Free Republic

A day after promising to give its store workers raises and bonuses, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT) is preparing to hand out pink slips at its headquarters. The giant retailer, which is based in Bentonville, Ark., and employs more than 1.5 million people in the U.S., plans to cut more than 1,000 corporate jobs ..... < snip > ..... The job cuts are expected to be broad based, focused on workers primarily at the company's headquarters ..... < snip >

Universal daycare may become one of the more costly side effects of the government’s large increase in the minimum wage. As always, it will be the taxpayers who get it in the end Economics is not an exact science. This is why President Harry Truman asked for a one-armed economist because he was tired of being told “on the one hand…, but on the other hand…” But it is basic Economics 101 that if a business’s costs increase, that business will end up raising its prices. On Jan. 1, 2018, Ontario’s minimum wage increased from $11.60 an hour to $14...

Restaurant busboys, in line to earn a little more dough this year as minimum wage hikes hit across the country, are instead losing their jobs as chains look to cut costs. One chain axing jobs is Red Robin, which hopes to save about $8 million this year by eliminating busboys at each of its 570 restaurants, the company said Monday. Red Robin restaurants are located mostly in Western states, where the minimum wage has risen more quickly.

NO ONE LIKES to admit having been wrong. It's especially tough for members of the pundit class, whose job amounts to telling people what to think. So when National Review's critic-at-large Kyle Smith last week published a piece with the headline "We Were Wrong About Stop-and-Frisk," people noticed.Smith and National Review are conservative. Like many conservatives, they had predicted that if New York Mayor Bill de Blasio fulfilled his campaign pledge to end stop-and-frisk — the police practice of stopping, questioning, and patting down people for weapons merely because they seemed suspicious — crime in the city would go up....

Received my Trump Bonus yesterday! A cool $1,000 added to our annual bonus. Email from the CEO cited the new corporate tax law signed by President Trump and the bank's desire to retain the best talent as the economy ramps up.

The laws range from further improving the Department of Veteran Affairs to cracking down on human trafficking and sexual assault. He also signed bills that celebrate the African-American community. Those include a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of African-Americans in the country, and a law which establishes the African American Civil Rights Network within the National Park Service.

We’ve already started to hear this lie: the US is at full employment. That nearly everyone who wants a job has got a job. The lie started during President Obama’s second term, when the job market was truly lousy. And now that President Trump is in charge, the lie is again coming out of the mouths of economists. Let me be clear about something. Parts of the US economy are doing better than they were post-recession. Other parts haven’t even gotten back to their pre-Great Recession levels. And, if you believe Trump, the economy will do much better now that...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its newest jobs report on Friday, and the data clearly show, under the pro-business policies implemented by the Trump administration, low-income and working-class families are enjoying significant economic gains not experienced in nearly 20 years. Democrats and liberal pundits have argued the recent economic improvements are only helping a relatively small, mostly wealthy segment of the country, but nothing could be further from the truth. According to BLS, the national unemployment rate for December was 4.1 percent, a 0.6 percentage point drop from December 2016. That’s an impressive figure, especially since the unemployment rate...

Most Americans were probably drop-jawed to learn there was a state in the union where government overseers prohibited the people from pumping their own gas. The ultra-progressive and ever-controlling Oregon Legislature had banned this otherwise normal behavior for more than 50 years, ostensibly to provide some form of protection for its residents. This is the practical reality of the general principle that government coddling creates entitlement, pampered residents with fewer freedoms, and reduced abilities to live independently. Oregon has been telling its residents for generations they are incapable of pumping their own gas, and now there are generations of Oregonians...

Democratic warnings that President Trump would make life worse for minorities were discredited once again Friday, with the release of new unemployment statistics for December. In just under one year in office, the president and the Republican Congress have helped minorities make dramatic gains. Since taking the reins from President Obama, President Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress have embraced free-market and pro-liberty economic policies. Now – after a year of reducing regulations, approving a tax cut, and encouraging stricter standards for numerous welfare programs at the state level – the economy is thriving. Working-age minorities are benefitting in ways they...

The Fight for 15 crowd is having more success in the Great White North than they’ve seen across much of the United States lately, with Ontario being the latest province to massively increase their minimum wage. What could possibly go wrong?As we’ve already seen repeatedly on our side of the border, quite a bit, actually. And as soon as the new mandatory minimum went into effect on January 1st, big employers of largely unskilled, lower wage workers responded in the only way available to them. They began cutting costs, starting with perks and benefits, but also reducing hours and even...

