The Poison Pill of $15 Minimum Wage- by Jonathan LaForce

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

The Poison Pill of $15 Minimum Wage- by Jonathan LaForce

From Where I’m Standing, this idea is insane.

A federally mandated $15 minimum wage would likely see me lose my job. Yes, it’s more than I currently make (by $4.40 per hour). But what it does not account for is whether or not my employer can afford a $15 minimum for a semi-entry level job. Because it’s not just Jon LaForce who is affected, it’s the 6 guys and agal who are also drivers for our office. It’s the 3 guys and a gal we have washing cars 40 hours a week.  It’s the managers-in-training who don’t start for less than $13, and only go up to $15 after they’ve passed training while demonstrating basic knowledge and understanding of company policy.

All of that is affected. Financial performance incentives within my company are destroyed under the incoming POTUS’ economically unsustainable idea. We’ve already seen how this played out in Seattle and elsewhere. It was a financial loss for the very people it was supposedly going to benefit. If it was ever actually intended to benefit them at all.

If, as I stated a year ago, the ACA mandate regarding what is “full-time” status for an employee was reversed, I would be able to better support my family, without worrying about losing my job. Being hard-capped at 25 hours a week is utterly garbage. Prior to COVID, I had enough consistent work that I should’ve been enabled to work up to 39 without being full-time and a financial burden to my employer. Having an extra 14 hours a week on my time card is far better than no job at all. That is the reality of raising minimum wage to $15 an hour.

“Well Jon, just go get a new job.” Have you tried finding a job right now? Try finding a job that I can perform while being physically limited due to injuries. I don’t have a 90% disability rating with the VA because I was bored! Try finding a job in an economy and culture where a bachelor’s degree has been devalued by public institutions which prefer being degree mills instead of encouraging genuine scholarship. I have put out approximately 50 job applications just with the Federal government. The fact that I’m still driving cars for a living should tell you quite a bit about how slow the hiring process is. I’ll also tell you that I’ve been rejected for 10 of those jobs, without ever having an interview, or a background check. In nearly six months of applications, I’ve only started 1 background check, and that was last week. 

Somebody will want to say “Oh but we have the welfare net, what are you worried about, Jon?” People, when you remove enough of the gasoline, oil, and coolant, from a running engine, it stops working. We’ve gotten a taste of that with COVID. To continue to do so, intentionally drink the vile dregs, so pointlessly, is a waste. Removing more people like me from the system will ensure the engine of our economy crashes to a halt. This is not good for the health of our republic. Nor is it what I want for myself or my family.

I find a quote from John Wayne’s “McClintock” to be most appropriate to the current matter. “This that the white man calls ‘charity’ is a fine thing for widows and orphans, but no warrior can accept it. For if he does he is no longer a man, and when he is no longer a man he is nothing, and better off dead.”

We, as a culture and a country, need to stop taking counsel from our fears. End the lockdowns, begin isolating only those who genuinely need it, and return to normalcy. No more forced masking, no more house arrest. No more encouraging incivility with our neighbors.

If you really want to enable working class, blue collar laborers like myself and so many millions of my fellow Americans, quit working against our best interests. Quit undercutting us at every turn. Stop the senseless minimum wage mandate. Stop hamstringing the American worker with unsound economic theories. Let us work. And take pride in our work.

(*One thing Jon doesn’t mention that makes mandated minimum wage for the entire country even crazier is that there is a completely different cost of living in different regions of the country. I think mostly people in CO at least in the cities are close to a de-facto $15 minimum wage, except for “tipping jobs.” Because the cost of living is excessive. For instance I was shocked to find a friend somewhere else in the country had been the sole earner and put four kids through college on less than 30k a year. In Colorado Springs you could not do that for less than 50k a year unless someone gave you a free house or the family lived exclusively on rice and walked everywhere. So, you know. Different regions have different earning standards and different needs. A Federal minimum wage will devastate entire regions of this country for absolutely no reason. It might be incompetence, but it’s almost surely malice also- SAH)

326 thoughts on “The Poison Pill of $15 Minimum Wage- by Jonathan LaForce”

  1. BA and 20+ years experience, and my husband makes $15 base rate (also sales commissions). Single earner family. (I’m self employed, but mostly home schooling, not earning: put me right at the line where most years the IRS takes an interest.)

    And we’re smack at average household income for nearby town.

    Everyone will be so screwed if this happens. This is about punishing rural people, far as I can see.

    1. Part of the reason for getting out of CO is idiot raising the minimum to $16,
      It doesn’t affect US except in the sense it will destroy our city. What is still standing.

      1. Actually it hits urban areas hard to, because it will lead to massive loss of the exact types of jobs that entry level young urbanites need to establish a work history and gain experience in the real world, and this is NOT referencing things like working at a fast food joint (although one can note the number of franchise owners who started on the bottom rung flipping burgers). Both Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell often noted how the people hurt most by these policies are urban minorities and poor who are the ones the policymakers profess to be helping.

        There is also a very nasty hidden side effect that will cause even more massive inflation; must union contracts are pegged to minimum wage, so if min wage goes up, those contracts AUTOMATICALLY go up. This holds true for many of the public employee unions. Raising the minimum wage is an automatic sop to the unions who get a ton more money in their pockets because they, unlike others, are virtually impossible to fire in order to reduce work forces to accommodate the increased expense and of course government could care less about how much more it indebts the tax payers.

        Democrats are trying to return us to the Jimmy Carter era of stagflation on steroids and with an extra added dose of totalitarianism.

        2. Both Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell often noted how the people hurt most by these policies are urban minorities and poor who are the ones the policymakers profess to be helping.

          Earlier scummy policymakers at least had the minimum decency to be honest about what they were doing.

        4. One very interesting effect is that it will wind up driving jobs to states and cities that already have a high minimum wage, and where (surviving) employers have priced that in to their business costs. This may help to reverse some of the population losses from blue states to red ones.

          2. That had been the reason, historically, for support for the national minimum wage by Yankee & Midwestern unions: opposing wage competition by Southerners whose lower cost of living permitted them to undercut established high wage states.

            Now, of course, regulatory regimes are a major factor in plant location, as Boeing demonstrated by moving most of its construction to South Carolina. There are costs to permitting and other regulatory hurdles, and it matters if you can build a plant in three months vs three years.
            ~

    3. Well, you can’t let them leverage their advantages against the cities. It’s the cities’ prerogative to leverage THEIR advantages.

  2. “It was a financial loss for the very people it was supposedly going to benefit. If it was ever actually intended to benefit them at all.”

    The ONLY intended benefit of this was to Democratic politicians, by keeping utter morons voting “Blue, No Matter Who.”

      1. easier to make a buck when you use slave labor that you don’t care if it lives or not.
        Well, for a while. But the chin would love to keep the U.S. as unprofitable for work as possible.
        Trump’s bill to ban doing business with those using slave labor sure did bring some surprises out against the bill . . . okay, no not really. Apple, Disney, Alphabet, were a given, Coke was a mild surprise. Time to find another energy drink. (they gotta have crack in those things, I tell ya!)

      2. The myth of the minimum wage as a good thing long predates China’s direct influence in our politics.

        1. Yes, but the alternative/renewable energy shit makes very little sense except as deliberate sabotage. Always picking environmentalism over pandering to blue collar workers makes no sense, unless they already knew that they were dependent on fraud.

          So, the determination to restore and enhance the green energy stuff, and the employee overhead stuff, now, is a pattern. Yes, there are other patterns it fits. Perhaps the Dems coincidentally concluded that now was the time to go all in on fraud and information control, at the same time the PRC has been making victory announcements about restoration of normalcy.

          The only internal obligations the Dems have if they are betting on fraud and information control is that the policies must be nuts. They people whose support they directly need are will to power sorts that would be satisfied by anything.

          Nuts keeps the sane people off balance, and behind the curve.

          These are very cynical people calling the shots, if there is a pattern beyond insanity, it may have something to do with the supporters that are actually important to them.

          1. The Dems have been throwing over blue-collar workers in favor of the greens for decades now. I remember people talking about it when I was up in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho back in the ’90s. In the ’80s, the cause was the need to stop acid rain. It’s been decades now since there wasn’t some environmental reason to screw over the people who actually work. The difference now is that the green agenda has advanced sufficiently far that the Dems can no longer satisfy both parties at the same time. Each time the greens and the blue-collar workers clash, the latter are asked to give up a little bit more. And the blue-collar workers have given up so much over the decades that the only things left to give up are the big, important ones.

            Killing Keystone has been a Democratic cause since Obama was in office. Sure, Beijing doesn’t mind it, and is probably happy about it for a number of reasons (IIRC, the alternate route for the oil that Keystone would have carried is shipping it to China). But this is the same old thing that the left has been doing in the US for decades now. The self-destructive actions of those in authority hasn’t changed one bit.

            1. The reason is it is money in Buffet’s pocket to kill the pipeline (and gives him more money to filter to them and theirs), plain and simple. China likes because it hurts our economy at a lesser extent than it will cause hurt to theirs, Russia LOVES because it helps their oil money, and Fracking Bans help the Rus for the same reason. If output is reduced enough we stop exporting and Putin gets his hammer to keep the E.U. especially the former soviets, in line by not keeping them warm in winter.

              1. You overlook one key point: Keystone and fracking provide the United States a secure, inexpensive energy supply, with all the benefits that entails.
                ~

                2. Yes, and they use the excuse of saving the environment and green will replace etc. What it will do though is make Fracking on non-federal lands (Texas especially but some other areas) more profitable. The Rus and OPEC tried to kill fracking during 0bama by dropping the prices and frackers just figured out how to do it cheaper and maintained the ability until oil dropped too far for OPEC then the Rus to be able to maintain the dump, then when they relented it never went back up to their preferred level to pay for their internal needs. We shall see what CCP Joe is given to sign that away.

                3. If the greens in this country cared about secure, inexpensive energy supplies, then they would be pushing nuclear power HARD. But they don’t. In fact, they go after nuclear power even more viciously than they go after coal and oil, and will pull out every scare tactic in the book to keep nuclear power plants from being built.

                  Coal and oil and natural gas are dirty. Nuclear is scary. Hydroelectric is habitat destruction. The only kinds of power sources that the greens will allow are solar and wind farms… until, that is, someone tries to build a solar farm in a place that actually makes some sense, like the Mojave Desert. Then it’s back to the habitat destruction argument again.

                  And they’ve been using this exact same set of arguments since even back when the US and Beijing had a tacit understanding regarding opposition to the USSR.

