If You Give A Mouse A Cookie…

I think “If you give a mouse a cookie…” is going to be my motto for 2019. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is a children’s book written by Laura Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond. The book was published in 2015 and contains more wisdom than most adult books. The basic premise is that if you give a mouse a cookie he will want milk to go with it. Then he will want a chair to sit in and a table to sit at. You get the picture. Well, on January 11th, The Las Vegas Review-Journal posted an article that beautifully illustrates the message of the book.

The article reports:

The Fight for $15 isn’t living up to its promise.

For years, liberals have claimed that the minimum wage needs to increase to $15 an hour to provide a living wage for full-time workers. The stated goal, as socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders writes on his website, is straightforward, “We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty.”

In one way, the campaign has been remarkably successful. California and New York are phasing in a statewide $15 an hour minimum wage. Numerous cities, including Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington D.C., have passed $15 an hour minimum wage laws as well.

But as sure as the sun comes up in the morning, progressives are now demanding more.

“$15 an hour: A higher wage, but hardly a living,” a CBS News headline from October reads. After bemoaning the inadequacy of the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage, the CBS story asserts that “even at $15 an hour, life doesn’t get a whole lot easier.”

The article continues:

“The arrival of a $15 hourly minimum wage cannot be considered the end of something,” New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante wrote last week. Her suggestion? A $33 an hour minimum wage for the Big Apple.

Ah, the wonders of progressive economics. Just pass a law mandating that everybody must make at least $68,000 a year — with full medical benefits, vacation time and family leave allowances, of course. But why stop there? Why with a stroke of the pen, we could all be millionaires!

The argument for a higher minimum wage is that in some cities housing is very expensive. Might this be an argument for the free market? If housing is too expensive and people cannot easily afford to live there, don’t they move to places they can afford? If people can’t afford housing in a city, doesn’t the availability of housing increase and put downward pressure on the price?  It seems to me that is one of the reasons many states are losing rather than gaining population.

The article concludes:

The minimum wage was never intended to provide a living wage. Most minimum wage workers aren’t trying to make a living. A great many are earning supplemental income. Most are between 16 and 24 and work part-time. Inexperienced workers don’t produce that much value. It can still be profitable for the company to hire them — at a lower wage rate.

This creates a win-win. Companies make money by hiring less expensive workers. The workers receive the experience and training that allows them to move up the career ladder. According to the Heritage Foundation, two-thirds of minimum wage workers see their wages increase within a year of starting their job.

This normal career progression is short-circuited when politicians meddle in the marketplace and set unreasonable wage floors. As some leftists are now acknowledging, it’s not even as beneficial as advertised for the workers who manage to find work.

Raising the minimum wage isn’t going to end poverty. But it can make it worse.

If the minimum wage ever increases to $50 an hour, I promise to come out of retirement!

More Shark Jumping In The House Of Representatives

While our southern border remains porous, the new majority of House Democrats is busy. On January 3rd, The Hill reported that Representative Julia Brownley of California has introduced a bill to rewrite federal laws with gender-neutral terms, codifying the progressive ideological tenet that distinctions between men and women are exclusionary.

The article reports:

The Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015, but LGBT rights advocates say discrimination against same-sex couples still persists.

Lambda Legal, a civil rights group, has filed two lawsuits in the past year challenging the Social Security Administration’s requirement that couples be married for at least nine months to qualify for survivor’s benefits.

Brownley introduced a similar bill in the previous Congress, and before that the bill was championed by former Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.). The measure failed to make it out of committee.

Brownley said the new legislation will “recognize and re-affirm that all Americans have the right to marry the person they love, to ensure no one is denied federal benefits and protections because of who they love, and more broadly to make sure that same sex couples are treated equally under the law in all respects.”

If the law requires that all couples must be married for at least nine months to collect survivor’s benefits, how is that discriminatory? I think this proposed law is another example of the children’s book If You Give A Mouse A Cookie.

