Is The Democratic Party Becoming Anti-Labor?

Studies show there are three things you can do that will almost guarantee you will never live in poverty: (1) finish high school, (2) get a full time job and (3) get married, but wait until you are 21 and don’t have children until you are married. Do these three things and it’s very unlikely you will be poor. If you are, you won’t be poor for very long.

So how does public policy affect these choices? Inner city schools dominated by powerful teacher unions are not meeting the needs of poor minority students. The welfare state (185 federal/state means test programs) is designed from top to bottom to encourage single motherhood and penalize marriage. And virtually every public policy you can think of is making it more expensive to hire workers.

It is this last set of policies that I find most perplexing. In times past, the Democratic Party was the party of full employment. It wasn’t that long ago that The New York Times endorsed a zero minimum wage. Prominent Democrats once endorsed the idea of enterprise zones – places where there would be fewer regulations and lower taxes, so that job producing businesses would flourish. And although it originated in a Republican administration, Democrats have traditionally supported the Earned Income Tax Credit – under which low-income workers get a bigger tax “refund,” the more they work and the more they earn.

But these days we are witnessing backsliding. It’s as though the talking heads for the Democratic Party have not only forgotten what they learned in Econ 101, they positively reject it all. Hardly a week goes by without someone calling for a higher minimum wage on the editorial pages of The New York Times. In fact a recentTimes editorial implied that employers have a duty to substitute for the welfare state. That is, if a Wal-Mart employee signs up for Medicaid or Food Stamps, that’s Wal-Mart’s fault!

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