1. Ron Paul 25%
2. Rick Santorum 19%
3. Mitt Romney 19%
4. Newt Gingrich 17%
5. Michele Bachmann 8%
6. Rick Perry 8%
7. Jon Huntsman 3%

Link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/10/14/occupy_wall_street_a_manifesto_for_insert_date_111687.html

Is this in jest? Just asking …

The minimum wage is a misguided economic policy that attempts to set an hourly wage floor above the prevailing market wage of low-skilled workers. It is advanced by the federal government, 45 state governments, and a few local governments.

I am an opponent of the minimum wage for three reasons: in the short term it is ineffective and even counterproductive in achieving the aims for which it is designed; in the long term it is inefficient, leading to lost economic gains for employers, employees, and consumers; and it is immoral for prohibiting free economic activity in a free society.

The purpose of a minimum wage policy is generally to raise the wages and money incomes of those at the bottom of the wage scale by imposing a wage floor. However, the minimum wage does not force employers to pay the minimum wage to employees; rather, it prohibits employers from paying and employees from taking a lower wage. This is a subtle but critical distinction. It means that, rather than paying a minimum wage that is higher than the market wage, employers can simply terminate or not hire workers whose skills do not provide economic benefits that commensurate with the cost of the higher minimum wage.

Yet even if they choose to pay the higher wage, many of the employers’ options work against the intended beneficiary of the policy. The employer may curtail fringe benefits, thus reducing or eliminating any gains in total compensation. The employer may eliminate training programs, or cut back on improvements to the working environment. Or the employer may just make the employee work harder.

The imposition of a minimum wage may even cause employers to reduce wages to zero. Office internships where employees gain useful training by accepting no pay would in many circumstances pay a low nominal wage if that was permissible by law. Since it is not, interns are paid nothing and there is a shortage of interns as demand outstrips supply.

In an effort to stay competitive, measures such as termination or reduction of benefits or zero pay, which all focus on the employee in question, are the most effective short-term responses. Thus, in general, minimum wage laws result in a decrease in employment or a reduction in benefits of some other kind for low wage workers. This is obviously directly contrary to the intent of the law.

In the longer term, the minimum wage traps low-skilled workers and causes marketplace inefficiencies that hurt consumers, especially poor consumers.

While in the short-term low-skilled workers may escape termination by having their benefits cut instead, in the long-term the minimum wage traps them in a skills gap from which they find it increasingly difficult to recover. When businesses hire new workers at the higher minimum wage, workers with better skills will be hired (or kept) over workers with inferior skills. Whereas previously all workers had the opportunity to compete with higher skilled workers by accepting a lower wage, now they cannot. Without the ability to gain experience and skills at a job with a lower starting wage, low-skilled workers get trapped with no opportunity to acquire skills and thereby compete at the minimum wage level. The lowest rung on the ladder of the American dream is removed.

The minimum wage also contributes to marketplace inefficiencies that affect consumers. Proponents of the minimum wage do not dispute that there are adverse effects, only on who suffers them. They claim that either businesses will suffer the loss themselves or pass on the higher costs in higher prices to consumers. Though there is more sense and more evidence in businesses cutting costs at the source of the problem (the employee) rather than placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage with higher prices or simply losing profit, there is some evidence that this can happen in the long-term. For example, food preparation (59%) is by far the occupation with the most wage earners at the minimum wage. What happens is that fast food and sandwich and burrito shops become less competitive with restaurants where the food is served by a waiter or waitress who earns a tip. This negatively impacts low-income consumers, who generally can not spare the extra cost and time to eat out at sit-down restaurants.

Finally, the minimum wage law is objectionable on moral grounds. Employment is a voluntary contract where an employee exchanges labor and skills to an employer for an agreed wage. To prohibit both from this exchange eliminates a whole segment of potential employers and employees for each, respectively. It is true that an employer may find a worker with more skills to fill the job at the higher mandated wage, but is it fair to restrict his or her choices in such a way? It is also true that a potential employee may find a job with a minimum wage that is available to him because by its nature it is repulsive and has few applicants, but is it fair to eliminate the possibility of a lower-paying job that is more to his liking or that is in the industry he wants to enter? The minimum wage law forcibly eliminates opportunities in a free economy where both employer and employee freely associate. In that way it is not only counterproductive and inefficient but also immoral.

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203633104576623254205029400.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

I read the linked article by William McGurn, The Cult of Anti-Mormonism, and remain unconvinced. I think how a candidate sees the world, man’s place in it, and the possible existence of God(s), all of which are potentially influenced by his religion, to be fair game in presidential politics.

First of all, let’s take McGurn’s opening salvo, about how a candidate in a presidential debate should respond to assertions that the Mormon faith is a cult:

[An appropriate answer] comes from the last sentence of Article VI of the Constitution, and it reads as follows: “[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

Hmmm. Doesn’t work for me. That is a prohibition of a legal qualification. The constitution doesn’t say you can’t vote for someone because of their religion; it says that anyone is allowed to run (and serve) for an office despite their religion. You are not by law disqualified, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to vote for you. The constitution also says that you have to be 35 years old to serve as President; but it doesn’t say you can’t determine a guy is too old to run at 73 (as many people did when Bob Dole ran) or 123 (as I would do).