 

If You Give A Mouse A Cookie…

Until recently it was understood that if you immigrated to a country, you learned the language and adopted the culture. You might keep the traditions of your culture alive in your own home, but for the most part, you tried to assimilate into the culture of your new home. Unfortunately, there are many immigrants who have recently arrived in America with the idea of transforming America into the country they left. If you are happy with the culture of the country you left, please stay there–do not attempt to bring that culture here.

BizPac Review posted an article today that illustrates one of the problems immigration without assimilation creates.

The article reports:

group of Muslims who work for Amazon would rather pray than work, and because the multinational tech giant refuses to grant them this entitlement, the Muslims are now fighting back. How? By protesting and airing their grievances to sympathetic ears in the left-wing media.

On Dec. 14 the group of Minneapolis-based East African Muslims held a protest outside the Amazon warehouse where they work to demand longer break times.

…At the moment the Muslim warehouse workers receive two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute break per shift. According to Somali immigrant Khadra Ibrahin, these breaks are too short. Why? Because they make it impossible for her and her peers to both use the restroom and pray.

“And so most of the time we choose prayer over bathroom, and have learned to balance our bodily needs,” she said to Vox, adding that to do otherwise would affect their production rate.

Each employee must pack at least 240 boxes per hour, or 4 per minute, which is possible so long as their breaks are short, i.e., under 15 or 30 minutes. But to use the restroom and pray, Ibrahin and her coworkers would need longer break times. And that’s exactly what they want.

“Workers and the community want respect,” Abdirahman Muse of the Awood Center, which reportedly organized the protest, said to Vox. “Responding to our demands for basic fairness and dignity are things we shouldn’t have had to even push Amazon on. We don’t want charity; we want respect and a fair return on the hard work that brings Amazon their profits.”

A spokesman for Amazon noted, “Associates are welcome to request an unpaid prayer break for over 20 minutes for which productivity expectations would be adjusted.” To me that seems like the perfect solution–you may have all the prayer breaks you want but you will only be paid for the breaks other employees are also paid for. Amazon has a responsibility to allow for religious practices–it does not have a responsibility to pay someone to practice their religion on company time.

I hope that Amazon stands strong on this–caving would set a very bad precedent.

The Fruits Of A Failed Welfare System

Our government welfare system has failed. It has destroyed the black family and undermined the white family. It has trapped many people into poverty that they are not able to escape. It has convinced many talented and capable people that they cannot be successful and left them poor and discouraged. It has also created in some people the idea that they are entitled. To what are they entitled? Anything they think they should have.

I attended a meeting tonight where one of the issues was collection of electric bills. About six percent of the residents of the city involved are seriously delinquent in payment of their electric bills. Since the electric bills are part of the city government, the city is making an effort to collect some of the debt. The proposed method of collection involves deposits to be paid over a period of time and payment of overdue bills. The alternative method would be to forgive the debt and raise the rates on everyone–including the people who routinely pay their bills.

The meeting was packed with people complaining that they could not pay their electric bills or the deposit and did not want their electricity turned off. It really doesn’t work that way. We have government programs that provide a safety net for poor people. We provide food stamps, public housing, rent assistance, etc.

I have run out of patience. I am reminded of the book “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” by Laura Numeroff.

Wikipedia describes the book:

The book is known for its playful, circular pattern. A boy gives a cookie to a mouse. The mouse asks for a glass of milk. He then requests a straw (to drink the milk), a mirror (to avoid a milk mustache), nail scissors (to trim his hair), and a broom (to sweep up). Next he wants to take a nap, to have a story read to him, to draw a picture, and to hang the drawing on the refrigerator. Looking at the refrigerator makes him thirsty, so the mouse asks for a glass of milk. The circle is complete when he wants a cookie to go with it.

I do have compassion for the poor, but I am not convinced that anything we are currently doing to help them is actually helpful. There are many poor people who are very capable of success. Somehow we have to teach them this and give them the tools to achieve success. The War on Poverty has created generations of people who, because they are paid to do nothing, are denied the opportunity to accomplish something. That needs to end.