From Zero Hedge, the “unintended” (?) but inevitable consequence of the $15/hour minimum wage:

With a seemingly endless line of talking-heads willing to ignore essentially every study that has been undertaken with regard the effects of raising the minimum-wage; and propose what is merely populist vote-getting ‘benefits’ for the ever-increasing not-1% who benefitted from Ben Bernanke’s bubbles – we thought the following burger-flipping robot was a perfect example of unintended consequences for the fast food industry’s workers.

Oh, my.

And it’s produced by a what, you say?

With humans needing to take breaks, have at least 4 weekend days off per month, and demanding ever-increasing minimum-wage for a job that was never meant to provide a ‘living-wage’, Momentum Machines – a San Francisco-based robotics company has unveiled the ‘Smart Restaurants’ machine which is capable of making ~360 ‘customized’ gourmet burgers per hour without the aid of a human. First Jamba Juice,then Applebees, next McDonalds…

The end result – says the company?

There are those on the left who say that it’s inevitable, that robots were/are going to replace humans in fast-food kitchens anyway.  The statement itself betrays ignorance about how economics work; the artificial acceleration of wages for what was never intended to be anything but entry level jobs where people trade low-skill labor for low-skill wages and – for the smart ones – work experience.  As the jobs got priced beyond what the labor was naturally worth to the market, the imperative for the “robots” grew.

The opportunity is there, of course, for those who are smart enough to see it and develop the skills for it; for people to build, sell, install, program, maintain and repair the “robots”, this is going to be the good ol’ days.

But those aren’t the people who are marching up and down in front of WalMart, McDonalds and Burger King demanding minimum wage hikes.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Seattle raised its minimum wage to $15 while the economy is in the doldrums and employers are reacting by cutting hours, benefits, and in some cases relocating out of the city.

This is PROOF that employers are robber barons who will do anything to go on exploiting the workers. Plainly, the minimum wage must be set at a higher level of government so employers cannot move to escape it. And benefits mandated, too. With free parking, and overtime. And more vacation.

I’ve noticed the celebratory coverage from Seattle has been really light on impacts.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The panhandlers are back, stronger than ever. Used to be one per overpass, now there are four. I didn’t see them this Winter, when they could have made a bundle shoveling sidewalks. Do panhandlers hibernate, like bears, or are they migratory, like geese? Maybe the DNR should put up “No Feeding” signs.

I know the courts have ruled that panhandlers have a First Amendment right to ask the public for donations, but I got hit up in the drive-through lane at McDonalds this morning, which is a little much. At first I thought I might slide out of it: he was wearing an American flag on his jacket so I suspected he was a Tea Partier seeking donations to spread the word about Obama’s fake economic “recovery.” If that had been the case, I could have saved a buck plus sicced the IRS on him because, as everyone knows, Tea Partiers have no First Amendment rights. But no – he only wanted money for the bus to get to the homeless shelter for breakfast, so I was stuck.

This is an area where traditional DFL solutions would work: regulate, license and tax. Permit fees and registration. Make them register as licensed mendicants, same as itinerent peddlers. If they work in teams, they must provide employer-paid insurance, including unemployment and Obama care. They need a permit for each day and location of business. Hot spots require a medallion, just like a taxi at the airport. Also nobody is allowed to give alms in amounts less than $20.00. After all, beggers deserve a living handout. Or livable handout, I’ve lost track of the current terminology.

Mandatory jail for first offenders, escalating punishment for scofflaws. Traditional Liberal solutions can solve modern urban problems. We just need to implement them.

Joe Doakes

They “solve” all manner of free enterprise and prosperity.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Labour Party in Britian proposes to tie the minimum wage to average earnings.

 

Doesn’t this simply shift the fight to Whose earnings?  Everybody?  Only Union?  Excluding Government?  Basing the minimum wage paid by McDonalds on the average wage paid to bureaucrats in Washington – is that sensible?

 

Rife for political manipulation without transparency or accountability, just like every CBO report.

 

I know – let’s tie the minimum wage to an international monetary standard like the Libor, that will eliminate all chance of manipulation of the standard.

 

Joe Doakes

People seem amazed that when you turn things over to politicians, the solution is inevitably political.

Real economic growth…didn’t exist in the first quarter:

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property

located in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent in the first quarter according to

the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP

increased 2.6 percent.

