On the Minimum Wage: Mitch's Response

Below is Mitch's response to my post on the minimum wage. The only adjustment I have made is to delete parenthetical references to outside articles and replace them with in-body hyperlinks. I will, of course, be responding in due time.

I’m going to try to respond to particular points made throughout the blog post, so developing a linear narrative is going to be difficult. After the comments I will try to give a big-picture account that ties it all together.

First, I certainly wouldn’t offer up the article I posted as any sort of thorough or even remotely rigorous critique of minimum wage law. Nevertheless, I don’t think it is correct to portray the author as failing in intellectual honesty through a straw man fallacy. The point of the article is not to demolish minimum wage, but to give some passing remarks and illustrate a single (although crucial) point. That point is that the law harms members of the set of people it is purported to help. Although we may claim that minimum wage raises workers’ pay, and make it seem as if this is a true universal claim that applies to all workers at the bottom, this is not true. Nor is it necessarily true that we will be taking this extra pay from the employer. In fact, with laws such as this, some people win and some people lose, and those people are both from the low-skilled, low-experience, employee class, not the employer class. So, according to the goal of the proponents of minimum wage, the policy is self-defeating.

On the Minimum Wage

This post is in response to a continuing Facebook discussion regarding the minimum wage, initiated by my old friend Mitch Kaufman, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington in Seattle. Mitch was always the smartest person I knew, even when he agreed with me. Over the last few years, he has gone from a left liberal to a right libertarian, putting us at odds, which has made him an even more valuable resource for gut checking my beliefs. I always prefer to have the most intelligent and informed debate opponents possible, and Mitch never fails to provide. The discussion evolved into something I could not respond to (for length reasons) within Facebook, and I hope people will follow it out onto the web.

IBD has MPD

Investor's Business Daily seems to have come down with a case multiple personality disorder recently. They published a piece on Wednesday noting that the U.S. deficit is actually shrinking at a faster clip than at any time since the demobilization at the end of the second world war. The argument that the article put forward is that since we are already shrinking the deficit at this time, the contraction caused by going over the so-called "fiscal cliff" would have a negative impact on economic growth, and that we should avoid this outcome at all costs. A sample:

If U.S. history offers any guide, we are already testing the speed limits of a fiscal consolidation that doesn't risk backfiring. That's why the best way to address the fiscal cliff likely is to postpone it.

While long-term deficit reduction is important and deficits remain very large by historical standards, the reality is that the government already has its foot on the brakes.

In this sense, the "fiscal cliff" metaphor is especially poor. The government doesn't need to apply the brakes with more force to avoid disaster. Rather the "cliff" is an artificial one that has sprung up because the two parties are able to agree on so little.

Hopefully, they will agree, as they did at the end of 2010, to embrace their disagreement for a bit longer. That seems a reasonably likely outcome of negotiations because the most likely alternative to a punt is a compromise (expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the top and the payroll tax cut, along with modest spending cuts) that could still push the economy into recession.

There certainly is a case to be made here, but I seemed to recall a very different tone coming from the same publication in the relatively recent past. Here's IBD in August talking about Obama's level of success vis-a-vis deficit reduction:

Remember when President Obama promised he'd cut the deficit in half in his first term? Well, the results are in, and red ink will once again top $1 trillion. Calling this an epic failure isn't enough.

Here's another opinion piece dressed up as "reporting" looking at Obama's handling of debt (ominously titled "Obama Let America's Debt and Deficit Cancer Spread"), this one from the middle of October:

During his first 44 months in office, President Obama's policies added $122 billion a month to the U.S. taxpayer burden. At the same time, those policies added only $40 billion a month to the tax base.

This is Obamanomics at work — an extremely rapid rise in outstanding Treasury debt compared to nominal GDP. U.S. taxpayer liabilities increased by a factor of three times as fast as the tax base during his leadership as president.

Finally, there is an article from five days before the deficit shrinking piece, which references AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka's statement that, "all the deficit chatter has distracted us from our real crisis — the immediate crisis of 23 million unemployed or underemployed workers," and then compares this to the dire (austerity induced) fiscal straights that Spain and Greece are weathering:

In short, Trumka is arguing that there's no such thing as too much government spending, that deficits don't matter and that entitlements cannot be cut. Such denialist thinking is beyond irresponsible in the face of a $16 trillion debt, highest on global record and a sign of an irrational agenda often followed by would-be tyrants...This is the kind of irresponsible thinking that has triggered riots in Greece and Spain — a belief that the money is there and only the meanness of austerity is keeping the common man from his share.

Investor's Business Daily seems to have come quite a ways in the last five days on this topic. It couldn't have anything to do with the increasingly obvious fact that the President's re-election and the mechanics of the fiscal cliff give him the lion's share of leverage in the negotiations, which look increasingly likely to end with the GOP grudgingly allowing the upper income tax cuts to expire...could it?

