Random Politics & Religion #25

Such a nice victory lap while Trump sits on the sidelines and does nothing. Enjoy those hostile town halls.

inb4 Vic coming here, making a victory lap, while the score is still Trump 140, liberals 6.

The Supreme Court gave several examples. "Bona fide" is a term from UCIS along with the various levels of "hardship", lots of legal precedent already existing.


Absolutely not, Supreme Court explicitly said that agencies purposefully setup to assist foreigners to come to the USA would not be considered a bona fide relationship.


Nope.

It's pretty much family of US Citizens or Legal Permanent Residents, not just anyone already in the USA. Or someone who's already accepted a position with a US company, university or business function. Anyone familiar with the US immigration system (I now am intimately familiar) should recognize those are various already existing visa programs that involve a rather lengthy process. Furthermore the position must be authentic, meaning they can't of been accepted / hired merely to get them into the US.

Now the media hasn't talked about this but UCIS and DHS are cracking down on visa fraud and mass importing of foreigners into the US. Random site inspections and a higher bar of proof required, especially for H1B's.

Honestly, if this was a Muslim ban, it's not a very good one.

For one: It doesn't ban Muslims. It just prevents people hailing from certain countries or who has documents (forged or legit) from those countries.

For two: It doesn't even target all the countries who are primarily or majority Muslim. Heck, it barely targets the tip of the iceberg.

So, for a ban against a religion, it certainly is not effective at all.

Also, the Supreme Court was very specific in stating that foreign nationals do not have Constitutional Rights. Bona Fide or not, they don't have the same US rights as US citizens do.

Such a nice victory lap while Trump sits on the sidelines and does nothing. Enjoy those hostile town halls.

In my mind the big questions would be refugees who have ... college acceptance letters.

The experiment has hurt low-wage workers, cutting their earnings by $125 a month.

In the summer of 2014, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a bill increasing the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. “No city or state has gone this far. We go into uncharted territory,” said council member Sally Clark. The City of Seattle, to its credit, actually made some effort to chart the waters as they went, funding an ideologically diverse research team at the University of Washington whose members range from Jacob Vigdor, who is a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, to Hillary Wething, a graduate student who used to be a fellow at the left-wing Economic Policy Institute.

Since the law raised the wage in stages, they studied it in stages. The results of the first jump, from $9.47 to $11 an hour, were released last year, and seemed to show that the effects on earnings were pretty small -- an increase of about $72 every three months -- and that low-wage employment declined slightly. In the long-running battle over the effects of the minimum wage, this paper didn’t offer much ammunition for either side, and thus occasioned relatively little excitement in the wonkosphere.

Now the question has acquired a little sizzle. UW is not the only school studying Seattle’s experiment, and last week a report came out from UC Berkeley, focused specifically on food services. Last week, that study reported: “Our results show that wages in food services did increase -- indicating the policy achieved its goal. … Employment in food service, however, was not affected, even among the limited-service restaurants, many of them franchisees, for whom the policy was most binding.”

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray seemed ecstatic at the news; as Michael Saltsman noted at the time, he “conveniently had an infographic designed and ready to go for the study's release. His office excitedly tweeted that the policy had 'raised food workers' pay, without negative impact on employment,' linking to an uploaded study version on the Mayor's personal .gov website rather than a University domain.”

This morning's data gives ammunition to the mayor's opposition. The University of Washington released its second study, this one covering the increase from $11 an hour to $13. And this study found huge effects: For every 1 percent increase in their hourly wage, low-wage workers saw a 3 percent reduction in the number of hours worked. As a result, they lost about $125 in earnings a month, clawing back the entire gain from the earlier hike and more.

Mayor Murray did not have an infographic ready to go for this study. Instead, he simply retweeted the infographic from the old one.

This is hardly the first time we’ve had dueling studies on the minimum wage; indeed, by this point, the dueling is so common that the minimum wage practically has its own rules of engagement. But it’s pretty rare for a city to fund one study and then try to rebut it with another. Worse still for the citizens of Seattle, a read of the new paper suggests that this rebuttal won’t work.

To understand why not, you first need to understand a little bit of the history of minimum wage research. Such research has often focused on restaurants, because they employ a lot of low-wage workers, which would seem to make them a good proxy for a variety of low-wage industries. The most famous study in the field is probably David Card and Alan Krueger’s study of fast food restaurants from 1994. When you hear someone on the left claim that “research shows” minimum wage increases don’t hurt employment, then you can almost certainly trace that statement back to Card and Krueger.

Reality was always more complicated. We are not working with a model in a textbook where undifferentiated widget manufacturers hire indistinguishable workers from a giant pile of bodies marked “labor.” Different industries, different firms within those industries, and different workers within those firms may all have very different experiences under a minimum wage: some unaffected, some better off, some driven into insolvency. So while Card and Krueger was important, it was by no means the final word that some took it for.

The new paper, unlike Card and Krueger, has broad data covering all of Washington’s workers, not just those employed by fast food franchises that happened to be operating at the beginning of the study. This is no slur on Card and Krueger, mind you; Washington State just happens to have unusually rich data available compared to most other states.[1]

Leading labor economist David Autor told the Washington Post that “This strikes me as a study that is likely to influence people,” saying the study is "very credible" and "sufficiently compelling in its design and statistical power that it can change minds." In other words: if you thought it was settled science that raising the minimum wage is good for workers, be prepared to think again.