                  Was Beijing quietly lobbying to have Keystone cancelled? Probably. As I noted above, the alternate destination for all of that Canadian oil will likely end up being China. Is Beijing lobbying to have fracking undone? Given how much the Chinese economy relies on cheap oil, and the reason why oil is cheap is because of American fracking, the Chinese attitude toward fracking is likely the opposite. American fracking makes it much easier for China to keep its thirsty economy moving. I’m sure the Russians and OPEC are lobbying to end fracking. For them, it’s economic self-interest.

                  But the green hatred of energy production has been a strong element of the Democratic party much longer than those three nations (at least as presently constituted) have been lobbying over this.

                    1. Russia also has been a big financier of the anti-fracking movement and books/films that advocate for banning it in the USA

                    2. yep, and the footage of them lighting faucet water on fire that we keep being shown? there’s a reason it looks like it was shot on VHS….

            2. The dems gave up on the union workers decades ago…the dirty smelly pos scum. Favoring the Greens favors more dems. After all the fancy pants govt unions…can all get green street creds and wave their greenie weenie card…but they can’t get their union creds.

    2. Right — I remember when the city of SeaTac, Washington (named after the airport, which is in the center of it) was lauded on high for raising their minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour, so all those hotel and restaurant workers (remember, airport is the center of the economy there) could FINALLY have a living wage! Yay us, we are so progressive!
      Not long after, word got out that many of these same folks were asking for their hours to be reduced…!?
      Yes, reduced, since they were now (with the new wage) making TOO MUCH money to be eligible for all those government freebies they qualified for when they weren’t making enough money.
      And you thought that a “living wage” was the secret to getting people off of government dependency.. it is to laugh. It’s really a virtue signalling scam.

      1. I don’t remember reading those stories, but I do remember others about cut employer benefits such as paying for parking for airport workers. They seemed to get paid the higher minimum out of fringe benefits. The kicker is fringe benefits are normally taxable income. Being paid to buy those same benefits is.

        So, the company held outlays constant, but workers actually took less home.

      2. I remember that, yes.

        I know a lady that wants to start her own baking business, but has been on welfare for so long she’s scared to do anything uncle sugar might disapprove of.

        1. Years ago I read about a woman who turned down a 50 cent an hour raise because that extra 20 dollars a week would lose her 60 dollars of subsidy for her child care. If it had only lost her say, 10 dollars, she would have happily taken the raise, but basically it would have meant over 40 dollars less in her pocket at the end of the week. As a mother, she wasn’t stupid; she told the reporter she would rather be earning her money than taking it as a handout, but she wasn’t going to cut her food and utility budget because she had kids to raise.

          It does seem that a lot of the systems are set up to trap you in them once you get there. Back in the ’90s in CT, a woman was told she had to pay back something like 8 thousand dollars in food stamps and housing benefits because her teenage daughter had a part-time job and had put her money in a savings account instead of spending it on entertainment and junk food. Since she had over $2000 in the bank, they weren’t eligible for most of the benefits. The daughter was saving to go to college so she could get a good job and move her family out of Section 8 housing.

          1. In my experience the system exists to find, acquire, and keep citizens in its hellhole grasp.

            Key West, FL has seven affordable housing complexes. Seven. The island is 2×4 miles. SEVEN. It is the ambition of every conch to find, acquire, and keep affordable housing–live in paradise on your neighbor’s dime.

            I knew people who had the chance to get off-island and make a good life for themselves, but they were married to the idea that “good life” meant “forcing Uncle Sam to give me things until I die so I can stay where the weather is nice.” It takes no time at all for normal people to become meth-addicted wards of the state. It’s the behavior that’s rewarded.

            Eventually someone has to pay the piper for the tune, though. My friend’s oldest son is 17. I have bets on how long we have before he murders his mother–she sees it, too. She refuses to kick him out because the state will label her an unfit mother. I told her that might be a preferable solution. She said no way–because they will take her 14-year-old, too. And that, apparently, is unacceptable. So she sits and waits. For what? I don’t know. I pray, but I don’t see an end to her situation.

            1. My friend’s oldest son is 17. I have bets on how long we have before he murders his mother–she sees it, too. She refuses to kick him out because the state will label her an unfit mother.

              Waiting until he turns 18 and is a legal adult who (hypothetically) can be kicked out without jeopardizing the younger son as well?

              1. That’s what I’m praying for.

                If I had to bet on whether mama will have the stones to throw the boy out on his ear the day after his 18th, I’d bet she won’t do it. That culture is wildly self destructive.

                But I’m praying, and standing with her, and trying to be in a place to help when the time comes.

      3. And the funny thing about all those government freebees, is that when you get to a certain level of income, they suddenly drop off en mass, so that it’s painful (and in some cases, impossible) to get to the point where you can earn yourself out of poverty.

        I almost think this is on purpose, to keep people on welfare, but it’s easy to see how it’s done on accident. There’s an easy fix to it, too: have every program be based on the combination of income and benefits you get, and for every dollar you earn that exceeds your “minimum”, you lose, say, $0.50 of total benefits.

        That no effort has been made to smooth out these “welfare cliffs” gives me the impression that politicians are satisfied, and perhaps even happy, that people are stuck on welfare.

        1. Of course they are. LBJ quite explicitly stated that the purpose was to keep people voting for Democrats by making them dependent on government (he said it in a very patently actually racist manner). They WANT a nation of dependent serfs who are drones in service to the ruling nobility.

        2. Yes, exactly. And that goes for disabled folk too; if you’re on SSDI, you literally can’t save, because too much money cuts off your income entirely. People can’t get married because it would cut off their living. And even if you can work, it doesn’t always happen—I know a gent with cerebral palsy who keeps his computer certifications not only up-to-date, but who troubleshoots any problems that people might come across, and people won’t hire him because he can’t drive and Paratransit is worse than a joke. (And yes, work-from-home would be ideal if they’d even interview him, but he’s often discarded before it gets to that point because he can’t come in for a job he can do from home.)

  3. And of course, if you point out that people who are already making right about $15/hr, perhaps after working their way up from a lower wage over years, will NOT be getting any sort of increase and will have to watch new hires who know nothing come in making the same?
    “You’re just being selfish!”

    Of course, that also presumes that the employer will WANT to bring in new staff, or will try to keep costs down by telling the current staff “sorry, there’s not enough to hire more people, we aren’t bringing in enough to give you a raise, and we need to you fit 60hrs of work in a 40hr week. Every week.”

    My wife WILL fall into that boat. She’s making $15/hr now, and they’re somewhat short-handed…

    AND her (and our) spending power WILL go down, because anyone who thinks businesses will NOT raise prices to cover at least some of the increased cost of labor is delusional…

    1. Businesses will simply hire all the new slaves being imported over the border under the table.

      1. For people who love condemning the past for slavery, progressives are sure in a hurry to de fact reimpose it.

        I guess they’ll be the good type of slave owner taking care of people too simple to take care of themselves (really, the parallels in language between southern slave owners and modern progressives justifying their right to rule are pretty close).

        1. No kidding – they’re howling about slavery in the American South more than a hundred and sixty years ago … and turning a blind eye towards slavery in China right now.

            1. It is very apparent that their problem is not per se slavery but that the wrong groups were enslaved.,

              ____________________________________________________________________
              A dragon is not a slave. Be a dragon.

        2. As kids we all learned the rule of “He who said it, let it.”

          Just because some people loudly condemn slavery does not mean they resist benefitting from it.

          It seems a shame,’ the Walrus said,
          To play them such a trick,
          After we’ve brought them out so far,
          And made them trot so quick!’
          The Carpenter said nothing but
          The butter’s spread too thick!’

          I weep for you,’ the Walrus said:
          I deeply sympathize.’
          With sobs and tears he sorted out
          Those of the largest size,
          Holding his pocket-handkerchief
          Before his streaming eyes.
          ~

      2. Or depending on the job locals will take the jobs at reduced (say $8-10/hr) paid out in cash. Heck my first job was at a butcher shop for 2.25/hr under the table cash when the official rate was $2.75. Next summer I worked for 3.25/hr and made less than the previous year due to Income tax and SS. If they do this there will be a huge under the table cash market in lower end jobs likely filled from High School and College kids…

        1. This in fact is why illegal labor is so popular. As explained to me by a guy who ran his own construction company in CA: about 70% of the cost of each employee is crap paid to the state. Only about 30% is wages. If I hire illegals, I only have to pay wages, and then I can actually afford to pay them more (to keep the better workers) — and even tho I can’t deduct pay under the table as a business expense, overall it still costs me less. And everyone has more in their pocket at the end of the day. Who is being harmed by this??

          [This 70-30 split is in line with what I found when I considered hiring a part-timer, and what Costco calculated when they were fighting with CA over a cost increase.Your state may vary.]

            1. Well, yes, but now we also have a government benefits problem dating all the way back to the SCUS ruling Texas couldn’t bar students from public schools for being illegal aliens.

              About 30 years before Obama used such students to create DACA…go figure a critical mass grew in the decades after.

              In El Paso, the county hospital tries to keep Mexican women from giving birth there because they’re all but met outside of delivery by people with the forms for them to claim various welfare benefits for the US citizen kids.

              1. The left is just implementing the old Cloward-Piven strategy to bankrupt the USA in pursuit of their “glorious Marxist revolution”

          2. The increases to Michigan’s wages and coverage under Jenni the Commie Canuckistani drove relatives to go from a deli full of part time kids doing summer jobs and a manager, to the couple that owned it running the place by themselves 7 days a week in summer, shutting down for winter, and not long after they put it up for sale. It is still for sale.

        2. That’s what I’d expect, but that does require people to have a demonstratable skill, and to work by task rather than by hour.

          But, that also requires everything to be by word of mouth and social contact, which is currently nearly dead because of human malware, too, so no idea what’s likely to happen.

          Also, it will reduce the available complexity to business, since gray market means groups really can’t coordinate or plan long term like they can in open markets, so advanced, high complexity things will get more expensive.

      3. The moves that the Dems are making all only make sense if you take as axiomatic that what they’re actually *trying* to do (as opposed to what they *claim* to be doing) is to enshrine themselves and their associates as the aristocratic upper classes with 90+% of the country the underclass/serfs. It’s what communism devolves to generally anyway. Though they do seem to have a practically infinite ability to delude themselves into thinking that their policies are something besides pure selfishness/self-protectiveness… or maybe just the ability to delude their useful idiots. I waffle on that part. Probably depends on the person.

