Coyote Blog

For many, low wage jobs are the first rung on the ladder to success and prosperity.  Raising the minimum wage is putting the first rung of the ladder out of reach of many low-skilled Americans.

File this under "why I blog rather than do a lot of talking head cable shows."

I flew to New York to go in studio on the Stossel show today.  I did a brief bit on the minimum wage, a reprise from my earlier cameo on Stossel special.  It will be on tomorrow, Thursday at 9PM Eastern on Fox Business  (not Fox News, Fox Business).

The whole experience was new to me, which made me virtually unique as I was surrounded by policy wonks who do this kind of talking head thing all the time.   By the way, there was no sharing of questions or his plan in advance -- I think they want you cold.  So answers are all in real time.

Please, please, please do not write me or post comments such as "you should have said ____."  It will just depress me.  Believe me, 5 minutes after walking out I thought of 9 things I should have said.  Which is in fact why I blog rather than engage much any more in real time argument.

Anyway, I think his show will be pretty good -- he has Michael Cannon on health care and segments after mine on cash for clunkers and alpaca subsidies.  I shared the green room with an alpaca, which will probably just go to prove the old saying about always getting upstaged by kids and animals.

By the way, I think Stossel must set a different tone for his staff than is normal on TV.  I was talking to one of his producers, a guy that had come with Stossel from ABC, and I asked him if he had studied something relevant to this job in college.  I expected him to say "yes, theater" or "yes, television production."  But he said "yes, economics at George Mason."  I loved that answer.

I hear rumor that a few snippets from a series of interviews I did on the minimum wage with John Stossel's crew may have appeared on his "Politicians' Top 10 Promises Gone Wrong" show tonight.  I have it TIVO'd but have not been able to watch it yet.  It is being replayed (in Hannity's usual time slot) at 9pm and Midnight on Sunday (EST).  Even if I am not in it, it still looks like a great show and I can't imagine that readers of this blog would not enjoy it.   More here.

As Obama pushes the US into a corporate state model like those in Europe, here is one cost we will face: increases in long-term unemployment.  Already we see higher structural barriers being created to employment (preference for preferred unions, higher minimum wage, reduced internships) combined with increasing incentives to remain unemployed (extension of unemployment benefits, subsidized medical services).

Most countries who move to this model experience very high long-term structural unemployment.   The costs to add an employee in Europe are really, really high, meaning that it is only done reluctantly and the preference is for highly skilled workers  (who is going to give a job for life to an untested, unskilled young worker?)  Further, these states are run by a troika of large corporations, unions, and government insiders who protect each other from competition.  Young unskilled workers are a competitive threat to established unions.  Since these unions workers get above-market wages, they are protected from younger workers who are willing to offer their admittedly less skilled labor much cheaper.

I was playing around with data released from the World Bank, and compared the US to a number of other industrialized countries on this metric.  Even in past recessions, long-term unemployment has remained low in the US (click to enlarge).  The metric is percent of total unemployed that are unemployed for longer than 1 year.

I get tired of the perception that labor law is universally beneficial to people selling their labor, and that these laws are solely intended to reduce the ability of rapacious employers to exploit powerless workers.  It confuses people to no end when I say that minimum wage laws prevent workers from selling their labor for less than the minimum wage, and is therefore a restriction on every worker's freedom.  Supporters of the law say, that's can't be right, it simply must be helping all workers.

But I think anyone who has gone through the experience lately of trying to help their teen get a summer job knows this is not the case.  My son would gladly work for free or below minimum wage at any number of jobs to get experience.  Unfortunately, he must be paid the same minimum wage as someone with years of experience, and many large corporate chains have simply banned hiring of kids under 18 to avoid liability and labor law hassles associated with hiring teens.  The result is an astronomical unemployment rate for teens.

So here is another example, with the Feds cracking down on unpaid internships.  This is simply crazy.  The government has got to realize that there are useful and valuable things one can trade his labor for (e.g. experience, training) that can't be measured in money.

Of course, you know who is the greatest violator of these internship rules?  The organization that requires the longest hours for the least pay (well under minimum wage) for a huge portion of its staff?  Why, its the US Congress, but of course they exempt themselves from these laws.

Update:  From a commenter on Stossel's blog:

Maggie Hanson:

I have an unemployed friend trying to land work in a new field where she has no experience. She's up against experienced applicants. I suggested she offer her services for free as an intern for 3 months in exchange for learning on the job and a letter of recommendation. She told me she didn't think that was legal. I'm appalled to learn she is right! Yet how else is she going to get experience? She can't afford school. Internships are a free education.

Michigan has  a huge problem with jobs and capital leaving the state for more favorable climates.  Which makes it incredible that the ruling Democrats in the state have this plan to improve things:

• Hiking the minimum wage to $10 an hour for all workers.
• Imposing a blanket moratorium on home foreclosures for 12 months.
• Cutting utility rates 20% across the board.
• Requiring all employers to provide health care to their employees.
• Hiking, by $100 a week, and extending, for six months, unemployment benefits.

Wow, that should really bring companies running to the state to invest their capital.  This is always a powerfully attractive package:

• Raise the price of unskilled labor and entry-level employees
• Reduce protections for lenders investing capital in the state
• Set the state up for power shortages
• Increase the price of labor by $12,000 or more per year
• Increase employment-related taxes  ( a sure outcome of raising unemplyment benefits)

If you want to really confuse someone, restate the minimum wage laws this way:

It is generally illegal in the US to accept a job for less than $7.25 an hour.  The minimum wage laws are therefore a substantial constraint on individual liberties

When I say this to most folks, they get confused because laws like minimum wages are usually stated in terms of empowerment of the common man.  The theory is that individuals don't have enough bargaining power to really get what the true clearing price should be for their labor, so the government steps in to prevent evil corporations (ie "the man") from exploiting this power imbalance and paying wages that are too low.

Tell that to my 15-year-old son who is looking for a job.  Sure, he would like to earn some good cash, but the wage scale of a job is way down the list of priorities.  What he really needs is a chance to build basic work skills and knowledge of how organizations function that you and I take for granted.  Further, he would like to get some direct experience with customer contact.  And finally, he wants to demonstrate to future college choices that he can function successfully in a work environment, and that he is motivated enough to keep and hold a job.