We have been raising the minimum wage for 78 years, and as a new study clearly reveals, 78 years of minimum-wage hikes have produced zero evidence of the "job-killing" consequences these headline writers want us to fear. In a first-of-its-kind report, researchers at the National Employment Law Project pore over employment data from every federal increase since the minimum wage was first established, making "simple before-and-after comparisons of job-growth trends 12 months after each minimum-wage increase."

Venezuela is set to raise its minimum wage by 40%, in a move expected to worsen already high levels of inflation. The country is suffering from an economic crisis in which shortages of food and medicine are common. Venezuela's economy has been hit by falling oil revenue and the plummeting value of the Bolivar. President Nicolas Maduro announced the wage increase in his end-of-year address. He said the move would "protect workers" from what he called an economic war on the socialist nation by the United States and others.

Of all the new laws going into effect Monday (legal cannabis in California, higher minimum wages in several states, and many more), you may be surprised about which one drew the most backlash online. It appears to be Oregon House Bill 2482, which allows people who live in counties with 40,000 residents or less to pump their own gas. Oregonians aired their frustrations on Facebook over the new law. And just about everyone else in the country made fun of them. New California laws going into effect in 2018 New era opens in California with first sales of recreational marijuana...

Is a low income or prolonged unemployment truly cause for financial stress? According to one study, not really. In some states, public assistance programs, or welfare, could pay more than full-time, minimum-wage jobs. Cato Institute’s 2013 Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off study totaled the welfare benefits offered in each state and compared that value with the wages workers would need to earn in order to have an equivalent take-home income. Cato found for long-term dependents, welfare actually pays pretty well. The study examined the package for a single mother with two children, who could use programs such as Temporary Assistance for...

DETROIT (WWJ/AP) – Some local workers will be seeing a pay raise because of the newly approved tax reform legislation. Fifth-Third Bank says it will raise its minimum wage for all employees to $15 an hour and a one-time bonus of $1000 to more than 13,000 workers. Fifth Third has about 2,600 workers in Michigan. The CEO says the tax cut allowed the bank the opportunity to re-evaluate its compensation structure and share some of those benefits with its workforce. At least two other major companies are building goodwill in the wake of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts by finding...

DENVER -- Colorado is raising its minimum wage again in 2018 to $10.20 an hour. The increase is part of a constitutional requirement voters approved in 2016. It will be $12 an hour by 2020. ... not everyone is pleased with the hike. "I think we are going to see more and more restaurants use technology because it cuts down on costs -- your computer is not going to call in sick," said Sonia Riggs, president of the Colorado Restaurant Association. Riggs said most restaurants don't make much profit, and another sharp increase is resulting in potential menu increases and...

That is studied by Renkin, Montialoux, and Siegenthaler in a recent paper, which is also a job market paper for Tobias Renkin from the University of Zurich. Here is the abstract: We study the impact of increases in local minimum wages on the dynamics of prices in local grocery stores in the US during the 2001-2012 period. We find a signifi cant impact of increasing minimum wages on prices in grocery stores. Our baseline estimate of the minimum wage elasticity of grocery prices is 0.02. This magnitude is consistent with a full pass-through of cost increases into prices. We show...

Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) signed legislation Monday that requires a $15-an-hour minimum wage starting in 2021 for businesses with at least 51 employees, and giving smaller businesses a bit more time to implement that wage. The wealthy county is the first jurisdiction in Maryland, and the second in the region behind the District, to adopt a $15 minimum, which has become a central focus of the progressive movement in recent years. Leaders of the business community oppose the law and say it will put Maryland’s largest jurisdiction at a disadvantage compared to its suburban neighbors. Advocates are vowing...

Many of the minimum wage laws passed in recent years, including in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, include waivers allowing unionized businesses to pay their employees below the minimum.The waivers in effect make unionizing workers a low-cost option for businesses unwilling or unable to pay the new minimum wage, which in cities such as San Francisco and SeaTac, Wash., which also has a waiver, will climb as high as $15 an hour when fully phased in. In those cities, businesses can sign a collective bargaining agreement with a union that sets the wages below the...