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Monday, June 8, 2015

On Fighting Inequality, President is-Thankfully-the anti Scott Sumner

      Sumner, as we saw earlier, diagnosed rising inequality and stagnant wages. This puts him ahead of many conservatives who deny that it's rising at all-or that if it is that it even matters-many conservatives think high inequality is fine as it's the road to efficiency.

     I call it the inequality denial the Judge Judy defense-you know where someone pees on your leg and tells you it's raining-while the claim that it's just the price of economic efficiency is the Sucks to be You defense of inequality.

     Sumner admits it exists and it's a problem but his diagnosis is 'libertarian'-basically it's bad old regulations that have gotten us here.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/sumner-on-how-capitalism-is-supposed-to.html

     Basically if it weren't for Dodd-Frank, the minimum wage, the ACA, etc, we'd be in much better shape.

     Meanwhile, Sumner is really covering libertarianism in a blaze of glory by defending Dennis Hastert on libertarian grounds. Yes, the leader of the Clinton impeachment in the 90s in the new poster boy for civil liberties-in the mind of a Scott Sumner.

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/in-sumners-special-pleading-for-dennis.html

  http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29547&cpage=1#comment-391130

  Thankfully, the President has other ideas on how to fight inequality. He continues to have as much fun as he wants since the GOP 'wave election' of 2014. He has a new plan that really should do something about stagnating wages.

   "The Obama administration is on the verge of possibly doubling the salary levels that would require employers to pay overtime in the most ambitious government intervention on wages in a decade. And it doesn’t need Congress’s permission."

    "As early as this week, the Labor Department could propose a rule that would raise the current overtime threshold — $23,660 – to as much as $52,000, extending time and a half overtime pay to millions of American workers. The rule has already come under fire from business and Republican opponents who say it will kill jobs and force employers to cut hours for salaried employees."


     As Paul Waldman notes, the GOP is going to set records for the number of times the words 'job killer' is uttered.

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/06/08/happy-hour-roundup-620/

   "The minimum wage they can’t do,” said Bill Samuel, director of legislative affairs for the AFL-CIO. “This is probably the most significant step they can take to raise wages for millions of workers.”

    "Congressional Republicans are gearing up for a major battle against raising the overtime threshold. The House Education and the Workforce subcommittee will devote much of a scheduled June 10 hearing on federal wage and hour standards to the overtime rule, even if it isn’t yet released. Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, said the rule—sight unseen—“seems engineered to make it as unappealing as possible to be an employer creating jobs in this country.”

    It occurs to me something I've said before but needs to be said again-probably often. Guys like Sumner can call themselves 'libertarian' friends of the working man all they want. At the end of the day though, libertarian is just a euphemism for 'conservative' and conservatives aren't about 'liberty' economic or otherwise but preserving traditional lines of authority-the religious over non-believers or those from other non-traditionally Christian faiths, men over women, whites over black, employers over their employees.

   We see this very clearly during the Obama years. The President makes proposals. All the GOP tells us is they don't like what he proposes but they never get around to giving us any in depth idea of what they want as an alternative. Truly just the Part of No

    Conservatism is all about reactionary politics-and here like everywhere else, they merely react to President Obama.

    P.S. When I pointed out to Sumner that some might see what happened to Hastert as poetic justice-consideirng his role in Lewinskygate, he moved the goal posts. 

    "Mike, NBC reported that Bill Clinton raped a women. But then you wouldn’t have heard of that accusation, would you?"
 
     This has nothing to do with the argument-the comparison to the lynch mob Hastert led in the 90s to the charges against him in 2015. I find it interesting that Sumner now seems to want to overturn laws against bank fraud, perjury, and age of consent just to absolve Hastert. 

     
   

     

    
   

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