If you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that a vote for the surge in Iraq and its strategy changes would dramatically reduce the amount of violence and deaths, giving the Iraqi government breathing room to get 15 of 18 benchmarks completed, would you vote for it?  If it was a certainty?

Obama wouldn’t have.  The man of Hope and Change(tm) would have kept the status quo.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is playing politics with the war and the lives of our soldiers.  Bailing out at all costs — big costs, to Iraq if not to us — is irresponsibility at its highest.  That’s not the kind of man I want as President.

[tags]Barack Obama,Iraq surge[/tags]

If America falls into recession, Democrats will blame Bush, no doubt.  But does Dubya’s influence on the economy cover the entire continent of Europe?  Retroactively?

A mood of fear and pessimism is starting to descend on Europe. It now seems the region could head into recession even before the United States.

Many EU nations are in real trouble. In Spain, economy minister Pedro Solbes declared that the country was facing its "most complex crisis ever" following a collapse of the property market.

A leading Spanish property group, Martinsa-Fadesa, filed for bankruptcy earlier this week.

Like Spain, Ireland has suffered a housing market collapse and many people have run up huge personal debts. The Irish economy shrank earlier in the year and economists say that if it continues to contract, the nation will fall into recession by the end of 2008.

Despite this, the Irish Prime Minister or Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, has insisted his country is still doing remarkably well, despite the global economic downturn, and has rejected claims that he is personally responsible for the downturn.

Denmark is already in recession and shows no sign of emerging from it in the near future. The government there stepped in to rescue a failing bank, Roskilde, in early July.

Unlike the US economy, which still grew (albeit very weakly) in the first quarter, European countries are already in different degrees of economic retreat.  And the emphasis above (mine) notes that this is a global economic problem which we are weathering better than the countries Democrats keep holding up as examples we should follow.

Is Bush that all-powerful?  (Hint: No.)  But it’s just too good a glop of mud to sling at him for Democrats.  They just can’t pass up the chance, and they hope their followers aren’t paying attention. 

[tags]economics,recession,Spain,Ireland,Denmark[/tags]

The conventional wisdom is that this upcoming election will be Obama’s in a walk-away.  Could be.  But on the chance he loses, Democrats are already writing the narrative they will use to explain it.

In a speech at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s annual convention in Cincinnati, [NY governor David] Paterson also suggested that the defeat of Senator Obama by Senator McCain in the presidential contest would be a victory for racism.

And he knows this because everything can be blames on racism.  The preceding paragraph notes:

Governor Paterson, who became New York’s first black governor following the resignation of Eliot Spitzer, is lashing out at the press for describing him as an "accidental governor," implying in a speech that the term’s frequent usage was motivated by racial bias.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names are racist! 

The article actually goes on to note, contrary to Paterson’s contention that only he, as a black governor, has been termed "accidental", 3 other people (including President Bush) and 6 separate examples of politicians being referred to as "accidental".  The man has got a serious chip on his shoulder.

[tags]New York,Governor David Paterson,racism,Barack Obama,NAACP[/tags]

What does it mean, “He’s smart” or “He’s very intelligent?” Largely on the left, we see citations of “that candidate” is very smart or the other one is not so much (typically oddly enough the “smart” ones lean left in the view of the left leaning commentators. Whether that is an attempt at validating their own left leaning predilections or explaining reasons why they admire that particular candidate I will not guess.) What I fail to understand is how they come up with their estimation that a given candidate is smart. I know how I figure that a programmer, physicist, or mathmetician is smart. By looking at their work and asking is it clean? Is it beautiful?

If one was to ask whether an artist was talented. One would ask another performer (or artist in the same field) or perhaps a critic (to be distinguished from a “reviewer”).  However, talent at art is not exactly the same as smart.

