Financial Friday
It’s Fraudulent Friday.
Please email the folks at the Oregon Restaurant Association and tell them to stop hurting college students and hard working Oregonians with outrageous attacks on the minimum wage. The people at ORA are so incredibly nice. I’m sure they would love hearing from you every morning. Wouldn't that be nice?
Karen Mainzer, Director of Local Government Affairs
Bill Perry, Director of Government Relations
Mike McCallum, President/CEO
And if you still have time, please email these four Oregon Republican legislators.
Jeff Kruse, R-Roseburg
Donna Nelson, R-McMinnville
George Gilman, R-Medford
Wayne Scott, R-Oregon City
And if you think that you are immune from what they are doing, please read on . . .
Republican legislators are scurrying around the halls of Salem working feverishly to lower Oregon’s minimum wage. In fact, they proposed several bills within a week of the legislative session. How can they create these bills so quickly? We even have our very own Senator Gordon Smith voting in favor of Rick Santorum’s amendment to the Federal bankruptcy bill that would enable restaurants to include tip income into the overall minimum wage equation. Thankfully the amendment failed.
Conservatives want to lower the minimum wage to create more jobs. That logical is just mind blowing. It’s like president Terd’s town hall meeting where a lady in the audience said: “That's good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.” And then the president retardedly retorted: “You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. Get any sleep?” (self-chuckle). Hello. When you reduce the minimum wage, you increase the need to hold more than one job, thus canceling out the net effect on unemployment from any increase in the number of jobs available.
Only 12 states have legislated minimum wages set higher than the Federal rate of $5.15 per hour. Who can live at this level? Oh right, conservatives firmly believe that only teenagers earn minimum wage. Well, living in reality has its perks. Here we learn that people making several dollars over minimum wage also get impacted by shifts in the wage base, and we discover that a fair amount of single mothers, college students, and other older social sectors earn the minimum wage or slightly above it. Here’s some good minimum wage facts for people.
Q: So why have I spent the time to find all these links?
A: They are the perfect way to showcase Republican hypocrisy. While college tuition and health care go up and up, the Republicans have decided to spend resources fighting our minimum wage laws that enable people to pay for college and health care.
A: I am also concerned by what the Oregon Republican Party and the Oregon Restaurant Association are doing. The Oregon AFL-CIO has just hired a new employee to combat the growing momentum that the ORP and ORA are building. There are now seven bills circulating the halls of Salem, each one having a different angle on how it will decrease the minimum wage.
HB 2331, sponsored by Wayne Scott, deletes the annual cost of living increase.
HB 2409, sponsored by George Gilman, reduces the minimum wage for anyone under 18 or those earning tips.
HB 2386, sponsored by Donna Nelson, completely eliminates Oregon’s minimum wage laws for an employee’s first year.
HB 2720, sponsored by the committee on business, labor, and consumer affairs, will reduce the annual cost of living indexing and reduce the minimum wage for workers under 18.
SB 451, sponsored by Jeff Kruse, will do the same exact thing as HB 2409.
SB 452, sponsored by Jeff Kruse, will reduce the minimum wage for workers under age 18 for the first 60 days of employment.
SB 455, sponsored by Jeff Kruse, will eliminate the annual cost of living adjustment.
Have a nice weekend! And please get to emailing.
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March 10, 2005 |
Jenson Hagen | Comments (16 so far)
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Comments
Posted by: iggi | Mar 11, 2005 10:53:16 AM
i'll do it as soon as Wal-Mart is required to pay their employees a living wage...oh wait, that'll never happen.
Posted by: Rorovitz | Mar 11, 2005 1:43:56 PM
Gus,
Huh? So some people don't have the minimum wage as a standard so you don't support it for those who do?
Was that a joke?
Posted by: Steve Bucknum | Mar 11, 2005 5:06:17 PM
In my part of rural Oregon, we have made the minimum wage the cornerstone of our attack on those Republicans that get elected from here, especially State Senator Whitsett.
We attacked him by way of a letter to the editor in our local paper in early January when he looked like he was going to support rolling back the minimum wage. We noted that he was attacking those that voted for him, and that the Democrats would do everything we could to block this, and since we had 18 Senators controlling the Senate, the bill might well die in Committee. Then, HE DENIED HE WAS DOING IT! (in a follow up letter to the editor) Several days later he turned up as a co-sponsor of SB 451, 451, 455, which proposed to roll back the minimum wage in various forms.
