There comes a time, every few years actually, when government has to be the mommy of all the little greedy business boys and girls and make them take their medicine. Among the medications that business most dislikes the taste of is the Minimum Wage. Because business dislikes it, the GOP dislikes it, joined at the hip as they are to business.
Joe Miller, the crackpot Tea Party loon that won the GOP nomination for Senate from Alaska recently said, in public, that he thought the minimum wage to be unconstitutional. Bear in mind that the entire GOP hates the minimum wage. They stalled increases in it for the entire Bush Administration. Even more mainstream GOP candidates like Dino Rossi, Senate candidate in Washington State, have argued to lower it, although on less obviously irrational grounds than its constitutionality. Both Joe Miller and Dino are irretrievably wrong.
Rossi argues that Minimum wage is bad for business, raises costs and so raises prices. Rossi, apparently, flunked ECON 101. The cornerstone of economics is that productivity increases create wealth. Where that wealth ends up is critical to an economy. If productivity increases are shared between labor and business, the economy grows. If not, the economy is damaged by either of inflation or deflation. Trickle down economics is, by its nature, deflationary. Wages that are too high relative to value added are inflationary. Ideally these forces balance in the free market. But as libertarians are fond of pointing out, there is not such thing as a free market, never has been.
Business is the main offender in preventing a free labor market. Unions arose because of the inherent advantage that business has in setting wage scales. Unions and management can balance each other out over time and a certain amount of head knocking. But labor and management are more often than not in imbalance, wages growing more slowly with reference to productivity gains. Minimum wage is a measure by government to redress imbalance and so reduce the head knocking outcomes. That is its purpose, a sane government making sane choices about ameliorating the conflict between two natural enemies so that the conflict doesn't spill out into the streets with torches and pitchforks. When politicians are invested in having one or the other of the sides win, the intent of minimum wages as law is corrupted. It is not intended to create winners and losers, it is intended to maintain order.
So while Dino Rossi is intent on corrupting a system that has worked for 75 years to mediate the inherent conflict of labor and industry, the neophyte politician Joe Miller, and others of the current crazy crop of Tea Party candidates, is decrying it as unconstitutional. Miller is among the Tenth Amendment idiots, no clearer in vision and no more honest in intent than were the idiots who forced the Tenth's inclusion in the Bill of Rights in the first place. The Tenth is meaningless.
The Tenth Amendment endeavors, in club blunt words, to limit the power of the federal government to what was written in 1791 including the Tenth itself, seemingly negating all the effort of enacting the additional amendments. Government, both federal and state, should have saved their time if a pustule in the stream of competence such as is the Tea Party can succeed in convincing the public that all law post to the Tenth is illegal and unconstitutional.
The Tenth Amendment is a joke and was seen so when adopted solely to mollify the South that feared emancipation even then. The Southern States sought to freeze the argument over slavery with the Tenth. They might have succeeded had it not been for the simple logic that the venerable document that formed the nation was left unfinished for sake of the expediency of placating the slavers. The Tenthers then seem to be arguing that a Constitution that denies the personhood of tens of percents of the population is just fine with them, even though the prime tenant of the Declaration is that all men are created equal, self evidently. Not so self evident to the King or to the Tea Party it seems.
The Tenth states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." It does not say that laws derived under and consistent with the Articles of the Constitution cannot be enacted over and above the original writing or that States, and certainly not individual citizens, obtain a power from it to overrule federal law or amendments duly adopted by two thirds of the states. The authority for making law over and above the words in the original Constitution is based in implied powers and is among the earliest arguments in Constitutional law. Implied powers are derived from the general welfare and necessary and proper clauses of the Preamble. Under the Tea Party interpretation that the Tenth limits the federal government in imposition of post ratification law, the Tenth is, logically, self nullifying. There can be no power to amend the Constitution that is asserted by a denial of its power to amend itself. It could just as easily be amended to say "we were just kidding with the Tenth". What defines law is a recognition of what best serves all or at least most of us, it is that we all agree on the enlightened and progressive thought that is the Preamble on which the Constitution and all law that follows is based. Anything that does not meet this measure is simply not sustainable as law.
No court in the land that has more than a trained ape in the seat of justice will uphold a challenge to Minimum Wage as it passes the test of promoting the general welfare. You would have to believe in Trickle Down economics to believe that it would not, and no one any longer believes in Trickle Down, if they ever did. Joe Miller is out on a Constitutional limb that won't support a down feather, and is an attorney. All you can conclude is that he is the most intellectually dishonest cracker to run for the Senate since "Tail Gunner" Joe McCarthy.