As a result, my son would likely gladly take the right job for, say, $3 an hour.  And an employer might jump at this deal, understanding the lower wage helps compensate for the costs of dealing with an inexperienced new employee and the risk of hiring a teenaged boy with distracting amounts of hormones running through his system.  This would be a perfectly rational, consensual, everybody-wins arrangement that is absolutely illegal.  So don't tell me or my family that minimum wage laws are empowering.

The health care analog

Many very similar liberty-reducing regulations exist in the health care world, and more appear to be on the way.  One great example that is entirely similar to the minimum wage issue is minimum coverage rules.  Many states have lengthy lists of conditions that must be covered in any health insurance plan sold in that state.  From acupuncture to mental health to massages to homeopathic treatments, you can find just about every care specialty with a lobbying organization getting its services embodied in state laws as minimum requirements.

Again, supporters of such laws argue that this is empowering for consumers.  Every health care plan you can buy will have a wide array of covered services.  But, they will also all be expensive.  What if I don't want mental health coverage or acupuncture?  Why do I have to pay extra for this stuff to be covered by my policy?  I go to the doctor very, very infrequently - basically only if the condition is critical - so why is it illegal to purchase a health insurance plan that matches my health care use preferences?

Currently I pay for my own health care plan and have insurance that I consider true insurance.  It has a high deductible, and does not cover a bunch of non-critical stuff.  I have no dental coverage, and pay dental all out of pocket, as I do most routine medical expenses   I have medical insurance solely to cover catastrophic medical events that would likely be financially disastrous for me  (I do the same thing with my house and car, paying for routine maintenance with insurance reserved for catastrophes).   Fortunately, Arizona allows me to buy such a policy, though it does have minimum coverage rules that make the policy more expensive than it might be.  In other states, like Massachusetts, my health plan with a high deductible is illegal.  It would also be illegal under the current House and Senate versions of Obamacare.

Medical Insurance and Windshields

I do a lot of back road and highway driving, so windshield repair and replacement are things I deal with fairly frequently.  I've generally always just paid for these repairs out of pocket.   It is a field where if one shops around, there are a lot of good deals.  However, for a while I lived in a state that had a law that said all auto insurance must have windshield replacement coverage.

The effect on my behavior was dramatic.  When living there, I didn't even think about shopping around for a windshield repair.  I just had the dealer do it (surely the high cost supplier) when I had the car in for regular service.  I didn't care what the cost was, it was covered in my policy.  (Ironically, it turns out in retrospect that I should have shopped around -- because no one else in the sate cared about cost, all the windshield suppliers jacked up their prices and then competed by offering kickbacks in various forms to consumers, basically competing on how much of the insurance money they would share with the car owner.  Truly dysfunctional).

I have seen the exact same change in my behavior, but in reverse, in switching to a high deductible medical policy.  Until about 3 years ago, like most Americans, we never even thought about the cost of our medical care.  We weren't paying for it.  But now, as I pay most of our routine expenses, I am amazed at the difference.  When my son needed a CT scan, three phone calls gave us a huge variation in quoted prices.  It turns out, shopping works, even in medical care.

Postscript: I have always wondered why insurance companies didn't create some incentive for shopping.  If I were running such a company, I would be tempted to tell customers - "our reimbursement rate for CT scans in your area is X.  If you get it done for less than X, we will split the savings with you 50/50."  Though I suppose the danger is tht this could morph into a variation of the windshield kickback system.

...that this sort of article is absolutely inevitable only AFTER bad legislation is passed.

A federal minimum wage increase that takes effect Friday could prolong the recession, some economists say, by forcing small businesses to lay off the same workers that the pay hike passed in better times was meant to help.

The increase to $7.25 means 70 cents more an hour for the lowest-paid workers in the 30 states that don't have a higher minimum. It also means higher costs for employers who feel they've already trimmed all their operating fat.

"How will they absorb the increase?" said Rajeev Dhawan, director of Georgia State University's Economic Forecasting Center. "They will either hire less people or they will do less business."

More than in any period before, businesses are likely to lay off employees and reduce hours, further fueling the economic slump in states seeing double-digit unemployment rates, fiscal conservatives and some economists say.

In the run up to actually passing this legislation, the Arizona Republic did nothing but cheer-lead the effort, and would never have published such a story, or would have mentioned it only in graph 36 with some perfunctory balance-quote from the dreaded "industry representative."

We saw this exact same thing occur with ethanol legislation.

My son is at the age in high school that he needs to find a job, either during the summer or after school or both.  But this is not an easy chore.  The economy certainly has a lot to do with this, but Congress has been doing its share to keep teenagers unemployed as well:

Thanks to an ill-advised law enacted with bipartisan support in 2007, the cost of providing an entry-level job to individuals with few skills or minimal experience will be going up by more than 10 percent. Those who cannot find a job paying at least $7.25 an hour will not be permitted to work. Welcome to the latest chapter of America's minimum-wage folly.

Those who press for a higher minimum wage often claim that making entry-level jobs more expensive won't reduce the number of entry-level jobs. Were the government to compel a 41 percent increase (see graph above showing the 41% increase in the minimum wage from $5.15 in 2006 to $7.25 this year) in the price of gasoline or movie tickets or steel, every rational observer would expect a drop in the demand for gasoline, movie tickets, or steel. Yet when it comes to the minimum wage, politicians and journalists somehow persuade themselves that making workers more expensive won't reduce the demand for workers.

But that's exactly what it does. Artificial price floors - mandatory minimum prices set higher than what the market will bear - generate surpluses. Minimum-wage laws are no exception. The price floor imposed by the government on the supply of low-skilled labor results in a labor surplus, which is just another way of saying higher unemployment.

The laws of supply and demand are not optional. They weren't enacted by Congress and Congress can't override them. Minimum-wage laws don't make low- and unskilled Americans more productive, more experienced, or more desirable. They merely make them more expensive - and more likely, therefore, to be unemployed.

