Tag Archives: Minimum Wage

News

Bush spent $622B on Iraq, Obama spends $888B on welfare in 2010 alone

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Story from CNS News. (H/T Weasel Zippers via ECM)

Excerpt:

During the entire administration of George W. Bush, the Iraq war cost a total of $622 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

President Obama’s welfare spending will reach $888 billion in a single fiscal year–2010–more than the Bush administration spent on war in Iraq from the first “shock and awe” attack in 2003 until Bush left office in January.

Obama’s spending proposals call for the largest increases in welfare benefits in U.S. history, according to a report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. This will lead to a spending total of $10.3 trillion over the next decade on various welfare programs. These include cash payments, food, housing, Medicaid and various social services for low-income Americans and those at 200 percent of the poverty level, or $44,000 for a family of four. Among that total, $7.5 trillion will be federal money and $2.8 trillion will be federally mandated state expenditures.

I personally know a lot of people who voted for Obama because we were spending too much on the war. The government’s job is to fight against the enemies of the United States. The government’s job is not to equalize life outcomes regardless of lifestyle choices. But I guess Obama has to buy votes somehow! How else will he be able to get re-elected unless he takes from the productive minority to pay for the votes of the irresponsible majority?

Don’t forget my previous post on the CBO’s projections about Social Security running cash deficits in starting in 2010.

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News

Ignorant leftists beginning to learn about economics the hard way

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Schadenfreude is such a wonderful thing.

First, young people are beginning to realize that taxing the rich is not as great as they thought. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

The proportion of people ages 16 to 24 who were employed in July was 51.4 percent, the lowest July rate since records began in 1948 and 4.6 percentage points lower than in July 2008. …

The Labor Department said 4.4 million youths were unemployed in July 2009, or about 1 million more than in July 2008, putting the youth jobless rate at 18.5 percent, about double the overall national percentage.

Fewer young people were even trying to be part of the labor force this year than in recent years, perhaps choosing summer school, odd jobs around the house or idleness instead.

Let’s be clear. If you raise the price of labor while leaving production levels constant, people will be laid off. Period. This is non-negotiable among rational individuals. My recommendation to the young people: put down the Che Guevara t-shirt and step away from television.

Meanwhile, public school teachers are striking against their own union in order to save their jobs. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

A group of teachers in the North Clackamas School District took the initiative Thursday, amid losing their jobs because of budget cuts, by gathering signatures in an effort to have their voices heard by their union.

The teachers, who gathered outside their union office, said they want a response from the union and put their demands in writing in the form of a petition.

Those speaking out said it shouldn’t have reached this point, and they would have accepted the district’s offer, favoring a wage freeze to save jobs.

“We took a poll in the spring and they got our opinion and the majority said wage freeze,” said Monica Whiteley, who was laid off. “So I would like them to look at the poll or honor it and have us look at the memo of understanding that is out there.”

It’s good to see reliable Democrat voting blocs finally moving beyond rhetoric into reality. The world is dangerous place, and willful blindness has consequences. Next time, they should learn economics the easy way – by reading Thomas Sowell.

Commentary

British tax and benefit system favors single parents over married couples

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ECM found this article by Carolyn Moynihan on MercatorNet.

Excerpt:

An analysis of 98 couples with different earnings and numbers of children carried out by the charity Care showed that 76 of the couples would be better off if they split up and claimed welfare benefits that average £8007. Increasingly it is middle-income families where both parents work that suffer this “couple penalty”.

[…]Many do stay single — but they have children anyway, which entitles them to tax credits that take account of only one working adult per household.

Last year Labour MP Frank Field calculated that a single mother on the minimum wage with two children under eleven would get a weekly income of £487 if she worked 16 hours a week. A two-parent family with one earner would have to put in 116 hours of work on the same pay to get the same money.

It would be a poor sort of marriage that could break under the “pressure” of the partners receiving less in the way of tax breaks than the solo mum down the road (who has other disadvantages, to be sure) — as the Daily Mail suggests — but the messages being sent out are certainly not supportive of marriage as the best environment for children growing up.

The Conservative Party has promised to give back tax breaks to married couples.

This is how big government discourages marriage. The left-wing parties get elected by promising to help the poor. They help the poor by confiscating the wealth from married couples and giving it to single mothers. People see this wealth redistribution, and they stop marrying in order to get more money for doing less work. The children suffer from being raised without a father. This is called “compassion”.

Christians! Stop being ignorant! If you want to do some good in the world, do it with your own money. Don’t give it to a secular government who will try to solve the problem without any awareness of the moral law or human nature. Secular-left elites can’t solve social problems because they have no wisdom. Solve the problem yourself!