Now a bad time to raise minimum wage

Now a bad time to raise minimum wage 

In reply to the Rev. John W. Cahill’s op-ed, “Stop subsidizing corporations” from the June 2 Enquirer: As a business owner I had to jump through many hoops before I could open my businesses, among them regulations, permit fees, licensing fees and many different taxes. With two businesses I had to hire lawyers and go to court to obtain the permit to operate. I then had to hire a bookkeeper to compute payroll, write quarterly reports, send reports to government regulatory agencies and keep records for income taxes. As it is very dangerous to hire employees and be in business, I had to purchase expensive liability insurance and hire a company lawyer whom I always had to use several times a year. Then with each employee I had to pay workers’ compensation, unemployment compensation, Social Security and other benefits. Each employee cost about $20 an hour, but the employee only received $10 an hour.

We must remember that once high wages and benefits were required for workers at Studebaker, Packard, Admiral TV, Muntz TV, Crosley and hundreds of other companies, and they are all gone now. General Motors required a government bailout of $11.2 billion. Once we paid high wages to those who made televisions, telephones, shoes and shirts, but all those jobs are gone. Almost everything that is sold at Wal-Mart is no longer made here.

It might not be a good time to raise minimum and low-wages pay, when 102 million – or 48 percent of working age Americans – cannot find jobs, and minimum wage starter jobs for teenagers are hard to find.

Everything that we legislate has unintended consequences. We must be careful.

William Schmidter, Indian Hill 

Obamacare hurting Kentucky hospitals

Obamacare hurting Kentucky hospitals

In my travels across Kentucky, I routinely hear from constituents about how disastrous Obamacare has been for them and their families. It’s caused increased premiums, reduced coverage – and now comes further evidence that this terrible law is hurting Kentucky hospitals and the patients they treat.

A recent report published by the Kentucky Hospital Association (KHA) showed that Obamacare’s multibillion-dollar attack on hospitals throughout my state is expected to result in a net loss of $1 billion over the next few years. That’s a $1 billion loss to hospitals that are oftentimes drivers of the local economy.

Incredibly, this report shows that Kentucky hospitals are expected to lose more money under Obamacare than they’re expected to gain in new revenue from the law’s expanded health care coverage. That’s partly because Obamacare cut Medicare by more than $700 billion to pay for this new entitlement.

A Medicare cut that Kentucky hospitals are feeling particularly hard results from a provision known as the “Bay State Boondoggle,” which adjusted the Medicare reimbursement rate for hospital costs in a way that resulted in a windfall for Massachusetts hospitals at the expense of hospitals in other states. As a result of this provision, Kentucky hospitals have lost approximately $61 million in Medicare payments. To address this loss of funding, I was proud to cosponsor the Hospital Payment Fairness Act, which would end this unfair giveaway.

So how are Kentucky hospitals reacting to this devastating news of lost funding despite coverage expansion? By cutting jobs, reducing or freezing wages, eliminating services or, in some instances, closing down altogether.

In large part due to Obamacare, two-thirds of Kentucky hospitals have eliminated positions through layoffs, attrition or abolishing positions. That’s more than a 10 percent reduction in the statewide hospital workforce from 2013 – a major loss of jobs on top of the other well-known consequences of Obamacare.

Nearly half of all Kentucky hospital workers have experienced either a freeze or a reduction in wages. More than half have seen their benefits, such as health or retirement benefits, reduced.

Two-fifths of all Kentucky hospitals have reported cutting programs and services thanks to lower revenues. Programs and services on the chopping block include psychiatric units and outpatient clinics.

Finally, there are the tragic cases of hospitals that have had no choice but to close their doors. Nicholas County Hospital, located in Carlisle, announced it was closing last year. Parkway Regional Hospital in Fulton, with 192 employees, announced it would close this year.

Every one of these lost jobs, pay or service cuts, or closed facilities degrades the care that Kentuckians receive, and for hospital employees, it means tightening their belts or looking for new work. That’s the last thing our commonwealth needs when too many Kentuckians are still looking for jobs in the Obama economy.

The horrible truth, as too many Kentuckians are finding out the hard way, is that Obamacare is filled with broken promises. It promised that if you liked your plan, you could keep it. It promised to bring health care costs down. It’s a disaster of a law that isn’t working and there’s only one way to fix it. It needs to be repealed and replaced with common-sense, step-by - step reforms that will actually lower health care costs and increase patient choice.

I hope both parties in Washington can come together to work toward this more hopeful outcome. We owe Kentuckians – we owe Americans – more than Obamacare’s broken promises.