The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for

the “advance” estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, real GDP was estimated to have

increased 0.1 percent. With this second estimate for the first quarter, the decline in private inventory

investment was larger than previously estimated.

Some lefty pundits are blaming the “tough winter”.

I remember some tough winters in ’83-85.  The economy kept on recovering, somehow.  Perhaps shovel and snowblower factories and shoveling crews were hiring?

The real answer?  It goes beyond President Obama.  “Progressivism” destroys economies and lives.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another feel-good law passed by Minnesota Democrat-controlled legislature.  If your cell phone is stolen, the cell phone company must do something to switch it off so thieves can’t use it.

Private industry already offers that service – you call the cell phone provider to report your phone stolen and they shut it off.

There are two ways to kill a phone: the Hard Kill that turns the phone into a brick permanently, and the Soft Kill that shuts it off temporarily, but we have no control over which option your cell phone company takes so if the phone is lost but recovered, it still may be unusable.

Worse, industry experts don’t think it’ll solve the problem because thieves can work around the shut-off with SIM cards and computer program.

Providing a mandatory service costs the cell phone provider money.  The state isn’t funding this service.  So your cell phone rates will go up to pay for other people’s carelessness.

The U of M Police Chief who claims guns are often used to steal cell phones on campus is LYING.  He must be, the U of M is a “gun-free” zone.

Joe Doakes

It’s amazing how little the DFL accomplished this past session that wasn’t entirely “feel-good”.

Tell a liberal “the workforce participation rate is at an all time low”.

Their conditioned response will be “it’s because people are retiring!”

And there’s a grain of truth in that.  It’s just that many of them are retiring 10, 20 or 40 years early. 

As anyone who’s done hiring for web designers, Java programmers or network techs knows, there’s no shortage of technical workers; wages throughout most of the IT sector have been worse than stagnant for quite some time.

And yet not only do our kids constantly have “Take STEM courses!” beaten into their heads, but the government and business want more tech workers immigrating to the US.

Now, a survey shows there isn’t a shortage:

In looking at the latest government data available, my co-author and I found the following: In 2012, there were more than twice as many people with STEM degrees (immigrants and native-born) as there were STEM jobs — 5.3 million STEM jobs vs. 12.1 million people with STEM degrees. Only one-third of natives who have a STEM degree and have a job work in a STEM occupation. There are 1.5 million native-born Americans with engineering degrees not working as engineers, as well as half a million with technology degrees, 400,000 with math degrees, and 2.6 million with science degrees working outside their field. In addition, there are 1.2 million natives with STEM degrees who are not working.

Meanwhile, less than half of immigrants with STEM degrees work in STEM jobs. In particular, just 23 percent of all immigrants with engineering degrees work as engineers. Of the 700,000 immigrant STEM workers allowed into the country between 2007 and 2012, only one-third got a STEM job, about one-third got a non-STEM job, and about one-third are not working.

But enough about the statisticians – what is the market saying?

Wage trends are one of the best measures of labor demand. If STEM workers were in short supply, wages would be increasing rapidly. But wage data from multiple sources show little growth over the last 12 years. We found that real hourly wages (adjusted for inflation) grew on average just 0.7 percent a year from 2000 to 2012 for STEM workers, and annual wages grew even less — 0.4 percent a year. Wage growth is very modest for almost every category of STEM worker as well

The drive to jam kids – especially girls – into STEM classes is just a long-term plan to drive down tech costs.

 …we’d have an administration with Kevin Williamson running domestic policy…:

Our choice is not really between neat ideological verities with their roots in Adam Smith or Karl Marx, but between the DMV and the Apple store. Each model has its downsides, to be sure, but it does not seem like a terribly difficult choice to me.

 And Richard Fernandez as Secretary of State:

Suppose Benghazi was a catastrophic failure, made all the more dangerous by the possibility that Russia had a hand in it. If Putin, having studied how Reagan used the jihad to bring down Soviet Union, played the same game on Barack Hussein Obama, it would explain many otherwise inexplicable things. The role of Snowden. The disgrace of Petraeus. The exile of anyone and anything to do with Benghazi. The kid-gloves treatment of the Ansar attackers. The strange enmity between Hillary and Obama. Each is bound by the same secret. Each lives in fear of the same smoldering fire burning in the bowels of the administration.