Currently, Mr Obama is the politician most often touted as “smart” by the left. Some months ago, blog neighbor David Schraub declaimed that both Mr Obama and Ms Clinton were both “very smart.” What I fail to understand is on what basis he might make such a claim. For the two examples above, one has to look at some sort of body of work to estimate whether a person is smart. There is, of course, another time honored means of deciding if a person is smart, which is to interact personally with that person for an extended period of time. That method of determination by the average citizen with respect to a national candidate is unlikely or impossible so as to be discounted. That pretty much leaves, their corpus of work, which in the case of lawyers like Mr Obama and Ms Clinton would be their body of written opinions.

Rhetoric is of course another key people use to decide whether a person is intelligent. However, in this age of the teleprompter and speechwriters the facility at oration is a actors skill.  However, it is a stretch to thing that those claiming these people are intelligent is based on facility at reading from a teleprompter and calling it oration.

Yet strangely it seems such offerings are absent in the case of these individuals. There are no publicly available opinions written by either of these candidates. Odd that, no? Mr Obama was, for a time, an academic lawyer. To be an academic in the publish or perish environment, yet not to publish seems more than a little strange. If this is a case of lawyers who have read his and her work, deciding that it is good, but that it is to “technical” or abstract or otherwise unfit for general consumption … that seems elitest and very likely to be concealing of a lie.

I would guess that the likeliest reason that these people think, in this case, that Mr Obama is highly intelligent is because they’ve heard it second hand. It is a “meme” if you will, spread by his supporters (and the press) that Mr Obama is very bright. But the question is, why is this to be given credence?
So, if you think, the candidate of the hour, Mr Obama is smart. Why do you think that? On what do you base your appraisal? How does that compare with how you decide or would decide if a candidate is smart?
(disclaimer: I should note, I have no opinion at all on the matter of whether Mr Obama is “smart” or not. I feel I’m not qualified (I’ve read nothing he’s written (or had ghost written)) nor do I have the contact with him. Furthermore, I’m a little disinclined to think “smartness” is a qualification for President. Of our the 19th century Presidents the smartest arguably was John Quincy Adams. Was he the “best” President? Obviously not. Woodrow Wilson was alleged to be very bright … consider the League of Nations and the stellar treaty of Versailles. Clearly intelligence is not what it is cracked up to be in the political arena)

So John McCain is left to address Phil Gramm’s remarks that we have become a nation of whiners who are merely in a mental recession?

What exactly is a mental recession? Well, let’s do a little comparison of a mental recession with an economic depression.

Below is a photo (courtesy Yahoo!News) in which we see people queued up… waiting.

Now take a look at a photo (courtesy National Park Service) in which we see another group of people queued up… waiting.

The difference?

In the first photo, the people are waiting to buy the latest iPhone (circa 2008), while in the second photo, the people are waiting to be given something to eat (circa 1930s).

First photo = mental recession.
Second photo = economic depression.

First photo = nation of whiners.
Second photo = nation of those eager, but unable, to provide for their families.

[tag]phil gramm, nation of whiners, mental recession, obama, john mccain[/tag]

No, not Bush’s.  This group would love to have the same ratings as Dubya.  In most cases, based on who you talk to, only 1/3rd of the number of people who approve of what Bush is doing think Congress is any good.

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008.

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.

Voters not affiliated with either party are the most critical of Congressional performance. Just 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings, down from 6% last month. Sixty-three percent (63%) believe Congress is doing a poor job, up from 57% last month.

For comparison, most other polls give Bush +/- 30%.  Hating polls as I do, I would only bring this up to counter those who use them as a bludgeon for Bush and his policies.  If popular opinion is your bellwether for whether a course of action should be taken, the Democratic Congress has less of a mandate than the President.

Now, we can debate as to what the poll means, and that can have as many explanations as people polled.  But if you want to claim that Bush is doing a poor job, you must also say that it could be worse; we could have Congress in charge.