        1. The biggest delusion I’ve noted they have (see my comment about laundromats below) is that this neo-feudalism will function without the dual-direction flow of obligation the real thing has.

          A landed knight, stories they tell now days notwithstanding, did not go out of his way to mistreat his serfs. His eating depended on their working of his fields and then their fields and gardens. Abusing them to inability to work or sustain themselves meant he would starve as well.

          Modern communists and leftists mouth a lot about the lower classes, but they do think those below them in their social hierarchy exist solely to serve.

          While the divinely ordered world of the Middle Ages may do better than communists morally due to its ideal of mutual obligation, it does better on a much more practical test…it does not encourage the destruction of those who feed you (cue Fight Club video).

          1. They intend to get rid of all the peasants who don’t meekly comply:

            https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/01/29/bedingfield-biden-tasked-intel-community-to-deal-with-rising-tide-of-white-supremacy/

            They are openly weaponizing the entire federal spying apparatus and bureaucracy against political opponents. Anyone who disagrees with them is a “white nationalist” that must be treated as being subhuman and imprisoned and executed the way a foreign enemy would be.

            1. Should be. Remember the ruling class gonna be propping up the countries that wanna wipe the US off map or at least subjugate it.

              1. They seem committed to seeing Western Civilization wiped off the map and erased from history, not just the USA.

          2. Their delusion is fed, in large part, by their misunderstanding of history. If you pay attention to the setting in fiction created by leftists that’s set in medieval times, the nobles are always abusing the peasants. Not because the author is trying to push an agenda to justify that kind of behavior by today’s “elite” (contempt quotes fully in effect here), but because they really think that’s how it worked back then. They really don’t know any better. They think medieval feudalism was one-way only, and therefore they think that the neo-feudalism they’re trying to set up will also work out for them.

            Their ignorance of history is going to destroy them, and hurt a lot of innocent people along the way.

            1. I think there’s a vicious cycle in there. They project their own conduct, and it gets reinforced.

              1. They are also the people who station Political Officers behind the troops, with orders to shoot any retreaters.
                ~

            3. The leftist writers have eliminated whole categories of plots/conflicts because they’re not acceptable in their stupid Woke Religion. There are a few plot lines which are always reliable lefty fodder, and “oppression” and “discrimination” show up in pretty much 90% of their plots somewhere. So *of course* the peasants are oppressed.

              1. But only the right sort of oppression. “Peasants” is actually dangerous because it draws attention to class, and they love giving Affirmative Action to the children of millionaires over the children of welfare mothers.

  4. I think a minimum wage hike indirectly raises the hourly wages of union workers on federal contracts. I hope someone here has more details but if I’m recalling correctly a minimum wage hike is quite nice for union members. Not so much for anyone else.

    1. More to the point, it increases how much the workers pay as dues into union coffers, which in turn donate vast sums to Democrat political campaigns.

    2. I remember that from one of my long ago project planning courses. On government contracts, the minimum pay rate for each profession was set as a multiple of the minimum wage. Thus, any increase in the minimum wage triggered an adjustment across all the pay grades. Since unions usually charge a percentage of total wages as dues, they probably make out pretty well.

      1. A lot of union contracts also have escalator clauses that require their wages to be a certain amount above the minimum, so if the min wage goes up, so do the rates the union members get under the contract.

  5. From the only economics book you need in your library (Basic Economics – Thomas Sowell). “Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.”

    1. They’ll get the universal leftist answer, “Learn to code”.

      Which, oddly, is hate speech if you say it when click-bait journalists lose their jobs. You don’t even have to say it directly to thiem.

        1. Nope, also hate speech.

          You’re telling them to learn to do what they hire people to do, thus implying they’re not the gods among men they know they are.

          1. When the journos, etc., lose their jobs, instead of telling them learn to code, which the tech monopolies ban as hate speech when directed to leftists, tell them “John Kerry said to learn to build solar panels”, instead.

      2. Um. My job that I started in 2004, *coding, was < $15/hour. (Salary, calculated out, < $15/hour.) Support is notoriously worse pay. Better than Oregon's minimum wage for our area now, even better then. But still that is less than I earned in 1990 my first salaried programming/development job.

        Plus, as many coder's here can attest. Salaried programmers/developers are typically expected to put in more than 40 hours per week … just saying. Or most salaried jobs. I think my husband's job was one of the few exceptions (actually it was the ONLY exception I know of). Only because he was Salary NOT exempt; which means he got paid overtime, anything over 8 hours/day. Didn't work on Friday because they didn't have work for you? Then you worked Saturday? Friday was standby. Saturday was overtime. (One of the things I missed about that job. What I didn't miss was working outside regardless of the weather.)

        * More than that really. But not from scratch, or you are in charge of the software now, that I had in my prior two jobs. I did have to keep reminding myself, for a long, long, time. "It is a paycheck!" Alternatives were not paying any better.

        1. Is it time for another linking of Code Monkey?

          [Verse 1]
          Code Monkey get up, get coffee
          Code Monkey go to job
          Code Monkey have boring meeting
          With boring manager Rob
          Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
          But his output stink
          His code not “functional” or “elegant”
          What do Code Monkey think?

          [Pre-Chorus 1]
          Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god-damned login page himself
          Code Monkey not say it out loud
          Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

          [Chorus]
          Code Monkey like Fritos
          Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew
          Code Monkey very simple man
          With big warm fuzzy secret heart
          Code Monkey like you
          Code Monkey like you …
          ~

    2. What’s worse: even when there’s a “minimum wage”, you might literally be working for $0.00/hour.

      When I was looking for work after finishing graduate school, and having a difficult time finding something, I was seriously considering doing volunteer computer work for a hospital, figuring that it would give me experience, and that it would be something I could put on my resume. Eventually, I found an $8/hr part-time position which, shortly after being hired and proving myself, became $11l/hour part-time, and gradually (over a period of years) led to employment where I could provide for my family. In the meantime, though, $8/hr might not be a “living wage” for a family of four (and growing), but it sure as heck was better than nothing!

      And I’m fairly confident that, had the minimum been $15/hr instead, I would never have gotten my foot in the door in software development without a lot of volunteer work.

      Come to think of it, for all this talk of “needing a living wage”, there’s never a suggestion that those working for less than X number of hours shouldn’t have Social Security and other taxes taken out of their paychecks. It’s always “the employer should be forced to pay more”.

      1. A new hire into an entry level job is always a gamble by the employer who would much rather hire someone with experience who could hit the ground running instead of being trained up.
        In a nutshell, entry level are not even worth whatever wage they are paid until some future time when they become proficient enough to earn it, if they ever do, and at that time become a valuable employee worth getting a raise to ensure that they stay with that employer.
        Somehow left wing progressives never seem to be able to wrap their heads around the concept of the balance between work delivered and wage compensation paid.
        During my stint as a company officer with C&NW railroad our firm policy was to not even consider a candidate for employment unless they had either military service or at least five years of prior employment. If hired they had 90 days to prove their value or be let go. At that time, mid 1980s, we calculated that a new employee cost us $6k the day they started work what with all the Federally mandated regulations and benefits we had to pay up front. We were also the highest blue collar employer in the small midwestern city we were located in.

        1. Son and all my nieces (nephew is just out of HS), all started their jobs under 6 month temp to hire temporary employment agencies. Even professional have been heading that way over the last 20 or so years. Almost all blue collar jobs are handled this way now.

          I ran into it some between ’02 – ’04 last time I was looking. But the jobs didn’t click enough, to consider getting over my attitude of “this is unprofessional of them” to bother applying. Might have gotten there shortly. But found a job. Granted that job had the same 6 month trial period, what job doesn’t? BUT it was a direct hire, not through a temp to hire third party.

    3. From the only economics book you need in your library (Basic Economics – Thomas Sowell).

      Wrong. That would would be Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson. BE covers more, but EIOL better covers the root instinct you have to develop to have any hope of thinking clearly. Once you have that learning or deriving the rest is much easier.

  6. So, you know. Different regions have different earning standards and different needs.

    More than the Federal minimum wage has issues with this: poverty line, tax deductions, especially the standard deduction, pretty much any national dollar amount, have this problem

    1. Yet another advantage for my plan to fund the federal government entirely from taxes levied on the states.

  8. Argh.

    Hadn’t thought about this as one of the things of the Biden administration that is likely to damage my financial stability.

    For years our beloved enlightened superiors have been pricing Americans out of the job market with a combination of direct wage meddling and regulatory overhead.

    There are several options when the cost of hiring someone to do a task is priced higher than the value of the task.

    1. Eat the cost of leaving the task undone.
    2. Eat the loss of hiring someone to do the task that it more than the task is worth.
    3. Automate a replacement for the task.
    4. Find someone to engage in criminal conspiracy with, to avoid the costs imposed by the legal employment process.

    At the same time, the beloved enlightened superior traitors have been driving down the cost of 4 when it involves illegals. Illegal border crossing and residence is about the ideal sort of crime for making employment of a criminal work in this sort of conspiracy. A crime like murder gives the employer too much blackmail leverage over the employee, jaywalking too little. Ergo, the quasi official toleration of the illegals prevents employment of those Americans willing to deal fairly as employees in such conspiracy.

    The more the officially regulated ‘white’ economy takes prices higher, the more it makes sense to take the economy grey or black.

    This is particularly career destroying for that subset of employees whose value rests partly in a personal reputation for integrity.

    These officials are profoundly stupid motherf#$kers.

    It is not the case that the only option is all activity inside a white economy, with disputes resolved through the formal legal system, and the deliberately displaced American workers helplessly sucking the welfare teat or committing suicide.

    First, the superlatively brilliant geniuses do not realize that their apparent preferred option may be physically impossible.

    Second, consider a black economy, disputes resolved extra legally, and part of how you obtain trust from an employer is by murdering someone who is an accepted target. The beloved enlightened superior traitors do not realize that they are making it more practical to rebel, and to string the fellows up.

    1. “Illegal border crossing and residence is about the ideal sort of crime for making employment of a criminal work in this sort of conspiracy. ”

      Which is why their notion that border crossing won’t be illegal, and everyone can legally stay and work in the “white” economy, is going to bite them in the butt….. 😎

      Why not demand full wages and bennies if they can’t deport you?

          2. Nonsense – they see past failures and know, absolutely know that their problem was insufficient dedication and an excess of tolerant indulgence of their opponents and such obsolete values as bipartisanship (because those damned Rethuglicans never seem to grasp that bipartisan means Republicans endorsing Democrat agendas!)

