Clinton’s One-Two Does Number On Poor
Only a couple of months ago, it seemed to be such a political masterstroke.
First, move left to repay heavy-spending union labor by raising the minimum wage. Make the Republicans look like skinflints with their murmuring about job losses at the entry level.
Simultaneously, move rightward to embrace welfare reform, which, like the minimum wage, had been ignored when Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House. That stole the GOP’s big issue.
The one-two of raising entry-level wages and requiring the welfare recipient to go to work was a combo of political genius, everybody said. Clinton’s popularity soared.
But nobody stopped to think what would happen in the real world when you pushed people into the labor force and - at the same time - made it more expensive for employers to hire them. Taken together, the two guarantee big trouble.
Last month, the consequence of the left-right combination to the welfare-laden District of Columbia dawned on the Clinton White House. Political strategists panicked, swung left, and granted D.C. a “waiver.”
But by assuring 20,000 welfare mothers that the work requirement would not apply to them, Clinton in effect repealed welfare reform in the nation’s capital.
One trouble with that maneuver was that it was against the new law. Worse, repealing welfare reform by fiat as soon as it took effect would make Clinton look like the old, liberal Democrat. Worst of all, it would signal that if re-elected, Clinton would promptly bring back the era of big government.
That prospect sent Clinton scurrying back again to the right. Last week, he rescinded most of his unlawful waiver and now those 20,000 mothers will have to start looking for jobs.
But not half of these people have high school diplomas, and most can hardly read. What’s one big advantage these potential workers offer prospective employers? To gain entry, they could lower costs by working cheap.
And what is the most wrong-headed thing that government can do? To make it more expensive for an employer to give them a chance to work, especially in a city that is losing 10,000 jobs a year. But raising the cost of entry-level workers, of course, is precisely what the minimum-wage increase does. When combined with welfare reform’s work requirement, making cheap labor more expensive is public-policy stupidity.
Nobody - certainly not the bludgeoned Republican House leadership - points this out because political strategists turned the minimum wage into the equivalent of motherhood. ‘Twas a famous victory.
This came on top of another liberal victory: the Family Leave Act. Beyond abortion rights, the new law mandating time off work for familial behavior at home is the centerpiece of the Clinton appeal to women. He boasts of it every day to widen the gender gap.
Bob Dole makes no attempt to argue, because polls show that mandated time off to meet family problems is a big winner with women. Occasionally you hear a peep from some business type that such government intrusion into the workplace makes a company less competitive in global markets, but that’s a lot of abstruse economic talk. That battle is over.
Few stop to think of the unintended consequences to workers, female and male, in real life. The popular notion is to force employers to grant leave for family crises, then extend that to taking the family dog to the vet, then to paying for that time off.
But reality is sure to intrude on this politically rosy social engineering. If one worker takes full advantage of his entitlement of family leave time, and another shows up for work every day, which one is likelier to get ahead?
The worker who is on the job regularly will do better (and be a better provider) than the one who takes full advantage of the new entitlement to stay home. The unintended consequence of “family leave” will be to force many breadwinners into more frequent work-family conflicts.
Ultimate decisions about hours and wages will be made between workers and managers, by the law of supply and demand, not by the meddling of politicians.
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