Many ideas taken as ‘facts’ may not remain true tomorrow

Many ideas taken as ‘facts’ may not remain true tomorrow

By Walter E. Williams

President Barack Obama’s stance, expressed in his 2014 State of the Union address, is that the debate is settled and climate change is a fact. Obama is by no means unique in that view. Former Vice President Al Gore declared that “the science is settled.” This “settled science” vision about climate is held by many, including those in academia. To call any science settled is sheer idiocy. Had mankind acted as though any science could possibly be settled, we’d be living in caves, as opposed to having the standard of living we enjoy today. That higher standard of living stems from challenges to what might have been seen as “scientific fact.”

According to mathematician Samuel Arbesman’s book, “The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date,” many ideas taken as facts today will be shown to be wrong as early as five years from now. Arbesman argues that a study published in a physics journal will lose half its value in 10 years.

Many academics know that to call any science settled is nonsense. But their leftist political sentiments and lack of academic integrity prevent them from criticizing public officials and the media for misleading a gullible public about global warming.

The concept of white privilege, along with diversity and multiculturalism, is part of today’s campus craze. Millions of dollars are spent on conferences and other forums teaching students about the horrors of white privilege. A Vanderbilt University sociology professor said white privilege is to blame for the Baltimore riots and looting.

I wonder how one goes about determining whether a person is privileged. White privilege can’t be based on median income. Why? It turns out that Asian-American households had the highest median income ($68,636) in 2012. Median income for white households was $57,000. Maybe our academic elite should condemn Asian privilege instead of white privilege. But there’s another problem. My income puts me in America’s top 5 percent. If those who condemn white privilege could not see my dark brown skin color, they would also condemn me for white privilege. The bottom line to this campus nonsense is that “privilege” has become the new word for “personal achievement.”

President Obama has often said the wealthiest Americans must make sacrifices to better the lives of poor people. At Georgetown University’s May 12 poverty summit, Obama said, “If we can’t ask from society’s lottery winners to just make that modest investment, then really this conversation is for show.” Let’s look at this “lottery winner” nonsense.

A lottery is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as “a process or thing whose success or outcome is governed by chance.” The question before us is whether wealth is something that is obtained by chance. Did Bill Gates acquire his wealth by luck or chance? Or did he produce something that benefited his fellow man, causing people to voluntarily reach in their pockets to pay?

Gayle Cook and her late husband, William Cook, founded a medical device company using a spare bedroom in their apartment as a factory. Their company specializes in stents and antibiotic catheters. Now Gayle Cook has a net worth in the billions of dollars. Was she a winner in the lottery of life, or did she have to do something like serve her fellow man?

Are those who work hard, take risks, make life better for others and become wealthy in the process the people who should be held up to ridicule and scorn? And should we make mascots out of social parasites?

Obama talked about asking “from society’s lottery winners to just make that modest investment.” Congress doesn’t ask people for money. Through intimidation, threats and coercion, it takes people’s earnings. If people don’t comply, the agents of Congress will imprison them.

Most instructive for us is that Obama’s remarks were made at a university. Not a single professor has said anything about his suggestion that people accumulate great wealth by winning life’s lottery. That is just more evidence about the level of corruption among today’s academics.

Stop playing the poverty blame game

Stop playing the poverty blame game

Patty Eber, East Walnut Hills, Ohio

I commend the Enquirer for the attention the stories about Millvale have brought to the deplorable conditions that so many of our children and their families live in today. Similarly, I am pleased to see the outpouring from community members and groups eager to eradicate child neglect and abuse and, more pointedly, the abject poverty that almost always envelops it.

However, all the hand wringing, “summits” of community leaders, donations from          good-hearted citizens and empathy in the world will not make a whit of difference unless we all own up to our part in the evolution of the culture of poverty in our society.

Everyone wants to blame someone else but it seems no one is willing to confront their own part in it.

The Democrats blame the Republicans for stinginess in funding programs to help the poor and the Republicans blame the Democrats for having authorized so many programs that the poor have few incentives to improve themselves. The social service organizations blame the government for not giving them enough money to produce long lasting outcomes and the government blames the social service agencies for not providing more effective programs. The African- Americans blame the whites for overt as well as hidden racism and the whites blame the African-Americans for playing the race card too often and not taking responsibility for their actions..The upper class blames the downtrodden for not raising their children properly and the downtrodden blame the upper class for hoarding all the wealth. The inner city school systems blame poor parenting for low achieving schools and the parents blame the lousy school systems for their children’s lack of achievement. And on and on it goes.

The unassailable fact is that everyone – everyone – bears some responsibility for the mess we now find our most vulnerable citizens in. Until everyone stops the finger pointing and looks to themselves to see what they can change, absolutely nothing will change at all.

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, ask not what someone else can do about poverty but rather ask what you – not others – can change to fix it. 

Paying the Price

Paying the Price

A Commentary By Thomas Sowell

Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters.

Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent.

