Minimum Wage for a Minimal Citizenry

To those harping about the minimum wage, your rhetoric fails to take in the full picture. The latest CBO report shows that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour could kill up to 1 Million jobs by the time it is fully implemented.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that around 3.6 Million people are paid minimum wage. A large portion of those are young people, with much less education and experience than their higher paid counterparts.

So, even if the CBO report is totally wrong and a minimum wage hike results in ZERO job cuts, this is still only benefitting about 1% of the total workforce.

The bigger issue here is twofold. Firstly anytime the minimum wage has increased, consumer prices rise proportionally. Secondly, chances are all of the hourly workers making around $10 an hour won't see a proportional rise in their wages. So all that is really accomplished is a large swath of jobs that used to be considered "well paying" or at least decent now become bottom feeding minimum wage jobs. If this happens the left will surely grandstand and go on and on about how they have lifted all of these people out of poverty, while neglecting to mention that the poverty line should slide upward with a rise in consumer prices, so in reality they have created more poverty not less.

But the politicians and the media know that the average citizen knows little to nothing about real economics, so the poor will demand a larger portion of the table scraps which they have become accustomed to surviving on, unaware that these actions will do nothing but increase their numbers while nobody really gets ahead at all.

I understand that young people need to get by, and because of this horrible job market "AKA wonderful economic recovery according to our dear leader" that more and more older workers have had to take minimum wage jobs just to try and make ends meet. However, for whatever reason the left never wants to admit that these jobs were never meant to be careers, they were meant to be an "entry level" opportunity for young people to get experience and work their way up. How the left rationalizes prosperity as wallowing in a combination of low wages and government assistance is beyond me.

If we are really going to attempt government investment as a way to spur job growth, (a shaky idea to start with) shouldn't we be investing in ways to pull these people up to the next rungs of the job market, instead of trying to force burger flipping to be higher up the food chain than it should be? Couldn't just the money spent on government studies about wages be used to fund better job training programs and trade schools?

You can't force prosperity and success on people. The people have to want it and go get it. Otherwise it's not really prosperity or success it is only a handout.

So the real question becomes: Why all the fuss over such a miniscule percentage of the total workforce? The easy answer being perceptions and votes. This being an election year, it is pretty obvious that this is the Democratic Party's attempt to take back the House. The plan being to get the Republicans to go on record as voting against the minimum wage increase, and then lambasting them with attack ads all summer long proclaiming that the Republicans hate the poor and only cater to the top 1%.

The reality of course is not nearly so cut and dry. Sure, the so called "progressives" love the poor, but only to the extent that they are politically expedient. They love the poor to stay poor and to grow in number. The progressive movement makes its political hay out of taking middle class tax dollars and turning it into entitlement programs for the poor. Their policies expand the lower class and in turn they continue to vote for the progressives and their promises of "free stuff". They play on the people's insecurities and talk about "class warfare" trying to make it poor vs rich. When in reality it is really the ruling class vs everyone who doesn't make them richer and more powerful. It really is what can only be described as Neo-Feudalism. Their idea of progress is to take us back into serfdom. They want you as distracted and uneducated as possible so that you will just take their word as gospel truth.

So we see that for all of the supposed good intentions, when it comes to politics there are always hidden motives behind everything. The sooner the powers that be are held to account, and their lies and motives exposed, the sooner we can start moving toward real economic growth and prosperity.

The Economics of "Change"

Ok so we've obviously seen that Obamacare has raised health care costs... Obama also said that under his energy plan electricity rates would skyrocket... Food prices are nearing record highs... And he wants you to believe that minimum wage is the problem...

Well over here in reality, it is not hard to see the cause and effect between the Fed dumping gigantic amounts of cash into circulation, and that cash therefore being worth less overall...

If income inequality really is the biggest problem, why is Obama ensuring that only the top 0.01% benefit most from all of the Quantitative Easing?

The real 800 pound gorilla in the room is fascism. Don't be misled, this is not the same outwardly overt, "Kill all the Jews" style fascism that our grandparents fought in Europe. This is a slow, creeping, "under your nose" kind of fascism. However, it still holds true to Mussolini's definition: "The merger of State and Corporate powers"

Greenspan told you as much, he stated that "There is no other agency of government that can overrule actions taken by the Federal Reserve". Combine that with the fact that the Federal Reserve is nothing more than a revolving door for the heads of the 6 Mega Banks, who ensure that their board members end up on the Fed's board with the express mission of protecting the interests of the Mega Banks. Is the picture a little clearer? 
As much as the left loves painting the free market capitalist system as only leading to the Bernie Madoffs of the world, in reality it is the moves we've made away from capitalist principles which have done the worst damage.

