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It’s about improving people’s lives. Miss ya, Paul!

More Games, More Work

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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report has a simple title, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2014 to 2024”. If the whole thing sounds about as cut and dried as possible, you’d be completely wrong. After all, the is the US in 2014, a place where absolutely anything can become a political football. A nonpartisan report from a respected institution which is full of detail and hard to read makes a perfect game ball.

The last week has been nothing but back and forth on the topic of how many jobs are destroyed, er, left behind with glee because of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Nevermind that the bulk of the report was indeed a warning about what will happen if we don’t straighten the budget out in the next decade. That’s hard work, however, and no one will look good on teevee talking about that. So let’s get to the garbage that filled the airwaves instead.

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Something Like a Warning

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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released their projections for the next 10 years and you can tell they were written by economists. There is plenty of good news and bad news in the report, and the details become very hard to read. Deficits will go down, and the economy will grow – but interest on the debt already incurred is going to turn into a very large and crippling bill.

To make these projections, they start with current policy and trends and simply extrapolate forward. None of it is written in stone, and some of it is clearly a warning to create new policies. Let’s run down what we have in front of us and what has to be done.

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Head Count or Overhead?

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What are you worth as an employee? A good check for anyone working is to add up what it takes to keep them employed and what their net value is to the company. A strong positive value means job security, something pretty valuable these days. But to do it right, what you cost the company is a lot more than just your salary. There are benefits, like health care and retirement plans, yes. The total cost is far more than even that and it can roughly be called the “overhead per employee”.

By the simplest calculation that’s more than 42% above what you take home, and it could be much more than that. And this overhead is one of the biggest barriers to increasing employment, reducing hours, and generally creating a better quality of life for working people in the US. Not to mention it puts us at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to creating high quality jobs.

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No Decision is a Decision?

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This is a repeat from 2011 – again, the lure of my son’s Robotics League makes a new post nearly impossible tonight.  But it’s still a very important topic, given that a government that does nothing is actually a strategy employed by many politicians today.  What does that mean?  Consider this a case study.

When is no decision actually a policy?  In government it’s often the default position, a deliberate plan to stay the course and keep things the way they are.  Bureaucracy has a tendency to be conservative, punting whenever it can and allowing things to stay as they are.  But in a time of great change or even crisis, is this acceptable?  Increasingly there are signs that Minnesota has become a state mired by diffuse responsibility and an inability for the government to respond to the situation at hand in a way that is effective.

No action can be very dangerous.  But there is increasing evidence that it is become a serious problem – and I doubt that Minnesota is alone.

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At a Minimum

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There is little doubt that income inequality will become the Democratic Party’s big issue for 2014. While there is a good chance the problem will correct itself once there is upward pressure on wages again, it is still an important policy that the Federal Government can and should pursue. It’s very popular, too, with 58% of identified independents supporting some action.

Barataria has outlined a few ideas that will have a longer-term effect, but what can be done in the short term? The answer is something equally popular, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour – a 39% increase. It seems like a longshot, given the Republican House, but if the recent budget deal forged by Sen Murray and Rep Ryan is an indication of the future there may be room for a grand deal. But there is little doubt that the Democratic position will include the minimum wage increase. It’s worth getting to know well.

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