And particularly be prepared to rethink very high minimum wages, like those supported by the “Fight for $15” folks. For as the authors note, the first round of hikes had relatively small impacts, while the second round had huge ones, suggesting that the effects may be nonlinear. And that makes sense. Relatively few people in this country make the minimum wage, so a small increase doesn’t make that much difference to most workers, or most employers. But a large jump affects more people, and the wage increases are much bigger for the lowest-paid staffers. If you make $9 an hour, but generate $10.50 in revenue for your boss, a law that raises the wage to $10.45 may cause her to shrug and decide it’s easier to keep you on as long as she’s making something. But a wage that forces her to pay you far more than you bring in…. Continuing to employ you would just be bad business.

It’s worth noting that Card and Krueger’s famous study involved an increase in the minimum wage from $4.25 an hour to $5.05. That was a significant increase -- about 18 percent. But Seattle’s minimum wage has already increased by 37 percent, and it still has roughly another 20 percent to go.

At some level, we all intuitively understood that this was true. If the minimum wage increases by a penny an hour, probably even most rock-ribbed conservatives would not predict mass firings. On the other hand, if the wage was arbitrarily set to $100 an hour, even ardent labor activists would presumably expect widespread unemployment to follow. You can’t flat-out say “minimum wages don’t increase unemployment,” because the size of the increase, and the level of the resulting wage, obviously matter at some margin.

Seattle may have discovered that margin. And unfortunately, it may yet discover even further, uglier margins when the data is in on the full increase to $15. That’s the danger of striking out for uncharted territory; sometimes, you end up where there be dragons.

#4Chanti (and anyone else who cares about the debate on minimum wage):

Seattle's Painful Lesson on the Road to a $15 Minimum Wage
...

Interestingly enough both this study and a previous one focused on food service

This paper evaluates the wage, employment, and hours effects of the first and second phase-in of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance, which raised the minimum wage from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015 and to $13 per hour in 2016. Using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly rate, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent. Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees’ earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016. Evidence attributes more modest effects to the first wage increase. We estimate an effect of zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage levels, comparable to many prior studies.

Senate Republicans Can't Get Enough Backing For Their Health Bill So They Delayed The Vote

Six senators have said publicly that they cannot support the health care bill as written, while several others are on the fence. Republicans are heading to the White House Tuesday afternoon to discuss the issue.
BuzzFeed

Looking less likely to happen now.

I agree with your take on those two examples Saevel.

In my mind the big questions would be refugees who have relatives in the USA or college acceptance letters. Also how hard DHS will push on the academic front; students, lecturers, conference attendees and speakers.

Also: The study regarding the hurt the increase in minimum wage is doing (on average).

I can't wait for the reality deniers to deny this!

So $11 is fine but $13 is too much (for Seattle, in a preliminary result). $11 is still more than $7.25.

You are fine with higher labor costs, and lower wages for the employees?

Ehh, I wouldn't put it past you.

Nope.

The one from Washington State, the one that says that minimum wage increases actually hurt wages, focused not on one industry, but all industries that has minimum wages....

The previous one focused on food service, the one you quoted was broader but mentioned food service in part.

Deliberate misconstruction?

So $11 is fine but $13 is too much (for Seattle, in a preliminary result). $11 is still more than $7.25.

An $11 dollar increase didn't reportedly result in a decrease in wages.

The framed copy of Time Magazine was hung up in at least four of President Trump’s golf clubs, from South Florida to Scotland. Filling the entire cover was a photo of Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” the big headline said. Above the Time nameplate, there was another headline in all caps: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!”

This cover — dated March 1, 2009 — looks like an impressive memento from Trump’s pre-presidential career. To club members eating lunch, or golfers waiting for a pro-shop purchase, it seemed to be a signal that Trump had always been a man who mattered. Even when he was just a reality-TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in Time.

But that wasn’t true.

The Time cover is a fake.

There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time Magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

In fact,the cover on display at Trump’s clubs, observed recently by a reporter visiting one of the properties, contains several small but telling mistakes. Its red border is skinnier than that of a genuine Time cover, and, unlike the real thing, there is no thin white border next to the red. The Trump cover’s secondary headlines are stacked on the right side — on a real Time cover, they would go across the top....

The previous one focused on food service, the one you quoted was broader but mentioned food service in part.

Deliberate misconstruction?

Real facts I don't like Dept:

A Time Magazine with Trump on the cover hangs in his golf clubs. It’s fake.
WaPo


Real Time cover is on the left.

You mean from that study that only looked at a very specific industry (restaurants) because, if it actually looked at the economy as a whole, it would have come to the same conclusion as what the Washington State did?

Also, for comparison purposes, the Washington State study also showed that the specific industry noted in the previous study (aka, the only restaurant industry method) would have shown no change in findings.

But hey, if you want to say that only restaurants should have minimum wage, I'm sure you would please the 95% of the country that isn't restaurants but have minimum wage workers.

The same study evaluated both phases of the increase.