            As always, their solution is more cowbell..
            ~

    3. the “Massive” Grocery chain here in town (they own 4 stores! 4! 2 each in Michigan and Wisconsin) is putting in self checkouts at the Menominee location. It’s been rolled back a bit but it is slowly to increase. It is in part because of the Gov’s stupid lockdowns it is slightly delayed, but they went for a $12/hr but Republicans kicked the full increase down the road, and it was due to be $9.85. Currently it remains at $9.65.

      1. Some friends of mine worked grocery for years before injuries and/or bad management drove them out. They were union members (closed shop) and the union hates hates HATES self-checkout terminals. My response was basically, “well, stop voting for Democrats, then.”

          1. Except that the self-checkout is much faster. I almost never have to wait, and when I do it’s rarely more than five minutes or so.

              1. Well, yeah, probably 90% of my grocery shopping is <10 items, because the store is six blocks from my house. If I have a lot of produce I'll go through the cashier, or if I have 30-40 items (maybe once every other month). For my bulk purchases I go to Costco.

                Considering how many times I've heard a cashier call out "I can help the next person over here", clearly I'm not the only person who prefers self-checkout.

            2. I tend to prefer self-checkout for the reasons cited and because I do not have to “make conversation” or be rude. OTOH, if I am buying multiples of an item, such as restocking the distilled water for the coffee making the self-checkout requires each of the gallon jugs be scanned individually while a clerk can just scan one and hit the multiple key. Sometimes that is worthwhile.

              Beloved Spouse, OTOH, prefers to deal with a clerk. Beloved Spouse is insane, but I expect that was an already obvious conclusion, either from forty-five years being married to me or having married me in the first place.
              ~

          2. The nice thing about self-checkout these days, is that there’s no risk of a computer getting snotty about a customer not wearing a mask.

          3. I prefer the self-checkout lanes myself. It’s possible to pack groceries just the way I like it with no harried cashier rushing me through before I can issue so much as an indignant moo. o_o

      2. I went to Home Depot in a nearby town. The registers that were open all had long lines. I very reluctantly went to the single self-checkout station. After examining it for a while, it became apparent that it only took credit cards. I had cash. I left the full cart at the register and started walking out.

        To their credit, a store employee rushed over before I made it to the door and offered to check me out. At that same register – it had an “employee mode” that allowed them to handle a cash transaction.

        That’s still about 1000% better than the Wal-Mall, where I walked past half a dozen checkers who were in a huddle talking to each other instead of doing their jobs.

        I saw an interesting article a couple of weeks ago. McDonalds’ announced they’re going to trial a new order and payment system – an app on your gPhone or iPhone, with online payment. At “participating stores”, that will be the *only* way to place or pay for an order. If you don’t have a compatible phone, their app, and a credit card connected to their payment processor, they don’t want your business. Should this be successful, for whatever criteria they use for “success”, I expect to see it spread.

        I guess they’ll still slide the food over the counter… though I could see them walling off that area and just dropping your order out of a chute. No customer contact at all, such a deal!

        1. hmm, the HD in Texas had cash abilities, and if it hiccupped there was one monitor who paid out change if beyond the machine’s ability. Depending on rush or not, it was one or two cashiers for 6 or 8 self checks. Lowes was the same way. Have spent so little time in HD here (Green Bay and Iron Mountain are the closest HDs) let alone Lowes (Nearest is 100 miles from my door) I’ve been to the pro checkouts far more often.

          1. HD and Lowes are one of the few places I prefer self-checkout. They work, unlike grocery where half the time I’m cursing by the time I get the second item scanned.

            1. same here, though like I said, since moving I either need to go through a cashier (yeah, you point your laser gun at this stuff) or I’ve not gone into one

          2. There’s a Home Depot about half a mile from my house in Seattle, and since I do a lot of DIY I’m there all the time. It’s the same thing: four self-checkout registers, one or two live cashiers. Unless I’m buying a load of lumber, I only go through the live cashier lines if I have something that needs to have the anti-theft device deactivated.

                1. Those around me, too, to the extent I’ve used cash in them.

                  You might recall the video of the presentation by that guy to the Georgia Senate Committee on ballot security? The guy who informed them his team had made entry to oe of their supposedly secure machies via wifi?

                  His expertise was from developing those vending machines which accept cash.
                  ~

                3. At the stores local to me, it varies with both place and time. Sometimes a self-checkout station will degrade to “does not take cash” mode because of trouble with the station, and sometimes a store will set all its self-checkout stations to “no cash because coin shortage.”

        3. “If you don’t have a compatible phone, their app, and a credit card connected to their payment processor, they don’t want your business.”

          And you won’t have any of those, you h8r you. Did someone say 666?

      3. Hmm, posted at work and there seems to be a part of it missing. After the Menominee Location, it should say “Michigan planned to increase it on the first of the month, but there is a clause saying that if the year prior has unemployment above a certain level, no increase.”
        WPDE always and forever

      4. Closest Albertsons/Safeway doesn’t have self checkout. They did. Then they pulled them. Don’t know why.

        Local Kroger’s (Fred Meyer’s) has them. I use them. Primarily because I’m picky on how I pack my groceries, at least now. Originally, when they first came out, they were Spectra Physic units, which were locally developed and produced. Then later my employer when PSC bought Spectra Physics (flatbed scanners), then bought Percon (handheld scanner, and handheld computer scanner). They started with 8, now they have 12.

        Heck even Costco has gotten self checkout locally. Costco OTOH has more than 2 employees monitoring the bank of 12 units. Those only take Credit.

        The other change at local Costco is the lunch counter order kiosks. There are 8 of them. Punch in order. Pay for it with Credit (only). Still can walk up to register, order, and pay cash or credit.

        HD and Lowe’s locally have self checkout. However our local employee owned hardware store, Jerry’s, does not. We prefer Jerry’s … but sometimes we don’t have a choice.

    4. When honest work costs more than the market will support, only grey and black work will remain. This is the Russian model, with skill operating outside the law being critical. Hard to increase prosperity for all people operating like this, but a small group controlling the government can become rich, like the Dem nomenkultura.

      1. From the Federal government side of the desk it is one terrific feature. Not only does it reduce the real value of their debts, thanks to bracket creep (oh! how they miss the days of nine, twelve brackets!) it raises taxes without their fingerprints on the gun. Apparently they think enough people have forgotten the Seventies when people would turn down raises (or avoid overtime) for fear it would move them into a higher tax bracket and end up netting them less (after-taxes) pay.
        ~

      1. I know! Right? Why would I pay off: 3.35% house (and we’re considering getting it down to 2.25% depending on closing costs, might have missed that window)? Vehicle loans of 3.65% and 1.9% respectively? Why?

        Granted what money we have in “savings” isn’t as worth as much. OTOH it is earning way more than inflation at present, and is likely to do better under inflation, if the ’70s and ’80s interest rates are to go by, even if we have to hold it as cash.

      2. The less debt you hold the less debt the banks and the Fed have available to monetize. (If I understand things right.)

  10. This is economic fraud because once the wages go up, then the food goes up. This faux-President has already stopped the Keystone pipeline so there won’t be inexpensive gas after a month or two. This means the heating costs will rise too. Another chain in the line of servitude and slavery to the government.

      2. A sufficiently advanced apathy is indistinguishable from malice.

        “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

        — T. S. Eliot

        1. I think its down to 5000. However, that’s still 10-1 on congress critters, especially if they avoid the armed ones…

    3. he stopped the XL expansion of keystone. The keystone pipleline itself has been running successfully for years.

              1. Gee, wouldn’t a RICO action against him be fun to watch.

                Although I am sure he has numerous lawyers in petty cash, willing and able to obfuscate matters.
                ~

              2. Soros didn’t even both to hide his financing of the BLM/Antifa riots, looting and arson in the open effort to overthrow the constitutional government (trained Marxist revolutionaries leading chants of “no borders, no walls, NO USA AT ALL).

  11. I’ve seen the impact the ACA had on companies, with increased demand for ways to make damned sure that employees do not ever hit the magic 30 hour mark, especially when the companies realized it’s cheaper to pay some OT and to shift some work to keep the part-timers under the 30 hour mark. I was doing payroll for fast food restaurants during the moves from $5/hour to $7.50/hour, and I can guarantee that no one who was already at or above the new minimum got a raise.

    My daughter can tell you what the impact of $15/hour will have on our town. High school and college kids will not be able to get jobs, because when your hiring dollars are limited, you hire the most useful people, who are the ones not hindered by Child Labor laws and OSHA regs on what equipment they can use.

    1. ah but see, Michigan sorta fixed that by making the min for 16 and 17 yr olds $8.20 v. $9.65 for everyone else.
      So you see more teens in the part time jobs, but not as many as when it was the actual national minimum, Nor do you see as many people over all. Less cashiers, longer lines, etc and yeah, Congrats! You started at $8.20, and at 18 jumped to $9.65, got a cut in hours, and never see another raise.

      1. President Reagan made a similar proposal in his first term. The letter I sent to the White House is probably the keystone of my FBI dossier.

        “What part of ‘equal pay for equal work’ do you not understand?”

        I liked Uncle Ronnie a lot, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to call him out for his occasional bouts of dumbass.

      1. Happened here in Oregon too. Well before our kid hit HS or college age.

        We got away with hiring a HS student to work on our yard and help do some painting on the Shed. Rehired him his brief weeks between spring and summer terms to paint the house … got away with, it too. Hired our son. Grandma did the same for painting her house. This last summer she got the Friends & Family Discount by hiring dad’s cousin’s son (adult who house painted for a living).

        Worked for getting son his current job. Plus almost worked for getting him jobs in chemistry labs. When the people touting your work ethic because they observed it (neighbors) as it occurred, it counts. Unfortunately the chemistry jobs didn’t materialized as the ones headhunting him suddenly were scrambling for their jobs, as the local labs were purchased for their intellectual properties and shutdown.

    3. “High school and college kids will not be able to get jobs”

      But that’s okay because the government will still lend them plenty of money to transfer into the coffers of college administrators. Besides, working jobs before their indoctrination is complete risks instilling bad ideas about economics. We MUST avoid developing False Consciousness in our youth.
      ~

    4. Whenever I hear someone say “living wage for a family of four”, I can’t help but want to ask the question “Why do you think 16-year-olds need to provide for a family of four?”

      1. Because they believe in a stricter caste system than the one India had and has. They really think that people spend 40 years flipping burgers at the same fast food joint.

