire population has been unemployed for more than 26 weeks -- an all time-record since the government began compiling that data in 1948. No one is predicting that the private sector is about to go on a hiring spree. In fact, many analysts think it'll take more than a decade for the labor market to fully recover. You can't tell the unemployed to wait ten years. Counting on a private sector market miracle is an exercise in faith-based economics. There simply is no evidence that the private sector can create on its own the colossal number of jobs we need. If we wanted to go down to a real unemployment rate of 5% ("full employment"), we'd have to create about 22.4 million jobs. (See Leo Hindery's excellent accounting.) We'd need over 100,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. It's not fair to the unemployed to pray for private sector jobs that might never come through. 2. We can't afford it. Funding public sector jobs will explode the deficit and the country will go broke: This argument always makes intuitive sense because most of us think of the federal budget as a giant version of our household budget - we've got to balance the books, right? I'd suggest we leave that analogy behind. Governments just don't work the same way as families do. We have to look at the hard realities of unemployment, taxes and deficits. For instance, every unemployed worker is someone who is not paying taxes. If we're not collecting taxes from the unemployed, then we've got to collect more taxes from everyone who is working. Either that, or we have to cut back on services. If we go with option one and raise taxes on middle and low income earners, they'll have less money to spend on goods and services. When demand goes down, businesses contract--meaning layoffs in the private sector. But if we go with option two and cut government services, we'll have to lay off public sector workers. Now we won't be collecting their taxes, and the downward cycle continues. Plus, we don't get the services. Or, we could spend the money to create the jobs and just let the deficit rise a bit more. The very thought makes politicians and the public weak in the knees. But in fact this would start a virtuous cycle that would eventually reduce the deficit: Our newly reemployed people start paying taxes again. And with their increased income, they start buying more goods and services. This new demand leads to more hiring in the private sector. These freshly hired private sector workers start paying taxes too. The federal budget swells with new revenue, and the deficit drops. But let's say you just can't stomach letting the deficit rise right now. You think the government is really out of money--or maybe you hate deficits in principle. There's an easy solution to your problem. Place a windfall profits tax on Wall Street bonuses. Impose a steep tax on people collecting $3 million or more. (Another way to do it is to tax the financial transactions involved in speculative investments by Wall Street and the super-rich.) After all, those fat bonuses are unearned: The entire financial sector is still being bankrolled by the taxpayers, who just doled out $10 trillion (not billion) in loans and guarantees. Besides, taxing the super-rich doesn't put a dent in demand for goods and services the way taxing other people does. The rich can only buy so much. The rest goes into investment, much of it speculative. So a tax on the super rich reduces demand for the very casino type investments that got us into this mess.
  • 3. Private sector jobs are better that public sector jobs. Why is that? There is a widely shared perception that having a public job is like being on the dole, while having a private sector job is righteous. Maybe people sense that in the private sector you are competing to sell your goods and services in the rough and tumble of the marketplace--and so you must be producing items that buyers want and need. Government jobs are shielded from market forces. But think about some of our greatest public employment efforts. Was there anything wrong with the government workers at NASA who landed us on the moon? Or with the public sector workers in the Manhattan project charged with winning World War II? Are teachers at public universities somehow less worthy than those in private universities? Let's be honest: a good job is one that contributes to the well-being of society and that provides a fair wage and benefits. During an employment crisis, those jobs might best come directly from federal employment or indirectly through federal contracts and grants to state governments. This myth also includes the notion that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Sometimes it is, but mostly it isn't. Take health care, which accounts for nearly 17 percent of our entire economy. Medicare is a relative model of efficiency, with much lower administrative costs than private health insurers. The average private insurance company worker is far less productive and efficient than an equivalent federal employee working for Medicare. (See study by Himmelstein, Woolhandler and Wolfe) 4. Big government suffocates our freedom. The smaller the central government, the better -- period, the end. This is the hardest argument to refute because it is about ideology not facts. Simply put, many Americans believe that the federal government is bad by definition. Some don't like any government at all. Others think power should reside mostly with state governments. This idea goes all the way back to the anti-federalists led by Thomas Jefferson, who feared that yeomen farmers would be ruled (and feasted upon) by far-away economic elites who controlled the nation's money and wealth. In modern times this has turned into a fear of a totalitarian state with the power to tell us what to do and even deny us our most basic liberties. A government that creates millions of jobs could be seen as a government that's taking over the economy (like taking over GM). It just gets bigger and more intrusive. And more corrupt and pork-ridden. (There's no denying we've got some federal corruption, but again the private sector is hardly immune to the problem. In fact, it lobbies for the pork each and every day.) It's probably impossible to convince anyone who hates big government to change their minds. But we need to consider what state governments can and cannot do to create jobs. Basically, their hands are tied precisely because they are not permitted by our federal constitution to run up debt. So when tax revenues plunge (as they still are doing) states have to cut back services and/or increase taxes. In effect, the states act as anti-stimulus programs. They are laying off workers and will continue to do so until either the private sector or the federal government creates many more jobs. Unlike the feds, states are in no position to regulate Wall Street. They're not big enough, not strong enough and can easily be played off against each other. While many fear big government, I fear high unemployment even more. That's because the Petri dish for real totalitarianism is high unemployment -- not the relatively benign big government we've experienced in America. When people don't have jobs and see no prospect for finding them, they get desperate -- maybe desperate enough to follow leaders who whip up hatred and trample on people's rights in their quest for power. Violent oppression of minority groups often flows from high unemployment. So does war. No thanks. I'll take a government that puts people to work even if it has to hire 10 million more workers itself. We don't have to sacrifice freedom to put people to work. We just have to muster the will to hire them.
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    Unemployment is the scourge of our nation. It causes death and disease. It eats away at family life. It erodes our sense of confidence and well being. And it's a profound insult to the richest country on Earth. Yet it takes a minor miracle for the Senate just to extend our paltry unemployment benefits and COBRA health insurance premium subsidies for a month. Workers are waiting for real jobs, but our government no longer has the will to create them. How can we allow millions to go without work while Wall Street bankers--the ones who caused people to lose their jobs in the first place-- "earn" record bonuses? Why are we putting up with this? It's not rocket science to create decent and useful jobs, (although it does go beyond the current cranial capacity of the U.S. Senate). It's obvious that we desperately need to repair our infrastructure, increase our energy efficiency, generate more renewable energy, and invest in educating our young. We need millions of new workers to do all this work--right now. Our government has all the money and power (and yes, borrowing capacity) it needs to hire these workers directly or fund contractors and state governments to hire them. Either way, workers would get the jobs, and we would get safer bridges and roads, a greener environment, better schools, and a brighter future all around. So what are we waiting for?
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