Over 20 States Increase Minimum Wage On January 1; Federal Stuck at $7.25

One of the good things about a new year is that new laws go into effect. On January 1, twenty states raised their minimum wage, with Washington state continuing to have the highest minimum wage in the country at $9.47 per hour. New York raised its minimum wage to $8.75 on December 31st. California's minimum wage is $9.00.

The Huffington Post reports:

Minimum wage workers in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia will all see their pay go up on Jan. 1. Minimum wage workers in Delaware and Minnesota are also expected to receive a pay hike in June and August 2015, respectively. 

For the first time a majority of states (29) have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum.

GRAPHIC: 50% Of All Economic Activity Is In Urban Centers

Via Kevin Drum is this interesting picture demonstrating the outsized impact of urban centers on America's economic activity.

POLL: Supermajority Support for Federal Minimum Wage of $10.25

A new poll from ABC News indicates that there is strong popular support for an increase in the hourly minimum wage from the current level of $7.25. The last increase was in 2009; President Obama called for Congress to raise it to $9.00 and has endorsed pending legislation that would increase it to $10.10.

This poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, offered pro and con arguments on the issue, noting that some say the minimum wage should be raised “to help low-income workers get by,” while others say taking such action “will lead some businesses to cut jobs.” The result is 2-1 in favor: Sixty-six percent support raising the minimum wage, while 31 percent oppose it.

Intensity of sentiment is even more lopsided: Nearly half, 48 percent, “strongly” support raising the minimum wage, vs. 20 percent who are strongly opposed.

Told its current level and asked what the minimum wage should be, Americans, on average, say $9.41 per hour. That rises to $10.25 just among those who favor raising the minimum wage.

[...]

In partisan terms, support for a higher minimum wage peaks at 85 percent among Democrats and liberals alike, and also draws 71 percent of moderates and 65 percent of independents. Support declines to 50 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of strong conservatives.

This is an issue that progressives should promote in 2014 and beyond.

Minimum Wage Goes Up In Multiple States

Hat/tip to Daily Kos

Saturday Politics: Great Resource on CA Propositions

The above image is a screen shot from CaliforniaChoices.org, a very useful resource for California voters who are contemplating how to vote on the 11 ballot propositions on the 2012 general election ballot. I just selected the postions of the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Bay Guardian and San Diego Union-Tribune but you can customize it how you like. I also included the positions of the California Democratic Party and the California Republican Party. There's a whole other option of  selecting the positions from various unions as well.

One weird feature of the website is that it doesn't allow you to add your own choices in the red/green comparison table, although it does allow you to share your choices via social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Pinterest.

If you are a California voter I strongly encourage you to use CaliforniaChoices.org to find out more about the ballot propositions to help you make your decisions. You can also see my own positions on the 2012 California ballot propositions:

Good luck, and happy voting!

Top 10 Billionaires in the United States

The list of the 400 richest people in the United States was released by Forbes magazine recently. The top 10 have a number of familiar names, led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates at #1 and Nebraska-based investor Warren Buffet at #2. At #3 was Larry Ellison who made waves with the news that he was buying the Hawaiian island of Lanai in its entirety. The infamous Koch brothers, who are attempting to buy their preferred election result thanks to loopholes in campaign finance laws are tied for 4th, followed by 4 members of the Walton family (whose patriarch founded the Walmart company) and at #10 is the 3-term mayor of
New York City, Mike Bloomberg.

Forbes magazine notes that things are going very well for most of the super-ricj=h, with their wealth increasing at an astonishing rate:

Gates alone was worth $7 billion more than he was last year. Berkshire Hathaway head and renown investor Warren Buffett again ranked No. 2 on the list, with his net worth climbing by the same amount to $46 billion. 

Larry Ellison, head of software maker Oracle, remained in the No. 3 spot, but posted the biggest gain in wealth on the list, with his net worth rising by $8 billion to $41 billion. 

