• Productivity gains not a good reason for minimum wage increase

TheCBS News article below could have been written by the poorly educated AOC, the “Econ major” from Boston University (which showed what wonders it could do with a childish dimwit) . . . or perhaps Pope Francis — the Marxist prelate who hates capitalism, the USA, anybody who voted for D J Trump, and any economic system other than communism . . . or maybe Bernie Sanders, who fell in love all over again during his honeymoon trip to view the marvels of communism in the Soviet Union.

Should the minimum wage really be $26 an hour?
Aimee Picchi

The federal minimum wage in the U.S. has remained glued at $7.25 an hour for the last 12 years, the longest stretch without a boost since it was first adopted in 1938. Yet there’s another revealing figure that underscores how the minimum wage — created by Congress after the Great Depression as a way to ensure that Americans were fairly paid for their labor — has failed to keep up with the times.

Even as workers have been more industrious — helping drive corporate profits, the stock market and CEO compensation to record heights — their pay has flatlined, or even declined when factoring in inflation. If the minimum wage had kept pace with gains in the economy’s productivity over the last 50 years, it would be nearly $26 an hour today, or more than $50,000 a year in annual income, one economist notes.

“That may sound pretty crazy, but that’s roughly what the minimum wage would be today if it had kept pace with productivity growth since its value peaked in 1968,” wrote Dean Baker, senior economist at the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, in a recent blog post.

Productivity — how much income someone generates in an hour of work — is critical for the economy because it helps determine a country’s standard of living. Yet rising productivity is no guarantee of a healthy economy. Equally important is how the fruits of productivity are divided.

To that end, “Having the minimum wage track productivity growth is not a crazy idea,” Baker said.

A recent CBS News poll found that most Americans support a hike in the federal minimum wage, a view that cut across socioeconomic status.

Our observation:

“Having the minimum wage track productivity growth is not a crazy idea,” —  ahem,  he doth protest too much and pretty much yes it is a crazy idea. (see economic definition of productivity below)

Capital investment is key to productivity growth and the safety and efficiency of labor. And to a great extent it can supplant labor.  The guy who turns on the machine by pushing a button which at present is a necessary function by humans (coldheartedly, arguably a limitation to the process) and maybe monitoring its performance, (something that down the road can perhaps be computerized) just to start and see that machine pump out 100 times more widgets or do a hundred more welds more precisely in an hour than he or maybe ten other humans working together could do,  can not honestly be considered as contributing a key skill to productivity if productivity is the benchmark.  That worker may actually be less trained in the widget making or welding process than previous workers who actually had to know how to weld. Such a function may now only require a low skilled worker to push the button and if monitoring, push another button to sound an alarm (in lieu of computerization of that process). Such productivity is a poor benchmark for wage determination.

Investopedia    https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/labor-productivity.asp
What Is Labor Productivity?
Labor productivity measures the hourly output of a country’s economy. Specifically, it charts the amount of real gross domestic product (GDP) produced by an hour of labor. Growth in labor productivity depends on three main factors: saving and investment in physical capital, new technology, and human capital.

Key Takeaways
•    Labor productivity measures output per labor hour.
•    Labor productivity is largely driven by investment in capital, technological progress, and human capital development.
•    Business and government can increase labor productivity of workers by direct investing in or creating incentives for increases in technology and human or physical capital.

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It is not merely about the efficacy of a vaccine, it is about inhibiting take-home cures, denigrating natural immunity, denying possible sequelae of the “vaccine” and  mandates

There are more in the hospital “with COVID” now than a year ago when vaccines were not available

• Biden owns COVID
• Watchdogs concede to neither the sheep nor the wolves
• “We may not have reached herd immunity, but we’ve definitely achieved herd stupidity.” *
• Applies especially to Australia (sheep country)

Listening to the Clay and Buck show yesterday (the worthy replacements for Rush Limbaugh on the EIB Network distributed by Premier Broadcasting) the two engaged in this conversation:  (transcript from ClayandBuck.com)

CLAY: I want to hit with you a data point that I think is significant that is not being discussed anywhere. Joe Biden ran his entire campaign on the idea that he was going to fix covid. He hid in the basement, he wore the oversized mask, he used it as a cudgel to attack Donald Trump all the time. The idea that Trump was not taking covid seriously enough, the idea that Trump had mismanaged covid — all of that — was the underlying theme and justification, alongside of normalcy, that Joe Biden based his entire presidential campaign upon.

We are now coming up on the fall, now that we have passed Labor Day, and you can look at the data from last fall, a year ago, when Joe Biden was making this argument all through Labor Day in September. Did you know, Buck Sexton, that right now today as we speak, there are twice as many people hospitalized with covid as on Labor Day last year when Joe Biden was saying that President Trump was doing an awful job of handling covid?