We confronted his contradictory behavior in another letter to the editor, and we will be running a 1/4 page ad in our local paper with a banner headline -
"Isn't it a shame ... that the first thing Senator Whitsett did when elected was to act deceptively towards the people that elected him." Forked tongue, etc. We re-print his letter denying support for cutting the minimum wage next to copies of text from the Senate bills, and the heading that shows him as co-sponsor.
We are doing a full court press. In rural Oregon, the most likely Republican voter is in fact a minimum wage worker. Finally, a wedge issue going our way!!
Rather than make lots of comments here on Blue Oregon, if everyone that reads this that is in a District of a co-sponsor of these bills would write a letter to the editor - we'd have something going!
Sponsor of 451, 452, 455 - Kruse, Co-sponsors - Beyer, George, Morse, C. Starr, Westlund, Whitsett, Winters.
And by the way, buried in the middle of these bills, SB 453 by the same sponsors cuts the Oregon capital gain tax - which I don't think any minimum wage workers pay!
Go for the jugular, please!
Posted by: paul gronke | Mar 12, 2005 7:38:04 PM
Jenson,
seriously, just trying to figure out what "Financial Friday" is all about. I thought it was to give us your analytical insight from your perspective as an accountant. But sometimes you wave the partisan banner so hard that I'm not sure it's helpful.
Five minutes of internet searching reveals that the impact of the minimum wage on employment is a highly contested issue among policy makers and economists, not all of whom are Republican loonies of "President Terd".
I just don't get the rhetoric. If you want a higher minimum wage for social justice considerations, I'm all with you. But please don't be misleading about the impact of the m.w. on employment. There is good evidence, for instance, that is lowers employment among teenagers. That may be good, that may be bad, but don't pretend like increasing the m.w. is an unalloyed good.
Posted by: ron | Mar 13, 2005 12:07:22 AM
Paul -- are the policy disagreements you refer to free of rhetoric and partisanship?
The list presented by Jenson seems to reveal a real battle by some folks to earn, in a true capitalist sense, future campaign contributions. They seem to be tripping over themselves to out do one another. Bland policy does not seem to be the guiding principal in the Oregon legislature on this issue.
If you think we need something like a Deliberation Day, a bland policy discussion, then you need to go read something from Richard Posner (a federal judge with extensive writings on economics). Click here. I personally like a little vigor in any discussion.
I think the letter writing is useless. I think the labor law needs to be changed to reflect the existence of a statewide bargaining unit rather than having a state-set rate. This would do much more good for labor; that is, the right to strike without fear of being fired for demanding more (as a group) would be far better than picking some number out of a hat.
From this economist's point of view -- a statewide bargaining unit would result in a more accurate bargain, and higher wages. The current minimum wage, by comparison, is a bargain to say the least. The current crop of democrats and republicans seem to think that a politician's judgment can substitute for a market driven rate; on this I would hope you would agree is ludicrous, but there must be an alternative method available to arrive at a fair bargain. If you can think of a better one than a statewide bargaining unit be sure to let me know. (This would be the capitalist freedom-to-contract approach, rather than a social justice angle and would yield more than the current Oregon law.)
Posted by: Jenson | Mar 13, 2005 3:49:49 AM
Paul,
I wish I could post items that were free of partisanship. I spoke to Karen Minnis this morning about these bills and she said none are being moved through the House. That's great. So why are they there and why are a lot of Dems supporting them.
Campaign contributions. You thought that I was going to give you my analytical perspective as an accountant. Well, as a tax accountant, the first thing you learn is that your job will change every real for political reasons.
And you will find that I am fair about my partisanship. I will hammer away at the Dems when they do stupid things too. But as for right now, I'm not impressed with what the Republicans are doing.
As far as giving a pure outlook on changes to the minimum wage, this post wasn't about describing in depth the economic impact. This post was about saying "stop" there are many other better things we can do to boost our economy before going after the minimum wage with such force.
If we spent this energy in other areas, we could create an economy that offered good jobs instead of blanketing the unemployment numbers with gas station workers and more minimum wage jobs.