Two-thirds of the list’s members saw their wealth grow over the past year to an average $4.2 billion, Forbes said.

It's too bad that we have a communist president or else these revered job creators would not be suffering so much! (Yes, this is sarcasm!)

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God

GRAPHIC: Who Pays What Taxes In America?

The internet and political chattering classes are going absolutely bonkers about the revelation that Mitt Romney has nothing but contempt for 47% of the American electorate, when he was caught on video saying:

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...These are people who pay no income tax.My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

The graphics above show what the distribution of tax payers is in the United States, and it is true that roughly 53.6% of taxpayers pay federal income tax, but it also true that another 28.3% pay federal payroll taxes.

Ezra Klein points out that current tax policy has generally been crafted by Republican presidents and Congresses of the last couple decades:

Part of the reason so many Americans don’t pay federal income taxes is that Republicans have passed a series of very large tax cuts that wiped out the income-tax liability for many Americans. That’s why, when you look at graphs of the percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, you see huge jumps after Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So whenever you hear that half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, remember: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush helped build that. (You also see a jump after the financial crisis begins in 2008, but we can expect that to be mostly temporary.) 

Some of those tax cuts for the poor were there to make the tax cuts for the rich more politically palatable. “Do you think we wanted to include a welfare payment to people who don’t pay taxes and call it a tax cut?” A top Bush administration official once asked me. “No. But that’s what we needed to do to get it done.” 

But now that those tax cuts have passed and many fewer Americans are paying federal income taxes and the rich are paying a much higher percentage of federal income taxes, Republicans are arguing that these Americans they have helped free from income taxes have become a dependent and destabilizing “taker” class who want to hike taxes on the rich in order to purchase more social services for themselves.

As Bill Clinton says, "It takes a lot of brass to blame a guy for something you did yourself."

The Graphic That May Decide The Presidency

Matt Yglesias points out this chart signals doom for Mitt Romney's desire to be President. According to a poll from the Pew Research Center, 71% of people think Romney's policies will help "wealthy people" while 42% of people think those policies will help "Middle-class people" and only 33% of people think Romney's policies will help "poor people."

On the other hand, President Obama's policies are viewed by people as more likely to help middle class people (52%) and poor people (62%) as opposed to wealthy people (38%).

Celebrity Friday: Roland Fryer

Professor Roland Fryer

The 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellows were announced a few weeks ago. These fellowships are commonly known as "genius"grants. One of the winners this year was Roland Fryer, an Economics Professor at Harvard.

From the official announcement:

Roland Fryer is an economist illuminating the causes and consequences of economic disparity due to race and inequality in American society. Through innovative empirical and theoretical investigations, Fryer has opened up a range of topics to quantitative analysis, offering new insights on such issues as the cognitive underpinnings of racial discrimination, labor market inequalities, and, in particular, the educational trajectory of minority children. In an examination of the longitudinal trends of testing gaps among elementary schoolchildren, Fryer and a collaborator determined that, after controlling for background characteristics, black and white children enter kindergarten at parity, but their achievement gap widens through higher grade levels; in addition, they found that traditional socioeconomic metrics could not account for this gap. In other work, Fryer posited that social network structure could be a contributing factor. Having constructed an index of social status based on a large, national set of demographic data, his analysis suggests that peer-group loyalty sometimes competes with academic performance, particularly in ethnically heterogeneous environments. Recently, Fryer led a randomized experiment with well over 20,000 students from more than 200 schools in three cities, testing several models of financial incentives to see if they improve children's academic performance. Results collected to date indicate that incentives payments alone have no statistically significant impact on subsequent state test scores. These studies, among many others, demonstrate Fryer's propensity to tackle difficult, often sensitive, social questions with scientific rigor. His research is informing the work of academics and policy makers alike, and he is playing a singular and influential role in ongoing discussions about the effects of racial differences in America.

