On Thursday, the president will direct the Labor Department to revamp its regulations to require overtime pay for several million additional fast-food managers, loan officers, computer technicians and others whom many businesses currently classify as “executive or professional” employees to avoid paying them overtime, according to White House officials briefed on the announcement.So the geniuses who came up with Obamacare -- to force evil corporations to provide their workers with health insurance -- ended up creating the following effects:
1) Part time workers, who used to carry fewer than 40 hours a week, now carry fewer than 29 hours a week to stay under the mandates.
2) Full time jobs largely ceased being created, because they come with the mandate.
3) Part time jobs were increasingly likely to be classified as 'temporary' or 'seasonal,' which means they can be paid less than minimum wage.
4) Businesses close to the mandatory lines either shrank to get under the line, or stopped expanding to avoid getting over it.
5) Regulatory uncertainty prevented job creation and new business formation.
Now you're going to 'force evil corporations to pay overtime.' What that means is:
A) Reduced hours, and,
B) Pay cuts.
Stop it. I agree that we should be giving more attention to the misery afflicting the lower-middle and working classes in America, because this recession has been brutal on them. The Right needs to develop its own discussion about how to address those problems, though, because the Left's solutions invariably make things worse.
38 comments:
"We're from the government, and we're here to help."
Reagan was right. The most frightening words in the US right now.
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Grim, while I agree with you completely on this topic, I'm unable to see why you distinguish it from minimum-wage initiatives, which I see in the same light entirely.
Yes, I understand your argument, and I know that I've had difficulty making mine intelligible to you. It's not that I support the minimum wage as a good or end in itself. It's that, in an atmosphere of various welfare programs, it serves the purpose of preventing employers from passing their labor costs on to the taxpayer.
That is another way of saying that it prevents employers from capturing the welfare that voters and legislators intended for the working poor. It would be very easy for employers to do this, simply by drifting pay down until they found the new supply/demand labor price. But then we as taxpayers would be paying our money not to the benefit of the poor workers, but to the benefit of their employers.
So it's not that I think minimum wage laws are necessary or good in themselves. They're good contingently on certain features of our flawed system. And not perfectly good even then!
So why wouldn't laws like the requirement of paying overtime to mid-level managers also serve to prevent employers from passing on their obligations to taxpayers?
My assumption is that managers will be paid enough to avoid being the subject of our welfare system. It looks like Pizza Hut (to pick a random company) pays $9.15 an hour to shift managers, Assistant Managers $28,420, and $38,138 a year to General Managers.
Now if the shift manager is working enough to be eligible for overtime, they aren't one of those employees being pushed to 29 hours a week. Assuming he or she is working 50 hours a week, that comes out to $23,790.
So the problem is, are these levels at which the government is offering welfare? I think you can omit from the calculations outliers that won't affect the market much, such as families with 6 kids: Pizza Hut can't assume it will be employing people with 6 dependents' worth of food stamps.
Now $23,000 is the poverty line for a family of four, so if this shift manager is the sole source of income for that family, they're just over it. It looks like they might still be eligible for food stamps if they do have 3 dependents, but not if they only have 1 (and maybe if they have 2 depending on other things).
So it's a limit case, depending on how many people they're trying to feed. But considered as an individual, which is how the market thinks of people -- your market value has nothing to do with how many people depend on you -- they're easily above the poverty line and won't receive welfare. Another way of saying that is that any welfare goes to their dependents.
But the probable harm seems the same in both cases--and the lower-paid worker is even less in a position to withstand the harm.
You must be thinking of the harm as being to the worker. The harm I'm concerned about here is to the taxpayer.
There's no harm to the taxpayer if the manager is not receiving welfare. The harm that I'm thinking of is the danger that the welfare benefit, intended by the legislature and the taxpayers for the poor citizen, will instead be captured by the company. That's a harm the company is doing, not to the worker, but to us.
If there's no welfare payment, there's no such harm.
...in an atmosphere of various welfare programs, [minimum wage] serves the purpose of preventing....