[tags]polls,approval rating,Congress[/tags]

I’m not a great student of recent politics, that is the politics of my lifetime, instead more of a casual observer or johnny come lately, in that my interest in politics is quite young. When I was in college and until just a few years ago, Politics was much like the weather, people talk about it, have opinions and all, but it really didn’t touch me (actually did far less than the weather) and the “little guy” of which I number have about as much effect on the weather as we do on federal politics. I am not well aware of the history of Mr Helms, nor have I walked a mile in his shoes nor understand how he thinks and sees the world. I don’t hate him, I don’t love him (any more than I would another stranger).

Mr Jessie Helms has died. Every single one of the liberal blogs I read have failed to say anything gracious (and some are definitely ungracious) at the passing of a man from this mortal coil. On reflection over their attitude on his passing, I find it a good thing that I hold no American and very few foreigners in a similar regard as the beheld Mr Helms. To reiterarate:

There is no American and very few foreign nationals whose death I would celebrate.

As they did today.  I don’t hate as they hate, it seems. I can think of very few men on whose deminse I would react in a similar fashion. I think I had little good to say about the deceased when Mr Hussein and Mr Arafat died.  It seems to me, if you are trying to rid the world of hatred and bigotry, one must start with oneself. In our liturgy, we repeat and strive to uphold each week, these words before the anaphora (Eucharist):

I believe and confess, Lord, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first….

The confession/statement goes on, but the important phrase (for this discussion) is emphasized. This does not mean I am a worse sinner than Mr Hussein, Josef Stailn, or perhaps Mr Helms. It does mean however, I am the first person whose sins are my concern. It is not for me to address the “other’s” sins while mine are lying plain before me. And … if you (on the left) hate Mr Helms, Mr Bush, or Mr Cheney then that sin is far more important to you to address than anything that those men have done or do that you find unrighteous. And no, I don’t think that to others your sin of hatred is being compared or worse then perception of the sins of those men whom you hate. What I am suggesting is that it is more important for you to address than the other.

Mr Obama is, as we speak, swinging to center. A question for those few who read this blog and support Mr Obama. Apparently, he is reneging on his, perhaps most emphatic primary campaign promse, that of “immediate” pullout from Iraq. I’ve three question(s):

• Do you believe the shift a lie? Why is this the lie and not the prior promise?
• What shift, if taken by Mr Obama, would cause you to no longer support him?
• If there is none, what does mean?

Or, if you want to explain the “shift” is due to “changes on the ground in Iraq”, uhm, those changes have been plain to see for almost the entire primary season. It seems disingenuous to just notice it “now” when it’s politically convenient is not inherently dishonest.

(Dan Trabue, in a comment here to my previous post on health care, referenced a think tank paper that predicts cost reductions without a loss of effectiveness with a single-payer system, and took issue with my terming this "socialized medicine".  I decided to put my response up as a post.)

From the Wikipedia entry on health care in Canada: "Health care in Canada is funded and delivered through a publicly funded health care system, with most services provided by private entities."  So in Canada, it’s not government-run hospitals but it is a government funded system.  While the writer of this Wikipedia entry insists it’s not truly socialized medicine, the article at the link to the words "socialized medicine" does concede, "The term can refer to any system of medical care that is publicly financed, government administered, or both", I suppose depending on who you ask.

But who’s in charge of the hospitals or what you want to call it is immaterial, as the outcome is the same.  Britain has government-owned hospitals and Canada doesn’t, but the result is still that bureaucracies make medical decisions instead of doctors and patients.  HMOs were the Left’s bogeyman for years, but their solution is to institute the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, largest HMO/insurance company to make our individual health care decisions.  This makes no sense at all.

From the think tank paper cited:

[The Lewin Group, "a nationally respected nonpartisan
consulting firm"] estimates the proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising total national health spending. It would also save hundreds of billions over time – more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years – in national health spending, according to Lewin.