Posted by: Suzii | Mar 13, 2005 1:21:04 PM
Just to clear up a technical point, yes, it is normal for bills to be introduced at the start of the session. Because it would be wasteful to have the Legislature meeting *before* there are bills to consider, the people who research and draft them (the Legislative Counsel's staff) work through the interim, and gear up to superspeed between the election and the start of business.
Given how many better reasons there are to start conspiracy theories, we might want to skip this one.
(Full disclosure: I worked for Legislative Counsel in 1997.)
Posted by: ron ledbury | Mar 13, 2005 6:46:19 PM
Suzii, it is certainly a reasonable supposition to think that material submitted to the Legislative Counsel's office by July 1, 2004, could still be motivated by a desire to make good on campaign contributions, and to earn more for the next round. That is simple practical analysis and not remotely related to the modern use of the phrase conspiracy theory.
If the link between campaign contributions and constituent service can be defeated by the assertion that any claim to such a link is a conspiracy theory, as if by definition an invalid possibility, then I might as well believe in the benevolence of a king too, for how could someone imply that a king would not act for the good of his subjects.
If anything, stating the link is a waste of space and words because it is obvious to all already.
You know, having worked in the LC's office, that most measures are not submitted by agencies in five or six different forms, rather an agency requests a draft of one bill that corresponds to one set of policy parameters. The blast of numerous options as displayed by the list, as presented by Jenson, is indeed unusual, in that the various parties have not lined up in advance to support one or two options. That variety, is itself the source of my assertion that the individual's are competing . . . competing with future contenders from the same party.
Posted by: Ron Deming | May 23, 2005 11:18:42 PM
My concern is this: It may be that not everyone is valuable enough to earn a "living wage". Especially in the current market, (lots of available labor) employers may simply pass on people who they deem not to be "worth" a living wage. What happens to those people as the minimum wage goes up? It's a nice idea and all, but let's be realistic. In an environment where the lowest paying job pays pretty well, those who are only marginally employable are going to get thrown overboard. If they can't get job, then the rest of us get to take care of them. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't see the social safety net here in Oregon as being all that successful at giving people a hand up.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | May 23, 2005 11:53:55 PM
Ron, no surprise that our social safety net is in tatters... we're 46th in America in corporate taxes!
This has been the Big Lie of the conservative movement. First, starve the social safety net by constantly arguing "it can be done for less". Then, when the safety net fails, declare "aha! the safety net doesn't work; abandon programs!"
I believe it was Grover Norquist who encapsulated the strategy when he said, "I want to shrink government until it's small enough to drown in the bathtub."
Posted by: Ron Deming | May 27, 2005 11:09:23 AM
Kari, actually one I'm of those who buy into the "Big Lie" - at least to some extent. While I don't believing in starving programs to "prove" they don't work, I do believe that most programs don't work, no matter how much money goes into them, and therefore should be starved. In the 70's and 80's money flowed freely into a lot of social programs, and the net result was pretty hideous. More people were reached with the safety net; but they were not helped by it. Arguably, they were hurt. Lot's of reasons for that. Most of them, I believe, stem from changes in our culture, and not lack of money.
I do agree that a lot of corporate greedheads are getting away with murder in the tax arena, but collecting more taxes won't necessarily help. It just means we have more money to throw at problems; and it doesn't appear that there is enough money in the known universe to meet all the social "needs" that program managers can find.
Posted by: Pat Ryan | May 27, 2005 12:11:18 PM
Ron,
You make a good point regarding how much revenue is "enough" for a given program. Just look at the incentives:
On a government budget, the mandate is to spend the entire appropriation for the last fiscal year and ideally to still fall short of a couple of goals so that you can ask for increased funding and thus increase your own grade level and grow your department.
In the private sector, you want to spend less than you were budgeted by management and accomplish all of your goals so that you will be promoted, bonused, etcetera.
*************
The Army Corp of Engineers (among others) is addressing this problem by offering bonuses for efficiencies to change the standard incentive. And guess what. It works.
Posted by: Ron Deming | May 27, 2005 3:19:29 PM
Well said, Pat.
I seem to recall the Corp of Engineers incentive idea you mentioned also being floated around Salem a year or two ago, but I don't think it got any traction.
Does anyone have any recollection of this?
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Posted by: gus | Mar 11, 2005 10:43:14 AM
I'll do so after all public and private employers are required to pay their student interns at least minimum wage.