11 Facts About The Minimum Wage That President Obama Forgot To Mention

Unfortunately for the White House, many of its claims about the minimum wage are divorced from reality. Here are 11 facts about the minimum wage that Barack Obama forgot to mention during his State of the Union address.

1) Only 1 Percent Of The U.S. Labor Force Earns The Minimum Wage

2) Teenagers Comprise The Single Largest Age Group Of Minimum Wage Workers

3) Most Minimum Wage Workers Are Under The Age Of 25

4) A Majority Of Those Who Earn The Minimum Wage Work In Food Preparation Or Sales

5) Less Than 5 Percent Of People Who Earn The Minimum Wage Work In

6) A Majority Of Them Also Worked Less Than 30 Hours Per Week

7) Less Than One-Third Worked Full-Time

8) A Full-Time Minimum Wage Worker In 2014 Will Make 24 Percent More Than The Federal Poverty Limit

A White House tweet and accompanying infographic from last August said, "It's time to raise the minimum wage because nobody who works full-time should love in poverty." But a little math and a quick look at the 2014 federal poverty guidelines show that a single individual who earns the current federal minimum wage and works full-time will earn $14,500 in a year (50 weeks per year x 40 hours per week x $7.25 per hour). By way of comparison, the federal poverty limit for 2014 for a one-person household is $11,670.

Wage income from a two-earner family with two kids where both adults earned the minimum wage would exceed the federal poverty limit by 22 percent:  $29,000 in income compared to a four-member household federal poverty limit of $23,850. And that's before federal benefits like Medicaid and food stamps are included.

9) One-Third Of Minimum Wage Workers Either Dropped Out Of Or Never Attended High School

10) There Are Nearly Six Times More Minimum Wage Workers Today Than In 2007

11) A Change In The Minimum Wage Often Triggers Union Wage Hikes And Benefit Renegotiations

The famous investment banker J.P. Morgan said something along the lines of, "Every man has two reasons for everything he does:  a good reason and the real reason."

http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/28/11-facts-about-the-minimum-wage-that-president-obama-forgot-to-mention-during-the-state-of-the-union/
Read the whole article to find out the real reason why the min wage is a political winner for the President.

Will a Fish Swim?

 Is she going to run? Fish have got to swim. Birds have got to fly, and Clintons have to run for office. It's what they do. It's a metabolic urge. That's all they've done their entire life is borrow money from rich people to seek public office. And I think that will continue and "The New York Times" article is a guide to this. The problem is, a problem, nothing is more annoying to voters and infuriating to activists than a candidate that comes cloaked in an aura of inevitability. Because it says, in effect, here they are and you don't matter, and this is a foregone conclusion, and their inclination is to say well, we'll just see about that.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/01/26/george_will_nothing_more_annoying_to_voters_than_a_candidate_cloaked_in_an_aura_of_inevitability.html

The Abortion Rate Hits a 30-Year Low | Mother Jones

The US abortion rate fell by 13 percent from 2008 to 2011, according to a new study.

The study, released by the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights think tank, concluded that nearly 1.1 million abortions took place in the United States in 2011, some 700,000 fewer than in 2008. That's the equivalent of 16.9 abortions per 1,000 women between 15 and 44. During the same time, the number of abortion providers fell by 4 percent and the number of abortion clinics fell by 1 percent.

"The national abortion rate appears to have resumed its long-term decline," conclude researchers Rachel K. Jones and Jenna Jerman. The rate of abortions in the United State has decreased almost every year since 1981, when, according to Guttmacher spokeswoman Rebecca Wind, there were 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women. The decline halted from 2005 to 2008. As of 2011, the abortion rate not only began to drop again, it also hit its lowest point since 1973.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/abortion-rate-record-decline-map

Wow

Myth-Making About Economic Inequality | RealClearPolitics

Unless you are exceptionally coldblooded, it's hard not to be disturbed by today's huge economic inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor is enormous, wider than most Americans would (almost certainly) wish. But this incontestable reality has made economic inequality a misleading intellectual fad, blamed for many of our problems. Actually, the reverse is true: Economic inequality is usually a consequence of our problems and not a cause.

For starters, the poor are not poor because the rich are rich. The two conditions are generally unrelated.

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/03/myth-making_about_economic_inequality_121433.html#ixzz2sH6bU4Wl 
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Unicorns and Wage Gaps

Consider, for example, how men and women differ in their college majors. Here is a list (PDF) of the ten most remunerative majors compiled by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Men overwhelmingly outnumber women in all but one of them:

1.   Petroleum Engineering: 87% male
2.   Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: 48% male
3.   Mathematics and Computer Science: 67% male
4.   Aerospace Engineering: 88% male
5.   Chemical Engineering: 72% male
6.   Electrical Engineering: 89% male
7.   Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: 97% male
8.   Mechanical Engineering: 90% male
9.   Metallurgical Engineering: 83% male
10. Mining and Mineral Engineering: 90% male

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-don-t-make-less-money-than-men.html

The Mobility Muddle | RealClearPolitics

By the conventional wisdom, American society is becoming more rigid. People's place on the economic ladder ("relative mobility") is increasingly fixed.

Untrue, concludes the NBER study. (The study is NBER Working Paper 19844.)

"We find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s," write the economists. Comparing their results with earlier studies covering 1950 to 1970, they also find little difference. Social mobility "remained remarkably stable over the second half of the 20th century in the United States," the study says.

Moreover, there's significant shifting among classes. About a third of the children born into the wealthiest fifth of Americans stay in the richest fifth as adults -- but two-thirds move down. Among children born to parents in the middle 20 percent by income, about a fifth end up in the richest fifth, as do about 9 percent of children born to the poorest fifth of Americans.

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/01/25/the_mobility_muddle_121352.html#ixzz2sHFQiRpP
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What Did You Expect?

It seems to me that you are making the error that was the norm in textbooks and the profession fifty years ago, before public choice theory. You are evaluating proposals for government policy on the basis of what they could do if optimally implemented not on what one can expect them to do given the incentives of the people making the decisions—what used to be referred to as the philosopher king model of government. It makes no more sense than evaluating the market alternative on the assumption that all the decision makers in that case will act to maximize social welfare rather than in their own interest. The question is not whether an optimal carbon tax designed and enforced by wise and benevolent economists would produce net benefits—very likely it would. It's whether passing a carbon tax designed and implemented as we can best expect it to be would produce net benefits.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/01/me-vs-mankiw-on-global-warming.html