A recent paper from the Federal Reserve shows that we can expect states with high corporate tax rates to perform poorly on entrepreneurship. Minnesota has high corporate tax rates and poor performance on entrepreneurship. Sadly, our state is just another data point in support of their findings. ...
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In 1970, Minnesota was among the states with the least income inequality. Black household median income was competitive with white households, and Hispanic incomes were nearly identical to white households. Since then, the racial wage gap has increased significantly despite remaining mostly unchanged in the rest of the country. Why are black and Hispanic families so much worse off in Minnesota? The answer is likely the result of several variables. Immigration patterns, language barriers, and skill deficiencies may all contribute to Minnesota’s growing income gap. One important factor, however, is the education system....
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If Farmer and Sue had been forced by the government to pay us the equivalent of $15 an hour, I think they would have hired older people, and avoided teenagers altogether. We were not worth the money or the hassle; that would have been tragic as our basic training was priceless for a lifetime of hard, honest work. ...
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This cartoon sums up a fundamental truth that for some reason, lots of liberals seem unable to grasp. It should be posted in every high school and college classroom! ...
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Public policy must deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. As in any profession, some teachers are better than others. We might wish that more effective teachers paid the same as less effective teachers would work just as hard, but theory, and new evidence from Wisconsin, suggest that this is not the case. If we want to get the best out of our teachers, we need a labor market structured to encourage that. ...
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In late June, the American Enterprise Institute released a study by three scholars which found “more than one-in-two black men (57%) have made it into the middle class or higher as adults, up from 38% in 1960, according to a new analysis of Census data.” The researchers, W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia, Wendy R. Wang of the Institute for Family Studies, and Ronald B. Mincy of Columbia University, also found that the “share of black men who are poor has fallen from 41% in 1960 to 18 percent in 2016.” Surprisingly, this good news generated only one comment...
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When politicians decree that labor costs will rise, businesses are incentivized to switch to capital inputs rather than labor. Who wins and who loses from this? ...
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Leaving aside the question of whether government ought to be involving itself in these sorts of personal decisions, cigarette taxes don't even appear to be working on their own terms. But they do represent a handy source of revenue. ...
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We all want to see higher wages. They’re are the best way of guaranteeing a good standard of living. But, to be sustainable, they need to come from higher productivity, not the wave of legislators’ magic wand. ...
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Minneapolis has passed an ordnance raising the city's minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 and St. Paul is currently considering similar legislation. But why? If you are unsatisfied with your wage of $9.65 or $7.87, you can literally double that by going to work for Metro Transit. ...
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