You Can't Miss the Bear!

Below is a screen cap from Drudge this morning, which I presume is a shot across the bow in response to Governor Chrisitie's kind words for the President's Hurricane Sandy disaster aid, his much publicized congratulatory call to Obama upon re-election (coupled with a mere email to Romney), and his dismissal of Romney's "gifts" theory for his loss:

While I can certainly understand wanting to keep someone like Chris Christie in line, I can imagine this kind of adversarial approach backfiring when applied to someone of Christie's...energy. The best way to incite the kind of civil war within the GOP that many are predicting would be to create a leader among the currently disorganized moderates. And maybe the best way to do that would be to radicalize a popular and moderate figure like Governor Christie. Bottom line, if you go after the bear, make sure you don't miss.

Examining the Obama Coalition

There has been significant insinuation from the right, most clearly on display in Governor Romney's post-election "gifts to minorities" explanation for his loss, that Obama was able to eke out a victory due to his reliance on the old Democratic stratagem of identity politics. Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard has a more (read: slightly more) academic take on this theory available here. The idea is that Obama, taking advantage of demographic shifts in the landscape of America, made enough micro-targeted promises to minority groups  to earn him their lopsided support, barely besting Romney's broad-based coalition of real Americans.

Election Wrap-up II: All Hail the Great Nate Silver

One of the prominent themes of the final weeks of the campaign was the exponential increase in visibility of New York Times writer and FiveThirtyEight Blog editor Nate Silver. As pundit after pundit crowed about the imminence of a Romney victory (Andrew Sullivan has a good round-up), they were increasingly forced to push back against Silver's prediction of a fairly hefty Obama victory. They did this in various ways and for various reasons.

When Jonah Goldberg called Silver's model a "numbers racket," or when former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough referred to Silver as an "ideologue" and a "joke," one could safely assume that this was just right-leaning pundits keeping the hope alive and trying to stave off negative press on their guy. Then there are the non-partisan pundits like Politico's Dylan Byers, who wrote the following:

Election Wrap-up I: "Squeaker?"

During his post-election bloviating (as to be distinguished from his pre-election bloviating), Dick Morris made a statement about the election results that has been echoed by many conservatives:

I predicted a Romney landslide and, instead, we ended up with an Obama squeaker.

I've also seen reference to how Obama "eked" out a slim victory, and various pundits refer to the fact that this victory fails to bring with it an electoral mandate, due to the closeness of the final result, as well as the fact that the GOP retained their House majority (the subject of an upcoming post). Karl Rove is a great example of this:

Yaay!

So on sabbatical in Colorado, my resident evil tooth decided to act up once again, and is now breaking into pieces before my very eyes. Most recent chunk below:

Vacation!

The SCOTUS Medicaid Ruling: Part II

So, a couple days ago we detailed the legitimacy and coherence of the Supreme Court ruling on the Medicaid expansion portion of the Affordable Care Act, and decided that the ruling was probably just a bit intellectually dishonest and politically motivated. If you are interested in that aspect of the decision, click on through and give it a read. Today, however, we move on to the practical effects of the decision.

Photo of the Day

Regular readers of this blog (well, one irregular reader) should recognize the following view of the North Table Mountain and the Coors Brewery from a certain patch of grass in Golden, CO:

Ah, Golden.

The 80% and the 5%

I was on my way to Denver yesterday on a Frontier Airlines flight, and had an interesting set of experiences that I felt should go up on the blog. You be the judge.

Right as the crew was boarding the plane, a woman stopped to speak with the man who was scanning the boarding passes. She was in the first 20% or so of the line, and her discussion put the boarding on hold. In her defense, I couldn't tell what they were discussing, but the body language between the two of them (and the annoyance of her teenage son, who kept trying to push her through the gate door) seemed to indicate that it was a matter of satisfying her curiosity on some subject, and not the sort of thing that should cause a boarding delay for the rest of the passengers.

Later in the flight, the same woman wanted to have water as her complimentary beverage, but wanted the water poured into her plastic cup, and not in the one provided by the airlines. I am not sure why this was an issue (concern about contamination from her cup to the collective bottle perhaps?), but the flight attendant was hesitant. The woman was unrelenting, and after holding up the beverage cart for a little while, the crew member shrugged and poured the water into her cup.

Finally, immediately after the pilot announced final descent and turned the seat-belt light on, the same woman unbuckled, left her seat, and traveled to the lavatory, where she remained for long enough to prompt the crew to begin knocking and asking her to return to her seat. When they were finally able to extract her (a minute or so after the first attempt), she returned to her seat making a face and a mock knocking gesture to her husband, in full view of the crew.