He owns covid now, and this failure — which would, honestly, if Trump were still in office, that hospitalization data would be being used as continued failure of the Trump administration. Yet I’d bet a huge percentage of our audience right now that’s listening to us has no idea that compared to last Labor Day, we have twice as many people hospitalized right now with covid as we did last year.
BUCK: And how could that be? As we know the dominant lib, journo, media narrative is day in and day out… How could the current surge, not just in cases, but hospitalizations, be the fault of the unvaccinated, and it exceeds where we were a year ago, remember? Right?

CLAY: When everyone was unvaccinated.
BUCK: When everybody was unvaccinated a year ago.
CLAY: It’s a great point.

BUCK: So how is it possible to blame those who have not been unvaccinated when it’s worse somehow now with than it was a year ago when it was not possible to even be vaccinated, there is obviously something else going on here, Clay, which is why the questions about, “How does this end, what does that look like, what do we have to do, how long do these vaccines really lost, how well do they really work?” If we had an honest, not just journalistic but scientific community in this country… People are still so terrified. We both know personally doctors who think that what’s —
CLAY: Lots of them.

BUCK: — going with Fauciism is madness, but they don’t want to abandon all their patients and their career by being booted out of their hospital and having their license suspended for questioning Fauci. This is like the flat-eartherism of our current moment, actually. It’s not people that are skeptical of vaccines. It’s people who won’t allow there to be the questions about vaccines.

CLAY: And what I would say too, Buck — I think you hit it well there with the flat-earthism. We talked about the heliocentric versus geocentric theories. Take the people all the way back to sixth grade science. But the essence of this and why it should be so offensive to everyone out there regardless of your political beliefs is, science is about rigorously questioning conventional wisdom.

hat’s how we get to legitimate ideas and new hypotheses and theories which govern our existence. And yet, if you point out, “Wait a minute. Israel, right now, is starting to discuss a fourth different covid shot. They have already given everybody a third covid vaccine. They are now talking about a fourth.” Israeli data reflects that the number of people who are testing positive for covid continues to skyrocket in that country.

nd if you ask, “Wait a minute. Is this really a vaccine? Is it a therapeutic?” How is it that we, with 75%, Buck, of people 18 and up in this country have received at least one covid vaccine shot have twice as many people hospitalized for covid this year as we did at the exact same time last year when no one had an opportunity to be vaccinated yet?

BUCK: How is it the Biden administration gets away — day in and day out — with not addressing this in any way other than just to say, “We need everyone to get vaccinated”? Clearly that does not end this thing.

CLAY: That’s right. That’s the key.

BUCK: Because you have a lot of people who are vaccinated who are still getting covid. And I know that they say, “Oh, it protects from severe disease.” Okay. How long does it protect? If the vaccine wanes in effectiveness, right, the assumption here could be, all right. Maybe you have enough antibodies that you’re more likely than not going to survive. But does that also…? Remember, originally it was you won’t get it? You’re basically not gonna get covid. Rochelle Walensky of the CDC, the director, said, “You don’t get it; you don’t spread it. Get the vaccine!” That was the pitch. Now you definitely can get it, right? I mean, maybe it’s less likely —

CLAY: You can still get hospitalized with it. I mean, there’s still… Look, it’s not as if your chances of ever dying of covid-19 go away when you get this vaccine. You could still die of covid.

BUCK: And we’re looking now at a situation where, I think, Clay, they don’t want to do the real analysis. They don’t want to actually look at natural immunity because we could be heading toward a point where it’s just everyone’s basically gonna get covid —

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: — and the way that this actually not goes away entirely but gets under control is when enough people have natural immunity, more so even than vaccinated immunity. I’m not saying we’re there yet, but that’s clearly in the background here, and when you’re talking about getting a third, fourth shot, now all the questions about, “All right. Well, what are the side effects and what percentage of people have them?

“And how much is too much? And what does it do?” I mean, as a simple function of math, if one in 100,000 people have a really bad reaction to a shot, if everyone has to get it every year, the math starts to add up very quickly to, “What’s really the benefit of this, especially if it starts to fade, if the protection of it goes away very quickly.”

Related commentary:

BUCK: (impression) “Get vaccinated or you can’t be in the economy.”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Something like that. That’s what the guy in Australia is saying. Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. The Aussie accent’s kind of funky. It’s a tough one to do. This is what they’re doing there, folks. I just think you should know that whereas a lot of us have been for a while here pointing to Australia saying, look at how crazy they are. I think that the CDC, Democrat control apparatus of the Fauciites sees Australia and goes, “Wow, that’s possible here too. We could do some of that stuff!”