The Lewin Group is inexplicably closing its eyes to the Canadian system, blue-skying his prediction.  The Canadian system uses both government- and employer-based payment system, utilizing private insurance/doctors/hospitals, and they are in crisis.  They are not saving money (Claude Castonguay, quoted in the original post, notes that rationing and "injecting massive amounts of new money" has not helped).  They most certainly do not serve effectively (Wikipedia cites a study showing 57% of Canadians wait 4 or more week to see a specialist).  And it unfortunately affects everyone (read the Wikipedia article sections titled "Government Involvement" and "Private Sector").

Are you really going to believe predictions on the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a massive government program.  No government program of such a size ever comes in under budget; not Medicare, not Social Security, not the Iraq War, nothing. 

The Lewin Group says that the government could bargain for lower costs, and yet Canada’s are skyrocketing.  They may have gone down at the beginning, but as The Acton Institute’s Dr. Donald Condit notes:

Resource consumption increases when people think someone else is shouldering the cost. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman observed, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” More than 60 years of “someone else” paying for health care has led to medical expense inflation. Our predominately third-party reimbursement “system,” beginning after World War II for employees and after Medicare in 1965 for the retired, has resulted in out-of-control spending. Increasing the role of government will spur unbridled medical services consumption and further harm the underserved. Medical resources are limited. An expanded government role in health care will necessarily lead to rationing, shortages of health-care providers, delay in treatment, and deterioration in quality of care.

Medicaid is a socialized medicine microcosm. In that system, price controls and bureaucracy result in rationing by deterring provider participation and delaying treatment, with subsequent deterioration in quality of care. Affluent individuals are able to access better health care outside of any government system.

And this "Medicare model" is what the EPI plan wants to take the "best elements" of, which they only enumerate later on as the federal government administering it.  How can the Left possibly say they care more for the less-fortunate in one breath, and in the other hold up health care rationing as "caring"?  This makes no sense at all.

Canada’s system currently compares favorably to the US in terms of a couple of cherry-picked statistics, but that’s like judging a pyramid scheme based on the first few generations.  They are losing on other fronts, like a drain of doctors.  And they are now at the tipping point of that pyramid scheme, where the choice is either returning a bigger role to the private sector (what Castonguay called "radical" and what conservatives call "sensible") or sliding further down the slope to socialism.  The Left, not wishing to have their utopian vision challenged, will no doubt push for the latter.

Read the rest of this entry

As the promise of Universal Healthcare continues to be sold to the American public by Democrats, the anecdotes fly. Look here; a case failure of our healthcare system! Look there; another person falls through the cracks!

The problem is, it’s the big picture that continues to put the lie to the selling of socialized medicine. As I’ve noted before, the system in Oregon will deny cancer patients life-saving or -extending medicine, but will gladly pay for life-ending “treatment”. You can decry all you want the profit motive of the private enterprise system, but with socialized medicine the profit motive is just as motivating, with a bigger bureaucracy larger than any insurance company you can name calling the shots.

And as Christians, is this the kind of system that we want to be encouraging? We’d have rationed healthcare (all socialized systems wind up here, sooner or later), equally poor quality, and a respect for life on par with Oregon’s.

But hey, it would be “equal”. Wonderful.

This bit of “hope” and “change”, however, has already been done on this scale. And how has it worked? Let’s talk to one of the founding fathers.

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Read the rest of this entry

Your taxpayer dollars at work.  Michelle Malkin has the story.

If you don’t know what ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is all about, you better bone up. This left-wing group takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers — you and me — and has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance, some of which have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and encouraging voter fraud. A new whistleblower report from the Consumer Rights League claims that Chicago-based ACORN has commingled public tax dollars with political projects. Who in Washington will fight to ensure that your money isn’t being spent on these radical activities?

OK, so why should you care that a "community organization" out of Chicago plays dirty politics?  A real yawner, right?  What’s next, reporting that the sky is blue? 

Malkin gives you a reason to care, by noting who in particular probably won’t be doing any fighting.

Don’t bother asking Barack Obama. He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a "community organizer" and legal representative. Naturally, ACORN’s political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who "best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about" — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money.