People often think of the minimum wage as a restriction on employers -- that they cannot pay less than a certain number for a job.  But it is also equally a restriction on job seekers -- my son cannot legally offer to take a job for less than $7.25, even though he would probably gladly do so.  For teenagers, just gaining the experience of working and building basic skills (like showing up on time, following procedures, interacting with customers and fellow employees) has enormous value, such that even a nominal payment of a few dollars an hour would more than compensate him for his labor.

But I think there is another factor that increasingly limits teenage jobs that is not often discussed - liability.  I never really thought about this until I was running a business and found that my company and I may be personally liable for bone-headed decisions made by far off employees I have never met.  In our super-ligious society, does a company really want 15-year-old boys interacting with the public, no matter how much or little they are paid, when even one teenage-boy-style flip comment or sexual joke might result in a lawsuit?

Previously, I have written a number of articles on the minimum wage focused on the other end of the age scale.  My company hires folks in the seventies and eighties, a practice that is increasingly difficult to maintain with the minimum wage increasing.

The entire Pacific coast is vying to become the next rust belt.  Only the nice climate and beautiful scenery will keep anyone there.

The Labor Department reported yesterday that Oregon's unemployment rate soared to 12.4% in May, the nation's second highest after Michigan's 14.1%. What to do? If you're the geniuses in the state legislature in Salem, you naturally raise taxes.

Last week the legislature approved a $2 billion tax hike on personal income and small businesses that haven't already left the state. The highest tax rate on income above $500,000 would climb to 11% -- up from an already high 9%. Oregon will soon boast the second highest income tax rate in the nation, moving ahead of California (10.55%), and only slightly behind New York City (12.6%). Corporations will pay a 7.9% tax on gross receipts, up from 6.6%.

To be fair, Oregon does not really have a sales tax, so it is hard to compare apples and oranges on taxes.  But missing from the article is another factor in their unemployment, and the reason our company ultimately had to leave the state:  Oregon has the second highest minimum wage in the country (just behind Washington State and just ahead of California), and it is getting higher every year as it is automatically indexed to something or other that seems to be rising faster than inflation.

The Arizona minimum wage is going up again:

The annual increase is the third since voters approved the minimum-wage initiative by a 2-1 ratio in 2006. This year's increase is 5 percent. At $7.25 an hour, the wage is up nearly 41 percent from December 2006 but still only about half of the state's median wage of $14.25, according to the Arizona Department of Commerce.

Oh my God!  You mean the minimum is still below the median?  (Sorry, that is a bit off-topic, but I just can never resist making fun of journalist's understanding of math and statistics).

In just over two years, the minimum wage is up over 41%.  As a company that employs a lot of minimum wage workers in Arizona, I thought I would report on the impact to date.  As a quick background, my company runs campgrounds (and other recreation facilities) all across the country.  We typically employ retired couples who live in their RV onsite and work both for the free camp site as well as a wage, usually minimum wage.  In a good year, our business makes between 6-8% pre-tax profit on sales, which I can tell you is a thin, thin cushion given all of my life's savings are locked up in this one investment.

I don't know where minimum wage supporters think the extra money comes from to pay higher wages.  If they think at all, I suppose they would say that the government is in effect collective bargaining for these workers and getting businesses to cough up some of their immense profits to pay a bit better wage.

Well, our labor costs are about 50% of revenues  (we are a service business).  This 50% is not just wages, but other costs calculated as a percent of wages, such as FICA, medicare, and unemployment taxes and workers comp premiums.  So, if I still want to earn a living for myself, and the state says half my costs must go up by 41%, then it means that prices are going up 20+%.  And that is what has happened.   Remember, at the same time, fuel prices, electricity prices, insurance prices, and everything else has gone up, so that camping prices have risen by 20% or more.  But there is a limit to how far we can push prices, particularly since our typical customer tends to be relatively low-income.  So we are pursuing two other longer term responses:

• We are increasingly turning to automation solutions, like automatic pay systems and gates, to replace people.  While we like to have someone actually there to answer questions and to help visitors, fee collection machines work 24 hours, are not subject to overtime rules, they never get hurt, they never sue us, and the government never passes laws to increase their price.
• We are changing our operating strategy from hiring retired couples who live on-site to hiring younger workers.  This is a change I really hate.  The business model of hiring retired folks who live on-site at a campground is an old and successful one.  Folks in their seventies (and I even have workers in their eighties and nineties) don't work very fast, and they have more workers comp claims, but they had the ability to live on-site and life experience that helped them with customer service.  But trade-offs that worked at $5.15 an hour don't work as well at $7.25 and higher.  So far only selectively, but we are hiring younger folks from the local community to come in and do some of the janitorial and maintenance work.  Even if I pay them $8 or $10 an hour, they make sense if they can be twice as productive.

US unemployment in August "jumped unexpectedly" to 6.1%, by the oddest of coincidences in the first full month just after new, 12% higher US minimum wages took effect. 

The unemployment rate is higher than it has been in the United States in the last 5 years, but substantially lower than the rate most Western European countries like France and Germany experience even during peak economic times. 

In response, the Obama campaign is urging further increases to the minimum wage and emulation of labor policy and legislation in France and Germany.

I always find it fascinating to observe how the same folks who criticize the US for not taking drastic action based on the "settled science" of global warming are often the first to ignore hundreds of years of study in the science of economics.  While the full breadth of economics is far from settled science, one thing that is far better understood than the effect of CO2 on global temperatures is the effect of higher prices on demand:  (via Market Power)

This chart confirms that for teenagers, those between the ages of 16
and 19 years old, all of the jobs that disappeared in 2007 were minimum
wage jobs. In essence, a total of 94,000 hourly jobs disappeared for
this age group overall. This figure is the net change of this age group
losing some 118,000 minimum wage earning jobs and gaining some 24,000
jobs paying above this level.

This represents what we believe to be the effect of the higher
minimum wage level increasing the barriers to entry for young people
into the U.S. workforce. Since the minimum wage jobs that once were
held by individuals in each age group have disappeared, total
employment levels have declined as those who held them have been forced
to pursue other activities.