This woman is a useful example of my theory that about 80% of the problems in the world are caused by perhaps 5% of people, those who are completely incapable of imagining a world outside their own desires and intentions. This woman was the cause of no less than three incidents on a single flight, and while none of them were particularly calamitous or dilatory, I think that is probably more a function of the fact that her desires weren't particularly calamitous or dilatory, and not that she was holding others in any sort of regard.

Anybody have any idea where these people come from?

The SCOTUS Medicaid Ruling: Part I

Also known as, "was Chief Justice Robert's opinion consistent with the language and intent of the Social Security Act of 1965, or was he legislating from the bench." Let's start with a basic overview of the Medicaid program, the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion, and then follow-up a bit with the courts ruling on the issue.

Contempt

So, if you are reading this blog there is virtually no chance that you are not aware of the Supreme Court decision yesterday in Arizona v. U.S., overturning sections 3, 5(C), and 6 of Arizona SB 1070, the draconian anti-immigrant law that Governor Jan Brewer signed back in April, 2010. My interest today is not so much in amusing effort of both sides to paint the decision as a victory, nor in Scalia's ass-hat dissent (he accused the President of refusing to enforce the nation's immigration laws, a charge which centers on the President's recent announcement that he will be exercising "deferred action" on certain classes of immigrant, an authority the executive branch has lawfully possessed since at least 2003).

No, I am interested in the reaction of everyone's favorite wild west Sheriff, Mr. Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona:

And, by the way, I'm not stopping anything. I'm going to continue to enforce those state laws, regardless of what the federal government is trying to put pressure on me to satisfy all these activists, which, by the way, are in front of my building right now. Three-and-a-half years, they've been in front of my building.

So, I'm not going to bend to the federal government, especially when we still have state laws to enforce.

No, Joe, you don't still have state laws to enforce. Your state laws are preempted by federal statute, which makes sense when you think about it. You can't have every jackass Sheriff in the South running around deciding who will be eligible for citizenship and who will be shipped back to Me-hi-co. We're not talking about "residency" here, the state version of the same. Citizenship, the path to it, the requirements for it, and the shades of gray in between a flag-waving patriot and an illegal alien are the province of the nation as a whole, and by extension their elected representatives. To the extent that the Obama administration is "failing" to enforce immigration laws, they are doing so lawfully, with the discretionary power given to them by the legislative branch.

My real interest here is the idea that this man believes that he can continue to enforce a law vacated by the highest court in the land with impunity. This is an elected official already being sued by the Justice Department for flagrant civil rights violations that range from tackling, cuffing, and detaining a woman for a a malfunctioning license plate light, all the way to failing to investigate over 400 sex crimes due to the prioritization of immigration enforcement over, you know, crime.

This is Dick Cheney all over again. I am always wary of using law enforcement to arrest political figures for their role in crimes committed while pursuant to their duties in office, so long as those crimes aren't related to corruption or bribery. This sort of thing is all too often used to settle scores, rather than seek justice. I don't want to go down the slippery slope to criminalizing policy differences. But in some cases, I think we may be left with no choice but to send in the U.S. Marshall Service to kick down doors and handcuff people.

Dick Cheney and his cohorts were clearly guilty of both violations of international and domestic law, and have in fact been convicted in absentia of the latter. Joe Arpaio, should he choose to put his money where his mouth is, will be in clear violation of the highest court in the land. At some point, these guys have to be treated like the common criminals they are, or they will keep raising the bar for what it takes to be smacked down hard. Seriously, where does it end?

My Journey from Apostate to Apologist

This post could also be entitled How I Explain Myself to my Father or How I Came to Lose my Most Important Values, but I don't feel that those alternates have quite the ring of the winner. Basically, I get the following question all the time from my most astute friends and family:

The Trayvon Travesty

I see Jack Cahill has an article up breaking down the minute by minute of the Trayvon Martin incident, proving that the lamestream media is ignoring the fact that rather than being a seventeen year old kid with an Arizona Iced Tea and a bag of Skittles, he was in fact a dangerous gangbanger finally put out of commission by a heroic and misunderstood George Zimmerman. Or something like that. I feel a fisking coming on...

The Drudge and Switch

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an blurb a few days ago noting something posted on the Drudge Report recall election night that I also noticed. At a bit after seven, before polls had closed, Matt Drudge posted a headline indicating that early exits confirmed a Scott Walker victory.

As he is merely a link aggregator with out any original content, and as I was interested in the early exit information, I clicked through to an AP article regarding the election. I scanned through briefly, unable to locate the polls he was referring to. I read more carefully, still unable to find them. I finally did a page search for phrases like the words "poll" and "exit," which yielded three of the former and none of the latter, with none of the appearances in any way related to exit polling information. He made it up out of thin air.