The lie is much more dangerous than the truth. America can live with an Obama mistake. But it can’t live with an Obama who cannot acknowledge his mistakes.

 The world is, of course, not just.

But both of them provide some useful templates for gauging candidates and what they believe.

We warned you.

But did you listen?  No!  You said that jobs would not be lost as pay for low-skill jobs was forced upward by government fiat, and that there’d be no unintended consequences – because all consequences, presumably, would be forestalled by foo-foo dust brought down from the skies on the backs of unicorns. 

But there is no foo-foo dust, there are no unicorns, and when you force someone to pay more or less than the free market will bear for something, there will be consequences.

And so there are.

A report from the center-left Brookings Institution shows that not only is busines dynamism – the pace of new business openings and old business closings – the slowest it’s been, but during the Obama “Recovery” the pace of closings has far outrun the pace of new business creation, for the first time in post-Great-Depression history:

Says Brookings:

Research has firmly established that this dynamic process is vital to productivity and sustained economic growth. Entrepreneurs play a critical role in this process, and in net job creation.But recent research shows that dynamism is slowing down. Business churning and new firm formations have been on a persistent decline during the last few decades, and the pace of net job creation has been subdued. This decline has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech. …

While the reasons explaining this decline are still unknown, if it persists, it implies a continuation of slow growth for the indefinite future, unless for equally unknown reasons or by virtue of entrepreneurship enhancing policies (such as liberalized entry of high-skilled immigrants), these trends are reversed.

Why has America become less entrepreneurial? 

I’m going to suggest it’s two things; the constant accretion of new regulations atop old regulations, which continually make new businesses harder and harder to launch, and a culture – especially a school system – that is slowly leaching the desire independence out of the citizenry.

(Via Ed)

If you weren’t around – at least in a cognitive way – in 1984, then you have no frame of reference.  You’ve only been through so many downturns, and so many recoveries.

There’s been one traditional rule of thumb; the harsher the downturn, the more dramatic the recovery.

There’ve been two exceptions; the Great Depression (the recovery from which didn’t actually end until well after the Second World War; putting everyone to work on war-related production, or drafting them into the service, wasn’t a “economic recovery”, it was the mother of all temp job programs) and the current one.

How much different is the current one?

If you were in the workforce, or old enough to think about what “the workforce” was, between 1976 and 1982, you don’t need a reminder about how terribly slow the economy was; between Stagflation, the Fuel Crisis and the Carter Malaise, it was wretched time.  And when Reagan (and Fed chief Paul Volker) tightened the money supply to squeeze out inflation, things got ugly.  1981-1982 were awful times.

And yet by 1984, the economic blender had switched to puree, and Ronald Reagan coasted to the most lopsided presidential triumph in history.

If that’s what you remember – you’re right.  Job growth after the 1982 recession was a virtual mirror image of the “growth” under The Lightworker.

As John McCain said in 2008 (to Democrat derision), the fundamentals of the US economy are strong; lots of smart, hard-working people with ideas big and small to generate wealth equals an economy that, left to its own devices, can weather the cycle.

But the political system (both parties, although mostly the Democrats) have not left the economy to its own devices.

And that’s the problem.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This law passed, people who claim to be abuse victims can walk away from their leases.

I understand the emotional appeal of this law, but the potential for abuse is obvious. And once landlords get burnt, they’ll be twice shy about renting to people who have boyfriend trouble, or are divorced, or have a history of domestic trouble, the unintended consequence of which will be that the very people we’re trying to protect will find it harder to get a place to live.

I can see that. Why can’t Liberals?

Joe Doakes

Because none of them – at least, the elected ones – have the foggiest idea how business and the markets work?  None of them could identify “perverse incentive” if they saw one?

I could keep going.

A majority of Minnesotans support Sunday liquor sales.  And every year, as another generation of Minnesotans runs out of beer for a Sunday cookout for the first time, that support rises.

And yet the Minnesota Senate killed an amendment to an omnibus booze bill that would have legalized Sunday liquor sales for the first time.

In a state where taxes are booming and small business is being strangled, it seems like a minor issue – and it is.  But it’s also a no-brainer if you claim to support limited government and scaling back on pointless, mindless regulation – which are things Republicans talk about a lot.