Now consider this: The minimum wage was just reset on 24 July 2008
to $6.55 per hour, a 27.2% increase from where it was in early July
2007. Our best guess is that a lot of additional teenagers will be pursuing those other activities. 

Meanwhile, the lack of employment opportunities for the least
educated, least skilled and least experienced segment of the U.S.
workforce will likely have costs far beyond the benefits gained by
those who earn the higher minimum wage. The government might be able to
make the minimum wage earning teenage worker disappear, but they didn't
do anything to make the teenagers themselves disappear.

The increase in minimum wage earners in some of the middle brackets is likely due to a sweeping effect -- if the minimum wage is increase from $6 to $7, people making $6.50 before are swept into the "minimum wage" characterization.   

The Europeans have crafted a regulatory environment in their labor market that grants all kinds of protections and gauranteed benefits at the expense of new or unskilled workers trying to join the workforce.  We are doing the same thing:

This year, it's harder than ever for teens to find a summer job. Researchers at Northeastern University
described summer 2007 as "the worst in post-World War II history" for
teen summer employment, and those same researchers say that 2008 is
poised to be "even worse."

According to their data, only about
one-third of Americans 16 to 19 years old will have a job this summer,
and vulnerable low-income and minority teens are going to fare even
worse.

The percentage of teens classified as "unemployed""”those
who are actively seeking a job but can't get one"”is more than three
times higher than the national unemployment rate, according to the most
recent Department of Labor statistics.

One of the prime reasons
for this drastic employment drought is the mandated wage hikes that
policymakers have forced down the throats of local businesses. Economic
research has shown time and again that increasing the minimum wage
destroys jobs for low-skilled workers while doing little to address
poverty.

According to economist David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine,
for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, employment for high
school dropouts and young black adults and teenagers falls by 8.5
percent. In the past 11 months alone, the United States' minimum wage has increased by more than twice that amount.

There is very little that can make me go non-linear faster than when someone attributes economic growth to a politician, e.g. Reagan's economy or Clinton's economy.  So this post from Kevin Drum on the correlation between economic growth and the flavor of president in the Oval Office is just the kind of thing to make me lose it.  And not because I really care whether Team Coke or Team Pepsi looks better.

Larry Bartels says that Democratic presidents produce higher economic
growth than Republican presidents, and that the differences in average
growth rates for middle-class and poor families (but not affluent
families, apparently, who do well under both parties) are statistically
significant by conventional social-scientific standards.

OK, I have seen the analysis done different ways and accept the statistical conclusion.  You used to be able to get a really tight correlation between Washington Redskin football team performance and presidential election outcomes (via Snopes):

Sometimes one natural phenomenon supposedly
forecasts another, as in the belief that a groundhog's
seeing his shadow on February 2 portends another six weeks of
winter. In other instances the linkage is between affairs of mankind, as in the
superstition that the winner of football's Super
Bowl augurs that year's stock market performance (or vice-versa).

A recent item of this ilk maintains that the results of the last game
played at home by the NFL's Washington Redskins (a football team based in
the national capital, Washington, D.C.) before the U.S.
presidential elections has accurately foretold the winner of the last
fifteen of those political contests, going back to 1944. If the Redskins win
their last home game before the election, the party that occupies the White
House continues to hold it; if the Redskins lose that last home game, the
challenging party's candidate unseats the incumbent president. While we don't
presume there is anything more than a random correlation between these factors,
it is the case that the pattern held true even longer than claimed, stretching
back over seventeen presidential elections since 1936

What gets me is not the existence of a correlation, but the explanation:

In recent decades taxes and transfers have probably been more
important. Social spending. Business regulation or lack thereof. And
don't forget the minimum wage. Over the past 60 years, the real value
of the minimum wage has increased by 16 cents per year under Democratic
presidents and declined by 6 cents per year under Republican
presidents; that's a 3% difference in average income growth for minimum
wage workers, with ramifications for many more workers higher up the
wage scale. So, while I don't pretend to understand all the ways in
which presidents' policy choices shape the income distribution, I see
little reason to doubt that the effects are real and substantial.

I have three thoughts, of which the third is what really gets me:

• It is funny that no one considers that this correlation may work in reverse.  Everyone assumes government drives short-term economic performance.  What if, to some extent, short-term economic performance drives changes in government?  If one assumes that, even without the public spirited and Herculean efforts of our presidents, economies are naturally cyclical, then why try to explain cycles on politics when we know cycles are going to exist anyway.  Why wouldn't a perfectly valid alternate explanation be that one political party tends to be elected if the economy is in one part of the cycle and the other gets elected if the economy is in another place?
• The political brand names "Republican" and "Democrat" shift in meaning over time vis a vis economic policy recommendations, and individual presidents can diverge quite a ways from their party center line.  One can easily argue that Nixon was the most interventionist and economically ignorant president (think:  wage and price controls), despite the "Republican" brand name.  John Kennedy was more laissez faire than most Republicans are today.   Regulation, as measured by pages added to Federal Register, increased at a far faster pace under George Bush (I) than Bill Clinton.  Bill Clinton passed free market legislation, including NAFTA, that John McCain shys away from today, while George Bush passed an expansion of Medicare that Bill Clinton did not consider.  Oh, and when we discuss regulation and such, Congress sortof matter too.
• The author's argument boils down to "the more governors and useless loads we add to an engine, the more strongly the engine will run."  It is just absurd.  None of these guys have the first clue what it takes to run a business day to day, nor how much of a business owner's time and effort is aimed not at service customers better, and not at being more productive, and not at making employees happier or better trainined, but at responding to the latest mass of government regulation, paperwork, liscensing, taxes, and other total crap.  Here is just one example I wrote up about what sits on my desk.

To this last point, take just two things on my desk this morning.  The first is a pile of tax returns and some licensing paperwork.  Last year, our company's total tax bill was not that large.  But the problem is that the government takes the taxes in so many bites, and every bite costs time on our part learning the process and filling out paperwork.  For example, if I take all the taxes and licensing fees we pay to federal, local, and state governments, and multiply times the number of months or quarters each requires a report, I get a number of over 400.  Four hundred individual bites, each with its own paperwork and overhead.