I love seeing Black men officially recognized as "geniuses"! Don't you? Maybe this should become a regular feature of MadProfessah.com, let me know in the comments.

Graph Showing Obama's Positive Impact on Economy

Barack Obama became President of the United States on January 20, 2009. Ever since he took office the economy has improved, with average number of jobs gained or lost entering positive territory in 2010.

Daily Kos posted this graphic earlier this week, and explained:

Let's start with the recovery act. In the 27 months since President Obama signed it into law, we've lost 1.3 million private sector jobs and 1.8 million overall.

Those are terrible numbers, but in the 27 months before the stimulus, we were losing private sector jobs more than three times as quickly. During that stretch, we lost 4.5 million jobs in the private sector jobs and 4.1 million jobs overall. (The reason we lost more private sector jobs than jobs overall is that public sector hiring went up by nearly one-half million. Under Obama, we've lost a half-million government jobs, an ironic fact given the false Republican claim that government hiring has increased.)

As you can see in the chart at the top of the post, as bad as the jobs picture was in 2009, it was even worse in 2008, and things have turned around in 2010 and 2011 with job growth stronger than it was in 2007. Moreover, we've now had sixteen straight months of private sector job gains.

With unemployment still at 9.1%, economic growth is obviously still way below where anybody wants it to be, but to the extent the administration has fallen short, it's that they've soft-pedaled the need for more stimulus funds to accelerate the recovery beyond its current pace.

And the fact remains that unlike Bush and the Republicans who wrecked the economy in the first place, Obama and the Democrats haven't made things worse. They've made things better.

I understand people being impatient about the economy, but considering voting for a Republican, who will only make things worse, not better, why?

Happy Earth Day!

Hat/tip to Derrick's Window.

California Has Lowest Bond Rating in USA

It's official. California now has the lowest bond rating of any state in the Union.

All three major credit agencies are giving California the nation's lowest bond rating.

[...]

Moody's Investors Service downgraded the state's general-obligation bonds to A2 from A1 on Friday. The move follows similar decisions by Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings.

California previously was tied with Louisiana for the nation's worst credit rating.

Worse than Louisiana. Dayummmmmm!

At Calitics, there is a front page post stating that it is unlikely the CA economy will recover for at least two years.

New Logo For Obama Stimulus Plan Projects

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also known as the Obama Stimulus Plan now has its own logo! All federal projects that are funded by monies from the 787 billion dollar plan will be easily identifiable by the presence of the above logo.

California Has a Drought of Jobs and Water

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought emergency on Friday due to three years of below-average rain and urged Californians to reduce water usage by 20%.

Additionally, the unemployment rate in the state increased to 10.1%, the highest in 26 years and in Los Angeles County it is even worse:

Conditions are even worse in Los Angeles County, which saw its unemployment rate jump to 10.5% in January from 9.2% the month before.

[...]

The outlook for Southern California is considerably worse than the national forecast presented by President Obama's budget team this week because the economy here -- usually considered resilient because of its diversity -- relies on sectors battered by this particular recession, said economist Jack Kyser of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

L.A. County alone, his group projects, will lose 89,000 jobs in 2009, and Kyser suggested the unemployment rate could surpass 10.5% for the year. In the Inland Empire, the group predicts the unemployment rate will rise to 11.1%, while Orange County, which lost 41,400 jobs last year, is projected to see unemployment climb to 7.3%, the highest rate in 16 years. January figures for those counties will be released next month.

Los Angeles County lost a net 41,900 jobs last year and nearly all of them -- about 41,000 -- were in retail, manufacturing and construction, in that order. In January, retail shed 15,100 jobs, manufacturing lost 6,800, and construction, 4,800. The three sectors were caught in the collapse of the housing boom and recession.

To make matters worse, another key California industry -- the film business -- lost 22,300 jobs in January, leading L.A. County layoffs for the month.

Obama Gets Hot Talking About Stimulus Plan

Economic Conditions Are Worsening