        1. Yes. I remember several years back (Obama admin) the national newts had a sob-story about a man who had been working at a McD or BK for decades and still made little more than minimum wage. My first thought – why has he never been promoted? After hearing him talk, it was obvious why. He was mentally retarded. Not Downs, but something similar. Not your typical person, in other words. I suspect he lived in a group residence, and got some other forms of support as well. But that wouldn’t fit the Narrative.

          1. Yeah, having worked at the mall, there is only one reason anyone makes minimum wage after working for 6 months: they’re just barely effective enough to not be worth firing and hiring someone else.

        2. Yes, like India. The unintended consequences of Govt regulation freeze people in place, like the caste system. But businesses in India respond to regulations as US businesses do. I worked with a family business from India in the 1980s. The family owned 40+ companies with 49 employees each. Many regulations kicked in only at employee 50, so #50 was never hired. The cost of running 40+ companies separate from each other but in the same business was lower than the cost of employee 50.

  12. The absolute minimum wage is $0.00
    raise the artificial one high enough and more and more make the actual true minimum.
    and, of course WP has two “Gotta raise it!!1!11!eleventy” blogs in the “More on WP.Com” bar

  13. And the very people this is intended to help will be hurt the most – the poor.

    “Golly, I voted Blue and I’m making almost twice as much as I used to, but now everything is more expensive.”

    So we’re gonna get more minimum wage hikes, or price controls. With this administration? Probably the latter. Then we’ll be on the road to Caracas.

    2. Several states have already indexed the state minimum wage to inflation. Yet prices in those states seem to always go up faster than the national CPI…go figure.

      1. I call that The Ultimate Stupidity.

        They not only know nothing about economics, they refuse to learn.

      1. Just finished listening to Nick Offerman’s reading of that. He does such an amazing job bringing the story to life.

        Though the Yankee does a terrible job explaining himself to the peasants in that section. If he’d just tried to say, “Yes, you have more money but we have more stuff” instead of trying to insist that “we are richer” he might have gotten his point across. Actually, I felt that way through most of the book — the Yankee would have been more successful if he’d had more persuasive ability. Smarmily sitting on Mt. Know-it-all doesn’t accomplish much.

        Oh, and the virulent anti-Catholicism was nasty. I realize Twain was a product of his time, but the slurs don’t even make sense. “Catholicism creates and perpetuates slavery”? So St. Patrick taught the Irish slavery so he could become a slave and thus teach them Christianity? And I get that medieval history wasn’t well-known and hadn’t developed the way it has in the 20th century, but medieval Christians did not keep slaves, as a rule. I’ll grant that serfdom isn’t much of an improvement, but it doesn’t mean slaves in chains marching from town to town in convoys like Twain describes as a normal part of Arthur’s Britain. Hell, one of the big reasons the Pope commanded missionaries to convert the Irish, Scandinavians, and Russians was because Christians were not allowed to enslave fellow Christians, so conversion would stop the raiding and slaving.

        1. That book is a perpetual lesson in the importance of point of view characters. If you want to satirize chivalry, you need someone who hasn’t “seen through” it before he ever saw it, because you can’t believe him.

          Getting facts like that wrong is also a down-side.

  14. One thing that I’ve noted is how the Left likes to push minimum wage increases with one hand. And the Left will simultaneously push the argument with the other hand that we need to stop deporting illegal aliens because if farmers are forced to pay real wages to legal workers to pick their crops, it will drive up the cost of food.

    1. And with their third hand, push higher taxes. Especially taxes that hit the poor harder, like sales tax and gasoline tax.

      1. And they will not notice/deny any of this as they have their heads deeply implanted in their lower colon…

  15. I well remember when the minimum wage was a dollar an hour. I also well remember gasoline at fifteen cents a gallon. Gee, I wonder what’s changed since back in the day….

    1. jiminalaska, I didn’t start working until the minimum wage was $1.60/hour and 36.9 cents/gallon…

      My first job was for a Korean man who went to our church. He wanted to build his own house and hired a few of the local teens to help. I spent nine hours the first day following a backhoe with a spade, squaring the edges. The second day, we were told we couldn’t continue working because the Teamsters objected to the use of non-union labor. No deliveries, no plumbers, no electricians, etc.

      Since then, I’ve lost three other jobs due to “collective bargaining units”. And I frankly don’t think they have risen in my estimation since they cost me my first job. And the racist “fellow-travelers” black-balled the fellow who tried to help out 5 teens in an economically-distressed area. 20 years later, the lot was still bare except for the scars from that first day’s work.

  16. Apparently I was correct… The leftists *DO* want all of us on our knees in front of a government official, begging for a handful of rice, with no other place to go…

    1. Well yes. Anyone who doesn’t realize it yet hasn’t been paying attention, and they will do ANYTHING for power.

      I am expecting a wave of “accidents”, “heart attacks” and involuntary assisted suicides, of the House members and Senators who stand in the way of the Democrats packing the Courts, adding states, and ratifying ruinous treaties.

  17. Actually I’d like to see a maximum wage for politicians and all government employees that’s no higher than any mandated minimum wage.

    After all, they’re servants of We The People, why should they be paid any more than the people they work for, including the lady making beds a Motel 6?

  18. Those businesses that manage to stay in business WILL raise prices. The others that will be even more disadvantaged are those elderly on a fixed income. That’s NOT going to go up, but prices will. Eat, or pay for heat, or pay for electricity… Choices, choices…

      1. Un, no, they are just going use nationalized healthcare to deny medical care en masse to elderly, because 1) too many are of the wrong identity group, 2) they already lived their lives and shouldn’t take resources for younger people and 3) many of them have “outdated” views. They will publicly justify this by saying that “hard choices must be made due to limited resources”.

        We are already seeing this in how they are prioritizing vaccine distribution. Medical need is basically an afterthought.

          1. as opposed to the VA, who gave it to their employees first, and is giving it to 75 and older next… and caregivers for those 75 and older…

        2. Shaming the elderly out of the public square moves too slowly. The idea now is to kill them all with the flu and inattention.

          I’m on a leave of absence from a retail job because I refused to wear the diaper. I got a text yesterday: “Hi, Kathy! This is Samantha with UFCW 21. I’m contacting members who may be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine event this weekend, our records indicate you are over the age of 50. Persons working or living in Seattle, over 50, and living in a multi-generational house are eligible for the vaccine. Are you…?”

          To which I replied “Nope! And no vaccine for me, thanks.”

          The unions are actively recruiting people to vaccinate at the same time every state agency is weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth because “there aren’t enough vaccinations to go around! TRUMP BAD!”

    2. I don’t know if the stories of elderly people eating dog food during Carter’s depression were true, but given how upscale dog food has become nowadays, I doubt they could afford it anyway.

      1. Good pet food, is expensive. But canned chicken for dogs, without additives, is cheaper than the essentially the same canned chicken for people. Ditto for the chicken/salmon/tuna Fancy Feast Appetizers options for cats.

        I still get a kick out of the Soviet Union reporting on the reports during the Carter’s years (I’m sure it was true somewhere) of senors eating pet food, gleefully pointing out how bad free market and democracy is. Only to be blindsided with the soviet people’s response “Wait! The US is so prosperous (rich) that they have food to buy that is just for cats and dogs?”

        1. Wasn’t that one of Rush Limbaugh’s first great snoots at liberalism? Joking about dogfood for his ma? And CO Congresstwit Pat Schroeder thought he was serious?

          Here’s Patsy Schroeder. This is 1995 on the floor of the House of Representatives.

          SCHROEDER: And they had the Big Kahuna of GOPAC come speak, none other than Rush Limbaugh himself, who stood there and said to all these people who paid all this money to keep GOPAC rich, he was hailing the GOP budget! He said according to the paper and according to the C-SPAN tape, he thought it was wonderful because it would starve the poor and it would drive Medicare recipients, including his mother, to eat dog food, but not to worry, Mom, he says, I’m sending you a new can opener. Wow. That tells you what today’s about.

          RUSH: It’s incredible. I still laugh myself silly when I hear this. This is 14 years ago. And so now they just got somebody besides Patsy Schroeder, this Mark Potok guy from the Southern Poverty Law Center out doing the same — (laughing) — wow. Just think. She’s so dense. Patsy Schroeder is so dense she could absorb light. How dense do you have to be to think somebody would actually stand up and be serious, ‘Hey, Mom, don’t worry about it, I’m going to send you a new can opener’? Wow.

          Limbaugh transcript [rushlimbaugh . com/daily/2009/09/18/liberals_twist_sarcastic_rush_riff_into_a_call_for_segregated_buses/]

          And now this word of advice:

          ~

          1. Wasn’t that one of Rush Limbaugh’s first great snoots at liberalism? Joking about dogfood for his ma?

            –
            Could be. I was a snotty-know-it-all-teen to early 20’s in the ’70s. I don’t remember much beyond responding “yea right” so false. Heck I was in college with my own pet (German Shepard so not small pet). I never even came close to eating dog food despite counting out saved change for food for both of us. OTOH I bought her a huge bag of food. I might do with less to see that she was fed. I never considered eating her food (to be clear Eww). Besides, if things were that bad, she’d would have done what dogs have done for eons, eat my leftovers …

            It is more my response to the Soviet’s promotion of the notion of the falsehood to the soviet populace, then the populace’s response of the announcement. Heck both these might be false too. False/True matters, but I can visualize the situation where a population who rarely can find food to buy responds with “they have enough food to waste it making pet food! WTH?”

        2. I remember an episode of the Jeffersons back in the mid ’70s dealing with an elderly neighbor who was eating catfood part of the time because that was all she could afford. Sadly, based on what we saw at the grocery store, it was quite believable.

          1. I remember a Soviet emigrant who heard those stories and decided to try it. Concluded it was better than a lot of the food of the Soviet Union.

            Also a North Korean doctor escaping into China and hiding in a home’s shed and stumbling on the dog’s bowl. Rice with bits of meal. Better than she had eaten in a long time.

        3. As one who used to manufacture dog food and who still purchases it by the pallet… the main difference between cheap and expensive is the quality of the marketing, and the mandated distributor markup (which can be as much as 80% of the retail price). Some of the best is very inexpensive, and the worst nutritionally is commonly at the top end of the price scale (but costs a whole lot less at the contractor. Very few brands own their mill; most are made by either Purina/Mars/Doanes, or by Diamond.) And it all costs about the same to make, within a few bucks (ingredients being between about $8 and $15 per 50 pounds, mostly depending on fat content. The long lists of yuppie-stuff and supplements cost under $4 for enough to dose a ton of feed.)