The other problem sitting on my desk is a snack bar I inherited on a lease in California at Lake Piru.  The snack bar is a dump.  It is designed wrong, it is set up to cook the wrong kinds of foods, and uses space in the building very inefficiently.  I want to lay the whole thing out differently, as a win-win for everyone.  We could sell more with fewer workers.  The customers would get more selection, including much healthier choices.  The operation would be safer, because we would eliminate most of the heavy cooking  (e.g. deep fat fryers).  And it would be cleaner, with less wastewater and cleaner wastewater because there would be less grease and oil.

Unfortunately, it is very clear that Ventura County, California is not going to allow me to make these changes, at least at any cost I can afford.  First, apparently I need to build a new wastewater treatment plant for the snack bar!  But I am reducing the waste water load, I argue.  Does not matter.  New code requires a plant.  So because of this environmental code, I am pushed to continue the current operation which is environmentally worse than my proposed alternative.  We have the exact same problem on fire suppression.  But I am removing the ovens and most of the cooking equipment!  It's safer!  Doesn't matter, if I make any change at all, I have to install a new fire suppression system.  And on and on.  this is the true face of government regulation.  We face this kind of thing ten times a day.   

Anyway, I could go on and on about this stuff, but that is what the blog is about, so I will refer you to my past (and future) posts.

Apparently, the state of Arizona, fearing the coming old-folks demographic boom, is looking to create programs to keep older Americans working longer (and by extension off the government teat longer).

The thought of millions of boomers taking their early-retirement
benefits is causing concern about the stability of Social Security and
Medicare.

"We know not everybody is going to up and retire all at once," Starns
said, "and we will have younger workers coming in. But if you look at
all the demographics, there just won't be enough people to fill all the
jobs that could be vacant."

Add that possibility to existing shortages of workers in health-care
and other fields, she said, and "there could be some pretty significant
problems in society."

Arizona, which launched its Mature Workforce Initiative in 2005 to
avert such a crisis, was one of five states lauded last month for
efforts to engage people 50 and older in meaningful jobs and community
service.

The San Francisco-based Civic Ventures think tank also cited
California, Maryland, New York and Massachusetts, saying the five
states recognize older workers as "an experience dividend," rather than
a drain on resources.

Of course, since it is government, the state of Arizona is, with one hand, patting itself on the back for instituting vague and meaningless but well publicized programs nominally targeted at this issue, while with the other taking steps that have real and substantial effects in exactly the opposite direction.

First, Arizona has some of the toughest laws in the country to penalize businesses for hiring, even accidentally, young vigorous immigrants who don't have all their government licenses in order.   Young workers are pouring into this state every day, but Arizona is turning them away and locking them up. 

Second, Arizona has been legislating as fast as it can to make it nearly impossible to hire older workers.  I know, because the vast majority of my work force managing campgrounds is over 65.  These workers tend to work for a free camp site plus minimum wage.  They like the job despite the low pay because they get a place to park their RV and because the job is part time and very flexible in how they work (not to mention offers the opportunity to take whole chunks of the year off).  I like these workers because they are experienced and reliable and paying them minimum wage helps offset their slowing productivity and higher workers comp costs as they age. 

Here is the math:  Older workers might work 30-50% slower than a younger worker (I have workers right now in their nineties!)  They also have higher workers comp costs, maybe equating to as much as 10% of wages.  This means that an older worker at the old minimum wage of $5.15 an hour might be financially equivalent to a younger worker making $9.50 an hour, which is about what we might have to pay for such a worker. 

However, many states have implemented higher minimum wages with annual cost of living escalators.  States like Oregon and Washington now have minimum wages over $9.00.  At $9.00 an hour, an older worker is now financially equivalent to a younger worker making $16.50 an hour, well above what I can hire such a person for.  This means that as minimum wages rise, I have to consider substituting  younger workers for older but slower workers.

Last year, Arizona adopted just such a minimum wage system with annual escalators.  Though we have not reached the point yet, the state soon may make it impossible economically to hire older workers.  Already, we are looking at some automation projects to reduce headcount in certain places.  This is sad to me, but in a business where a 12% rise in wages wipes out my entire profit, I have to think about these steps.  I have to react to the fact that, no matter how many "policy advisers on aging" the state hires, in reality it is increasing the price to my company of older people's labor vis a vis younger workers.

Well, I should be skiing right this moment, but my son woke up barfing this morning, making it a perfect 15 of the last 15 family trips where one of my kids has gotten sick. 

But the ski lodge is nice, and the wireless works great, and Q&O has a very interesting post on immigration and welfare.

High unemployment among immigrants is of course not confined to just
Sweden or Scandinavia. Throughout Europe, governments have found that
well-intentioned social insurance policies can lead to lasting welfare
dependence, especially among immigrants. Belgium is the European
country with the highest difference in employment rates between the
foreign-born and natives. The images of burning cars in the suburbs of
Paris that were broadcast around the world illustrate the kind of
social and economic problems France is facing with its restive
immigrant population.

Given the high barriers to entry, many
immigrants in Europe no longer start accumulating essential language
and labor market skills. This is in stark contrast with the situation
across the Atlantic. For example, in 2000, Iranians in the U.S. had a
family income that was 42% above the U.S. average. The income of
Iranian immigrants in Sweden, however, was 39% below the country's
average.

Lots of interesting stuff there.  Which reminds me of something I wrote years ago:

In the 1930's, and continuing to this day, something changed
radically in the theory of government in this country that would cause
immigration to be severely limited and that would lead to much of the
current immigration debate.  With the New Deal, and later with the
Great Society and many other intervening pieces of legislation, we
began creating what I call non-right rights.  These newly described
"rights" were different from the ones I enumerated above.  Rather than
existing prior to government, and requiring at most the protection of
government, these new rights sprang forth from the government itself
and could only exist in the context of having a government.  These
non-right rights have multiplied throughout the years, and include
things like the "right" to a minimum wage, to health care, to a
pension, to education, to leisure time, to paid family leave, to
affordable housing, to public transportation, to cheap gasoline, etc.
etc. ad infinitum....