Various other communities across the country are experiencing very similar explosions of crime and reductions of arrests, in the wake of anti-police mob rampages from coast to coast that the media sanitize as "protests."

None of this should be surprising. In her carefully researched 2010 book, "Are Cops Racist?" Heather Mac Donald pointed out that, after anti-police campaigns, cops tended to do less policing and criminals tended to commit more crimes.

If all this has been known for years, why do the same mistakes keep getting made?

Mainly because it is not a mistake for those people who are looking out for their own political careers. Critics who accuse the mayor of Baltimore and the Maryland prosecutor of incompetence, for their irresponsible words and actions, are ignoring the possibility that these two elected officials are protecting and promoting their own chances of remaining in office or of moving on up to higher offices.

Racial demagoguery gains votes for politicians, money for race hustling lawyers and a combination of money, power and notoriety for armies of professional activists, ideologues and shakedown artists.

So let's not be so quick to say that people are incompetent when they say things that make no sense to us. Attacking the police makes sense in terms of politicians' personal interests, and often in terms of the media's personal interests or ideological leanings, even if what they say bears little or no resemblance to the facts.

Of course, all these benefits have costs. There is no free lunch. But the costs are paid by others, including men, women and children who are paying with their lives in ghettos around the country, as politicians think of ever more ways they can restrict or scapegoat the police.

The Obama administration's Department of Justice has been leading the charge, when it comes to presuming the police to be guilty -- not only until proven innocent, but even after grand juries have gone over all the facts and acquitted the police.

Not only Attorney General Holder, but President Obama himself, has repeatedly come out with public statements against the police in racial cases, long before the full facts were known. Nor have they confined their intervention to inflammatory words.

The Department of Justice has threatened various local police departments with lawsuits unless they adopt the federal government's ideas about how police work should be done.

The high cost of lawsuits virtually guarantees that the local police department is going to have to settle the case by bowing to the Justice Department's demands -- not on the merits, but because the federal government has a lot more money than a local police department, and can litigate the case until the local police department runs out of the money needed to do their work.

By and large, what the federal government imposes on local police departments may be summarized as kinder, gentler policing. This is not a new idea, nor an idea that has not been tested in practice.

It was tested in New York under Mayor David Dinkins more than 20 years ago. The opposite approach was also tested when Dinkins was succeeded as mayor by Rudolph Giuliani, who imposed tough policing policies -- which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it had been under Dinkins.

Unfortunately, when some people experience years of safety, they assume that means that there are no dangers. That is why New York's current mayor is moving back in the direction of Mayor Dinkins. It is also the politically expedient thing to do.

And innocent men, women and children -- most of them black -- will pay with their lives in New York, as they have in Baltimore and elsewhere.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Is it Time for Civil Disobedience of Kludgeocratic Bureaucracy?

Is it Time for Civil Disobedience of Kludgeocratic Bureaucracy?

A Commentary By Michael Barone

Is there any way to reverse the trend to ever more intrusive, bossy government? Things have gotten to such a pass, argues Charles Murray, that only civil disobedience might -- might -- work. But the chances are good enough, he says, that he's written a book about it: "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission."   

Murray has a track record of making seemingly outlandish proposals that turn out to be widely accepted public policy. His 1984 book "Losing Ground" recommended the radical step of abolishing all welfare payments. A dozen years later, the federal welfare reform act took a long step in that direction.  

Murray was prompted to write "By the People," he says, when a friend who owns a small business was confronted by OSHA inspectors and had an experience similar to one recounted in Philip Howard's "The Death of Common Sense."   

The inspector found violations. Railings in his factory were 40 inches high, not 42; there was no automatic shut off on a conveyor belt cordoned off from workers; a worker with a beard was allowed to use a non-close-fitting dust mask. Picayune stuff. But unless changes were made, the inspector said, we'll put you out of business. 

  

How had things come to this pass? Murray ascribes it to the abandonment of effective limits on government embedded in the Constitution by its prime architect James Madison. That started with the early 20th century Progressives, who passed laws setting up independent and supposedly expert bureaucrats in charge of regulation, and furthered by New Deal Supreme Court decisions. 

Murray argues that these mistakes cannot be reversed by the political or judicial processes. The Court won't abandon longstanding doctrines on which millions of people have relied. Congress, even a Republican Congress working with a Republican president, won't repeal vaguely worded statutes that give regulators wide-ranging discretion. 

  

State and local governments are just as bad. They pass laws protecting established businesses (notably taxi cartels) by restricting competition. 

  

What is to be done? Citizens, says Murray, should be willing to violate laws that the ordinary person would instantly recognize as ridiculous. And deep-pocketed citizens should set up a Madison Fund, to subsidize their legal defense and pay their fines. 

