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Tim Carney says de Blasio’s attack on the “rich” will miss them and fall instead on the middle class.
As New York City’s crusading liberal Mayor Bill de Blasio takes up his pitch fork, don’t worry too much about the wealthy bankers he plans to tax — they can fend for themselves. The potential victims of de Blasio’s “march toward a fairer, more just, more progressive place” are the small businesses and voluntary associations that make up civil society.
Charter schools, crisis pregnancy centers, small businesses and private charities are all in de Blasio’s crosshairs. These are government’s rivals in the business of getting people what they want and need — and a growing government doesn’t tolerate rivals.
Charter schools have long irked the teachers’ unions and many others on the Left. They are publicly funded schools, but they are run by private bodies. This decentralizes power, weakens the unions and applies competitive pressure to public schools.
But charter schools’ worst offense may be offering a different educational experience. The Left puts a huge emphasis on solidarity, which is a virtue. But sometimes “solidarity” can mutate into uniformity. If some New York City kids are at a stellar charter school while others are at mediocre public schools, then we have, to use de Blasio’s favorite phrase, “two cities.” This is intolerable to many activists and journalists on the Left, some of whom pen out op-eds declaring it a sin to send your kids to private school. …
John Hinderaker picks up a Cato post about the 1987 NY Times arguments against the minimum wage. That’s right, the paper that is now a reliable organ of the Dem party used to have some independent thoughts.
… The Times editorialists failure to mention that until very recently, they themselves (or their predecessors on the editorial board) agreed that the minimum wage hurts employment–the “party line theory” that is now “discredited.” David Boaz of the Cato Institute recounts the Times’s history on the issue:
The New York Times gets the prize for its stark decline in economic understanding. …
[F]or decades the Times’s editors knew better. Sure, Henry Hazlitt wrote some of their editorials back in the 1930s. But that doesn’t explain the paper’s continuing criticisms of the minimum wage into the 1990s. Bruce Bartlett reported some of the history in 2004:
When I first began clipping Times editorials on the minimum wage back in the 1970s, they were unambiguous in their condemnation of it as misdirected, inefficient, and having negative consequences for most of those it was supposed to help. For example, an August 17, 1977, editorial stated, “The basic effect of an increase in the minimum wage … would be to intensify the cruel competition among the poor for scarce jobs.” For this reason, it said, “Minimum wage legislation has no place in a strategy to eliminate poverty.”
In the 1980s, the Times became even more aggressive in its denunciations of the minimum wage. Rather than simply argue against increases, it actively campaigned for abolition of the minimum wage altogether. Indeed, a remarkable editorial on January 14, 1987, was entitled, “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.”
Everything in that editorial is still true today. “There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed,” it said. “Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and few will be hired,” it correctly observed. In conclusion, “The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable — and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.”
Even in the 1990s, the Times remained skeptical about the value of raising the minimum wage. An April 5, 1996, editorial conceded that a proposed 90 cent increase in the minimum wage would wipe out 100,000 jobs. It said that Republican critics of the minimum wage as a “crude” antipoverty tool were right.
One would think that the Times owes its readers an explanation of why it has done a 180-degree turn on this issue, but none has ever been offered. …
Even the president used to know the truth of the Times’ position. Now he is a fulltime demagogue. Or perhaps back then Valerie Jarrett didn’t have full control. Byron York has the story.
In coming weeks President Obama and Hill Democrats will launch a new campaign to raise the minimum wage. Working with labor unions and activist groups, Democrats hope to increase the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 to $10.10. “It’s well past the time to raise a minimum wage that in real terms right now is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office,” the president declared in his Dec. 4 speech on inequality.
Republicans will argue that raising the minimum wage will hurt the economy, as employers, especially small businesses, hire fewer low-wage workers. It’s an argument Obama expects to hear a lot. “Now, we all know the arguments that have been used against a higher minimum wage,” he said December 4. “Some say it actually hurts low-wage workers — businesses will be less likely to hire them. But there’s no solid evidence that a higher minimum wage costs jobs, and research shows it raises incomes for low-wage workers and boosts short-term economic growth.”
Perhaps the key word in that passage is “solid” — the president seems to acknowledge that there is evidence a higher minimum wage costs jobs, but he doesn’t find it “solid.” A few years ago, though, in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Obama seemed much more open to the evidence that raising the minimum wage results in less hiring.
“It may be true — as some economists argue — that any big jumps in the minimum wage discourage employers from hiring more workers,” then-Sen. Obama wrote. Nevertheless, Obama still wanted to do it, so he laid out his best case: “When the minimum wage hasn’t been changed in nine years and has less purchasing power in real dollars than it did in 1955, so that someone working full-time today in a minimum-wage job doesn’t earn enough to rise out of poverty, such arguments carry less force,” Obama added.
Little of Obama’s 2006 case applies today. …
John Hinderaker also posts on the lies constructed by Rachel Maddow.
MSNBC has had a hard time lately. The network fired Martin Bashir and Alec Baldwin for craziness, on-air and off-air respectively. Melissa Harris-Perry was forced to apologize, first on Twitter and then, tearfully, on the air, for making political hay out of Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson. The network put Ed Schulz out to pasture, and most people wrote Chris Matthews off as a hysteric long ago, so that pretty much leaves Rachel Maddow–amazingly enough–as MSNBC’s supposed voice of sanity. Eliana Johnson has reported on Maddow’s status as the “queen” of MSNBC, who wields more control than anyone else over the network’s often-crazed content.
But is Maddow any better than the rest? A recent incident suggests that if anything, she is worse.
Last Thursday, 45 minutes before Maddow’s show began, her producer sent this email to representatives of Koch Industries, with which MSNBC has long been obsessed. …