Although the Federal Reserve has been causing havoc in the economy for the past 100 years, up through even Reagan we still had some protections in place keeping us on the right side of capitalism. There is much more to be learned about the Fed itself, and I would point you toward the book: "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin

As the end of the 20th century approached, the rhetoric of the day moved toward terms like "modernization". It was all too easy of a scapegoat. "To remain competitive in the coming century, we must adjust our laws to align with global standards" which really meant "Give the banks unprecedented power and access create and manipulate markets, and in turn the banks will ensure that the politicians will be set for life"

Enter what Max Keiser so eloquently calls "The Casino Gulag". Part of this "modernization" was to repeal a law known as Glass-Stegall. Basically this law kept commercial banking (i.e. loans, savings, checking, etc.) separate from investment banking (i.e. Stocks, Bonds, Commodities, etc)

This change in law allowed for all of the shady dealings that caused the crash of '08 to take place. This stuff makes "The Wolf of Wall Street" look like a boy scout by comparison. Market manipulation, price fixing, interest rate rigging, "special investment vehicles"... All things these bankers knew that the general public couldn't even begin to fathom. They also knew that if it all came crashing down, that they would have already made their fortunes and would be set up in offshore tax havens.

Even when it did finally crash, all of the big time players just hid behind scary terminology like "too big to fail". The regulators and the DOJ were scared to death to try and prosecute any of this. Partially because everyone was screaming that if you arrest the bankers, you take down the entire global economy, and partially because the changes in law had moved all of this malfeasance into a legally gray area that would have been tough to prosecute. Mainly because it would be impossible to get a jury to understand what the banks were doing, let alone explain exactly how it was illegal.

So along came Obama. His "Hope and Change" platform swept him into office like few before him. But while the average voter heard "Hope and Change", some of us saw that he was ultimately just another puppet. However, a much more dangerous puppet than anyone before because he was able to be a front man for the banks and the status quo, while publicly grandstanding as a "man of the people", and the people bought it. Hook. Line. Sinker.

So now we come full circle back to the question of the Fed and QE. Obama started his attempt at economic recovery with "stimulus packages". Later it became apparent that the jig was up, and no other countries were going to buy our bonds and perpetuate this nonsense.  So the Fed decided to just flip on the printing press, and leave it on. This has continued with next to zero press coverage to the point where the Fed now owns more of our country's debt than anyone else.

Presumably, the Fed intends to sell the government bonds they bought up at a premium, and actually make money in the process. Unfortunately the dirty little secret is that nobody wants to buy them, and probably never will.

This has led to the conundrum we find ourselves in today. The Fed keeps claiming they want to "Taper" or slowly stop buying the $85 Billion in bonds every month, but every time they even hint about it, the markets tank by a couple percentage points.

The market has become addicted to this Quatntitative "heroin". Every month, more money is printed, and our dollar becomes worth less. This doesn't effect the rich, as they have millions to spare. But when a dollar won't buy as much as it did last month, it always hurts those who only have a dollar to spend.

The public at large loves to jump at the idea of "free stuff" (healthcare, food stamps, unemployment, higher minimum wage, etc), but they fail to realize that each time one of those programs expands the printing press is fired up, the value of the dollar sinks, purchasing power is lost, and the cycle is perpetuated.

So we see how the status quo is stacked to keep itself, and there will never be any kind of real substantive progress unless we make real moves to reign in the "Casino Gulag" and take steps back towards a true free market system.

Quick word on the Coke commercial

In case you missed it, during the Super Bowl last night there was a commercial for Coca Cola that has a lot of people talking.

The commercial involved the singing of America the Beautiful in several different languages. So obviously we already have battle lines drawn between the "right wing" "Keep America American" crowd, and the left wing "let's call everyone a racist" crowd.

As usual I come in with my 2 cents somewhere in between.   First off, both sides are being totally insufferable, and doing nothing but hurting their own causes. The right wing crowd should know better by now. America is a nation of immigrants, and you just add fuel to the race baiting fire by attacking the ad.  This was a trap waiting to happen, the left knew immediately that there would be controversy, and the right has once again fallen for it.

Illegal immigration is an entirely different issue and there are no shortages of arguments to be had on either side, but this commercial was really quite benign. It had more to do with celebrating America as the 'melting pot' of cultures that it has always been, rather than a pro illegal immigration message that some have tried to paint it as.

Anyway, that's my quick thoughts on it. It just proves to be another example of how polarized everything in this country has become. It seems like if you don't like Obama you are being pushed far right, and if you like Obama, you are off the far left deep end.  The middle ground has been eroded away into a deep partisan chasm.

If we could just get back to those 5 words that have always made America great... Liberty and Justice for All