          And if you think it’s all scientifically formulated… the only company that ever did more than token pet nutrition research (and published it) was Purina, and there’s one high-priced brand that was formulated by astrology (I shit you not).

          Most pet food is now mineral deficient (since mad cow disease took bone meal off the feed market) and nearly all is FAR too high in fiber (4% is the max a dog’s system can really handle, and less is better. 1% more fiber doubles the waste. Cats handle it even less well.) And get me started on “grain free”, grrr…. in the wild, canids and small felids mostly eat whole rodents which mostly eat grain (grass seed) and they need those digestive byproducts. But you’ll never see one dig up and eat a potato… tho that’s a fine way to get someone to buy the potato peels the french fry factory used to have to pay a pig farmer to haul away. We’re now starting to see the expected issues with long-term use of ‘grain-free’ (intractable intestinal upset, a noteworthy incidence of cardiomyopathy, and in hard-working dogs, starvation). Might even be worse than soy and flaxseed meal (which only really impact reproduction).

          However, you will see me snarf a handful for breakfast on my way to do kennel chores… come to it, a human can live a long time on dry dog food.

          1. my uncle swore by some old dry food that was rather cheap (forget which, The name that comes to mind doesn’t give hits or a different UK brand) and his huskies and rescue Malamute all lived 18 or so years

          2. As one who used to manufacture dog food and who still purchases it by the pallet…

            –
            What do you recommend? Healthy cats and one small dog.

          3. Is it possible to make your own cat or dog food and have it be cost competitive? My guess is you’d need access to cheap chicken/meat “byproducts” or equivalent.

            1. A local trainer does exactly that. Makes her own dog food, for her **personal dogs. The rescues she brings in for training and rehoming she takes regular dog food as donations and works that into the their dog food. Board and train she feeds what is brought by owners. She buys meat depending on what is being pushed. Cooks it up for a week, or few days (she has a few personal dogs), adding in *vegetables and rice.

              * Usually leftovers depending on additives, or those that need to be used sooner rather than later.
              ** 100% raw fed. Even adds extra fat for most of her own dogs to keep them at healthy weight.

          4. Absolutely fascinating inside skinny! I shall remember this if and when another impossibly cute fuzzy-wuzzy with big eyes ever again passes through my door to drive me mad by breaking everything in sight. ^_^

            1. Oh, get over yourself! AOC is NOT coming to live with you and you wouldn’t want her if she did.
              ~

          5. We did switch our cats to a grain-free kibble (after trying a lot of others) because we got tired of having about half of what they ate come back up. Our fuzzbutts like Taste of the Wild and we don’t have vomiting several days a week now, although one of our two current babies is on Science Diet for chronic kidney failure. That stays down well too.

            I haven’t used Purina in years, but in the ’80s there was something that was in all their dry foods and about half the tinned ones which all my cats reacted badly to. Thankfully I could smell it (whatever it was) and if I opened a bag or tin I could tell if there would be rug cleaning in the future *before* I fed it to them, and could head the issue off at the pass.

            And then there was our Irish black and white stray who had chronic diarrhea. The vet would practically hide if he saw us in the surgery; he’d tested that cat for every known issue, all tests negative, and we’d treated him for all of them too, just in case, with no result.

            One day he got a potato out of the bag and played with it, and then ate half of it. Mum figured if the cat wanted potatoes, we’d give him potatoes. So we switched his dinner (breakfast was usually the rat or bird he had caught sometime the night before) to grated raw potato with some grated cheese or broken-up fish stick. Within two weeks his guts were fine and stayed that way for the remaining decade of his life. Of course, God only knows what horrific additives were in the kibble sold in Ireland in the ’70s and ’80s. The stuff in people food was bad enough, and I distinctly remember a block of HB (Good Humor) Raspberry Ice Cream which informed us: “Contents: Raspberry Ripple Ice Cream”. Ingredients? What ingredients? (Though it was probably mostly hydrogenated pork fat. Don’t ask.)

    3. Pensions won’t go up. That I guaranty. Pretty sure even mom’s public pension isn’t tied to inflation (all $500/month-ish). Social Security is tied to inflation, kind of. Or at least the “reported inflation”, at any rate.

      FYI. Fuel locally has gone from $1.89/gal to $2.49/gal, in two weeks.

      1. Isn’t the CPI (Consumer Price Index) tied to strange things and not utility costs? And I recall their grocery basket involves weird thinking like “Well, when meat prices go up, people substitute hamburger instead of steak, so the cost of the grocery basket hasn’t really gone up. And when the price of hamburger hits that level, people will just use less of it, so the grocery basket price won’t go up either.”

        2. My overall grocery costs have gone up. Over $50 for weekly basics, easily. Usually approaches $100. That is not counting the bulk runs to Costco. I’m not buying a lot of meat either.

          We have been buying 1/2 pork from a hobby farmer, for the last few years. He takes orders from friends and family then buys that many piglets and raises them for winter kill. Cost all up ran $3.20/# this year. Which is less than hamburger at Costco. Chicken is another standby.

          One of the reasons I find the “no inflation” over the last 15 years or so, frustrating. To me it is an eye rolling, “seriously” response. About the ONLY thing that has stayed down is interest rates. We lived through that too, in ’70 and ’80s. Credit card rates don’t affect us, not because we don’t use one, we do. We don’t pay interest or penalties, ever.

          1. Consumer electronics get cheaper every year, and that’s the spending most people have their eye on. Rent, fuel, food… that’s “overhead” they don’t pay attention to.

            1. Dad and Mom are now retired and a few years back (0bama admin), Dad mentioned “No COLA last year from Social Security, because ‘We don’t count the cost of gas or food as part of the COL’, and this year we get ‘No COLA this year, because gas and food prices have dropped compared to last year.’ because we must not have a memory of last year.”
              because even with 0bama’s attempts the frackers drove down the price of oil and gas (which leftoids were trying to give 0bama credit for, too even though oil and natural gas were still higher than under GWB)

        3. Calculation of the CPI is a classic “Secret Sauce” process because there is no real way to factor the substitution process that you describe nor the fact that technological advances make many things incomparable. Twenty-five years ago, for example, computer storage ran about $1 per megabyte — a 200M hard drive ran about $200 — and now … well, you cannot buy quantities as small as megabytes but you can get an 8G thumb drive in the Walmart checkout line for $8 or so … if you want oe i a hurry and don’t mind overpaying. How does the CPI compensate for that? Or for the fact that a car costs far more than it did in fifty years ago but also provides far more value.
          ~

            1. No; I read an article a few years ago in some authoritative source — the Wall Street Journal or New York Times (perhaps quite a few) — and they explained that this is where the CPI Secret Sauce comes in. Primarily they make a “scientific” guess about the qualitative difference and change in value for money. Essentially it is just one more statistical illusion of expertise.

              When you get down to it, the whole purpose is to disguise the fact that decoupling the dollar from a basic measure of value makes inflation impossible to judge. Back in 1975 I bought my first pocket calculator, a TI beauty which offered four function capability PLUS a memory buffer for a mere $100! The very next year I bought its replacement for the same $100 price tag and got full slide rule functionality with not just memory buffers (3!) but four function manipulation of those memory buffers. How does that affect inflation?

              Then consider that (even with the Arab oil embargo) that same $100 would have bought over 150 gallons of gas (assuming it was an even day and there was any gasoline to be bought.)

              The difference between government statistics and bull [feces] is that the manure is great for your garden and nobody tries to tell you bull [feces] smells wonderful.
              ~

        1. Went slightly lower during lockdowns locally. Fuel is up from before lockdowns. Since lockdowns haven’t stopped, why would fuel costs be going up?

          Just asking.

  19. Government employees are unionized and we, though we pay them, have no say in union negotiations.

    Wonder of we can start a taxpayer’s union? The American Largely Locals Federation of United Citizens Kindly Employing Democrats. That’s a mouthfull we’ll just have to use the initials like the AFLCIO does.

    1. JiminAlaska, you made me laugh out loud with a mouthful of salad!

      Sarah, can I borrow the carp launcher, please?

  20. What can you expect from people who never had to create or run a business?
    They actively hate anyone who is a businessman as an exploiter and greedy to want filthy profits. Money from influence and bribes is somehow cleaner. What they want to be and have almost succeeded is to be royalty.

    1. I think it is they don’t understand why they aren’t getting the profits when they are clearly superior and deserved them.

      When I worked at the UConn Dominos I’d see a car, whose driver looked like he was probably a professor but might have been admin, with a bumper sticker “Bush Jr. isn’t smart enough to run a laundromat.”

      Now, laundromats are interesting businesses. At the time I was interested enough in trying to buy one that I was a member of the trade association. I knew the owner of the one I frequented pretty well. He was going to retire in a couple of years and had I not left CT I might have worked out some kind of owner financing with him.

      Good thing I didn’t given the direction CT has gone.

      But I learned a lot of interesting things. For example, laundromats are only one side of the coin-wash laundry industry. Apartment complex laundry rooms are the other and they are not run the same. I also learned that people see laundromats as a cash business and thus easy to cut corners on taxes. However, because inputs for both your machines, water and natural gas, are tightly tied to revenues, the IRS can find you very easily. That was in the more manual days. I suspect with more modern AI it’s almost impossible to get by.

      It’s nothing too complicated. It is a lot of specialized knowledge. It doesn’t require the same effort or raw horsepower differential equations does, but an idiot can’t do it.

      Nor can an arrogant SOB, like a college professor. He won’t take the time to learn the people skills necessary to maximize throughput and will probably be a “it’s a cash business, I’ll only report half” moron (while demanding higher taxes for the rich).

      What that bumper sticker told me was two things, neither about George W. Bush. It taught me the professor thought he was entitled to the good life and that he knew he was better than a small business owner who might not even have a Bachelor’s Degree, much less be smart enough for a Ph.D. (from observation, if you have the horsepower for a Masters, you have it for a Ph.D…what you are probably missing is the ability to put up with SEAL team levels of training hazing in an academic format).

      That’s why they hate businessmen and think they are exploiters. They’re doing better than the smart people when clearly they like what it takes to even do that well, thus they must be cheating.

      1. This reminds me of a conversation I listened to among 3 professors who were strongly socialist/communist. They were all encouraging communist governments in various South American countries. Then the conversation veered to the inheritance one of them was expecting from a father (lots of communists are actually trust fund children) and how they were structuring it with a trust to avoid paying taxes. They had no sense of cognitive dissonance at all.