I mean, Clay, just to give everyone a sense, new cases in Australia right now, they’ve these severe restriction… Remember, it’s an island, much lower population density, a lot going in its favor for covid in the first place. New cases, 1,545 as of today. The previous peak was in August of 2020, 395 cases! So somehow — in the era of vaccination and extreme lockdown in Australia — they’re having their worst covid surge ever. Hmm. Interesting.

BUCK: (impression) “Get vaccinated or you can’t be in the economy.”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Something like that. That’s what the guy in Australia is saying. Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. The Aussie accent’s kind of funky. It’s a tough one to do. This is what they’re doing there, folks. I just think you should know that whereas a lot of us have been for a while here pointing to Australia saying, look at how crazy they are. I think that the CDC, Democrat control apparatus of the Fauciites sees Australia and goes, “Wow, that’s possible here too. We could do some of that stuff!”

I mean, Clay, just to give everyone a sense, new cases in Australia right now, they’ve these severe restriction… Remember, it’s an island, much lower population density, a lot going in its favor for covid in the first place. New cases, 1,545 as of today. The previous peak was in August of 2020, 395 cases! So somehow — in the era of vaccination and extreme lockdown in Australia — they’re having their worst covid surge ever. Hmm. Interesting.

*great quote forwarded by TN

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Obama sort of signaled after the 2020 (fraudulent) election that he will be in charge, perhaps a bit giddy that his dream had come true — see 40 second video below

Obama, free of reelection workload and due bills, and a lazy twerp anyway, and Joe Biden – pliable one-termer — who they saddled with a desirable to them but a rather loathsome to the peasants successor — Kamala Harris — will  continue the denigrating of America after the Trump interruption due to the equally loathsome unelectable Hillary Clinton (the cheat system had not been worked out).  The stupid and generally controllable but deteriorating Biden  — was perfect for Obama’s dream– or so they thought.

But Obama and Obamaites perhaps now nod to one another confirming as Obama warned   “don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up” 

The clip below was widely characterized as Obama joking.  I do not think he was.  He was being flattered by Colbert and rose to the occasion with a phony giggle feigning humility, then offering his dream.

But Biden’s buffoonery, instinct to lie, and rough edged reserve of evil  has meant the plan must be implemented more carefully as the midterms are at risk.  While Joe is following orders  he is so far gone the optics are troublesome. They need more time.  Be sure and wait for the 40 second video to load.

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Chasten Buttigieg and his wife, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced that they are parents of two new-born children. (our headline*)

The gay couple was photographed in a hospital bed sporting what appears to be hospital admission bracelets while cradling two infants. The black and white photograph gives the impression that they – um – well – never mind.

Chasten and I are beyond thankful for all the kind wishes since first sharing the news that we’re becoming parents. We are delighted to welcome Penelope Rose and Joseph August Buttigieg to our family.

Oh yes “two daddies”? no mommies, one warped woke culture celebrating this travesty.

Can you get these at Neiman Marcus or wherever the elite gay go to shop?

Our impression is that because the babies were born in a hospital in the states they are not foreign adoptions. A wanting, loving, normal, male – female /mom and dad couple are left on the waiting list.

Of course the liberal media took a break from reporting that hospitals are overrun with unvaccinated COVID patients (a lie) to show these two taking up bed space  to have a photo-op with children they did not birth. Why in the hell are they issued a room and sharing a bed??  Oh well glad there were no complications for either of them.  There are creams for the stretch marks.

Reading the story link

In July, the couple nearly adopted a baby from a mother who was in labor who changed her mind about giving her baby up for adoption.

“It’s a really weird cycle of anger and frustration and hope,” Chasten told the Post in a July interview. “You think it’s finally happening and you get so excited, and then it’s gone.”

What the hell do they have to be angry about, a birth mother changing her mind and keeping the baby??!!. Adoptive parents are there for the child, not simply their egos.

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This is not a V’PAC position just an early huzzah from one editor.  Recognizing there are many possible substitutions, some perhaps improved,  the only issue I have with the roster  is a significant assured place for Ted Cruz if he wants one. Certainly McConnell should take his leave but we also understand the prickly nature of the Senate. I hope Trump would see the strength of the roster and historic opportunity for him as Speaker. His revenge (actually justice)  would be more attainable.  A Trump 2024 run with DeSantis as VP is of course eminently supportable but I do not think the accompanying drama is necessary or frankly AS winnable (although certainly winnable) apart from extensive fraud again.  From Deroy Murdock at Townhall:

Picture this: The 2024 GOP Dream Team

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• Change requires we stay in the game
• Some media outlets are capable of some straight “fair time” reporting  although usually they remain outlets for CDC mRNA propaganda and COVID fear porn 
• QCTimes is a hopeless rag
• More attention to organization will produce more effective results
• Another demonstration this Thursday 4:00 to 6:00 at Unity Point Bettendorf on Utica Ridge Rd

Well attended demonstrations, amplified by extensive support from passersby, were held the past few days in the Quad Cities area opposing vaccine mandates with another one set for tomorrow September 2nd. There has been one at Unity Point Trinity in Moline and one which we participated in at Genesis West in Davenport Sunday.  We were told of similar well attended events in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines.

