The Unbroken Window

It is likely that the decline of private sector unions has led to additional pressure on the federal government to provide a more state-centered medical system. Why? One defining feature of the old-style union firms was their top-notch health care benefits. Therefore, unions would be natural opponents to government intrusions in the health care sector. [...]

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Last Friday’s post may have been uninteresting, but thinking about the grading process reminded me of another “argument” that is presented to me as counter-evidence to some labor market information I present at times. A surprisingly small share of Americans earn the minimum wage or less. When I query students about this, I routinely get [...]

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Here’s a light weekend thought to chew on. I accept that many firms are thought to pay “excessive” amounts to compensate their top managers. Indeed, this is one reason the “99%-ers” are dismayed at the world. Under what model are we operating then that finds that firms are extremely benevolent toward one class of employees [...]

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By now I am sure you have heard that there are laws being floated which will make it illegal for firms to discriminate against the unemployed when it comes to hiring decisions. Forget for the moment any literal difficulties with identifying whether this is happening, or any other objections you might have to the difficulty [...]

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Steve Malanga reports: Steve Malanga at the Manhattan Institute’s PublicSectorInc.org, Oct. 21: [T]he Bureau of Labor Statistics released 2010 rates of injury and illness in the American work force, and once again state and local government workers on average missed far more days from illness and injury per worker than workers in the private sector. [...]

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I just want to say thank you to the waiter from the diner I ate at last Monday. He was one of the few people that I get to interact with in so called “service sector” jobs who genuinely seemed to take pride in his work. I am sure he was not paid great. But [...]

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Suppose you read a story with the headline: “Study Finds that Smaller Percentage of Women are Admitted to Graduate School than Men: Government Moves to Address this Discrimination.” Is the data evidence of discrimination? Does the policy proscription follow? Let’s put some hypothetical numbers to it. Suppose that for your university, 30% of male applicants [...]

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Did you know that: 13.3% of the workers who earn the minimum wage or less are employed in the government sector? 16.9% of the workers who earn the minimum wage or less have a college degree? 47.3% of the workers who earn the minimum wage or less are married and have a spouse present? 67.7% [...]

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Radio ads here in Rochester have been touting the “new” employment tax credits that have come from Washington, DC. The idea is that for firms that hire currently unemployed workers and keep them employed for a long-enough time period, they will receive a credit on their tax liabilities. Let’s not think of the labor economics [...]

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A few e-mails came in last week when I mentioned that my marginal tax rates on my next dollar of earned income were rather high. In doing so, I included nearly all of the 15.3% of the payroll tax as coming out of my wages. Was I right to do this? That is not the [...]

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