In 1968 the Minimum Wage was $1.80 per hour. On that hourly wage, in 40 hours a week, you could support a family of four with a stay at home mom in most of the country. The CPI has drifted around and the politic climate has change since then, and now the minimum wage will support about two thirds of one person. You have double up in housing and transportation to get by on it now. Don't add children or you will need food stamps and Medicaid, things invented to fight wage deflation.
The reason Minimum Wage won't support a person is that Republicans have been winning their war on Minimum Wage and Democrats have been tepid to chilly in defending it. The moderate Democrats seem to have bought into the idea that a growing economy and a free markets obviate the need for it. In this they are wrong, but not as wrong as are Republicans.
The drift away from support for Minimum Wage has been ill advised on several levels.
There is no free market for wages without government support. Business and corporations exert incessant pressure to lower wages and benefits with massive advantages. Against that pressure the only recourse without government involvement is labor unions. The National Labor Relations Board was created to balance the playing field. Unions have been eviscerated starting with Reagan's appointments to the NLRB of anti-union hard liners. Union busting became its own industry and wages have been in decline ever since. The fair market for labor, created by the New Deal Wagner Act, was destroyed by Republican governments. Minimum Wage, as an act of Congress, is now the main tool in balancing the benefits of economic growth, and without it, the economy is hostage to the willful misapprehensions of wage and economy dynamics of business and the Republicans.
Now, attacks on the minimum wage are the final resort of business to maintain profitability in markets put into decline by their own anti-labor agenda. Should they succeed in eliminating the minimum wage, there is no bottom for wages in America short of parity with the $2 a day scales of the third world. Business still fails to comprehend that a world filled with subsistence consumers will not power profits of any kind, not even with slaves as laborers.
It is an insanity of the gravest kind that business does not recognize the fate to which their aspirations lead. A world of impoverished people will not produce rich people. The already rich don't care. But those that follow, their own children and the working class of the world, should care, for they inherit the consequences of their parents and their parents employer's insatiable greed.
Assault on the minimum wage is not only an assault on the working class, it's an assault on the economy of the Untied States of America and all but an arrogant few who's futures do not depend on that economy. In the parlance of total warfare, it's the ultimate act of war. So, it's more than medicine for the greedy business boys and girls, it's really badly needed life saving medicine that they are marshaling armies of lobbyists and Tea Party zombies to resist. It's manifestly stupid to support them for not wanting to take the medicine.
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"Business" will never realize anything because it can't. Devoid of thought, it is simply a process to create profit. It doesn't have aspirations or understanding and it does not CARE if our society implodes. Yet we have given it rights and with that it seems, even more power to influence than majority vote.
It is evident already that the laws support the money, not the people. We've become slave to the Greed by allowing corporations to assume the rights of the individual without it having the body, conscience, or even mortality and weakness of an individual. Essentially this means that we've abdicated rule to a soul-less immortal monster and now we can't cut the head off the hydra because it doesn't even have one.
It is the laws that empower the corporations that must be examined. Otherwise our only recourse will be to invest in pitchforks.
cotton shirt to use as a sleep shirt.
It's one of the newer style where they don't put a tag near the neck line, which is good for me, because I have to cut out any tags that touch my skin
First thing I noticed was that the stitching of the seams on the inside was kind of scratchy/itchy
so I turned the shirt inside out and tried it on that way. Thats when I noticed the tag at the bottom of the shirt.
I wonder how many US factories Fruit of the Loom closed so they could make their clothing in the
Honduras?
I added them to my list of brands that I now need to check for country of origin
LET's END WELL FARE for The RICH !
Tax Capital Gains at the same Rates as WORK !
And then use the New Money to Put People Back to Work In America !
He seems to expect that the Federal Government is capable of checking, and balancing its own power. Good luck with that. Everything acts in self preservation. The 10A is a crucial check and balance on Fed over-reach. The 10A is about choice, allowing different ideas to flourish, and fostering an environment whereby people could ultimately vote with their feet.
Having said that, a national minimum wage is a good thing - and it should be high as it reasonably can be. However, when discussing the buying power as compared to the 50's etc. we have to remember that CPI disparity from place to place in this nation is VERY, VERY different. Subsistence wages in DC or NYC would be enough to live very well in other parts of the nation. This is not an issue to be heavy handed with.