These non-right rights all share one thing in common:  They require
the coercive power of the government to work.  They require that the
government take the product of one person's labor and give it to
someone else.  They require that the government force individuals to
make decisions in certain ways that they might not have of their own
free will. 

And since these non-right rights spring form and depend on
government, suddenly citizenship matters in the provision of these
rights.  The government already bankrupts itself trying to provide all
these non-right rights to its citizens  -- just as a practical matter,
it can't afford to provide them to an unlimited number of new
entrants.  It was as if for 150 years we had been running a very
successful party, attracting more and more guests each year.  The party
had a cash bar, so everyone had to pay their own way, and some people
had to go home thirsty but most had a good time.  Then, suddenly, for
whatever reasons, the long-time party guests decided they didn't like
the cash bar and banned it, making all drinks free.  But they quickly
learned that they had to lock the front doors, because they couldn't
afford to give free drinks to everyone who showed up.  After a while,
with the door locked and all the same people at the party, the whole
thing suddenly got kind of dull.

Megan McArdle has a good post and excerpts from Adam Shepard, who set out with $25 to see how hard it was to escape from poverty.  I won't re-quote that post here, you should see her site, but I wanted to comment on one thing Shepard says about his early days trying to convince supervisors they should hire a homeless guy:

So, he gave me the secret. To paraphrase, he told me to go to these
managers and tell them who you are, that you are the greatest worker on
the planet and that it would be a mistake not to hire you. If they take
you on, great. If not, move on down the line. By day's end, you're
gonna have a job.

So I did. The next day, I went to see Curtis at Fast Company, a
moving company where I'd already applied. "Curt!" I said. "I'm Adam
Shepard, and I'm the greatest mover on the planet. It would be a
mistake for you not to hire me." He looked at me across the table and
smiled, knowing I was lying like hell to him. But he liked my attitude
"“ especially after I offered to work a day for free "“ so he hired me on
the spot.

This is very normal -- if you want someone to take a risk, you try to reduce the cost for him.  Not sure you want to try our product?  We'll give you a free sample.  In this case, he agreed to work for free to convince the manager he was a good worker.  This makes sense -- to emerge from homelessness and to get a job with no skills and no work history, one needs to be willing to give a bit of a discount on your labor, at least at first, to get someone to give you a chance.

But here is the interesting part -- the arrangement Curtis and Adam Shepard made is ILLEGAL.  The Fair Labor Standards Act, which includes Federal minimum wage law, does not allow Curtis to accept unpaid labor and does not even allow Mr. Shepard to offer it.  The fact that the deal makes so much sense and it so clearly is in the mutual best interest of both parties is absolutely irrelevant under the law.  Fast Company could be busted, should the DOL choose to focus its attention their way.

When people argue that the minimum wage is most harmful to the poor, because it prices the first rung of the labor ladder beyond what their minimal skills can justify, this is what they mean.

In a post that is a nice follow-on to this one about wages in trucking, Russel Roberts has a nice post about people making minimum wage:

According to Current Population Survey estimates for 2006, 76.5
million American workers were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.7
percent of all wage and salary workers.¹
Of those paid by the hour, 409,000 were reported as earning exactly
$5.15, the prevailing Federal minimum wage. Another 1.3 million were
reported as earning wages below the minimum.²
Together, these 1.7 million workers with wages at or below the minimum
made up 2.2 percent of all hourly-paid workers.

Correcting for higher state minimum wages, but also adjusting for illegal immigrants (who are a special case with super-low bargaining power) and factoring in salaried workers (who by law to be salaried have to be making much more than minimum wage) one still finds that less than 2% or less make minimum wage, about half of whom are under 25.  Roberts has a follow-on post with comments from Tim Worstall to say that even this number may be too high:

Unfortunately, on the page he's taken his information from he's missed one thing which makes his case even stronger.

Nearly three in four workers earning $5.15 or less in 2006 were
employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and service
jobs.

That's your waitron units and barkeeps folks. And what do we know
about people who do these sorts of jobs? Well, perhaps you have to have
actually done them (as I have, everything from the graveyard shift in a
Denny's to tending bar around the corner from this guy's
place): they all make tips. In fact, so much so that there is (or at
least used to be when that BLS report was prepared) a special minimum
wage for those in such jobs, one lower than the official Federal
minimum wage.

For example, way back when, the min. wage was $3.35 an hour. Waiters
got $2.01. You didn't really care because even serving pancakes at 5 am
you made another $25-$30 a shift ($50-$150 in a decent place). Barkeeps
got $3.35 plus tips.

The BLS numbers are reporting what employers paid employees, not
what people are actually earning. So we might in fact say that while
the number being paid the minimum wage or less is 2.2% of the workforce, the number actually earning that figure is more like 0.5%.

As an aside, speaking of bargaining power, it strikes me that prostitution is an excellent example of supply and demand in labor markets trumping government mandates.  Prostitutes have absolutely no power to run to the government for help over minimum wage or work condition violations.  They have only limited power to get government help even when they are the victim of violence from those who pay them.  But on an hourly basis, the most succesful make far more than most Americans.

If I had to choose one word that describes why I despair of politics, it is "calibration."  Recently, it has been observed that Ron Paul, for example, cannot possibly win because he sticks to a basic set of beliefs and never calibrates his message to the electorate and recent polls.  On the other end of the scale, Hillary Clinton is famous for endlessly calibrating everything she does in the hopes of maximizing the votes she receives.

Calibration is one of those dangerous words that tend to obfuscate the underlying reality.  Because, there are only two possible definitions of calibration as used in this political context:

• Lying, i.e. telling the electorate what they want to hear with the intention of acting differently once in office
• Total nihilism,, i.e. willingness to shift beliefs based on whatever is effective

Russell Roberts describes the situation pretty well:

But there is little difference between Republican and Democratic
Presidents in what they actually do. In what they say? Sure. Both
Reagan and Bush talk about individual responsibility and the market
blah blah blah. Bill Clinton talked more about feeling people's pain
and the downtrodden blah blah blah. Similarly, in the current
presidential campaign, there are stark rhetorical differences between
say Giuliani and Romney on the one hand and Obama and Clinton on the
other.