Walter Hudson goes over the reasons,and finds them wanting:

While liquor stores near the border may clamor to compete with stores in surrounding states who enjoy a surge of business from exiled Minnesotans each Sunday, most of the liquor industry likes their state-mandated day off. Union contracts would have to be renegotiated if Sunday sales were legal. Routines would have to be adjusted. Staff might need to be hired and trained. Things would change, and change is icky.

Other special interests include moralizing theocrats who believe the state should force others to conform to their religious preferences, along with mother hens concerned that a seventh day of drinking invites untold carnage…Can you smell the nanny-statism? Do you see the cronyism at work? This is why rank-and-file activists and average everyday Minnesotans find this issue so provocative. There’s no plainer case of special interests wielding undue and wholly illegitimate influence over the rights of individuals.

And you’d think this’d be a no-brainer for Republicans.

And for a little over half the Senate GOP caucus, you’d be wrong.  While the DFL voted overwhelmingly to kill the Amendment, at the behest of their union benefactors and one of the state’s main booze-retail lobbies, the Senate GOP also voted 14-12 to kill the amendment.    Here are the votes.    And the s

And while it is a minor issue – to me more than most, since I go to liquor stores maybe once or twice a year – Hudson explains as capably as any I’ve read why that makes it, in some ways, even more important:

Why does this issue matter? Because if we can’t conjure the political will to overcome special interests in defense of individual rights when it barely matters at all, how are we going to champion rights when the stakes are huge?

If we can’t achieve consensus on the political Right that people should be free to open their businesses when they please, how are we going to win the argument that parents should educate as they please, or that individuals should own their healthcare, or that any of us own our life in any meaningful way? If the legislature can cite some social benefit to banning Sunday sales, why can’t they cite a social benefit to banning anything imaginable?

While 12 of the GOP caucus supported the Amendment (proposed by Branden Petersen, who is fast turning into the Rand Paul of the MN State Senate, and I mean that as a good thing), we need to have a word with Bruce Anderson, Gary Dahms, Michelle Fischbach, Paul Gazelka, Dan Hall (to whom I give a partial pass at voting for a higher principle as a Catholic lay priest, but it’s only a partial pass), Bill Ingebrigtsen,  Mary Kiffmeyer,  Warren Limmer,  Carla Nelson,  John C. Pederson,  Eric Pratt,  Julie A. Rosen,  Bill Weber and the normally-excellent Torrey Westrom.

I don’t oppose unions.

Unlike the vast majority of Democrats, I’ve actually belonged to a union.

Unions can be – can be – a vital part of a free labor market.

But they usually aren’t.  And when people encounter a product or service that’s of no worth to them in the free market, they can say no – provided the political process hasn’t removed that option.

In Michigan, which just passed a “right to work” law granting workers the option to say “no” to unions, 80% of healthcare workers have done just that:

That means some 44,000 workers did not wish to be part of the SEIU, when given the choice.

Ted O’Neil, media relations manager for the Mackinac Center, said plummeting SEIU membership is a clear sign that the forced unionization of home healthcare workers was never something those people wanted.

“All 44,000 of those caregivers who were originally forced into the union are free to go back and join,” he told The Daily Caller. “It’s very telling of what worker freedom means to people.”

Drop the word “worker”.  When people have the freedom to say “no” to things that don’t work for them, real change happens.

I bring this up because it’s an issue that should resonate with Minnesotans, where the DFL is trying to force healthcare and childcare workers into AFSCME and the SEIU, respectively.  They’re doing it for exactly the same reason as they did it in Michigan – to skim dues for their management and the Democrat party that gives them all the goodies:

The dues-skimming scheme was set up in 2006, after the SEIU identified home-based healthcare workers as a potential revenue source. Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm helped facilitate the process by setting up a by-mail election for union representation for home-based caregivers. Some said they never received ballots and were unaware of what had happened.

The Minnesota plan – which is currently under a court injunction – would be exactly the same scam.

In the eternal battle between crony controlled, politically endorsed monopolies and new service is popular among hipsters, a Minneapolis City Councilman has proposed – well, suggested – the unthinkable.

The Minneapolis city Council match in a public hearing to determine how to deal with the difference in regulation between the city sponsored taxicab monopoly, and the new ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft. Some cities have opted to back the monopolies.