Given that assumption, why is the correct answer to add another layer to a byzantine system of government "support" that by definition already is failing, else a minimum wage wouldn't be necessary? Why isn't the correct answer to greatly reduce the welfare programs, which serve, on the one hand, only the welfare of the politicians who get to pass out the goodies and, on the other hand, to destroy the welfare of the recipients by reducing them to dependency?
There's no harm to the taxpayer if the manager is not receiving welfare.
The harm is to the taxpayer regardless of who actually gets the proceeds. It's the taxpayer who's paying for a mendacious, and failed, system.
Eric Hines
We seem to agree that laws that are ostensibly meant to help workers can end up hurting the workers instead. I take your point that this is a problem for taxpayers only if the workers who are hurt are ones that the taxpayers are required to help. But why would we care only about the harm to taxpayers, if workers are being hurt, too? Or is the idea that the minimum-wage workers won't be hurt by losing their jobs, because taxpayers will take up the slack? Whereas middle-managers won't get help from taxpayers, so the harm to them is more compelling?
It may not be that workers are in fact being hurt. The lower wage worker may be in the situation of having a tough life regardless of what we do, or don't do, to help. It could be that her options are a low wage, or an even lower wage plus food stamps, or no wage plus even more food stamps.
It could be the middle manager is looking at a pay cut so that 'overtime' won't hurt the company; or a pay cut by being cut from 50 hours to 40 to avoid having to pay time and a half. Either way, government meddling may not be improving the situation at all. It may also not be hurting the workers.
Indeed, I would not be surprised if government meddling were completely ineffective.
The one thing I would like to avoid is a case in which we are paying 'to help the poorest workers,' only to have the taxpayer money being sent to them captured as revenue by employers who negotiate wages further down (since their employees now have another source of food money).
To Mr. Hines' question, it may not be the best solution. It's just that, until we figure out a way to get people off welfare and on to their own feet, we also have to protect our interests as taxpayers. Since for now the polity has decided that poverty at a certain level should be addressed with food stamps, we should make sure that the money allocated to food stamps doesn't end up artificially depressing wages among the poorest workers.
I would like to see better solutions in the long run, though, which are more in line with good principles. That's one reason I'm trying to interest people in the question of how we can identify ways to help the working class in accord with conservative principles. If we can make it a priority, we can probably move some people off food stamps. That improves things for conservativism in the long run, and helps the workers, too.
Since for now the polity has decided that poverty at a certain level should be addressed with food stamps, we should make sure that the money allocated to food stamps doesn't end up....
The problem is that it's government doing this handout. Any government handout, any modification to government handout programs, will be done only to help the people sitting in those government chairs. The little bit of taxpayer money that trickles out those politicians' fingers is only an accident.
Aside from that, even were the money to pass through those politicians' fingers to the targeted recipients with something approaching efficiency, we aren't helping those recipients, we're only tweaking the mechanics of the outcome: those recipients' dependency. The graph here illustrates the trap that is government welfare.
The solution is straightforward, but it's not easy because it requires reform across a range of areas, and it needs time (which demands popular patience) because budgets will need to adjust. The solution involves lowering tax rates and closing loopholes so as to get the tax system out of the social engineering business. There are only three Constitutional purposes for Federal government spending. Thus, there are only three legitimate purposes for taxing. Welfare (though I think Madison was too dogmatic on the matter) and social engineering are on neither list.
With the lowering and simplifying of our tax system must come spending cuts to within the revenues collected. Included in that is Social Security, Medicare, and Federal funds transfers to the States, of which Medicaid is the biggest, but it includes such things as food stamps, LIHEAP, and the like, to the tune of more than $400 billion in transfers last year. Actually, LIHEAP is chump change, but the synergy between it and food stamps is illustrative of how these transfers feed off of and magnify each other. Social Security and Medicare are "off-budget" items, but they're Federal spending nonetheless. These two need to be privatized, and the transfers eliminated, quickly, but not suddenly, so as to give the States time to adjust their budgets and the individuals time to adjust their budgets and saving/investment decisions.