  

Civil disobedience will stick in the craw of conservatives who revere law and order. Deep-pocketed donors may be repelled. And Murray admits that deciding what regulations civil disobeyers should disobey involves tricky judgment calls.  

But he argues that his project might not be entirely quixotic, because the nation has changed in ways not envisioned by the Progressives and New Dealers, and contrary to the predilections of the regulators at agencies like OSHA and EPA. 

  

The Progressives thought that the nation was becoming more uniform and that supposedly disinterested regulators could and should make it more so. Murray points out that the contrary is the case.   

The cultural uniformity that people remember from the post-World War II decades is the exception rather than the rule in American history. We were a religiously, ethnically and regionally diverse nation in James Madison's time, Murray says, and we are once again. The uniformity temporarily imposed by shared wartime and postwar experiences is no more.   

In addition, the assumption that centralized regulators would have unique expertise has proven unfounded. Government bureaucracy is increasingly a kludgeocracy (a word coined by the liberal political scientist Steven Teles), mindlessly enforcing absurdly precise rules by threatening ruin upon anyone who resists.   

But regulators are actually thin on the ground, unequipped to deal with mass -- and subsidized -- civil disobedience. When a spotlight is shined on their tyrannical behavior, even courts will rebel.  

Case in point: In 2012, the Supreme Court in Sackett v. EPA ruled that regulators couldn't impose a $75,000 per day fine until the agency, in its own good time, acted on a landowner's challenge to its ruling that his landlocked two-thirds of an acre parcel was a wetland.   

The Progressive push to give politically insulated bureaucrats power to impose detailed and often incomprehensible rules was a product of the industrial era, a time when it was supposed that experts with stopwatches could design maximally productive assembly lines.  

That idea is out of date in an information era, when expertise is widely dispersed and readily accessible to citizens acting on their own initiative and inspiration. 

Bureaucracy's time has passed, 

Murray argues, and its tyranny is ripe to be overthrown by creative Madisonian civil disobedience.   

Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner 

Questions We Should Ask In America But Aren’t ‘Allowed’ To – Thanks to PC-BS

Questions We Should Ask In America But Aren’t ‘Allowed’ To – Thanks to Politically Correct - BS

1) If Islam is really a religion of peace, as opposed to a particularly violent religion, then why do so many people and organizations across the world refuse to show Muhammad cartoons out of fear that they’ll be murdered by devout Muslims for doing it?

2) If illegal immigrants are supposed to help our economy, then why weren’t they helping the economies of the poor nations they fled?

3) Given that Hillary Clinton’s nearly accomplishment-free political career has been based on riding the coattails of a serial adulterer who has humiliated and cheated on her over and over, isn’t Hillary Clinton a terrible role model for young women?

4) If Barack Obama can directly contradict the laws on the books by refusing to deport millions of illegal aliens because of “prosecutorial discretion,” couldn’t a Republican President use the same precedent and refuse to prosecute people who don’t pay a capital gains tax or who violate EPA rules?

5) Wouldn’t it be just as stupid to send teenage Boy Scouts into the woods alone with gay men as it would to send teenage Girl Scouts into the woods alone with heterosexual men? …

6) Why should we take the threat of climate change seriously enough to cut back our lifestyles when even Al Gore, the foremost promoter of global warming hysteria, lives in a mansion, flies on private jets and rides around in SUVs? …

7) If we’re not willing to ask middle class Americans to at least pay in taxes what services provided to them from the government cost, then isn’t it time to start paring back the services the government offers until we get to a level of government that everyone but the poor is willing and able to pay for? …

8) If ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) has nothing to do with Islam, then why does it have “Islamic” in its name? …

9) If cites like Detroit and Baltimore have been run by liberals for decades, then aren’t Democrats fully responsible for the problems those cities have?

10) Isn’t it racist to argue that black Americans are so uniquely stupid and incompetent that they can’t even manage to get a government ID to vote?

11) If a man works more hours than a woman, takes off less time to be with his children and does more unpleasant, difficult jobs, shouldn’t he make more money than she does?

12) Isn’t a media personality — with a platform that gets him out to large numbers of people — who falsely accuses someone of racism doing much more damage to society and promoting more hatred than some hick or frat boy who hates black people because of the color of their skin?

13) If Barack Obama can make large changes to Obamacare without the approval of Congress, then couldn’t a Republican President use the same precedent to gut Obamacare regardless of what Congress has to say about it? …

14) If gun-free zones are effective and border fences are ineffective, why is the border of the White House surrounded by a huge fence guarded by lots of Secret Service agents with guns?

15) If black Americans commit 49.3% of all murders and account for 51.5% of all violent crime among juveniles, yet there are almost two white Americans killed by the police for every black American (2,151 vs. 1130 over 12 years), then aren’t black Americans actually less likely to be killed by police than you’d expect given the crime statistics?