Do crazy licensing rules kill entrepreneurship?
All states—though not the anarchic United Kingdom—require barbers to be licensed, but the specific requirements seem to vary arbitrarily. New York barbers need 884 days of education and apprenticeship. Across the river in New Jersey, it’s 280. But getting one’s hair cut in New Jersey (to say nothing of England) is hardly a life-threatening gamble.
Taxes don’t kill entrepeneurship. Crazy licencing rules do. — Matthew Yglesias, Slate.com
The worst-paying cities for women
While it’s been nearly a century since women across the country won the right to vote and the right to work alongside men, equal pay continues to remain a distant goal.
Is decoupling real? « Consider the Evidence
Since the 1970s, income growth for middle-class American households has become decoupled from growth of the economy.
Paychecks for young adults getting slimmer
Wages for young workers have been declining for more than a decade. They fell off a cliff during the Great Recession to levels not seen since the 1970s for certain groups of entry-level workers, according to new data from center-left think tank the Economic Policy Institute.
Bye Bye American Pie: The Challenge of the Productivity Revolution
So while the productivity revolution is indubitably good, the task ahead is to figure out how to distribute more of its gains to more of our people.
via Robert Reich Bye Bye American Pie: The Challenge of the Productivity Revolution.
Eliminating Minimum Wages as a Jobs Plan?
Fox News said Cain’s opportunity zone plan risks angering unions because it would enact policies they consider bad policy, such as the elimination of the U.S. minimum wage.
Eliminating unemployment is a necessary yet not sufficient solution. We need living wages. At issue here is not whether eliminating minimum wages would diminish joblessness (increase employment); rather it is to question living standards. Implementing a policy as this would create a larger poverty class. Even currently employed workers in affected areas would suffer as they would now be competing in a race to the bottom.
via Cain to scrap minimum wage in poor areas? – politics – Decision 2012 – msnbc.com.
Recession officially over, but US incomes kept falling
In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found.
Only the most educated 3% saw wage gains between 2000 and 2010
Welcome to another edition of Charts that Speak for Themselves. This one shows that we live in a country in which the 97 percent of the population without education beyond a master’s degree experienced declining income over the past decade.
via Daily Kos: Only the most educated 3% saw wage gains between 2000 and 2010.
Inside the Trillion-Dollar Underground Economy Keeping Many Americans Barely Afloat in Desperate Times
The Young Womens Empowerment Project [PDF] describes the “street economy” as “… any way that girls make cash money without paying taxes or having to show identification. Sometimes this means the sex trade. But other times it means braiding hair, babysitting, selling CDs/DVDs, drugs or other skills like sewing and laundry.”
leave a comment