With more money in the hands of the players in the private economy, both from the smaller tax bite and from businesses not being crowded out of the market--and so hiring more--there'll be less need for Federal welfare, and those same citizens will have more resources with which to honor their own, individual, obligations to their less well off fellows, rather than foisting them off onto government--which help (self-identified) conservatives already provide to a greater degree than (self-identified) liberals--who by insisting that only government can do these things are simply projecting their own selfishness onto all of us.
With this in play, family, friends, church, charity, and local community will become far more effective as the social safety nets they're intended to be and are trying to be. After this, there'll still be about two dozen folks who need help. This is where government can legitimately help, beginning with local government and then working up through county, State, and finally Federal welfare for the five or six folks left for the Feds to help. With government as the last resort, not the default.
Like I said, this will be hard. But hard means possible.
Eric Hines
The harm that I'm thinking of is the danger that the welfare benefit, intended by the legislature and the taxpayers for the poor citizen, will instead be captured by the company. That's a harm the company is doing, not to the worker, but to us.
It's easier to make your argument if you somewhat artificially separate "benefits" from "earnings" for the sake of your example, so:
"...health coverage will be paid for by the taxpayers as a whole if the employer does not provide them...."
But there's another complication. In most cases, the means test creates a HUGE marginal tax-increase for the worker. That certainly is the case for ObozoCare, where the 'tax' of non-subsidization goes to (say) $10K/year when the worker crosses from (say) $59,650 to $59,670/year cash compensation.
Therefore, in many cases, the WORKER does not want to cross the magic line.
So long as Gummints at all levels seek to demolish intermediary institutions such as family and church, there will be more problems.
Only 90 years ago, "welfare" did not exist as a Gummint function; it was strictly a family- or church-based affair. And of course, they did not put up with professional slaggards for very long at all.
All of Keynesian theory was based on the possibility that family and church could not sustain 'welfare' during the down-cycles of economies. He proposed that Gummints take up the slack then, and only then, paying off the bonds and STOPPING 'welfare' in good times.
The (D) Party saw that Gummint spending also insured them of continuing power (see FDR) and the Republicans did not have the cojones to effect the second part of Keynesian economocs, and there you have it.
I wish I could believe it was possible that somehow the minimum wage workers were not being hurt by hikes in the minimum wage. Unfortunately the impact on unemployment rates is hard to contest.
Well, two things could happen that could offset the higher prices to companies. Either taxpayers end up absorbing the harm via programs like foodstamps; or consumers do, if companies succeed in passing on higher costs with higher prices. The one would be compatible with unemployment, and the other not.
Now, if taxpayers end up paying for people who are unemployed, they end up being the ones who are hurt by the wage increase (rather than the workers). But, at least via their representatives, they agreed to be hurt. It's a voluntary hurt.
I'd prefer a better system, but accept this one contingently on figuring out how to get to a better system.
You don't really think that the full harm of unemployment can be transferred from the worker to the taxpayer, do you? I'm not convinced that's even theoretically possible, let alone actually true under our system.
I'm only talking about quantifiable harm, i.e., financial harm. The "full harm" includes some aspects that the current situation is forbidden from considering (e.g., the harm to the spirit or soul of living as a charity case, instead of someone with a right to feel pride as a productive member of their society).
Under a religious system, however, it should be theoretically possible for the givers of charity to fully mitigate the harms of poverty (to include unemployment, i.e., it's even a bigger set of harms than the set of "full harms" of unemployment alone). Jesus said that 'the poor will always be with you,' meaning that God has no plans to eliminate poverty. There must be some reason why not, which is to say, some at-least commensurate good to be achieved.
However, under our irreligious system, I am not considering these issues. As a good American is supposed to do, I am here thinking only about dollar signs.
What a nasty thing to say. You don't really believe that about Americans?
I believe that it is what our betters in the political and judicial system think good Americans are supposed to limit themselves to when engaging the system.
