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Friday, July 3, 2015

Kevin Edrman vs. Fortune on Obama's New Overtime Rules

     The first thing to understand is these aren't new rules. They merely bring the old rules up to date. Since the GOP Congress came in 1994 they haven''t bothered to adjust the overtime rules to inflation.

     Sumner's buddy Kevin Edrman thinks this is going to hurt the poor.

    "Warren Meyer posted a reminder of the Obama administration's proposed overtime rules, that would expand workers who are covered to anyone with income up to about $50,000. According to Meyer, they are not making him or his employees very happy, despite the hopes of Jared Bernstein and his Washington Post headline writer:"

     "President Obama’s new overtime proposal could make a lot of people happierI think this is a great example of the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" problem. Progressives place a bunch of constraints of the lives of the working poor, then they expect to be hoisted triumphantly into office on the shoulders of people they have harmed. When a worker making $800 on 50 hours of work has to go home and tell her family she is now making $600 on 40 hours of work because new federal rules on overtime pay make the 50 hour arrangement uneconomical, she doesn't need to understand the theoretical subtleties of economics to understand what's happened. Bernstein and the president's other supporters believe workers will be pleased about this constraint. They seem to think that someone making $15/hour for 50 hours of work will now have the same schedule, but with an extra $75 for the week. Or, alternatively, that they will be reduced to 40 hours and $600, and be happy about it, because they were only coerced into those extra hours by their employers. And, this has the added bonus of creating more jobs, to replace the lost hours. (I wonder if anyone has ever written on the troubling trend of workers who have to hold multiple jobs to get by.)"

     http://fortune.com/2015/07/02/june-jobs-report-wages/

     I have to laugh here. Has anyone ever written on people having to hold multiple jobs to get by? Short answer is yes-to say the least.

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/when-i-grow-up-i-want-to-be-like-nick.html

     I mean, Mr. Edrman must live a sheltered life if this is the first he's heard of this. For most Americans it's not a question of having written about heeding 2 jobs just to survive it's living this reality. I mean who today doesn't need 2 jobs just to survive? Kevin Erdman for one.

    These are the kinds of 'anecdotes' that Sumner and his buddies like TallDave dismiss when I've made them. However, conservatives love anecdotes. Take a look at this piece by Tyler Cowen about the coming Greek vote:

  "The Greek story is being framed as a battle between the Greeks and the Germans and thus between spending and austerity. But this frame can’t make sense of the fact that, win or lose, large numbers of Greeks will vote for austerity on Sunday.

   "To understand what’s really going on, listen to this remarkable interview between NPR’s Robin Young and Nikolalos Voglis, a restaurant owner in Athens. The interview begins with a discussion of the crisis. No one has cash or credit and Voglis’s restaurant is basically shuttered. Young then asks Voglis how he will vote on Sunday and he replies, “Definitely, Yes.” Young is surprised, she tries to clarify, you will vote, “even for more austerity?” “That’s right,” he replies.

 - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/07/the-battle-for-greece.html#sthash.E8zOgHiw.dpuf

   Just call it Variations on a Conservative Meme

   http://www.sydneysymphony.com/production-pages/2013/concert-season/variations-on-an-english-theme.aspx

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TCXINaWtkI

   What he doesn't seem to get is that never mind talking about the poor as if there this subspecies somewhere-who isn't poor today?

   "The June jobs report released on Friday shows an increase of 223,000 payroll jobs and a drop in the national unemployment rate to 5.3%. Unfortunately, wages were completely flat, remaining at $24.95 an hour."

    "So the job market continues to steadily improve, but is doing so too slowly to raise the earnings of workers, which have remained stagnant throughout the economic recovery and are lower than they were in 2000."

    http://fortune.com/2015/07/02/june-jobs-report-wages/

    Don't get me wrong during my personal lowest points in the 6 long years I lived in my parents basement I would have kissed the ground to make $25 an hour. But that this is the median wage is shocking. It''s a livable wage presuming you are single but not much more than that.

    In a better world it's what we would want young people just starting out in the workplace to make. We had this better world to-it's not just a beautiful dream-until Reagan in 1980.

  "How much can policymakers do to raise worker earnings when the labor market remains too soft to do so directly?

   "In a move that is quite overdue, President Obama earlier this week announced that he will increase the number of workers eligible to receive the 50% premium on overtime work by about 5 million. He plans to raise the ceiling on the annual earnings of workers who can receive overtime pay to over $50,000. The current ceiling — at about $23,000 — hasn’t been adjusted for inflation in decades."

   This is what Edrman seems to miss-all we are doing is just enforcing an overtime law already on the books that hasn't been updated for inflation in decades. Prior to that we had a reasonable cutoff point and lo and behold there were plenty of jobs. The Republican policy of stealth cuts by not updating to inflation roughly correlates with this deterioration in workers' pay.

  Talk about an idea whose time has come?



 

   

    

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