Fix Family Poverty With Free Markets, For Once

Posted on by Lone Candle

“What’s irritating, though, is that many of the best free market ideas for helping working families have not been tried.

What would happen if we actually stopped providing tax incentives for employer-sponsored health insurance? Or if we allowed people to pick less expensive insurance plans that didn’t cover chiropractic bills and dermatology visits but did provide the kind of coverage they were most likely to use and would most likely cause them financial strain if they didn’t have? The annual savings for the average family from this type of policy change would likely surpass any child allowance.

What if we had occupational licensing reforms and allowed people to run small businesses out of their home without fear that the local health department will shut them down? These would give families another path to upward mobility.

What if we stopped making childcare more expensive through government regulations, such as demanding that daycare workers have unnecessary masters degrees and mandating child-to- staff ratios instead of just allowing parents to decide whom they trust with their children?

What if we changed zoning rules so that families could rent out extra rooms in their homes or allowed extended families to more easily live together? What if zoning rules didn’t keep residential properties so far away from commercial properties, in turn requiring that children be driven everywhere?

What if—and here is an idea whose resonance has become even more apparent in recent months—we had real school choice? What if parents didn’t have to worry about buying a more expensive home in order to get their children access to a better school district? Or what if we allowed them to choose a charter school or private school when the public schools in their neighborhood didn’t perform (or even open in person)?

What if instead of continuing to subsidize the bloated higher education industry, we simply offered flexible vouchers to low-income students, letting them spend the money in a way that would allow them to quickly and efficiently gain the job skills they wanted?”

As Generation Z Comes of Age, America Is Getting Noticeably More LGBT

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Only 1.8 percent of Gen Xers identify as bisexual. A full 11.5 percent of Gen Z adults identify the same way. And there’s a much greater number of millennial and Gen Z adults identifying as transgender than previous generations, though it’s still a fairly small percentage.”

…

“for a significant amount of American history, especially the late 20th century, our culture has treated LGBT people as dangerous or deviant and therefore individuals were encouraged to suppress or just not act on non-heterosexual attractions. There’s been an absolutely dramatic shift in acceptance of LGBT people over the past 20 years and so it should not be surprising to see a greater percentage of young adults willing to identify as LGBT.
The increase in the number of LGBT self-identification is a positive result of allowing people to define themselves and their sexual identities absent government pressures forcing them to conform to majority preferences in order to enjoy the same rights granted to everyone else.”

The Minimum Wage Is Terrible for America’s Most Vulnerable Workers

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Minimum wages reduce the employment of low-skilled workers—a group disproportionately represented by immigrants, inner-city minorities, and young people. Some workers lose jobs altogether, while others see their hours reduced. This doesn’t mean that there are no beneficiaries of higher minimum wages. Economic theory predicts that some workers who are currently employed will retain their jobs with no reduction in hours, even after the minimum wage is increased. For those workers, the increase means higher take-home pay, although the jobs themselves might become more demanding or less secure.

So, what do we know about raising the federal minimum wage to $15, even gradually? In theory, we know a lot, but the empirical evidence is limited since so few states and localities have tried it. There are, however, some noteworthy attempts to get a good grasp of what might happen.

First, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that a $15 minimum wage by 2025 would eliminate 1.4 million jobs over that period. The CBO also forecasts that this increase could decrease business income, increase consumer prices and tap the brakes on the economy.

Second, economists at the University of Washington studied the employment effects of Seattle’s move to gradually increase its minimum wage to $15. Seattle, already a high-wage city, first raised its minimum wage to $13 in 2016 and hiked it to $15 in 2021.

Summing up the findings in Seattle, Michael Strain writes in Bloomberg: “The economists found that this led to a 9% reduction in low-wage jobs. The pay increase it generated didn’t make up for the reduction in employment, and earnings fell for low-wage workers overall. The economists’ subsequent research found that the gains from the higher minimum wage accrued to more experienced workers.” As I noted, there are some winners (those who are already relatively better) and some losers (those already worse off).

In a recent Twitter thread, one of the authors of the study, Jake Vigdor, noted that the following pattern emerges for employers dealing with higher labor costs: “1) Don’t lay people off 2) Cut back hours 3) Cut back hiring 4) As workers quit, restore hours for those who remain.” He also warns that the negative employment effects are somewhat understated in the study because it ignores “a subset of the workforce: those who didn’t have jobs at baseline, before the wage increase.”

Workers who didn’t have a job at the time of the increase and won’t get one after may pay the steepest (and unseen or overlooked) cost of the minimum wage. As Williams explained in his autobiography, “Early work experiences not only provide the pride and self-confidence that comes from financial semi-independence but also teach youngsters attitudes and habits that will make them more valuable and successful workers in the future.””

Labeling groups like the Proud Boys “domestic terrorists” won’t fix anything

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Canada recently designated the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group, as a terrorist organization, a move that has put pressure on President Joe Biden’s administration to take similar punitive action against the group and others who participated in January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

The Congressional Research Service has asserted that the Capitol insurrection was an act of domestic terrorism, as defined by federal regulations and law. The FBI has identified the criminal activity by the Proud Boys as a domestic terrorism threat.

But while the federal government maintains a list of foreign terrorist organizations, it does not have a mechanism to formally designate domestic terrorist organizations. National security experts argue that creating one would not only invite legal challenges, but would do little to improve law enforcement’s response to the nascent threat of domestic terrorism.

Creating such a list would raise legitimate First Amendment concerns because it could potentially be used to target political dissidents on both the left and the right. Experts also say it’s ill-suited to address the kind of domestic terrorist attacks and plots that the US is facing, which according to the Department of Homeland Security, primarily come from right-wing extremists acting as individuals, rather than as organized groups.

The best way forward, they say, is for the federal government to better employ existing tools to combat domestic terrorism — a threat that was not prioritized by former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly refused to denounce white nationalists and told those who stormed the Capitol, “We love you.”

“Violent white supremacists are not a new problem,” Faiza Patel, the director of liberty and national security at the Brennan Center for Justice, said. “Law enforcement has dealt with them before and can do so again. The FBI’s robust response to the attack on the Capitol shows that these groups can be investigated and prosecuted under existing law, undercutting any argument for new tools.””