It's an interpretation of the liberal political project really rooted in a British philosopher named John Stuart Mill, who argued that laws should not be enacted except to prevent harm. But by "harm," he means something very precisely quantifiable and demonstrable. Mill has proven to be very persuasive to left-leaning jurists in the United States for a good part of a century. (Indeed, he is clearly the favorite political philosopher of Dr. Martha Nussbaum, today's leading theorist on American Constitutional law, who cites him approvingly and regularly.)
There are a few cases of physical harm in which the law can do that without having to be able to express the harm in dollars (or pounds sterling), such as murder or rape.
In most cases, however, what I thought you wanted to capture as the "full harm" of unemployment is not subject to legislation or political action under a Millean interpretation. Much of that has been put beyond the pale, not because it isn't harm, but because it isn't quantifiable.
Mill was not motivated by wickedness, for the most part (his affairs in colonial India sometimes draw ire). Some of his intentions were good. The effect of the project, however, has been -- as you say -- nasty. It is utterly destructive.
Straw man, I think. No one who wants to give ever finds money (or anyone's exclusion devotion to money) an impediment. People who want to take sometimes get into the habit of complaining that the people they want to take from are unduly concerned with money.
Money's nothing but a device to de-couple mutual obligations in time. Anyone who wants to give without considering mutual obligations can do so. The social problem comes from people who want to take without considering mutual obligations.
That kind of giving is nonpolitical, however. It's excluded from the system. The system can consider harm only in dollars, which can then be taxed and spent. But it can't consider harm in terms of -- say -- the loneliness and isolation of unemployment, and force taxpayers to spend more time with the unemployed.
You can freely give your time, but that's not a political decision. It's a decision you make qua Christian or qua neighbor. Your participation qua American is political, and that's limited to what is quantifiable.
In a way this is meant to be helpful -- you wouldn't want to be forced to spend time with the unemployed, even if you might freely choose to do so. But it's a way that we limit what it means to be "American," because our political system is limited to only very specific kinds of concerns. Insofar as you approach the problem through American law, you're supposed to talk about harms that are quantifiable.
But you asked a question about theoretical limits, which is how we got here. I don't think the American system can begin to approach the theoretical limits because it is intentionally limited to practically quantifiable harms. But that doesn't mean it isn't theoretically possible to do more good than even the 'full harm,' however you want to express that. It should be theoretically possible.
I don't believe the political is limited to the quantifiable. People cast their votes according to whatever is important to them. Nor is the American legal system confined to financial calculations.
We don't need a political solution to the problem of being willing to give, because there are neither obstacles nor pitfalls to giving one's own resources. Some people believe we need a political solution to the problem of being unwilling to give. That's more properly viewed, I think, as a problem of people who want to take, but can't find willing givers. It's not a problem I'm interested in submitting to a political solution, not because it's hard to quantity (nothing would be easier), but because it substitutes socially-approved force for the voluntary arrangements that should be reached between every person that gives and every person that takes.
Maybe it should be theoretically possible to impose requirements like minimum wage and mandatory overtime without creating misery by eliminating jobs for the most vulnerable, but no one knows a theory that will permit it, and no one has ever achieved it pragmatically, either. That leaves us with actual costs and only imaginary benefits.
People cast their votes according to whatever is important to them. Nor is the American legal system confined to financial calculations.
I didn't say it was limited to that: I said it was limited to demonstrable harms of a certain kind, sometimes physical, sometimes financial.
Well, consider Prop 8 in California. People cast their votes for whatever reasons -- the Mormons had a high turn out, the black community, presumably for similar by different reasons. But the courts set it aside, and they did so because they said it wasn't the right kind of issue for the political system. You can't pass a law banning something unless you can show it causes particular harm to a particular person -- harm you can quantify.
Now if you could show it cost a given set of people X dollars, you'd be on the right ground. The system is not limited to thinking about money, but it is hard to quantify harm to individuals beyond physical damage except as money.