        1. I have noticed communism seems to appeal more to the less able children of the upper middle economically than the actual workers.

          Hollywood used to know that if you’ve seen <i.C

        1. Good as far as it goes but the terminal box on the Science side does lead back to more questions.

  21. $15/hr minimum wage is just the smoke screen. Here’s the hammer:

    https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/29/bidens-worst-executive-order-went-almost-entirely-unnoticed/

    Ignored by media, the Pen-That-Walks signed an order removing the “cost of compliance” rule for federal regulators. They can now impose any regulation on anything or anyone they want, regardless of the burden of compliance.

    Look for some -beauty- regulations coming down from the EPA in the next 6 months or so.

    1. And watch for total donations to Dems less than the cost, but enough for Congress to carve exemptions/limitations in the regulations.

      1. Congress? The insiders go directly to the regulators. It’s why the regulations always crush the competitors and aspiring competitors of the insiders.

    2. OMG. This actually made my insides go cold.

      We’ll be in a full on depression by this time next year.

      I take the over/under on 25% unemployment by… August.

      1. Look for massive commodity price inflation first. Every genuine recession since Samuelson managed to find a closed form solution for Keynesian economics has been preceded by a run up in inflation.

        Printing money, running up the minimum wage, it’s all just magic to them. Our republic is now an open kleptocracy.

        1. I need to plug in to the commodities market again. I haven’t done that in… about 100 years.

          I’ll keep watch, thank you.

    3. Oh my. That’s aimed specifically at Energy and Agriculture. If you can’t kill ’em with lawfare, regulate ’em out of business.

      What you might not be aware of is that such regulations can and do end-run the 4th amendment. They can make it perfectly “legal” to confiscate your property if there might be “harm” as defined by those regulations (and by the little tin gods tasked with enforcing them)… and even if a court later reverses that confiscation, you’re already ruined and out of business anyway.

      1. Happened a lot under Obama and this go around is going to be far worse, and you already here them saying that “it’s proof capitalism doesn’t work” and “solving” the problem by nationalizing entire sectors of the economy Venezuela style, with the same results.

        Expect them to enact “anti-hording” rules that limit what you can have on hand and require the rest to be turned over to the government for “economically and socially just redistribution”
        under pain of confiscation, fines and imprisonment…in the name of “equity”.

        It’s coming, and soon.

          1. There are already rumors about the State coming after us for “hoarding” supplies of all kinds.

            I think it was this blog where we talked about picking up a little bit extra here and there on every shopping trip so you didn’t stand out but could get the stuff you might need. I started buying isopropyl alcohol that way, and now have enough to trade.

    4. Having studied up some on environmental restoration and the hornet’s nest already created by the rules changing to “now you have to prove there’s no harm from new compounds”… oh bleep.

  22. My understanding of the history of the national minimum wage is that it was initiated to keep “Negros,” “Chinamen” and “White Trash” Southerners from competing with Yankee union workers on basis of price.

    It is well past time to end this relic of systemic racism, xenophobia, and regional division and abandon “minimum wages”!
    ~

    1. It does, especially for the first group. Illegal immigration does the same thing. Why, it’s almost like the party of Jim Crowe is still trying to keep the black man down.

    2. Gun control laws were first enacted in the post Civil War south in order to prevent black people from having the ability to defend themselves, and as such were a core part of the racist Jim Crow laws. Is anyone surprised that the Democrats are thus the party of gun control and gun confiscation.

  24. Pretty sure that the EO signed by Buden only applies to government jobs. He doesn’t have the executive authority over any other jobs.

    Yes, there has been discussion about making legislation for a national $15 minimum wage. But it hasn’t happened yet.

    I do agree with the article as to the consequences if such legislation passes.

    1. They are going to stuff it into the CCP VIrus relief bill and enact a national minimum wage that way without any Republican votes, as they will use budget reconciliation to prevent a filibuster. Even though reconciliation is supposed to be a once a term thing, it will be used for all legislation, even for non-budget stuff, as Democrats get rid of the filibuster in all but name while their media arm claims that minority party rights are being recognized because the filibuster wasn’t nuked. They will also claim that reconciliation is only needed due to obstinate racist Republicans refusing to show unity and being unpatriotic.

  25. Here in Fargo most entry level jobs at fast food places start at between $11-$13/hr, no experience necessary. Get a few miles out of town and that drops off quickly, but the prices of stuff also tend to drop off as well. It’s only in the more densely populated areas that those wages can be maintained with the extra volume of business done. Forcing square peg solutions for round hole problems is exactly what government does, and it never works well.

  26. I have not looked, but the EO for the $15/hr minimum wage probably is flowed down to companies doing business with the Fed government as a contract requirement. They stick it to more capitalists that way.
    It’s a cruel EO. It puts a wage floor above what inexperienced workers are worth, leading to structural unemployment of 9% or more. Like in France the permanently unemployed need government aid and have time for protests or riots, depending on inclination.

    1. Wonder if the corresponding cost to fire rules that France has, the other side of structural unemployment, will come too.

      2. Rules the same as affirmative action are coming, as an “equity’” rule, with guaranteed outcomes, the opposite of equal opportunity.
        Restrictions on firing employees are coming. Like in France, companies will avoid hiring employees that are very expensive to terminate. With this cost on top of the minimum wage and all the other costs in the EOs( Paris Accords, subsidies to Dem cities and States, allowing China to cheat on trade and more). The young, inexperienced and poorly educated ( from failing teacher union schools) will never see employment levels achieved under Trump pre- Wuhan virus. These Dem. actions will harm the people they claim to be helping, but the Media will never report it.

    2. It also applies to many private jobs if they ever got any government financing or loans, through imposition of “prevailing wage” requirements (prevailing wage is essentially whatever the standard union pay rates are). In addition, states by Democrats impose such requirements very broadly, and indeed have expanded it to such an extent that even private property owners engaged in an entirely private project are required to pay prevailing wage.

  27. These EOs hurting businesses have another benefit for Dems: as government interference becomes an ever larger issue, having managers with government experience becomes a major profit factor. Companies hire or at run by more people from government. More Woke companies employing more Democrats, giving more cash to Democrats. A bad feedback system already spinning along.

    1. Forget woke employees. It means more and more business orgs putting more and more of their cash to lobbying and donations to carve out exemptions.

      “Nice small business you have there; be a shame if I had to regulate it out of existence.”

      1. There is a clear intent to destroy small businesses and to consolidate every area of commerce into one or two megabusinesses. Those megabusinesses are then used as de-facto instruments of the state and serve to enforce state will. It is politically and economically essentially Mussolini’s version of fascism. The only difference is that they seek to make it global (thus international socialism rather than national socialism) and their variant stresses identity groups rather than class. Thus, it is a fascist form being used to achieve communist goals, with a heavy essence on a caste system of identity groups, with disfavored groups essentially treated as societal scapegoats (like the Nazi’s did). Thus, the logical term for their system is communazism. In essence, communazism is what the CCP’s system is.

        1. Making the price of energy skyrocket will do more to destroy small business than all other evils combined, other than “lockdowns”.

            2. WordPress doesn’t turn a URL into an image unless it sees that the URL ends with .jpg, .png, or .gif (and maybe a few other extensions I didn’t mention). The dot is important. Without the dot, WordPress won’t turn it into an image. So change the “?format=” part of that URL into a dot, so that it ends with YHZRE.jpg, and it will work.

        2. A long time ago, I have come to the conclusion that there are only two kinds of government — Individualist governments that protect the rights of the individual, and Collectivist governments that insist the individual should be subservient to the State.

          While people can and do split hairs trying to figure out the differences between Communism, Socialism (National and International), Feudalism, Monarchism, and whatnot, the fact is, there is no method of control that a Collectivist society would pass up on, if it’s expedient for getting and maintaining control. And if it becomes obvious that a Collectivist system will collapse without a relief valve of some sort, they’ll grudgingly and temporarily allow a little bit of carefully controlled “Individualism” of a sort to flourish for a little bit.

          Meanwhile, Individualists just want to be left alone. Collectivists will take advantage of this by organizing to take away the rights of Individualists, whether gradually or suddenly, while Individualists aren’t paying attention.

    2. Plus the ABA is full Dem, so their support of The China Joe Muppet Show basically yields this flood of questionable EOs that are a Lawyers Employment Act in this period of struggling law firms. With all the impacted companies filing lawsuits and looking for restraining orders, it’s a legal services bonanza!

  28. A really appreciated this post because the author talks from where I live, too. Work at the bottom of the income scale, retail, and you see the worse effects of all this junk. Zero full time work anymore anywhere. Nothing even approaching 40 hours unless you’re favored. Don’t even think about overtime.

    And the Krogers of the world will increase customer expectation such that they act like barbarians to the few people who still work in the store.

    I’ve got the over/under on 25% unemployment by August.

    1. Even if I could wear a mask and had gone back to the casino when they asked me in June, I’d still not be working full time. My section is one manager and three staff, and we dealt with four hotels, almost 2300 rooms. One of the smaller hotels still hasn’t reopened, and one of the large ones is I believe only open on weekends, and they, of course, can’t run at full capacity because if they do everyone is going to die!!1!!11!. So I gather the person who isn’t the department manager comes in and does a few hours and then goes home.

      I can’t go back to Macy’s even if I wanted to, because they are closing our local one. I haven’t been to the mall in months, but it must be a graveyard, seeing as they have had one anchor slot empty for two years (Sears), are losing a second (Macy’s), the third is Penney’s which I gather is on very shaky ground, and the fourth anchor used to be a Filene’s, but was split into a Bed Bath and Beyond on one floor and a Christmas Tree Shop on the other. Even in ’18, they seemed to be about the only place doing well.

        2. Yep indeed. We’re just a bit ahead of the curve, having been the part of a blue state they like to pretend doesn’t exist, or as I heard one person put it: “We’re the armpit of Connecticut.”

  29. I was doing today’s reading and the first part of the Epistle resonated with one of the ways I keep from despair given where we are, the minimum wage stupidity being just another example, that I thought it was worth sharing:

    Hebrews 11:8, 11-16 (Epistle) (I stopped at 14 for this)

    8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.
    11 By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised.
    12 Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude – innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.
    13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
    14 For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland.

  30. Strongly recommended: “Facts Matter with Roman Balmakov”
    Associated with Epoch Times. Presently on Youtube but also available via Youmaker.
    Densely packed info and frequently stuff you won’t hear elsewhere. With citations.

