US Energy Policy

Is The Minimum Wage Beneficial?

Another study has come out showing that the minimum wage actually hurts those it intends to help: unskilled workers.  This is not the first of these studies, but simply another study that will go unrecognized by those who favor high unemployment among minorities.  The author goes on to say:

Minimum-wage proponents argue that a higher wage floor will improve the standard of living for poor families. The reality is that higher labor costs reduce employment, especially for younger workers, and the greatest amount of pain is felt by black men. The Even and Macpherson study finds that among whites males ages 16-24, each 10% increase in a federal or state minimum wage has decreased employment by 2.5%. For Hispanic males, the figure is 1.2%. "But among black males in this group, each 10% increase in the minimum wage has decreased employment by 6.5%."

The effect on the black community is so pronounced, write the authors, that "employment losses for 16-to-24 year-old black males between 2007 and 2010 could have been nearly 50% lower had the federal and state minimum wages remained at the January 2007 level."

It gets worse. Not all states were fully affected by the federal minimum wage increases because some already mandated a minimum wage above the federal requirement. But in the 21 states that were fully affected, about 13,200 black young adults lost their job as a direct result of the recession, versus 18,500 who lost their job as a result of the minimum-wage mandates. "In other words," write Messrs. Even and Macpherson, "the consequences of the minimum wage for this subgroup were more harmful than the consequences of the recession."

In an interview, Mr. Macpherson told me that racial disparities in the employment consequences of minimum-wage hikes result from a number of factors. "One problem is that I think blacks tend to have, on average, inferior schooling," he said. "Also, the effects of the minimum wage differ by industry, and blacks tend to be heavily concentrated in, for example, eating and drinking establishments, where it's easier to substitute capital for labor."

Milton Friedman discusses the paradox of the minimum wage law:



It is actually interesting to note that the precursor to the minimum wage law was based on racism.  Powerful white unions were intimidated by having to compete against lower-cost black workers, and this led to the passage of the Davis Bacon Act.  Dr. Thomas Sowell discusses this in the following clip:

Navy SEALs Character Quality = Matthew 22:39?

As I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal on Navy SEALs, I was stunned by the one common trait among all SEALs.  The following section explains a little bit about SEAL training and what has been called "Hell Week" which weeds out want-to-be SEALs from will-be-SEALS.  

"What kind of man makes it through Hell Week? That's hard to say. But I do know—generally—who won't make it. There are a dozen types that fail: the weight-lifting meatheads who think that the size of their biceps is an indication of their strength, the kids covered in tattoos announcing to the world how tough they are, the preening leaders who don't want to get dirty, and the look-at-me former athletes who have always been told they are stars but have never have been pushed beyond the envelope of their talent to the core of their character. In short, those who fail are the ones who focus on show. The vicious beauty of Hell Week is that you either survive or fail, you endure or you quit, you do—or you do not.

Some men who seemed impossibly weak at the beginning of SEAL training—men who puked on runs and had trouble with pull-ups—made it. Some men who were skinny and short and whose teeth chattered just looking at the ocean also made it. Some men who were visibly afraid, sometimes to the point of shaking, made it too.

Almost all the men who survived possessed one common quality. Even in great pain, faced with the test of their lives, they had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more than the "fist" of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others, to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose."

Compare with Jesus' summation of the entire OT law in Matthew 22:34-39:


34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him,“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

It is interesting to note that the quality which sets the most elite military commandos apart from the rest of the military is the deep internalization of Jesus' commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.

Illiteracy Abounding in Detroit

According to a study by the National Institute for Literacy, 47% of Detroit's citizens are functionally illiterate.



-The National Institute for Literacy estimates that 47% of adults (more
 than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate,
 referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing,
 and computational skills in everyday life situations.

-We also know that of the 200,000 adults who are functionally illiterate,
  approximately half have a high school diploma or GED, so this issue cannot
  be solely addressed by a focus on adult high-school completion.

-The remaining 100,000 of these functionally illiterate adults (age 25 and
  older) lack a high school diploma or GED, another prerequisite for
  employment success.

The second and third statements above are the most shocking--half of the illiterate people graduated with a high school diploma or GED--that means teachers KNEW they couldn't read or write yet they still passed them all the way through their senior year of high school.  Why is this the case?  Thomas Sowell explains some of the reasoning in the following video:



  If you want to read the rest of the initial article, you can find it here.