I did address the different parts of the country regarding minimum wage, and agree that there are disparities in cost of living that minimum wage does not address. The reason it is not addressed is that those disparities are leveraged by conservatives to argue against it, even when ample data is available to regionalize the federal minimum wage.
Also, "I did address the different parts of the country regarding minimum wage", I re-read your article several times and, no, you didn't. But that's fine, I wasn't trying to say the main thrust of your article is wrong - in fact I believe just the opposite; the minimum wage should be as high as reasonably possible. All I was pointing out was an issue with statistics that you are using and why it would be hard for us to get anywhere near the situation that we found in the 50's.
They raise taxes, but yet down everything else. Don't they have math skills? Shamelessly they even employ illegals and throwing them pennies while downing the wage scale for Americans. We had better rise up
because they won't quit squeezing us. How dare they!
Undermining unions, low wages have lead us nowhere, now they want lower wages. Here in BC, Canada, we're at a $8.00/hour minimum wage. Raising it to $10.00/ hour is presently being debated.
I spent 15 years in corporate management. I watched industry "leaders" trash three major US industries. They made their quarterly numbers, all the way to the end. Pound wise and penny foolish is all that needs to be said.
It's penny wise and pound foolish.
Without reasonable wages in the US, the consumer base consumes less, creating a downward effect on the market
In order to create markets for goods and services people need to earn enough to afford those goods and services
wealth..."
The standard economics statement is that wealth is created through trade when the seller values the good or service less than the buyer. After the trade the sum of the value that each party has increases.
If your statement were true then wealth could be generated by increasing production in a market with perfectly inelastic demand (like electricity). Instead, production will simply be wasted.
The tenth amendment does not put any restrictions on future amendments as you suggest. It simply states that the federal government only has the powers that are stated in the constitution (and its amendments). Minimum wage is generally argued to be covered by the commerce clause which gives the federal government power to regulate interstate commerce. It states "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes"
The General Welfare clause that you allude to was written in the context of taxes. So, it isn't applicable to minimum wages.
The supreme court actually ruled that a federal minimum wage was unconstitutional in 1935 because it was not "interstate commerce". Later, court precedent expanded the definition of interstate commerce. As a result the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act was not overturned when it established a minimum wage.
So I guess that the remaining point for discussion is how anything so misguided is able to gain any actual traction.
Good point about inelastic demand, but otherwise you are saying what I said about creating wealth in a different way. You approach it from the commerce definition. I see innovation as the source for creating the profitable exchange, so ultimately the source of wealth.
Apparently I wasn't clear. "Implied powers are derived from the general welfare and necessary and proper clauses of the Preamble.", so while minimum wage falls under commerce, the power to expand commerce law to include it derives from general welfare through implied powers.
Regarding the Tenth, I was writing what I assumed was the Tenther take on it, not what it might actually mean. However I do harbor the notion that it is self cancelling if taken to mean what they seem to think it means.
The same thing happens in labor markets. A worker trades their labor for money. The worker values their labor less than the wage. The company that hired the worked values the labor more than the wage. This trade is prevented when a floor is put on wages that is higher than value that the company receives from the labor.
There are a lot of studies (and meta studies) that show that minimum wages increase unemployment for people that are paid a minimum wage.
The preamble is universally understood to have no actual legal bearing. It is just there to set the "mood". That specific statement was meant to be clear that the government was for the general welfare and not for a god or king. Effectively, it has the same legal weight as the Declaration of Independence.
So how about a bill with a set of options, one of which is to face a massive increase in the minimum wage payable to current workers, but which can be avoided by taking virtually those same few trillion dollars and spreading them over an expanded labor base. "Hire more workers at current pay rates, or double the pay of your workers on the bottom rungs, your choice." And some serious and appropriate incentive to not try to take the antisocial track of increasing our unemployment rate.
(By the way, even Judge Trained Ape will go with the Commerce Clause over General Welfare in upholding the minimum wage concept. Everytime. Aside from a few abberrational humans, there is no sentient being on the planet that cannot comprehend the connection between our workers having money to spend and our country actually having a marketplace to spend it in.)
Einstein said it quite well:
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Never argue against stupidity; the stupid will always win. They don't care that they are ignorant. That's why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are so successful: Mockery and satire DO work, as they make their points using the sharpest of rapiers: Wit and humor.
The minimum wage will be, as it has been, under near-continous assault until our business class returns its faith to our society, and its wealth to the service of the US economy, and not to the world's cheapest bidder on labor price.