Happy Labor Day, and welcome to another week of The Runback. Have you been enjoying The Duckpin? Do you have comments or suggestions? Do you want to write for us? Let me know at theduckpin@gmail.com. And please be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Thanks in advance.
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News and Politics
On Mac Love: More like, Double Standards in the Age of Trump.
The Facebook Panic: This is what y'all wanted, so it's what you get.
The Sun Says the Quiet Part Out Loud: The Usual Suspects Admit a Hard Truth.
Is it COVID or Teachers Unions Keeping Schools Closed from In-Person Instruction? The “Apple Ballot” should be known as the “Keep the Kids Home” Ballot going forward.
Sports
Big Ten Eyes Possible October 10 Return: Stay tuned.
5 Low End Players To Keep An Eye On In Fantasy Football This year: These 5 players are in interesting situations that could bring them surprise value.
5 Top Players to downgrade in Fantasy Football: These five players aren't worth the going rate.
Entertainment
It’s Christopher Nolan Week! Let’s talk about his movies:
Shameless Plugs
The Monday Thought
Today is Labor Day, the traditional end of summer. (It’s not the real end of summer: meteorological fall started last Tuesday, but I digress).
Labor Day is, ostensibly, mean to “honor and recognize the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements of the United States.”
One thing that is true this Labor Day is the fact that labor doesn’t get the respect that it used to and that it deserves.
Now let me be clear; I’m not talking about respect for labor unions. Labor unions long ago stopped being organizations meant to improve the life and working conditions of their members and started being political players focus on increasing political power within the Democratic Party. Take one look at the the Maryland State Education Association in Maryland to see what happens when a union becomes more focused on leading the Democrats around on a chain than they are the well-being of their members.
No, I’m talking about the people who are doing the actual hard work in this country. The mechanics, the electricians, the truck drivers, the bus drivers, the longshoremen, and everything in between. Because they are the people that everybody likes to ignore in the modern body politic.
Democrats don’t care about labor. They care only about the labor movement i.e. the professional Democrats who are the professional staff of most labor unions. The labor union staff has a nearly complete and total disconnect from the will of their members and from any inkling of what their members want. For example, many labor members are avid hunters and sportsmen. So it hurts them personally when labor unions take positions in favor of strict gun control. Labor unions also tend to back policies that would lead to the further redistribution of wealth from union members and other high paying blue-collar jobs and towards lower skill, lower-paying jobs. Minimum wage laws hurt union members and high-earning blue-collar workers more so than almost any other demographic.
An additional way that Democrats show their disrespect toward blue-collar workers is their insistence that everybody go to college. So often classroom instruction and curriculum creation are designed to force people to go to college. This means taking on tremendous debt and, often, leads to a path that is unsuccessful. Not everybody wants to go to college. Not everybody should go to college. People can make a fantastic living as a skilled blue-collar worker. Want to know why? Because so many people are going to college and so few people want to do the hard labor that being a blue-collar worker demands. It’s a simple case of supply and demand; there are too few people capable of doing the work, so the price for those workers goes up. A lot of people who are shunted toward college thanks to Democrat policies would be much better suited learning a trade, either in high school or immediately thereafter.
It doesn’t help that Democrats have opposed measures to reduce the cost of a college education, such as opposition to Rick Perry’s $10,000 degree in Texas.
Let’s not pretend that Republicans are any better at this these days. While President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has been aimed at “the common man”, his policies have been anything but. His continued implementation of tax hikes through tariffs hurts the export market for American products. His increase of the national debt has hurt purchasing power. His payroll tax holiday for workers making less than $104,000 has turned into a complicated mess that will likely see workers default on their payroll tax bills in six months.
But want to know the biggest indicator of Republican disdain in general and Trump disdain in particular for working people? It’s the fixation on the stock market. Trump has the completely misguided assumption that the economy is doing well because the stock market is doing well. His tweets on the subject are full of a near orgasmic enthusiasm for the market doing well. While it may be true that more blue collar workers these days benefit from the market doing well than in past years, there are a lot of people who don’t get helped one bit by the market.
What Trump and other Republicans fail to realize is that the stock market’s valuation doesn’t do much good if you have been out of work for six months and nobody seems to know when the job market will improve.
What Democrats fail to realize is that their backwards economic policies will put even more people out of work.
What neither party seems to realize is that their dithering on “stimulus” bills instead of implementing real solutions like budget cuts, tax cuts, debt reduction and smaller government isn’t going to help the average American worker.
American blue-collar workers are getting left behind, and neither party seems to care.
So on this Labor Day, instead of honoring the professional politicians in the labor movement, honor those blue-collar workers who have kept America going the last six months. Without them our country would not be able to function. Something politicians and voters would be smart to remember these next eight weeks.
The Runback: The Fruits of Labor
I agree with some but not all of the points in your article. One that I do not understand is that your comment that minimum wage laws hurt higher earning blue collar workers. To some degree if the lowest paid workers get a pay hike, higher paid workers will want some increase as well. Moreover higher skilled labor's output per dollar of employee costs will be stronger relative to the now more expensive than previously less skilled labor. Lower paid workers have by necessity a high marginal propensity to consume which boosts aggregate demand. I agree that in some cases that excessive minimum wage laws can cost workers jobs if their skills and marginal product do not match the higher wages or if strong lower cost competition exists from abroad.
The republican party has continually taken a strong anti-union position that on net has hurt labor. In addition, the republican party of the last one hundred years has not enforced the antitrust laws that encourage competition for products and the labor that makes them. Labors share of share of GDP output has fallen over the last four decades. In the vast majority of cases, big tax breaks for the wealthy and extreme laissez faire policies do not help the common man. An example is health care. Insulin prices are nearly 10 times higher in the U.S. the Canada thanks to lack of government action to stop this implicit or explicit price collusion by insulin manufacturers.