1) What Ever Happened To The Great American Work Ethic?
Our latest study shows that many Americans are being paid by the government not to work more than to be in a job. This is bad for the economy, people’s health, and their happiness.
Meanwhile, employers have been telling us that the work ethic is slipping with young workers. The WSJ poll results below seem to confirm that the younger generation puts less emphasis on work and excelling on the job than the boomer's generation.
Perhaps when, and if, they grow up, their attitudes and job performance will improve. But for now, it appears that this shift in attitudes about giving it 100% May explain why productivity growth went negative in 2022:
2) Minimum Wages Are Rising In Blue States (And Some Red States)
In part because of Bidenflation, the minimum wage is going up in 23 states and Washington D.C. this month. One way to keep inflation high is to mandate a higher wage than would apply under market conditions.
The federal minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour but many Blue States are at or will soon be reaching a $15 an-hour wage floor. That includes Washington state ($15.74), California ($15.50), and Massachusetts ($15). They will be joined by Connecticut this summer and New Jersey next year.
California’s legislature tried to raise its minimum wage to as high as $22 an hour for fast-food workers, but that move has been blocked pending a voter referendum on the issue.
Even Nebraska voters approved an increase in the minim wage from $9 an hour to $10.50 last November. Gradual increases will increase the rate to $15 an hour by 2026.
A high min wage drives up the unemployment of teenagers and the least skilled adult workers. The effects are not especially negative when the job market is strong, but it’s a killer if we go into recession and layoffs start coming.
3) The New York Conundrum: Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
New York’s Democratic pols routinely advise their Republican residents: get out of Dodge if you don’t like it here. In 2014, Andrew Cuomo told reporters that “they [Repubs] have no place in the state of New York.”
Then Cuomo’s successor Kathy Hochul issued the same message: “You are not New Yorkers,” she sneered, noting that real New Yorkers backed abortion, environmental justice programs, and LGBTQ rights.
But now that the new Census shows that no state is bleeding people more than NY, Hochul has changed her tune. She began her inaugural last week by complaining that high housing and energy costs were “making life just too damn hard for New Yorkers.
“We must reverse the trend of people leaving our state in search of lower costs and opportunities elsewhere.”
We welcome Hochul’s recognition of reality – New York City alone has lost 16 percent of its top taxpayers – but her words are empty. You must cut the country’s highest tax rates in half and fight crime on the streets—fat chance she’ll do either. Expect more dismal Census reports for years to come.
4) Who Says There’s No Bipartisanship In Washington?
Biden and McConnell met at a joint press conference In Kentucky yesterday and they agreed that they both love to spend money we don’t have. They even shook on it. During the event “celebrating” the $1.2 trillion Green New Deal bill, Biden gushed that the bill proves: 'We can work together, we can get things done, we can move the nation forward…”.
We mentioned yesterday that the most discredited academic of all time, doomsdayer Paul Ehrlich, appeared on 60 Minutes this weekend spreading more of his inane theories about the world coming to an end. We and many others pounced on CBS for giving this now-90-year-old loon a platform given the falseness of every prediction he has made over the past fifty years.
Ehrlich took to Twitter and almost comically gave this lame excuse for his perfect record of always being wrong.
Doesn’t he sound just like another discredited left-wing hero: Anthony Fauci, who once said “I am the science.”
What Ehrlich is saying is: sure I was dead wrong: but I hoodwinked all the other scientists. Thank you, Paul Ehrlich. This is a useful primer into why the “scientific consensus” is so often wrong.