One takeaway from these is that while freedom champions may feel beleaguered by the tyrannical dictates, threats, and propaganda they are constantly bombarded with, from indications of response to these rather low key protest efforts there is wide support for efforts to oppose vaccine mandates. As well attended as they were it was clear that more would have attended given the enthusiasm registered by so many passerby with horn-honks and waves.

Another is that at least elements of the local broadcast media are capable of reporting community events without bias.  The QC Times is another matter as that newspaper is nothing but an outlet for fear porn over COVID-19, propagandizing for those who push mask mandates, no jab no job employer requirements, etc. and denigration of any who, backed by science, challenge lockdowns and mandates. Check out their treatment of the significant event on Sunday (link provided) compared to coverage by local broadcast media. We also impart some candid pics from the protest.

KWQC (link) (NBC affiliate)

Hundreds protest mask mandate, COVID-19 vaccine requirement outside Genesis West in Davenport.

WHBF (CBS affiliate) and KLJB (Fox affiliate)

https://www.ourquadcities.com/news/local-news/250-plus-protest-genesis-mask-mandate-sunday-afternoon/

This is all the local newspaper of  record could muster.  Note it is reference to last Thursday’s protest in Moline but 95% of the story is more fear porn from them and official hospital stokesholes, nothing from the medical types and their supporters protesting mandates.  The QC Times has abandoned journalism.  More analysis in coming posts

Assorted candid shots from Sunday protest:

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• ARE WE KEEPING YOU UP, JOE?
• Or are you nervous?
• Not just once but many times he insults the families, the military and the nation with his watch checking
• Sure doesn’t look like a smartwatch
• Maybe it was getting on to be ice-cream time

Relax. There’s just a few more coffins to be unloaded, buddy.

Related reading: 

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• see articles regarding Chase ethics below
• perhaps the dirtiest of the dirty

The Nazis were all about corporations serving the political goals of the party

BANK’S REPUTATION

ARE YOU KIDDING???

There’s a bigger threat to the reputation of anyone who has a credit card account with this outfit! Who wants friends, relatives, and business associates to think  they do business with a sleazy institution (our opinion) like Chase?! (Consider: If you voted for Trump, Chase apparently believes you would be a risk to their “reputation”.)

Here’s the notice Chase sent to General Michael Flynn:

“Update: We are closing your credit cards

After careful consideration, we decided to close your credit cards on September 18, 2021 because continuing the relationship creates possible reputational risk to our company.”

Chase Bank Goes Full Woke, Cancels Gen Flynn’s Credit Card Over “Reputational Risk

So Chase does not like Gen. Flynns politics.   That is what this is about. What do you want to bet Chase has cards out to more actual known reprobates, convicted felons, despicable politicos than you can shake a stick at?

If Chase were to be excluded from say government contracts because the powers that be decided they did not like Chase’s politics, or just their scandalous history out of concern for the peoples “reputational risk”, it seems to us they have given up any argument or complaint as regards “discrimination” “unfairness”, “equal treatment”, “prejudicial treatment” , “political punishment” or “unjust retribution” .

Here are some articles about the fine upstanding folks at Chase

Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Agrees To Pay $920 Million in Connection with Schemes to Defraud Precious Metals and U.S. Treasuries Markets

U.S. Authorities Seize 20 Tons Of Cocaine From Ship Owned By JP Morgan.

JPMORGAN CHASE’S RECORD HIGHLIGHTS DOUBTS ABOUT BIG BANK’S DEVOTION TO FIGHTING FLOW OF DIRTY MONEY

Human Smugglers Thrive With Help of U.S. Banks.

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What will Kamala’s next trip include? Laying a wreath at the tomb of Josef Stalin?    dlh

But look here are two different poses by our Vice-President with different busts to Ho in the background. Is this a hall of Ho’s or something. Well she fits right in (only with reference to political ideology of course). As she stands before both is that a wave or a swearing in or pledge of allegiance thing?  R Mall

Kamala Harris Poses In Front Of Communist Ho Chi Minh Bust – “The WORST Photo Op For An American In That Country Since Jane Fonda Donned A Helmet There In 1972.”

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