So we can talk about the harm to the poor, politically, chiefly in that way. But that's not the best way to think about it -- what would really be helpful is often moral in nature, rather than financial. Financial gifts often create new moral problems, in fact. But the system is based on transfer payments (70% of government spending is now checks to individuals) in large part because we have structually limited government from thinking about responding to harms of other kinds.
We pass laws all the time about harms we can't quantify.
Certainly. California passed Prop 8.
That kind of giving is nonpolitical, however. It's excluded from the system.
And
You can freely give your time, but that's not a political decision. It's a decision you make qua Christian or qua neighbor. Your participation qua American is political, and that's limited to what is quantifiable.
No, and no. The nonpolitical is no more excluded than the political. They're two sides of the same thing; one can't be excluded, or included, without the other.
What's political in the American system, or in any system, of course includes the nonquantifiable. That's where the underlying principles originate, for instance, whether Conservative, Big Government/Progressive, or your Mills.
Insofar as you approach the problem through American law, you're supposed to talk about harms that are quantifiable.
Says who, exactly? Besides our current crop of Progressives, I mean. As a man said a bit ago, I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article in the Federal Constitution that mandates this. Nor can I see it in our Declaration of Independence. In fact, both of those defining documents of our social compact are built on the unquantifiable aspects of politics.
Eric Hines
California passed Prop 8
You dwell on that as if the Court is the final answer.
Was the Taney Court final? Was Plessy? Did Brandeis have the final word? Thurgood Marshall?
We just give up, then, because our Betters in the Court have spoken?
I choose not to.
Eric Hines
The nonpolitical is no more excluded than the political. They're two sides of the same thing; one can't be excluded, or included, without the other.
I have no idea what you intend that to mean, Mr. Hines. :)
Nor did I really understand what you meant by the reference to Prop. 8. Is there a connection to your theme of quantifiability? Actually I'm not sure how you're using that word.
Only that the two are so thoroughly intertwined that the distinction between the two is nothing more than an artificial construct, without general meaning.
Its usefulness is limited to its ability further the understanding of a narrow topic. Your apparent use of the distinction to limit what is permissible--nonpolitical.... It's excluded from the system--in a political discussion demonstrates that that understanding fails this distinction.
Eric Hines
I believe that it is what our betters in the political and judicial system think good Americans are supposed to limit themselves to when engaging the system.
Nonsense. There's a reason the word "moral" is half of the phrase "moral hazard". There are moral and economic arguments. Both matter.
I think we all agree that the law should include moral issues. The problem is that SCOTUS precedents now say that you cannot pass a law to express moral disapproval of a class of persons. A 'class of persons,' as Scalia warned in his dissent, can be united by behavior as well as by any other factor. But we're seeing law after law overturned on this basis:
"Thus, we are directed in our equal protection analysis by the United States Supreme Court's holding in Lawrence that moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate governmental interest."
So why can you pass a law against "embezzlers"? They are a group of persons united by a behavior. Why are they different? Well, because we can quantify the harm they've done to others -- in terms of money.
That's why this whole line of argument has gone the way it has. Prop 8 and Lawrence are a general attack on moral standards in the law, as Scalia has recognized correctly. The only standard left for inserting any kind of moral concern is quantifiable harm: in this case, Tex, I mean harm whose extent can be proven in a numerical way. "He lost 1 arm," or "she was raped twice," or "He had 9 thousand dollars stolen," or "They suffered 50 thousand dollars losses in wages, hospital bills, legal fees, and other damages."
If you can't show that kind of harm, it won't meet Mill's standard. The precedent here is not isolated to gay marriage issues, but is rather a natural outgrowth of a political philosophy that has a particular interpretation of Constitutional law. It's the reason the arguments play out as they do -- the reason, for example, that traditional marriage advocates are asked to "show the harm," and are told that the kinds of harm they can show -- damage to traditional moral norms or community standards, say -- are not admissible as kinds of harms.