But will the actual results be different? Will Hillary double the
minimum wage? Change our health care system to be more socialized?
Eliminate corporate welfare? Will Giuliani make the health care system
less socialized? Eliminate the minimum wage? Get rid of farm subsidies?
Stop spending federal money on education?

Most of it is talk and it's not just because change is hard to
achieve. It's because they really don't want change. Did Bill Clinton
get rid of income inequality? Dent it? The share of income going to the
top 1% rose throughout most of the Clinton administration. Was it his
policies? The steady rise in the share of income going to the top 1%
started rising in 1976. Was it Carter's doing?

Was Bush or Reagan a hard core free trader in practice? Nope. They
used protectionism when it was politically expedient. Just like Bill
Clinton signed welfare reform and NAFTA and then chose not to enforce
the truck provision of NAFTA because the Teamsters didn't like it.

Government gets bigger under both Republicans and Democrats. What
they spend money on is a little different, yes. But to hate George Bush
for being a free market guy is to miss what is really going on. And to
hate Hillary because she doesn't understand the power of markets and to
love, say, Mitt Romney, is to misunderstand both of them. They use
rhetoric to dupe you. Don't be duped.

This all leads to the question of into which category should we place Paul Krugman - lier or nihilist?

Paul Krugman worries that,
although trade between high-wage countries is mutually beneficial,
"trade between countries at very different levels of economic
development tends to create large classes of losers as well as winners"
- and so is suspect because it likely harms ordinary American workers
("Trouble With Trade," December 28).

A famous trade economist
argues that this concern is misplaced.  In a 1996 essay, this economist
- responding to a protectionist who fretted that western trade with
low-wage countries would harm workers in the west - wrote that this
protectionist "offers us no more than the classic 'pauper labor'
fallacy, the fallacy that Ricardo dealt with when he first stated the
idea, and which is a staple of even first-year courses in economics. In
fact, one never teaches the Ricardian model without emphasizing
precisely the way that model refutes the claim that competition from
low-wage countries is necessarily a bad thing, that it shows how trade
can be mutually beneficial regardless of differences in wage rates."

Oh - the economist who wisely warned against the pauper-labor fallacy is none other than Paul Krugman.

As defined by Kevin Drum:

Well, since you asked, the reason I
think Ron Paul is a crank is because he wants to repeal the 16th
amendment, eliminate the personal income tax, abolish the minimum wage,
deep six the Federal Reserve, and return the United States to some kind
of weird quasi-gold standard.

For those who are new to my blog, I run recreation sites like campgrounds, mostly with retired people as labor.  Retired people love these jobs, because they are looking for a nice place to live for the summer in their RV.  Often they are willing to work just for their site and utilities, though as a private entity I must pay them minimum wage as well (when they work for the government, they don't get paid).  We sometimes get into odd situations -- for example, because of a disability payment or Social Security limits, it is not unusual I have employees that ask me if I could not pay them or pay them below minimum wage, and I have to tell them no (minimum wage is absolutely required, even if the worker begs to be paid less).

This relationship works out well.  The retired persons bring conscientious and low-cost management to the campgrounds.  Our employees, who usually are living comfortably off their retirement savings or pension, get a few extra bucks and a nice place to live for the summer.  These folks may work a bit slow, but I can afford that at $6 an hour.

But what happens when a state like Maryland, because it's got its blood up against Wal-Mart, passes a $11.30 "living" wage?  A number of problems result.  First, a camping night generally consumes, on average, about an hour of labor.  At $6 an hour with 22% burden for payroll taxes and workers comp, this totals to $7.32  per night of camping in labor.  At $11.30 an hour, this totals $13.79 per night of camping.  Most of our campsites are tent camping sites and more primitive natural campgrounds (see here) and a typical price for a night of camping is $16.  This is a very low price for camping when compared to large RV parks, and makes our sites particularly popular with lower income people.  The Marlyland minimum wage would add at least $6.50 to this price, or increase prices by 41% in one swoop.  And this is before considering second order cost increases in other purchased goods and utilities due to the minimum wage increase.

The other problem is one I would have thought so obvious that it is amazing to me that no one seems to talk about it -- not everyone earning minimum wage is trying to live on it.  Certainly people new to the work force are one example, as they are often willing to trade lower initial wages for training and experience and a work record and other valuable but non-quantifiable benefits.  In my case, while I am perfectly happy to tolerate lower productivity from older, retired workers at $6 an hour (the average age of my employees is over 70), when wages are forced arbitrarily to over $11, then I have to think about changing my business model, substituting younger workers for older folks.  As any economist would predict, lower productivity workers get pushed out of the market.

For more on this topic, I discussed four case studies in my business dealing with the minimum wage.

George Reisman at Mises:

When it comes to matters such as the theory of evolution and
stem-cell research, so-called liberals"”i.e., socialists who have stolen
the name that once meant an advocate of individual freedom"”ridicule
religious conservatives for their desire to replace science with the
dictates of an alleged divine power. Yet when it comes to matters of
economic theory and economic policy"”for example, minimum-wage
legislation"”these same liberals themselves invoke the dictates of an
alleged divine power. Their divine power, of course, is not the God of
traditional religion, but rather a historically much more recent deity:
namely, the great god State.

Traditional religionists believe that an omnipotent God came before
all natural law and was not bound or limited by any such law, but
rather created such natural laws as suited him, as he went along. Just
so, today's liberals believe, at least in the realm of economics, that
the State is not bound or limited by any pre-existing natural laws. In
the case in hand, the State, today's liberals believe, is free to
decree wage rates above the level that would exist without its
interference and no ill-effects, such as unemployment, will arise.

Where have I heard that before?  Oh yeah, I remember:

So here is this week's message for the Left:  Economics is a
science.  Willful ignorance or emotional rejection of the well-known
precepts of this science is at least as bad as a fundamentalist
Christian's willful ignorance of evolution science (for which the Left
so often criticizes their opposition).  In fact, economic
ignorance is much worse, since most people can come to perfectly valid
conclusions about most public policy issues with a flawed knowledge of
the origin of the species but no one can with a flawed understanding of
economics....