  31. So today the retards held the line, despite remarkably synchronized graphs on all the stocks in question (who knew Dominion had a financial services division?). We didn’t hold it high enough to clear all of the new shorts, but it is still well above the bankruptcy line for the old set.

    Today we witnessed more narrative attacks: “Ok WSB! You won! Now please sell and take your profit!”, also (false) claims that the funds have exited their positions.

    1. The more those in authority (including the brokerages) pull crap like that, the more likely it becomes that the individual investors who hold those funds will dig in their heels and hold on to the bitter end instead of selling.

      This could get very, very interesting. I saw a comment earlier today that even the banking system could be at risk due to the scale of this mess that Melvin Capital and the other short-sellers recklessly got themselves into.

      1. This whole situation is yet more evidence that Trump was merely an effect of much larger forces.

        (for the 5 people in the world who hadn’t figured that out yet)

        1. I can be pretty slow, and very blind, so there are aspects from this that I hadn’t noticed before.

          I spent a little while today on theorizing parallel structures that could potentially bypass civil law.

          That, for whatever reason, primed me to finally notice that “Oh, that is why the interest in bitcoin. They were picking up on something unsettling that I wasn’t close enough to be aware of.”

          1. This is one of those places where it is incredibly useful to be familiar with ancap thinking. You don’t have to agree with it — any more than you have to agree with some historical figure’s actions — but like knowing history it lets you see some of the pervasive blindspots.

            1. I think we’ve seen a Melvin Capital provide a new definition for the slang verb “to melvin”

              give someone a melvin
              tv. to jerk up someone’s pants or underwear, drawing the fabric up sharply between the buttocks. (It is assumed that some geek named Melvin goes about with his underwear in this uncomfortable position.)

              “Tom came up behind Fred and, with a deft motion, gave Fred a melvin that he would never forget.”https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/melvin

              Apropos, isn’t it?

              Those hedgefund guys sure got melvined, didn’t they?
              ~

              1. Okay – that last segment –

                Apropos, isn’t it?

                Those hedgefund guys sure got melvined, didn’t they?

                – lost its slash for the END BLOCKQUOTE instruction. Pooh.
                ~

    2. “The Week They Drove Robinhood down”

      Virgil Caine is the name
      And I served on wallstreetbets train
      ‘Till Robinhood came
      And started fucking us over again

      In the winter of ’21
      We were hungry, we felt let down
      They’d stolen the election in plain sight
      And we didn’t even know how to fight

      The week they drove Robinhood down
      And the bells were ringing
      The week they drove Robinhood down
      And all the tards were singing
      They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, na”

      My girlfriend called from Tennessee
      Trying to find out what it meant to me
      But I held the line and couldn’t agree
      To sell and set us debt free

      Now, I don’t mind there will be lack of food
      And I don’t care if the money’s no good
      You take what you need
      And you leave the rest
      But they should never
      Have taken the very best

      The week they drove Robinhood down
      And the bells were ringing
      The week they drove Robinhood down
      And all the tards were singing
      They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, na”

      They can steal our laws and occupy DC
      But this they’ll never take from me
      I made them hurt and I made them scream
      It was real and not just a dream

      As the winter gets colder
      And the Feebs get bolder
      I’ve done something that can be told
      We tards held the line and we didn’t fold.

      The week they drove Robinhood down
      And all the bells were ringing
      The week they drove Robinhood down
      And all the tards were singing
      They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, na”

      The week they drove Robinhood down
      And all the bells were ringing
      The week they drove Robinhood down
      And the tards were singing
      They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, na”

      2. Over at Powerline, a commenter linked to an explaination that Robinhood’s blocking GameStop shares (and several other shares) is because they had a liquidity problem. The explanation gets highly technical, so I’d be quite grateful if Herb (and anyone else in that field) would take a look at let me know if I understood it right. But the super-short version is that they were required to do so by the Dodd-Frank rules. When they have a large volume of trades that meet some risk criteria I don’t fully understand, but the GameStop trades certainly met the criteria (on paper it looks like a classic bubble), they have to put up some collateral that’s like 10% of the volume of the high-risk stock being traded. And the volume of GameStop stock being traded through their app would have required them to post way too much of their available cash as collateral, and they couldn’t afford to have that much liquid cash tied up, so they temporarily stopped people from buying GameStop through their app so that they wouldn’t risk going bankrupt themselves.

        If that explanation is correct (and the guy giving it does appear to know what he’s talking about; his explanation has none of the “baffle ’em with BS” feel about it, and lots of the “I’m trying as best I can to explain a highly-technical field to non-technical people” feel, which is something I’m very familiar with from personal experience), then that explains them stopping the sales of GameStop shares, and it’s non-nefarious. That does NOT explain, or justify, the alleged forced selling of non-margin stock that some people have said that they did. I don’t yet know what’s going on there, whether it’s just a false rumor or whether they really did something illegal — but allegedly a suit has already been filed against them, so more details are going to come out in discovery at some point.

        1. (on paper it looks like a classic bubble)

          This is one of the most amazing parts of the situation. I have seen so many people on forums who are familiar with the stock market that simply cannot wrap their heads around the idea that this is not people buying into a bubble to profit, but people throwing money at the chance to hurt an enemy.

          1. I just posted a comment to that effect in the Powerline comments. I sort Disqus comments by “Best”, and the most-upvoted ones were 20+ votes. The first one who was actually pointing that out was way down the scroll list with just 3 votes (which I made 4). Now, plenty of other people were apparently thinking that way, but the top-rated comment I could see that was explaining “this is not people investing, this is people spending money with no expectation of getting it back, and if they do get some of it back, hey, bonus” was the one I replied to to say “Finally, someone gets it.”

            So many people are looking at this through the conventional lens, where it looks like a lot of people are going to lose their shirt. And they’re kind of right… except that they don’t realize that most of those people are only putting in money they can afford to lose because they’re expecting to lose it. The only shirt they’re going to lose is the spare shirt they have lying around in a drawer (or the $600 shirt that Uncle Spendthrift just handed them unasked-for).

          2. That’s what I get from it, and thanks to the New Math inflicted on me at a tender age, I am almost entirely enumerate, and also stock market gyrations make my head hurt … but I have gathered this much: it’s an attempt by micro-investors, not to make a profit in the long run – but to make the utterly corrupt big-investor hedge funds bleed out their rectums.

            2. I caught New Math in, I guess, sixth or seventh grade and really liked it.

              I consider that damned compelling evidence that New Math was a horrible experience for most kids.
              ~

          3. Ordinarily, I’d be annoyed with “investors” taking that approach, and sympathize somewhat with the short-sellers..

            But the short-sellers were so utterly and completely reckless in their shorting of the stocks of the various companies involved (most particularly GameStop), that any sympathy I might have had for them is completely absent.

        2. Louis Rossman has videos, on twitter, something called odyssey and lbry. Pixy Misa has been posting some of the ones on this market stuff.

          One of them is contrasting WeBull’s PR take on this with Robinhoods’s, and concluded that Robinhood’s was unnecessarily damaging. (His Pro-Tip: starting off honest gives your customers less cause to assume malice.)

          He is apparently a little convinced by some of the market cap arguments, but is still concerned by some of the relationships between entities. Would like to see things better investigated.

  32. Speaking of poison pills, the barely walking-breathing one named Malignancy is personally profiting from HarrisBiden executive orders:

    https://justthenews.com/government/congress/reports-pelosis-husband-made-huge-tesla-buy-prior-bidens-electric-vehicle?utm_medium=social_media&utm_source=twitter_social_icon&utm_campaign=social_icons

    And yet Pelosi is one of the loudest voices denouncing the Reddit/Robinhood folks pushing the price of Gamestop up to punish overreaching short sellers, while her husband enhances the family fortune through insider trading and dealing.

    1. And Sen. Fauxcahantas, who built her reputation with the Left attacking Wall Street, is busy preparing to go after the Redditors.

  35. A post that summarizes it well:

    OP must be a hit at parties.

    Take off your pocket protector, grab a beer and try to have fun.

    Two rules they didn’t teach you in finance school back in 1906.

    1) Americans don’t like being told what to do. Our national anthem should have fuck you in it at least twice.

    2) Americans are awesome at taking whatever bullshit rules the elites come up with, adapting, and using them to beat the system that forced them upon us. Darwin would be proud of our evolutionary capabilities.

    We’ve just been shown that our elections are a myth and we have long suspected that our money is too.

    So people are fighting back. Fuck the money.

    It’s down to shit like this or plate carriers and 5.56 combat.

    Pick one.

  36. When the Marks finally say, “I don’t care what happens to me as long as I can see the Con-Men are destroyed.”

    Critical mass.

    Nothing left to lose, meets nothing matters but revenge.

    Initiates implosion.

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  38. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley has authored a biography of Thomas Sowell, due for release later this year. To promote this he has produced a video profile of Sowell for the Free To Choose Network, featuring this trenchant observation about minimum wages:

    One summer in the government was enough to persuade Sowell that communism, government, and minimum wage laws do not work. Watch through 25:30, about two minutes.

    Hell, if you have the (just under) fifty-seven minutes, watch the whole damn thing. Then watch it again.
    ~

  39. A pay raise sounds tempting, but as you pointed out, it will have unintended consequences. A few years ago, when I was still living in the States, I remember this topic coming up, and some areas did indeed raise minimum wage to 15. Whether as a result or a coincidence, I noticed how many fast food joints started using automated machines for ordering, eliminating the need for employees to take orders and work the register. In Germany it’s like that. Maybe one person to work the cashier at McDonald’s, for example. They also have a higher national minimum wage. Coincidence or cause and effect? Small town businesses in rural communities like the one where I lived in Idaho also couldn’t afford to pay 15 minimum wage to all employees. So, I do believe you are right on what you think will happen if this goes through nationwide.
    And this is my favourite bit of your post:
    “We, as a culture and a country, need to stop taking counsel from our fears. End the lockdowns, begin isolating only those who genuinely need it, and return to normalcy. No more forced masking, no more house arrest. No more encouraging incivility with our neighbors.”

  41. Note the disparate effect on red states, which will suffer the most from a $15/hour minimum wage:

    https://www.aei.org/economics/the-disparate-impact-of-a-national-15-minimum-wage/

    Gee, who could have predicted that those states that most need that labor leverage would lose the most?? Basically, it kills ag jobs, and seasonal ranch jobs will be either 100% under the table, or will move to a sharecropping model. Well, we ain’t gonna need those migrant pickers no more, all be automated by the end of the decade.

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