Some employers are able to absorb minimum wage increases by increasing labor productivity - producing more output per worker. However, this isn’t possible in the childcare business, due to mandated staff-child ratios, which vary somewhat across states. So with large minimum wage increases, employers have little choice but to pass on the extra cost to the consumer, typically parents or government agencies. According to one estimate, a $15 minimum wage for childcare workers would increase US childcare costs by an average of 21 percent —an extra $310 per month for two children. But in some states the increase would be much higher, over $500 a month for two children.
Of course the minimum wage should be increased, but there is no justification for a one-size fits all approach. It makes more sense to yoke a state’s minimum wage to its median wage, at least for the initial reset, and then adjust annually for inflation. The minimum wage in developed countries is often between half and two-thirds of the median wage. For instance, minimum wage to median wage is 54% in Australia, 55% in the United Kingdom, and 63% in South Korea. For the US, I’m thinking a minimum wage of around 60% of each state’s median wage would be reasonable, rounded up to nearest dollar and with a few constraints, such as the new state minimum wage would not be less than the current one. Here’s what such a system might look like…
President Biden recently unveiled his plan to spend $109 billion over 10 years to make community college tuition-free. Biden also wants to increase the maximum Pell grant to $8,295 for the 2021-22 school year. The President’s proposals would certainly ease the financial strains of attending public community colleges, especially for low-income students who are most likely to qualify for the maximum Pell grants.
The Headlines:
“Almost 6 in 10 support Biden's American Families Plan: poll” by Dominick Mastrangelo/ The Hill. May 5, 2021
“Biden’s $1.8 Trillion American Families Plan Is Supported by Nearly 60% of Voters” by Claire Williams/Morning Consult. May 5, 2021
Housing wonks describe individuals who pay more than 30% of their income on housing as “cost-burdened”. So, who are these people, where do they live, and why can’t they find affordable housing?
As for Biden’s infrastructure plan, 59% of those surveyed in the NBC poll thought it was a good idea, 21% disagreed, and 19% had no opinion. Which got me thinking: what is it about the infrastructure plan that these people think is a good idea (or not)? Biden’s infrastructure plan is immense and involves dozens of large-scale projects, including …
The committee backed up their recommendations with results from a survey they had conducted of students and staff. The majority of people surveyed supported the position of School Resource Officer (SRO) , including 72% of Black students, 73% of Latino students, 77% of Asian students, and 62% of white students. White staff members were the most critical of the SRO role, with 54% opposing the position. No teachers and fewer than 6% of students found the SRO “hostile or mistrustful of kids.”
Ideologies are typically inspired by utopian visions entailing a radical overhaul of the existing order - what I call the Big Solution. Problems like intrusive government, poverty, and environmental harm may drive initial attraction to a Big Solution, but in time the relationship between problem and solution changes. That is, where once the Big Solution was seen as a means to fixing problems, it eventually becomes an end in itself - one that requires Big Problems to justify. That’s because Big Solutions typically involve painful sacrifice (the darkness before the dawn). And that pain had better be worth it!
The US federal debt exploded last year. Between a battered economy and trillions in stimulus spending, it will take years to shrink the debt back to a manageable size. In the meantime, the Bold Centrist still wants to fix this country, focusing on six problem areas: healthcare, infrastructure, poverty, social mobility, housing, and threats to the biosphere. The challenge is how to fund the repair job without adding to the public debt or zapping economic growth.
That’s the problem on the micro-level: unhappy and struggling individuals and families. On the macro-level, we have a mismatch between worker skills and employer needs, which has led to chronic labor shortages - especially in the better-paying fields… These shortages not only hurt the company’s bottom line, they undermine labor productivity and economic growth. And the problem’s only going to get worse in the decades to come unless this country comes up with better ways to help people update their skills as needed to meet ever-changing employer demand.
Lifelong learning on a mass scale is in order.
The ASBI would mostly pay for itself through reduced spending on other government programs…An ASBI would not impact eligibility for some non-cash benefits such as housing and Medicaid, as well as any aid meant for children. However, ASBI recipients would have to pay somewhat more for their Medicaid premiums…. So how did I arrive at a cost of $2 a day in new taxes for the ASBI? Easy: tax increase of $216 billion divided by 328.3 million US residents = $658 = less than $2 a day/per Capita.
The advantage of the ASBI over Pell Grants and the Danish scheme is that it’s more flexible, less likely to impose economic hardship on recipients, and more likely to encourage skill building across adulthood. The ASBI wouldn’t force people to quit jobs to go to school and it would allow people to quit jobs to go to school.
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, was founded in early 2019 by the then-mayor of Stockton, a city of about 292,000 in California. SEED is midway through an experimental project to demonstrate the advantages of a guaranteed basic income. The project includes a “treatment” group of 125 individuals who will receive a guaranteed monthly stipend of $500 for two years, as well as a control group that does not receive the stipend. Of the 125 in the treatment group, 100 comprise the core research sample and 25 serve as a “politically purposive, or storytelling cohort, or who publicly spoke about their experience with SEED.” (Preliminary Analysis: SEED's First Year, March 2021).
Conservatives have accepted the right to a public education and emergency medical care. But they don’t seem to have registered the implications of these modern rights. They still seem to think governments must be timid, as if it were impossible to mix fiscal discipline with ambitious policy goals or protect individual liberty while expanding the scope of government. Well, it is possible. Hard but possible.
So… how do people of various political persuasions differ in their worldviews, especially in their understanding of what is likely to lead to what? One way they differ is in the appreciation of scarcity and the implications of scarcity. By scarcity, I mean limited resources to achieve goals and satisfy desires, resources such as time, money, labor, skill sets, materials, the goodwill of others, and so on. As for the implications of scarcity, I mean how the realization that you can’t have everything you want exactly when you want it forces people to find ways to stretch their resources and prioritize their goals.
Okay, that’s the original essay. What I would add now is that ideologues are also prone to magical thinking, as reflected in the attitude that power plus the right values and a correct political understanding are enough to achieve ambitious societal goals.
Per the above table, a $15 minimum wage wouldn’t be much higher than the median wage in several states. However since my median wage figures are from 2016 and the US median wage has been increasing around 2% a year, let’s bump up the state median wages by 10%. That would make the average median hourly wage $16.75 for the low-paying states and $24.28 for the high-paying states.
In 2020, 132.1 million wage and salary workers age 16 and older were employed in the US. Around 73.3 million were paid by the hour, of which 1.1 million workers were paid wages at or below the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. This represents 1.5% of all hourly paid workers, a decline from 1.9% in 2019 and well below the 13.4% in 1979, when data on minimum wage workers were first collected on a regular basis.
Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, here are some characteristics of US workers earning hourly wages at or below the federal minimum wage in 2020…
So how is America doing in the infrastructure department? Somewhere between mediocre and poor, as the following tables make painfully clear…
The poll in question was a survey of 1,000 Trump voters conducted by The Suffolk University-USA Today between February 15 and February 19. Forty-six percent of respondents said they would abandon the GOP and join the Trump party if the former president created one. Just 27% said they would stay with the GOP, with the remainder undecided