When someone says “minimum wage,” what comes to mind? Do you think of teenagers flipping burgers? Or a single parent trying to feed several kids? While President Obama and other proponents of a higher minimum wage want you to visualize that single parent, the truth is that a burger-flipping teenager …
Should government agencies use the best information possible? For more than 80 years, the Labor Department has answered that question in the negative. The Davis–Bacon Act (DBA) of 1931 requires federal construction contractors to pay their workers at least the “prevailing wage” in their locality. The Act charges the Labor …
It seems that every day now brings another business owner in the news talking about cutting workers’ hours or making other cost-cutting moves in anticipation of Obamacare’s impact in 2013. Here are just a few of the business owners’ comments on the health care law: “We’ve calculated it will [cost] …
When a questioner at Tuesday’s presidential debate stated that women make only 72 cents for every dollar that men make, both President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney agreed. Not so fast. This figure is highly misleading. The statistic comes from a Census Bureau report (see figure 2 here) comparing the …
In a weak economy, the government should not erect barriers to hiring. But two government policies have hindered the already slow recovery: increases in the minimum wage and government unionization. Eliminating these policies would not be enough to spur a robust recovery—the cause of our current economic weakness goes far …
State governments across the nation are looking for ways to tighten their belts in the face of declining tax revenues and growing budget shortfalls. In Pennsylvania, legislators have offered a measure that would, they claim, dramatically reduce the state’s construction costs on public works projects by bringing contractors’ wages in …