There is no Constitutional standard prohibiting laws that cannot be reduced to the prevention of a numerical harm. To the extent the Court insists on concrete rather than intangible harm, it's not concerned with numbers. But even under the recently fashionable definition of morality, many cognizable rights and associated harms are intangible. It's just that many people have moved to a definition of morality that excludes many ills previously agreed to be immoral.
I agree with you, as always, that the attempt to limit moral judgments to things that can be established without reference to trans-human moral absolutes is doomed to failure, like sawing off the limb on which we sit. I just don't think the issue is quantifiableness. All kinds of currently fashionable inalienable rights have nothing to do with quantifiableness, just as all kinds of currently unfashionable inalienable rights can easily be quantified.
Do you think so? It's worth sorting out.
When we see speech codes on campus, for example, we see an un-Millean principle at work on the Left: he was explicitly opposed to some right to not be offended. But I note that these codes are defended in Millean terms: as some sort of denial of a service that's been paid for (hostile environment deprives me of the full quality of an education I've paid for via tuition), or in terms of financial damages (e.g., 'I lost the tuition payments because I dropped out of class due to the hostile environment, and also dropping out of college cost me a fortune if we assume an average wage increase associated with a bachelor's degree').
I'm not talking about quantifiable harm to be combative, but because it seems to be the strand that holds. If you can convince me I'm wrong about that, I'm not wed to it.
There are many sorts of relief that may be sought from a court, among which are money damages. If a plaintiff elects money damages, he will of course be required to come up with a theory under which his harm can be expressed in dollars.
But a criminal defendant, for instance, who seeks to throw out evidence gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment is not concerned with such a task, nor does the court ask him to undertake it. The same goes for injunctive relief, which requires a showing of harm, but not necessarily one expressed in dollars or any other quantifiable terms. In fact, one of the requirements for equitable relief (which may include injunctions, rescission, imposition of a constructive trust, or many other things) is that money damages will not answer.
Well, the criminal doesn't have to show harm because the harm is already quantifiable: not only has he suffered X alleged violations of his Fourth Amendment rights, more to the point of the story, he shall suffer Y years of imprisonment (or Z dollars in fines). It's still harm, and harm of the kind Mill was most concerned about -- harm to an individual.
As with the liberal project in general, he views people as being properly considered as atomistic individuals, rather than members of families or communities or societies. If you can show only harm to families or communities or societies, then, you aren't meeting the standard. You have to show harm to an individual.
Now as for injuctions, I don't know that much about them. My understanding is that an injunction is just a pause, so to speak, until due process is complete. So the standard doesn't change, if that's right; it's just that we might wait for the full process before the standard is applied. Is that how you understand it?
The harm to a criminal who has been made the object of an illegal search is no more quantifiable than any other harm. Any narrative may have numbers associated with it, without their being legally relevant.
You're on firmer ground with the lack of standing of families or communities as opposed to individuals, but that's not an issue of quantifiability. The law sees families as relationships among individuals. The individuals have a legal standing to sue, but their relationship does not. That is not to say that an individual can't establish a harm by pointing to damage to a relationship, because he certainly can. It's just that he can't be assured that the court will find the relationship as important as he does, especially if it's a statist sort of court that believes no relationship is as important as the relationship to the state.
Re injunctions, you're probably thinking of temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions, which are, as you say, intended to stay there only until a dispute is resolved. But a successful lawsuit for an injunction results in a permanent injunction. And there are many other kinds of equitable (i.e., non-monetary) relief besides injunctions, which are typically permanent rather than provisional.
The harm to the criminal is also no less quantifiable than other admitted harms, because it can be expressed in the right kind of terms. In a way you can't say what is involved in a loss of ten years' freedom; but in another way, you have just expressed it as a massive harm to an individual (and one that is, in magnitude, somehow more than the loss of five years' freedom, but less than the loss of thirty).
But this matter of injunctions, beyond the kind with which I am familiar, I don't understand well enough to debate. I will need to read up on it to think more about it.
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