SOME MORE ECONOMICS

Minimum wages destroy both jobs and employability: "When I discuss minimum wages in class I tell my students that one of the best ways to get a high-paying job is to get a low-paying job and work your way up. The minimum wage can put the least employable out of work and have permanent negative effects when training and work skills not acquired in youth are difficult to accumulate later on.... David Neumark and Olena Nizalova look at the how exposure to the minimum wage in the past impacts workers today. They find that teenagers who grow up in states with a minimum wage that is significantly and consistently higher than the federal minimum have lower earnings and work less a decade or more later when those workers are in their late twenties. The negative effects are larger for blacks, for whom the minimum wage tends to be more binding.... The bottom line? If you don't work at McDonald's when you are a teenager, don't expect to manage a McDonald's when you are middle-aged."

The origin of the income tax: "'The freedoms won by Americans in 1776 were lost in the revolution of 1913,' wrote Frank Chodorov. Indeed, a man's home used to be his castle. The income tax, however, gave the government the keys to every door and the sole right to change the locks. Today the American people are no longer the master and the government has ceased to be the servant.... Adjusting for inflation, in the 81 years between the enactment of the income tax in 1913 to 1994, government spending increased 13,592%!"

A reader writes: "This article shows that the number of Australians on full time welfare support has gone from 1 in 20 in the early 1960s to 1 in 5 today. The welfare lobby and 'social justice' advocates seem to be on a business as usual track. You don't have to be a libertarian or even a conservative to criticise these numbers. Many ordinary Australians would say that Australia was a fairer and more equal society in the 1960s than it is today. The welfare lobby needs to redirect their focus from welfare expansion to welfare targeting."

Walter E. Williams: "The truly rich don't deserve all the political hype we hear; they're only a tiny percentage of our population and not that important. According to recent U.S. Treasury statistics, the top 1 percent of income earners have an adjusted gross income that starts around $300,000. While $300,000 or $400,000 a year is nothing to sneeze at, it's a far cry from being rich; it's not even yacht-and-Gulfstream-jet money. The truly rich Americans are those with assets like Bill Gates ($46 billion), Warren Buffett ($43 billion) and Paul Allen ($21 billion). All told, there are about 275 Americans in the billionaire club. Having just a couple million dollars in assets doesn't merit much respect as riches.The 99 percent plus of the rest of us can safely ignore the truly rich."

What the Left won't tell you: "The twentieth century contrasts sharply with the record of the two preceding centuries. In every measure we have bearing on the standard of living, such as real income, homelessness, life expectancy and height, the gains of the lower class have been far greater than those experienced by the population as a whole, whose overall standard of living has also improved".

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ELSEWHERE

Peg Kaplan says why the use of forged documents by CBS to discredit GWB is a big deal. I am amazed that they keep defending themselves. A quick "we were conned" would have saved a lot of their reputation. One wonders whom they are protecting -- i.e. did the documents come directly from the Kerry campaign? NRO has the story about a much earlier "Rathergate" scandal that now seems generally forgotten. (Via Dick McDonald).

Further to my post about the "Could America be Satan" seminar, Dave Huber has some information about how away with the fairies these guys really are.

An Islamic "spiritual leader" speaks about the recent bombing of the Australian embassy in Indonesia: ""I suspect that America and Australia themselves are behind the [embassy] bombing, for two reasons: one, the US issued a travel warning before the bombing. It means they already knew in advance; and two, the bomb intentionally exploded about the embassy gates which made victims of ordinary people, who are Muslim. It means it is aimed at pushing Islam into a corner. On these two indicators, I suspect the US and Australia are behind the bombing".

Film on Cat Torture Draws Protesters in Toronto: I love the conflict between animal rights protesters and the PC art nazis. Such decisions for Leftists: protest the animal cruelty, or support some disgusting so-called "artist's" right to expression?

O'Reilly selling out? "OK, I have finally had enough with Mr. Switzerland, aka Bill O'Reilly. I started getting annoyed when he made comments such as " I think Kerry is a good guy, I could sleep well at night if he were President." Then I became angry when he criticized the Swift vets and refused to have an open discussion about the topic... The more I listen to this blowhard the more I feel he is a wanna-be elitist. I get the feeling that he wished he could leave that damn 'right wing' Fox and become anchor for one of the big networks".

John Kerry has been criticizing the Bush administration's approach to North Korea. But even the New York Times has put up another view: "The Bush administration's customary approach to North Korea, based on consultation with North Korea's neighbors and skepticism of its motives, is exactly what is necessary." A "mulitilateral" approach is what Kerry keeps demanding for Iraq so a naive person might think that a multilateral approach to North Korea would be approved of. But who said Leftists have to be consistent? Not John Kerry!

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual survey of the week's blogospheric wisdom.

There is a very irate email up on EDUCATION WATCH about government funding for Australian private schools. New posts on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE too.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and EDUCATION WATCH. Mirror sites here, here, here and here

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Anti-Americanism is in epidemic proportions in France and Germany but most people don't realize that it is in epidemic proportions in South Korea too. And what do those three countries have in common? They were liberated by America. And what is probably the most pro-American country in the world? Poland. They liberated themselves. Ego defeats rationality all the time.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and big egos who will say anything to win applause

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