Malkin continues with details of voter fraud (pending cases, but also the largest case in Washington state where they were convicted), using federal housing money for electioneering, and mortgage advice that would land them in jail if they were a lender in today’s market. 

Stanley Kurtz has an article with even more details of ACORN’s methods ("in your face", Code-Pink-type confrontation), it’s political aims (socialist), and Obama’s ties to the organization (a lot deeper than we were first led to believe).  If you want to flesh out Obam’s highly-vaunted "community organizer" credentials, you need to read Kurtz’s peek into ACORN.  A small excerpt:

To understand the nature and extent of Acorn’s radicalism, an excellent place to begin is Sol Stern’s 2003 City Journal article, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.” (For a shorter but helpful piece, try Steven Malanga’s “Acorn Squash.”)
Sol Stern explains that Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s “New Left,” with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. Acorn, says Stern, grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

Being a "community organizer" may sound like a refreshing thing to have on a presidential candidate’s resume, but, as with most things, it all depends on what one was organizing for. 

For another peek into ACORN, here’s an article from a guy who was gung-ho about the group itself.  Well, until he actually joined it.

So now, after Wright and Pfleger and Ayers and all the other people he kept company with but has thrown under the bus, is ACORN next?  He could pull out his standard line, "this is not the ACORN I knew", but that excuse is wearing rather thin. 

If he doesn’t distance himself from a group he worked for for 3 1/2 years, then his radical leftist views will be all the more evident.  If he does back away (and if he can do that for his pastor of 20 years, ACORN is fair game), then he continues to show himself to be a man who either has made very poor decisions all of his life, or shows himself to be cravenly and politically expedient when dealing with his inconvenient past.  Either way, he shows himself to be someone we don’t want in the Oval Office.

[tags]ACORN,Barack Obama,community organizer,Chicago,socialism,Sol Stern[/tags]

Which political party has this as its platform?

Meet the Needs of Working, Unemployed and Farm Families
– Raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour.
-Unemployment insurance for all workers.
– Moratorium on farm foreclosures
– Labor law reform to remove barriers to workers who want to join a union.
– No privatization of Social Security. Increase benefits.
– Universal prescription drug coverage administered by Medicare. Universal health care system.
– Restore social safety net. Welfare reform that includes job training, supports and living wages.
– Full funding for equal, quality, bi-lingual public education. No vouchers.

Make Corporate Giants Pay
– Repeal tax cuts to the rich and corporations.
– Close corporate tax loopholes.
– Restitution to workers’ pensions.
– Strong regulation of financial industry.
– Regulation and public ownership of utilities
– Prosecute corporate polluters. Public works program to clean our air, water and land
– Aid to cities and states. Federally funded infrastructure repair and social service programs

Foreign Policy for Peace and Justice
– No to war with Iraq – End military interventions
– Repeal Fast Track and NAFTA, stop Free Trade Area of the Americas(FTAA). No secrecy.
– Save Salt II Agreements, reject Star Wars and Nuclear Posture Review
-Abolish nuclear weapons
– End military interventions.
– Cut military budget and fund human needs.

Defend Democracy and Civil Rights
– End racial profiling.
– Repeal the death penalty.
– Enforce civil rights laws and affirmative action.
– Repeal USA Patriot Act.
– Legalization and protection of immigrant rights.
– Public financing of elections. Overall election law reform including Instant Runoff Voting.
– Youth and student bill of rights. Guarantee youth’s right to earn,learn and live.

Click here to find out.  Amazing how closely it tracks the platform of the major party you probably thought it belonged to.  You can probably pick out the individual items, or groups of them, and argue that they are good policy regardless of who approves of them.  However, it does make you wonder, with so much in common, if the destination of the two parties hasn’t always been the same place, especially since, in very recent days, some folks have been tipping their hand.