. But in Minneapolis, the ordinance sponsor, Council Member Jacob Frey, said after the hearing that he doesn’t yet know if that’s an option but he is open to considering relaxed taxi regulations.

What will those Democrats think of next?

The Twin Cities’ left is declaring a Code Red; Glen Taylor is buying the Strib. 

The Minnesota sports and business tycoon and former GOP state senator has picked up the shrivelling Gray Nag of Minnesota media properties – and has vowed to make some changes.

Some. 

Bear in mind, Taylor came from the old-school Minnesota GOP; relatively moderate, accustomed to working with the then-slightly-less-extreme DFL in a way that’s as obsolete as the personal computers from the 1980s, when that arrangement still held sway. 

But he’s talking changes; the MinnPost‘s Britt Robson (from the first installment of a two-part interview) talked with Taylor about his planned changes:

MP: The Star Tribune is regarded as a liberal newspaper, rightly or wrongly, and probably less so now than ten years ago. Will that change under you in any way shape or form?

GT: I think the answer is yes. But I think the answer is yes whether I buy it or don’t buy it. Everything changes, and some people are going to say, “Well it is, because you bought it, that it changed.”

I would say back to them, “No. You are going to have new hires. You are going to have new people. There are going to be changes in seniority. You have got to be responsible to your readership.” And I think it has already been changing, and I have been a longtime reader of the paper.

Will it change because of the ownership of Glen Taylor? Yeah. To say it won’t wouldn’t be accurate. But it isn’t like Glen Taylor is going to come in there on day one and say, “I’m going to fire people” and do all sorts of things. I am going to say — and I have already told them this — that first of all it has got to be fair and it has got to be accurate.

On the one hand, that – especially if manifested in the form of “reporting news that impacts the DFL with the same zeal as they do it to the GOP” – would be a huge start. 

On the other, I think Taylor is too sanguine about the evolutionary process in journalism.  The old, DFL-upsucking liberals like Nick Coleman are slowly fading away (and Lori Sturdevant has got to be eyeing that condo in Tampa, right?), but even they got their start at a time when American journalism paid more than feeble lip service to the ideals of impartiality and balance.

The Journalism academy today is far less idealistic than it was forty years ago.  New J-School grads are far more likely to start out as advocates from the word “go” than their elders, who oozed into the role over decades in a “progressive”-dominated state. 

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes:  So what does the Strib  really need?

1. An Editorial Staff that actually puts accuracy and completeness ahead of politics.  Today – when they’ll sit on video of Mark Dayton giving an embarassing speech, but race to press with even the most foetid allegations about Republicans – they do not.  This editorial staff needs to crack the whip on, if not “objectivity” (which I believe has always been a myth in the major media) at least detachment, balance and development of sources outside the current crop’s clubby Rolodex full of left-leaning contacts. 
2. Accountability:  For the better part of a decade, the person filling the role of the ombudsman (“reader representative”) at the Strib has served entirely as the editorial board’s spinmeister/spinmistress.  Ombuds like Sue Perry were the journalistic equivalents of Baghdad Bob, asking who you trusted – your lying eyes, or the Strib’s spin on the mountain of evidence of the paper’s bias.   The Strib needs an ombud that revels in mixing it up with the paper’s status quo. 
3. A Columnist’s Row With Real Diversity:  Liberals have spent the past half-decade or so whining about the hiring of Katherine Kersten.  The complaints took two forms; “why hire a conservative, the paper is already balanced/conservative”, and “she doesn’t know the journo’s secret handshake!”.  The first line of complaints was straight from Alice in Wonderland.  The second wasn’t so much delusional as, I think, a tacit admission that conservatives were right; the journos wanted someone filling the “house conservative” role who knew the secret journo handshake and would work for “the team” when in doubt.  Which is not to impugn Doug Tice, Kersten’s designated replacement, in any way – he’s a solid reporter, right of center by Strib standards, and a journo of great integrity, but hardly an iconoclast.   The Strib needs an iconoclast, someone who will hold the ancient, biased institution of the paper’s feet in the fire. 

What else will it take?

Example 1:  Take two electrical engineers;  both 32 years old, both in the industry at the same firm since graduating from the same college with the same BA BS in EEE.  One – not naming names here – has worked at the company the entire ten years.  The other – again, not naming names – has taken about a year of parental leave, and also spent about a year working part-time while their kids were little.    So between an engineer with ten years’ experience and one with in effect 8.5 years’ experience, who, all other things being equal should get paid more?

