Three disparate topics:\u00a0 the minimum wage, Obamacare, and illegal immigration.\u00a0 But they\u2019re fundamentally all connected and pointing to considerable uncertainty about the future of our economy.<\/p>\n
The minimum wage:\u00a0 people feel as if the economy has changed considerably from the way it was a decade or two ago, when minimum wage-paying jobs were typically held by teenagers getting their first work experience.\u00a0 Or maybe a stay-at-home mom might work a retail job because it provided a flexible schedule \u2014 during the day when the kids were at school perhaps, or nights and weekends when dad\u2019s at home.\u00a0 Now there\u2019s broad support for a minimum wage increase because these jobs are no longer perceived of as being teenager\u2019s jobs, but held by adults who have found themselves unable to gain more skills or, even with additional skills, can\u2019t find a higher-paid higher-skilled job. <\/p>\n
(Now, granted, around here at least, the nearby McDonald\u2019s is staffed by Mexicans who, one imagines, are more likely to be working with false IDs than not, but that\u2019s not the case at all the various food service and retail jobs around here.\u00a0 And even when I\u2019m shopping on the weekend, there generally aren\u2019t that many younger workers.\u00a0 I know the numbers are still that the majority of minimum wage workers are teens or other secondary earners, but I suppose it\u2019s the \u201cadults\u201d that you notice.)<\/p>\n
Do people have confidence that the economy is going to rebound, that well-paid jobs will soon be plentiful again?\u00a0 No \u2014 the support for the minimum wage increase is exactly because people are fearful that the jobless recovery is more or less permanent.<\/p>\n
And the curious thing is that the Left and the Right are both concerned about the decline in middle-class, or even working-class jobs, but the Left is simultaneously happy to increase the labor supply via legalizing illegal immigrants and providing for new immigration via guest worker programs, and then artificially react with a high minimum wage.\u00a0 But the Right (that is, the \u201ctrue\u201d Right, not those who are rushing to claim the mantle of \u201cmoderate\u201d) wants to let wages be whatever the market dictates, and boost wages by restricting labor supply (that is, opposing guest-worker programs and removing existing and future illegal workers from the labor market through enforcement).<\/p>\n
(That\u2019s not to say that I agree with raising the minimum wage \u2014 but I understand where the desire comes from.)<\/p>\n
And ObamaCare?\u00a0 All the speculation of what the impact ObamaCare will have on the economy comes from a lot of uncertainty about the future economy.\u00a0 Can we rely on all the past paths to success? \u2014 certainly a lot of the \u201cadult children\u201d now covered under their parents\u2019 health care plans don\u2019t think so.\u00a0 And the funny thing is that, ironically, it\u2019s the Left, who are ordinarily most concerned with the future of \u201cgood jobs,\u201d who are\u00a0most convinced that all the changes of ObamaCare are not going to have any ill effects \u2014 that employers won\u2019t reduce employees to part-time or stay at 49 employees, for instance, or that the Medical Devices Tax won\u2019t impact innovation.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
What will<\/em> happen?\u00a0 We don\u2019t really know what the long-term impact of the trio of globalization, immigration, and automation will be on American workers, and it seems as if the potential impact of those changes in the past has been masked \u2014 masked by the trade deficit, and the increased debt that America as a country, and Americans as individuals, have taken on, and masked by all the jobs that we\u2019ve added that haven\u2019t really added any value, increased the well-being of anyone other than the workers in those jobs:\u00a0 the regulators, the tax advisors, the college administrators, for instance.\u00a0 Will we just muddle along indefinitely?\u00a0 There are so many trends that bode ill, and some of the \u201csolutions\u201d I\u2019ve seen don\u2019t really offer much promise \u2014 for instance, the notion that the rise of the extremely wealthy will benefit the poor because there will be many jobs created providing services to the wealthy.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three disparate topics:\u00a0 the minimum wage, Obamacare, and illegal immigration.\u00a0 But they\u2019re fundamentally all connected and pointing to considerable uncertainty about the future of our economy. The minimum wage:\u00a0 people feel as if the economy has changed considerably from the way it was a decade or two ago, when minimum wage-paying jobs were typically held […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n