Bravo, business leaders

Bravo, Jeff Immelt.

Bravo, Lowell McAdam, too.

Bravo, Joe Rosenberg, too.

The Republican candidates ought to latch on to the pragmatic, forward-looking, technologically advanced narratives being advanced by these business leaders. Immelt and McAdam show what the American economy should (and must) look like as we look forward. Bernie is lost in the mists of the socialist 1930's.

A misquote and a quote, both worth thinking about

Imagine the hypocrisy of an Administration that requires everyone to prove that they have bought health care insurance but opposes laws requiring everyone to prove they are citizens in order to vote. Then imagine the additional irony of the fact that undocumented aliens who cannot prove their citizenship may receive health care benefits paid for by those who are forced to buy health care insurance because they are citizens. These observations are sometimes attributed to Ben Stein, but this attribution is incorrect. The observations are, nonetheless, worth thinking about. I have added the relevant documentary links.

In just the last two tax years alone, my wife and I have paid in excess of $6000 in additional 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax to support Obamacare. This is not our payment for health insurance for ourselves or our children, which we are happy to pay and is separate, but an additional tax that we pay to support the health insurance of others. And yet, if we complain about being forced to pay this tax, we are thought of as troglodytes or neanderthals for being unwilling to contribute our "fair share" of the upkeep of the brave new progressive world. This all reminds me of the other observation, this one correctly attributed to Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money to spend."

Minimum wage lunacy from California's Democratic overseers

The increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour in California is not only an outrageous tax imposed by our Democratic overseers on all the citizens of California (including the most vulnerable, for example, retired seniors living on fixed incomes), but also makes no economic sense. Increasing the minimum wage by such a large amount will merely serve to create an enormous incentive to replace unskilled workers in the workplace with robots and automation. Since highly skilled and highly compensated knowledge workers create these robots and automation, increasing the minimum wage will simply boost demand for those workers while driving down demand for low skill minimum wage workers, who now will become too expensive to employ relative to their skill level. This will inevitably result in higher unemployment for those low skill workers and a lower average wage, thereby actually increasing wage inequality.

If the Democrats had intentionally set out to hasten the spread of the kind of technological unemployment identified by Erik Brynjolfsson, they could not have chosen a better mechanism for doing so than by raising the minimum wage so dramatically. California Democrats claim to be acting on behalf of the little guy, when, in fact, they are driving the little guy right out of work.