Example 2: Take two 25 year olds.  One became an oilfield worker – a field involving a lot of brutally hard work, dominated by men, and with perennial shortage of workers with immense demand (especially in North Dakota), driving up wages.  One went into social work – a field involving significant work, sometimes a state license, dominated by women, and a perennial glut of workers, driving down wages.  With all other things equal, who should get paid more?

Example 3: Take two accountants – one male, one female.  They have identical qualifications, identical experience, identical job reviews.  Who do you think makes more?  Statistically, the difference is within the realm of statistical noise, nationwide. 

Example 4:  Take a low-income couple. He works as a security guard, doing his best to pick up 50 hours a week to make ends meet.  To avoid having to pay daycare, she stays at home with the kids and is counting the days til their youngest is at kindergarten so she can get a temp office job, or a part-time job at Target.  This one’s a no-brainer, right? 

Example 5:  A female business analyst with ten years’ experience is working with a male business analyst working his first job.  Who makes more? 

Example 6: A brother and a sister – fraternal twins – graduate from high school.  He goes into car mechanics.  She goes into daycare.   

Now – compare the “men” in the above examples with the “Women”. In aggregate, the guys make about 50% more than the women.

Is it because the men in the five examples are benefitting from sexism?  Or because of the…:

• Career choices each of them made:  Men are more likely to go into technical fields, highly-physically-demanding jobs that pay a premium, dangerous jobs that pay a premium, or to work while their spouses take time off or stay home. 
• Life choices each of them made:  Women have babies.  That’s the way biology made the species – so sue us.  No, that’s a figure of speech.  But women are more likely to take time off from work to do it.  Should men be penalized for working while women are, well, not?   

This last cuts both ways, by the way; when my kids were little, I made a conscious choice to seek out jobs that offered flexibility in hours and schedules, so I could spend more time with them.  This pretty inevitably led to contracting, which gave me flexibility and decent money – but cut down the chances for linear, corporate “career advancement”.  Am I lagging behind other people in my “age cohort” in that career?  Probably not – I switched careers – but if I were still a technical writer, those years that I spent focusing on other things would probably have had me lagging.  (Technical writing, by the way, is a field where women make more than men, on average.  Why?  Because they’ve been doing it longer, and they dominate the field, and they tend to go into it for a career, as opposed to men (like me) who see it as a stepping-stone to elsewhere.  Not because female tech writers are sexists.  Although some are.  Oh, the stories I could tell  But won’t.  Because most tech writer stories are really really boring. 

Of course, the whole “gender wage gap” isn’t so much about facts as about waving a bloody shirt to try to shore up Democrat numbers in a year that’s looking very bad for them, and to draw attention away from the fact that this past five years have been little better for women, economically, than for African-Americans.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you want to have a city full of blue collar workers earning a decent union wage, you need one of two things: industry, or government.

Since the 1980’s, Saint Paul has lost the Ford plant, West Publishing, Schmidt Brewery, Hamm’s Brewery, Whirlpool and 3M, good solid companies with well-paid union workers, every one. They should have been the DFL’s solidest supporters and the City should have fought to keep them.

But it seems we’re opting for less industry and more government instead. Downtown is full of government offices in former retail space. Good for the occupancy rate but government workers evacuate downtown at 4:30 so nobody shops downtown any more. Town Square died and now we’ve lost Macy’s. Moving the ball park to the riverfront might bring in the tailgate crowd and high-speed rail from Chicago will bring in the welfare crowd but neither they nor hipsters in converted Lowertown warehouse lofts promise to rejuvenate the city’s core.

Saint Paul is becoming more like Detroit every day.

Joe Doakes

Actually, downtown Detroit seens to on the mend; companies are moving to downtown Detroit, drawn by tax incentives and inexpensive office space.  Some companies are offering massive subsidies to workers who buy condos downtown (up to $20,000 toward down payment, or equivalent rental assistance).  People actually live and work in downtown Detroit, and do things there at night.  And I haven’t checked the stats, but I wouldn’t doubt that the crime stats in downtown Detroit (but not outside downtown) are competitive with downtown Minneapolis.

