Don's Tuesday Column

                THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   4/12/2016

          Minimum wage and climate taxes

For anyone wanting to know more about the Republican presidential campaign in Tehama County, Heidi Cuny, the Tehama County Chairman for the Ted Cruz campaign, will be at tonight’s Tea Party Patriots meeting, at 6 PM in the Westside Grange, 20794 Walnut Street.

The Corning Patriots will have Sam Parades from Gun Owners of California at their Thursday meeting at the Veterans Memorial Hall, 1620 Solano Street, also at 6 PM.

The Democratic economic illiterates in Sacramento (did any Republicans vote for this?) just assured thousands of low wage workers that they will be unemployed because their labor is not worth $15 dollars an hour. Most labor costs will also spike because union contracts peg their workers’ wage hikes to the minimum wage.

Many of the apparently all-knowing legislators may have actually worked at an entry-level job, as I did. We were all worth less than we were paid because we either brought nothing but the experience of doing chores at home, or we luckily had some training alongside a parent, or we attended some vocational classes. Nonetheless, any employer or manager had to invest the monetary equivalent of on-the-job tutoring, classroom instruction followed by training, or assign a “shadow worker” to achieve proficiency.

All of that has costs, which will hopefully produce a worker that contributes to a business’s bottom line profitability. Businesses are not social service delivery operations, although government has over 70 years turned them into health care/insurance providers, greatly diminishing the workers’ ownership of their own health choices and economic decisions.

Many restaurants are looking at replacing order-takers with self-service menu pads. “The real minimum wage is zero” link at Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit (pjmedia.com/instapundit/), shows a picture of a Japanese food delivery robot carrying a meal past onlookers. The bottom line is that if a business ekes out 5 to 8 percent profit after expenses, and 20 percent of the cost of their product or service is labor, a few extra dollars added to the wage scale wipes out that thin margin; prices must necessarily go up. Either that, or the company just goes out of business and all of the employees lose their jobs. Such laws cynically force businesses to transfer money from customers to workers, which drive customers, and their reduced cash, away.

In San Francisco, some of the most pro-minimum-wage-hike crowd, liberal bookstore owners and workers, faced that bitter reality as they shut their doors for good out of economic necessity. In Seattle and other places that foolishly raised the minimum wage, workers, who intelligently run the numbers of their personal budgets, have begged to be given fewer hours of work at the higher wage. They don’t want their food, rent, health or income benefits cut.

Letter writer Joe Neff brought up several lucid, irrefutable points against the wage hike. I would add that it increases poverty by making it more expensive, to both businesses and young “wannabe” workers, to provide an entry-level job. Hence, learning the most basic job skills—promptness, thoroughness, and responsibility in completing a task without direct supervision—is out of reach for most 16-year olds. Oregon passed a 3-tiered minimum wage hike, so rural areas wouldn’t bear the urban wage burden; businesses still see huge problems ahead.

Minimum wage laws, given the ideological and irrational devotion by liberals, also have the perverse effect of contributing to increasing unemployment during economic downturns like the Great Depression. During deflationary cycles, economic pressures reduce prices; employers must lower wages and salaries or fire people. In the 1930s, both presidents Hoover and Roosevelt favored artificially keeping wages and prices at pre-depression levels, in defiance of common sense and economic reality. The results took many years to correct, during which misery spread.

Another cynical aspect to the progressive minimum wage experiment: Liberals know that the laws will force young workers out of jobs; their solution is to use that as justification for ever-greater government benefit programs for the unemployed. That justifies more taxes on—workers.

Speaking of artificial (meaning government created) financial burdens, “Report: California carbon tax hikes gas prices 11 cents” (April 8 Daily News, AP), showed another perverse result of our state’s “Don Quixote”-like assault on the earth’s supposed fossil fuel-driven warming crisis. Last week, I found the Oregon gas prices to be 40 to 50 cents lower than California’s, and you don’t have to pump it. Obviously, the carbon tax doesn’t account for all of the difference; however, nothing but taxes account for nearly $2.50 a gallon here compared to sub-$2 a gallon gas in Bend, Oregon.

Many columns and essays have been and could be written deconstructing and refuting the “global warming” theory but let’s just consider that CO2, carbon dioxide, is called “pollution” at least 4 times in the shortened AP story. Manipulation of language precedes governmental fiat based on said verbiage; we exhale CO2 and plants require it to grow. But industries are tagged as “polluters” for the same exhalations without which life on earth would cease.

The entire “pot-o-gold”-like search for environmental/climate change purity has real consequences: The annual $2 billion gas climate taxes could build dams for water that would eliminate the need for residential brown yards and un-flushed toilets. “Moonbeam” Brown wants his high-speed train that will require vast amounts of carbon to build, cost more to travel and be slower than current jets. Businesses and residents will fork over “cap-and-tax” money through the nose for virtually zero effect on the earth’s climate, which displays no evidence of crisis.