In fact, the more I think about it, the more economics and evolution are very similar.  Both are sciences that are trying to describe the operation of very complex, bottom-up, self-organizing systems.  And,
in both cases, there exist many people who refuse to believe such
complex and beautiful systems can really operate without top-down
control.

By the way, the author partially addresses the Card and Krueger study on New Jersey fast food that purportedly showed that employment goes up as minimum wage goes up.  Unfortunately, the author does not get into the now fairly well-known problem with this study.  For those who don't know, here it is:

Card and Krueger looked at the employment in fast food restaurants in New Jersey both before and after the minimum wage went up.  Here is the key process fact you need to know -- they did not look at every restaurant, just at some branches of national chains (e.g. McDonalds).  They did not include, say, Joe's sub shop.  The restaurants they studied shared a couple of traits in common:

• They were all far more professionally managed than the average small restaurant
• They all had higher labor productivity than the average restaurant
• They all had far more capital equipment (e.g. automation of labor) than the average restaurant

In other words, they studied the restaurants that were able to incur a wage increase with the least impact on their total costs (and eventually prices).  Follow-up studies have shown that there was probably a real reduction in total restaurant employment in New Jersey in the studied period, but the differences in productivity cited above caused the impact to disproportionately hit small ma and pa operations as opposed to large capital intensive nation chains.  In fact, during this period, the national chains experienced a gain in market share vis a vis smaller shops, as the higher minimum wage made it harder for local shops to compete with the national chains.  So, in fact, what Card and Krueger observed was not an economic miracle on the order of seeing the virgin Mary in your pancakes, but a predictable shift of market share from low capital to high capital competitors in response to higher wage rates.

This theme of regulation, including the minimum wage, advantaging larger competitors is an old one.  I discussed it a while back in the context of Wal-Mart's support for a higher minimum wage:

Apparently, though I can't dig up a link right this second, Wal-mart
is putting its support behind a higher minimum wage.  One way to look
at this is a fairly cynical ploy to get the left off its back.  After
all, if Wal-mart's starting salary is $6.50 an hour (for example) it
costs them nothing to ask for a minimum wage of $6.50.

A different, and perhaps more realistic way to look at this Wal-mart
initiative is as a bald move to get government to sit on their
competition.  After all, as its wage rates creep up, as is typical in
more established companies, they are vulnerable to competitors gaining
advantage over them by paying lower wages.  If Wal-mart gets the
government to set the minimum wage closer to the wage rates it pays, it
eliminates the possibility of this competitor strategy. 

I thought this was amazing, from an article by John Fund on the activist group ACORN.  Most of the article is about allegations of election fraud, but this caught my eye:

Founded by union organizer Wade
Rathke in 1970, Acorn boasts an annual budget of some $40 million and
operates everything from "social justice" radio stations to an
affordable-housing arm. Still run after 36 years by Mr. Rathke as
"chief organizer," it is best known for its campaigns against Wal-Mart,
and for leading initiatives in six states to raise the minimum wage....

Acorn is vulnerable to charges
it doesn't practice what it preaches. Its manual for minimum-wage
campaigns says it intends "to push for as high a wage as possible." But
it doesn't pay those wages. In 2004 Acorn won a $9.50 an hour minimum
wage in Santa Fe, N.M., for example, but pays its organizers $25,000 a
year for a required 54-hour week--$8.90 an hour. This year Acorn had
workers in Missouri sign contracts saying they would be "working up to
80 hours over seven days of work." Mr. Rathke says "We pay as much as
we can. If people can get more elsewhere, we wish them well."

In 1995 Acorn unsuccessfully sued
California to be exempt from the minimum wage, claiming that "the more
that Acorn must pay each individual outreach worker . . . the fewer
outreach workers it will be able to hire." Mr. Rathke acknowledges
higher wages can cost some jobs but that the raises for other workers
are worth it.

I am not sure this hypocrisy even requires further comment.  It is particularly hilarious that he argues that economic arguments against the minimum wage (e.g. that they reduce jobs) apply to a non-profit but not to for-profit companies.

This is also hilarious, for a group that is at the forefront of trying to unionize Wal-Mart:

One of them, Sashanti Bryant of
Detroit, Mich., was a community organizer for Acorn....Ms. Barton
alleges that when she and her co-workers asked about forming a union
they were slapped down: "We were told if you get a union, you won't
have a job." There is some history here: In 2003, the National Labor
Relations Board ordered Acorn to rehire and pay restitution to three
employees it had illegally fired for trying to organize a union.

Tonight, it appears that AZ voters will pass Prop 202 to raise recreation use fees in Arizona.  Oh, you say that's not what Prop 202 was for?  It was minimum wage?  That's right.  Prop 202 raises the minimum wage in AZ by 31%. 

I have written about the minimum wage many times.  For a variety of reasons, many seasonal recreation workers in AZ, and in fact in the US, are retired folks who work for minimum wage and a camp site to take care of a facility.  They love the job, and do great work, while filling seasonal jobs that younger folks trying to raise a family can't really take on.  When you take all wage related costs -- wages, payroll taxes, unemployment insurances, workers comp, liability insurance, etc. -- wages drive about 2/3 of recreation costs.  That means that a 31% increase in wages equates to a 20% increase in recreation use fees for camping, boating, day use, etc.

What, you say?  That's not what we meant!  We consumers aren't supposed to pay this extra, you business guys are!  Well, my profit margin is about 5% of revenues, which is a pathetically low number for a service business.  Basically, I do this for fun -- I could probably make a better return investing in government bonds.  So, to avoid bankruptcy, wage increases get passed right through to use fees.  And since the law requires that the minimum wage be increased every year, it means that use fees will have to go up every year (for comparison, we have been able to hold many use fees flat for 3-4 years at a time, despite fuel and other costs).

Sorry.  My employees were happy to work for $5.15 an hour.  They did not ask for a raise.  In fact, I have a waiting list of people who want jobs at $5.15.  It was the voters of Arizona who decided that my employees could no longer legally accept this amount for their labor.  And, unfortunately, it is the voters of Arizona who will have to pay for this raise my employees did not even ask for.