As I have written before, I think there is a distinction between discriminating against people because of physical factors (race, sex, physical handicaps) and mental factors (religion, national origin). The former have no bearing on presidential judgment, or if it supposed that they do (an argument can be made that women have a different level of aggresiveness than men, for better or worse), it is incidental–the supposed difference is much more readily apparent in their mental factors, such as their policy pronouncements, so the voter can easily ignore the physical one(s).

The latter, on the other hand, may have much more bearing. Take national origin. If a candidate was born in Canada, we discriminate against him or her because of their national origin for the simple fact that we wouldn’t want our president to have a conscious or subconscious bias against America in any dispute or deal with Canada. We don’t do this because we dislike Canadians; we do this because we want our President to represent America first. As it so happens the constitution disallows a President who was born in a foreign country for this very reason. But if it didn’t, people would rightfully point to the candidate’s (non-American) national origin as a reason to vote against them.

Religion is an even stronger mental factor. For many people (perhaps most who are religious), religion forms a cornerstone of their philosophy of life. Theology, morality, and even political philosophy may all be wholly or partially derived from their religious background. With some candidates (like Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush), this is obvious and the connection is strong. With others, where morality and political philosophy may have been developed apart from religion, the connection is weak and conditional.

The importance of his religion is greater if the candidate has fewer stated policy positions. Let’s say you’re a hard-line Roman Catholic and a candidate has made clear, pro-Catholic policy positions on every moral and public policy issue you can think of. At that point, would it matter if the candidate wasn’t actually Catholic? Now let’s say that another candidate for whatever reason has not gotten the message out as to how they stand on any social or moral issue, but you know the candidate is Catholic. Wouldn’t the candidate’s stated religion matter? People can and will use religious affiliation as a short-cut to understanding someone’s politics, on current issues and on issues that are yet unknown, because they know that religious views inform political views. As stated earlier, this link may be strong or it may be weak, and voters can often determine the strength of the association.

Commentators who say that voters shouldn’t consider a candidate’s religion are making a generalization from their own experience. In the past, serious presidential candidates have not had religious affiliations that suggest a dark and nefarious policy streak that is hidden from public view. On the other hand, there have been candidates (Al Smith, and to a much lesser extent John Kennedy) who have been unfairly painted by demagogues because of their religion. For these reasons, such commentators believe that voters should always discard religion in their evaluation.

But was it necessarily wrong for voters to vote against Al Smith just because he was Catholic? If the motivation was strictly animus or ignorance (what some might call bigotry), sure it was wrong. But what if a voter simply figured they did not like Catholic values or moral teachings, that this plays prominently (paramount?) in the voter’s view of government policy, and Al Smith being Catholic meant that Al Smith would be more likely to implement these values? That doesn’t sound ignorant or bigoted at all, at least not more so than a socialist voting against a Republican for the mere fact that they are Republican, since Republicans are for a smaller government.

I will say that despite my serious misgivings about pushing voters to ignore completely a candidate’s religious affiliation, the seed of this discussion and McGurn’s article demands little consideration from the voter. It doesn’t appear to me that either Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman conveys much of their Mormon religious value system to their political views. Nor does it appear that someone who did have a saturated Mormon morality would propose public policies terribly different (or worse) than the status quo. Nor does it appear that either candidate (at least not Romney) is policy opaque to a degree that we could only infer policies from his religion. So it all is a moot point, no? If that is the case, why make a big deal out of your prerogative to use someone’s religion in deciding their fitness as a candidate?

The question is important for two reasons. First, I don’t like the thought police coming out with their political correctness telling people not to use available information, especially if it is just being used to fill in the gaps of a candidate’s political philosophy. Second, some religions do harbor moral and political views that are antithetical to the values and beliefs of a large segment of the American people. For example, Islam. This is not to say that a Muslim candidate for federal office should be disqualified in the minds of American voters (realizing they are not by the U.S. Constitution). But if a Muslim is cagey about their stands on the existence of Israel, the public tolerance of homosexuality, or the place of women in the workforce and society, voters who feel differently about these issues may be justified in voting against him or her simply because they can infer from the candidate’s religion that it is possible that the candidate would favor or implement anathematic policies. The same is true for candidates of any religion, to the degree that the public policy or the codification of morality that the religion itself espouses differs from the voter’s.

Link: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/10/key-to-entitlement-reform-full-refund/

An excellent article.

Main point:

Entitlements arguably have two components. First is a “contributive” component, which many Americans perceive as the money the government takes out of their paychecks and they view as contributing to their own retirements. Because all working people pay into Social Security and Medicare from their paychecks, they feel they bought into the system.

Then there’s the “redistributive” component, whereby some Americans with lower lifetime earnings receive more from these programs than they pay into them. Surely, not all Americans take the time to identify these two components or determine if they agree with both or one or the other.

But support for Social Security and Medicare is largely driven by the “contributive” element. Americans simply want to recoup the money they contribute to the system. They just want their money back. If policymakers can communicate that entitlement reform will not rip off contributions, they may be able to garner enough public support for meaningful reforms.

Emily Ekins’ polling for Reason found that 51% (Medicare) and 57% (Social Security) of respondents would be unwilling to have their benefits cut to balance the federal budget. But, if offered a full refund of dollars they (and their employers) paid in, the imbalance reverses: 59% (Medicare) and 61% (Social Security) of respondents would be willing to favor cuts in these programs “if they were guaranteed to get back what they and their employers have contributed into the two programs.”

Liberals always like to trumpet Social Security as one of our government’s most popular programs. Maybe it’s just popular in the sense that people want it around to get back what they put in.