Now, it turns out that it didn't matter as Walker won comfortably anyway, the only thing that conservatives seemed to take away from Drudge's total fabrication. This isn't the point. The point is that Matt Drudge knows that more people scan his headlines than actually click through to his links, and so without even producing content, he can provoke entirely different reactions based upon a scan of his top links than would be provoked if the same person read the articles he was linked to.

This case was merely an instance where he fabricated a fact that didn't originate from the linked article, but Drudge has repeatedly distorted headlines to the point that they no longer accurately represent even the gist of the articles they link to, and has used the aggregation of unrelated stories to push media narratives that aren't backed up by any kind of fact. Half the time he might as well be linking to Justin Bieber music videos for all the more germane his links are to the point he is trying to get across.

I'll be the first to say that the Drudge Report has its uses. Matt clearly has a mole in the New York Times newsroom, and picks up their scoops before they post on their site. He also provides occasional excellent primary source journalism, albeit just a few hours before everyone else jumps on board, such as breaking the Biden VP selection back in 2008. This is why he's on my list. But by and large the man is a shameless propagandist, and anyone who believes anything his headlines say without clicking through to verify probably  shouldn't be trusted to tie their shoes.

Ahead of his Time

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for pointing out my favorite quote in a while:

"We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that,"                                                                                                               - Thomas Edison

A Tale of Two Charts

Our collective debt, at the Federal level, 1980-2019 (projected of course, extrapolated using what appears at a glance to be the CBO's alternative fiscal scenario):

Image of the Day

Now where's the one for Tim Burton? A tip 'o the hat to BuzzFeed.

The Fairness Doctrine

I'm about a week late to the party, but Fox News aired this gem on May 30:

Normally, I am not someone that thinks that efforts to restore the "Fairness Doctrine" are worth the Herculean lift that would be necessary to overcome all the conspiracy-mongering and ill will it would generate among the masses.If FNC viewers weren't tuning in to this stuff, they'd be getting it from Rush. If someone made Rush provide equal time for opposing views, they'd tune him out in favor of pirate radio like the kind I used to listen while driving through rural Indiana on the way to Valparaiso. If we managed to get all the pirates, if that were even a good thing, people would simply get their news from chain emails.

The point is that in a country that respects free speech, there is no option but to respect the right to be grossly misinformed or propagandized to in a decidedly unidirectional manner. People have a right to their epistemic closure. My objection here is that there is no question that the above segment is for all practical purposes an in kind contribution to the Romney campaign, a four minute advertisement for which the campaign did not have to spend ad dollars, either for the airtime or for the production.

The absence of a fairness doctrine, combined with a willingness on the part of any sufficiently funded individuals to masquerade as journalists while in reality working as de facto campaign operatives creates a loophole in any kind of campaign finance law that you could push a battleship through. If this sort of thing is permissible, we might as well pare down the role of the FEC to merely rubber stamping attempts to disenfranchise minorities.

Star Trek: 2018

Corning has released a second "A Day Made of Glass" segment highlighting their developmental interactive glass technology. With the quickening pace of this kind of application, it's not difficult to see how this sort of thing could be ready for market in five to ten years, even as today's versions fall short of the prize. Video after the jump:

I'm Baaaack...

Yes indeed ladies and gents, after a nearly four year hiatus filled with family life, cable television, cooling towers and cockatiels flying about my head, I am returning to the fold to share my wisdom with the masses. Or my ignorance in silence. However it works out. I can't hear the whooping and applause, which I assume is because I am so far out in the country now, but feel free to send flowers and laurels. Or scotch. Good scotch.

The focus of this blog is going to drift a little, going from a straight political feed to something more like The Daily Dish that Andrew Sullivan has been putting out for more than a decade, minus the Mental Health Break and dubstep fixation. Over the last four years, technology has leapt forward, and since the last post on this blog we have woken up to the iPad (and the ubiquitousness of the tablet in general), the explosion of the smart phone, the advent of the first self-driving cars, not just in terms of prototypes, but also in practice and legal acceptance and adoption. We are rapidly approaching a future when technology will become so integrated into our lives that the the technological singularity sneaks up on us without even a thought. This exponential trend is fascinating to me, and you should expect to see it covered here in depth.

You can also expect updates regarding the coming Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut that I await with bated breath, commentary on television shows like Mad Men, personal tales from my increasingly bizarre life, and occasional sports commentary. Yeah, no, just kidding on that last. Positively no sports. I look forward to getting back into the saddle, and hope I still have what it takes not to disappoint all my loyal readers (you still out there, Guiseppe?), should I ever develop any. Well, for better or ill, here we go.