Which is not to say that Minneapolis or Saint Paul are quite in Detroit’s league – they’re not.  Minneapolis is merely headed the wrong way.  And Saint Paul is moving more toward the “Flint” territory.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

As women moved out of the kitchen and into the workforce, the Law of Supply and Demand came into play:

Everybody’s wages dropped.

Is the War on Women a case of Friendly Fire?

If we brought in millions of new immigrants, would the numbers get better or worse?

Joe Doakes

And if most of the immigrants were female, how much worse would it get?

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’m in the studio today from 1-3.  I’ll have Senator Roger Chamberlain on, regarding the dueling Bullying Bills.  Then, we’ll talk with Kim Crockett about the “Minnesota Exodus”, all of companies leaving Minnesota over taxes. (oops – that’s next week…)
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Tomorrow,  Brad Carlson is on “The Closer”!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

I’ve never worked at Target.

Sure, not the retail operation – but sometimes I feel like I’m one of few people in Twin Cities information technology contracting/consulting circles that hasn’t done at least a brief hitch doing something at the Minneapolis-based retail behemoth.

Target, of course, was beset over the holidays by a massive data breach. (more…)

Got this via email:

Who benefits the most from a minimum wage increase?

Here are some back of an envelope calculations:
40 hrs a week X 52 weeks = 2080 hrs

FICA: employee tax = 6.2%, employer = 6.2%, total 12.4%
SECA: employee = 1.45%, employer 1.45% total 2.9%

total FICA/SECA combined = 15.3%

current govt take
2080 x $7.25 = $15,080.00 x 0.153 = $2,307.24

proposed govt take
2080 x $10.10 =$21,008.00 x 0.153 = $3,214.224

Net gain for govt = $906.984

now just for fun lets index the minimum wage to the rate of inflation, who else gets an automatic raise with that?

Government Union members!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A buddy wonders why, if the economy is as bad as Republicans claim, the stock market is roaring?  Doesn’t that prove Republicans are lying?

I’m no expert but even I have noticed the S&P 500 and NASDAQ have hit highs while the Dow Industrials and Dow Transport have not.  What’s the difference?  The high-flying stock exchanges buy and sell stocks in companies that are NOT industrial or transport.  So what are they?  The NASDAQ-100, the top performing companies, is composed of banking, insurance, mortgage and brokerage companies  . . . in other words, companies that own a lot of paper but nothing else.  They are dependent on the federal government continuing to dump $60 Billion per Month into the economy to prop up lending and housing.  When that gravy train stops, those companies will collapse.

Industrial and transport – companies that own a lot of heavy iron – have been wrung dry for a decade and thus are far less dependent on stimulus but also far less profitable right now.  Major contractors don’t order billions of heavy machinery for a short term burst of government work; instead, they do the jobs with what they have, defer maintenance, scrape by.  The real orders for machinery, jumbo jets, etc. go to companies that are seeing real growth.

The true measure of the economy is not reflected in paper companies that shuffle stimulus money back and forth, skimming a percentage off the top each time.  The true measure of the economy is iron companies that make things that do stuff.  And that economy is not robust at all.

Joe Doakes

A high school friend of mine who lives in Texas, Jim, posted this on Facebook over the weekend:

———-

Q: Why does world-famous violinist Joshua Bell make $1M for each performance?

A: Because no one is stupid enough to pay him $2M – he’s just not worth that much.

(Implication: what you do has value. A finite value. And if someone else can and will do the same things you can do, for less money, then your value has been reduced to that lower amount. Unless, of course, one of a number of things happens:

1. that other person is already working for someone else (more jobs, scarcity of labor),
2.  you increase your value (through experience, education, or any of a sea of other factors),
3. you decide to assume a greater share of the risk (starting your own business doing what you do, for example), or
4. you find something new that you can do which will have greater value (new career, more responsibility, …).

What is exciting about all of these options is that, except for the first one, all are activities that you can do yourself. They don’t require that you supine yourself before some benefactor who will then own your future. What went so wrong with a society that no longer recognizes the beauty inherent in self-determination?

———-

What’s wrong is that we have a large, powerful interest in our society that profits handsomely from selling victimhood and dependence; the idea that all violinists, even people who’ve just picked up the instrument, should be making a “living fee” for their performances, just from pure fairness.

It’s a way of buying votes but making someone else pay for it.