[tags]Democrats,socialism[/tags]

More deconstructing of the meme that Bush lied and the Democrats were misled. This time, it’s from James Kirchick. This isn’t someone on the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy mailing list; he’s been actively speaking out against the Right. And now we hear from him:

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” — that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction — administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

Oh please Read the Whole Thing(tm). Frankly, I’m thrilled that the Washington Post Editorial Page Editor and now an assistant editor of the New Republic are finally arriving at the truth. At the same time, the information that they’re working from — the Senate Intelligence Committee report recently released — doesn’t really break new ground in terms of the facts presented, and in fact comes to the same conclusion that the 2004 report from the same committee came to, Senator Rockefeller’s bleat about being led to war “under false pretenses” not withstanding.

As much as the media has presented and pushed and given air to the charge of lying on the part of the Bush administration, and as serious a charge as it is, one would hope that it would give as much attention to the report and those on the Left who are backing the President.

One can hope. One can always hope. But hold not thy breath.

[tags]James Kirchick,The New Republic,Iraq war,Bush lied,Senate Intelligence Comittee,media bias[/tags]

I’d use a different adjective, but then, I’m not the target audience.

A stunning 20-something woman hooks up with a seemingly innocent guy at a rowdy singles bar. Hot foreplay starts on the cab ride home and progresses into the bedroom.

That is until, while searching for a condom in the bedside table, she sees a photo signed "Thanks for your support!" from Republican candidate John McCain.

Horrified, she bolts, dropping her bag and spilling a campaign button on the sidewalk: "I only sleep with Democrats." The camera quickly cuts to a cool, bespectacled man with a donkey pin on his lapel. The couple’s eyes lovingly lock.

"Blue Balled" — an edgy, video short distributed on YouTube and other Web sites this week — has a simple message: If you vote Democrat, you are intellectual, hip and savvy. If you vote Republican, you are an untouchable — bumbling, square and uptight.

…and are less likely to have an STD, perhaps? 

The 527 group putting this out is called "Truth Through Action".  They actually sell "I Only Sleep With Democrats" shirts on their web site.  OK, so then, what’s the truth that their action is trying to convey?

[tags]Democrats,politics,Truth Through Action,[/tags]

No, not the 80’s song by Nick Lowe. The “kindness” brought to you by a government that just doesn’t seem to understand basic economics. Employment of minimum wage earners keeps going down (the cruel part) because of the hikes in the minimum wage the government keeps mandating (the “kind” part).

The percentage of teens classified as “unemployed” — those who are actively seeking a job but can’t get one — is more than three times higher than the national unemployment rate, according to the most recent Department of Labor statistics.

One of the prime reasons for this drastic employment drought is the mandated wage hikes that policymakers have forced down the throats of local businesses. Economic research has shown time and again that increasing the minimum wage destroys jobs for low-skilled workers while doing little to address poverty.

According to economist David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine, for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, employment for high school dropouts and young black adults and teenagers falls by 8.5 percent. In the past 11 months alone, the United States’ minimum wage has increased by more than twice that amount.

So it should be no surprise to see teen jobs disappearing or to hear bleak testimony from employers across the country that make these hiring decisions.

And it’s not just teens looking for a summer job that this hurts.

There’s no end to the economic data that confirm these common-sense observations. Research from the University of Georgia, the University of Connecticut and Cornell University indicates that increasing the minimum wage causes four times more job loss for employees without a high school diploma than it does for the general population.

Furthermore, minimum wage hikes don’t effectively target the people who are typically portrayed as the key beneficiaries — low-income adults raising kids. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, just 14 percent of those who benefited from the most recent federal minimum wage hike are sole earners in families with children.

The whole “living wage” canard used to buttress the case for increased minimum wage, then, is an incredibly small amount of those who benefit, and arguable more folks are hurt because of it. The question always asked is, “Is it better to have a lower-paying job, or no job at all?” Democrats will consistently ignore or hand-wave away this question, in the interest of “caring”.

Well ask those unemployed folks how much that “caring” helped them.

[tags]minimum wage,economy[/tags]