U.S. — To avoid any future delays in sending billions of taxpayer dollars and deadly weapons to Ukraine, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has decided to make things easier and give President Zelensky the key to the U.S. Treasury.
“It’s simpler this way. Now Mr. Zelensky can let himself in whenever he wants, and help himself to whatever he needs!” said Yellen. “As a government official, I want to help the government be as efficient as possible. This removes all those unnecessary steps that come between Ukraine wanting money and then getting it! I’m a genius!”
“Zelensky, dear, you just take whatever you need, sweetie!”
Sources say Zelensky has already let himself in the massive, highly secure vault 3 times today, helping himself to wheelbarrows full of coins, gold bullion, and Ashley Biden’s diary. “We thank the American government for the lovely gift of their citizens’ money,” he said. “We promise to put this to good use by killing many Russians and buying lots of cocaine. God bless America!”
At publishing time, Zelensky had already made a return trip after blowing all the cash from his first three trips.
Last week, during her confirmation hearing, to become Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen told the Senate Finance Committee that analysis of states that boosted the minimum wage showed that job losses are “minimal, if anything.”
“Very minimal,” Yellen added in reply to a question by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott
She knows better than this.
A Wall Street Journal editorial points out that during a Congressional hearing in 2014 when she was asked about Barack Obama’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10, she said, “I think almost all economists think that the minimum wage has two main effects.”
One, she pointed out, is increasing pay for some low-paid workers, and the second is “there would be some amount of negative impact on employment.” How much is a matter of “considerable debate,” she said, adding that she “wouldn’t argue” with the Congressional Budget Office estimate that Obama’s hike would cost 500,000 jobs.
Now, she thinks job losses would be minimal if anything, yeah right.
The Journal editorial nailed what is really going on:
Ms. Yellen no doubt feels she has to sell her new boss’s economic policies, and on Tuesday she also endorsed his gigantic Covid relief bill of $1.9 trillion. The huge increase in the federal debt held by the public, which is already about 100% of the economy and rising, is no longer of much concern to America’s political class. But the main message of Ms. Yellen’s testimony is that she is no longer speaking as an economist. She’s a politician.
The big problem with all this is that 2021 is destined to be a year with one economic storm after another. Biden has named two weak economic advisers, one at the National Economic Council and one at the Council of Economic Advisers. They are very quickly going to be in way over their heads.
The only individual in the room during a crisis with any sense of how the economy works will be Yellen, but if she plays the role of the spineless lackey, and yields to the ideas of Senile Joe and his political controls, the economy could be driven off a cliff to the degree that 2020 might end up looking like the roaring ’20s compared to 2021.
Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would ‘really help’ struggling Americans make ends meet, Yellen said.
President Joe Biden’s Treasury Secretary nominee and former Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen.
Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour from $7.25 would help the U.S. economy more than it would harm it, Janet Yellen, President Joe Biden’s Treasury Secretary nominee, told lawmakers this week.
“Right now we have millions of American workers who are putting their lives on the line to keep their communities functioning, and sometimes even working multiple jobs, aren’t earning enough to put food on the table and a roof over their heads,” Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chair, told the Senate Finance Committee at her confirmation hearing.
Raising the minimum wage, she said, would “really help many of those workers” and job losses as a result of it would be “very minimal, if anything.”
Biden, in his recently unveiled stimulus proposal, is pushing for a $15 minimum wage and end tip credits — a way to pay tipped workers less than minimum wage. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009. Workers at this level earn roughly $15,000 a year if they work 40 hours a week.
Yellen’s testimony differs from research the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency, published in 2019 on the effects of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The agency estimated that such an increase would boost the wages of 17 million workers, but also said that a median of 1.3 million workers could become unemployed by 2025 if a $15 minimum were enacted. Though the same number of people would no longer be living below poverty levels, the CBO found.
The report also found that there’s a two-thirds chance there are zero to a maximum of 3.7 million job losses as a result of a $15 minimum wage.
“The last thing this economy needs as we attempt to recover is the loss of 1.3 to 3.7 million jobs,” Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, said Tuesday.
In Yellen’s prior testimony as Federal Reserve Chair in 2014, she acknowledged that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, which former President Barack Obama proposed, would result in “some amount of negative impact on employment as a consequence.”
The CBO reported in 2014 that 500,000 job losses would have resulted from raising the minimum wage to $10.10 from $7.25 by mid-2016. But the tradeoff she said is “that a large number of individuals would see their incomes raised as a consequence.”
Like Scott, some economists and Republican lawmakers are concerned that raising the minimum wage would result in more job losses in industries that have taken the biggest hits during the pandemic.
Like Florida, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York all pledged to pay workers a minimum wage of $15 in the coming years. Other states have opposed efforts to raise their states’ minimum wage, fearing that implementing it could result in widespread job losses.
Currently, no state has an effective $15 minimum wage, but Washington D.C. does. Washington (state) and Massachusetts have the highest state minimum wages as of July 2020 at $13.50 an hour and $12.75 an hour, respectively, according to the Department of Labor.
Last July, House Democrats passed the Raise the Wage Act, a bill that would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to take up the matter in the Senate citing the research from the Congressional Budget Office.
“We don’t need to lose jobs. We don’t have enough jobs now,” McConnell said in a July interview last year.
Designing and implementing a minimum-wage hike needs “more thought,” according to Yuci Chen, a labor economist at the W.E. UpJohn Institute, an independent research organization based in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Chen’s prior research found that increasing manufacturing employees’ wages by 1% caused employers to cut their working hours by 0.7%. It also caused employers to increase investments in machinery by 2.7%, according to her research that was published by the Center for Economic Studies, a branch of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think-tank, argued that the CBO’s estimated job losses from enacting a $15 minimum wage are “overstated.”
“The crucial fact is that an employment decline as a result of a minimum wage increase doesn’t necessarily mean any worker is actually worse off,” she wrote in a July 2019 report. “For a wide variety of reasons, a sizable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in and out of employment; each quarter, more than 20% of the lowest-wage workers leave or start a job.”
“This means that even if employment does decline as CBO predicts, workers who work less can still come out ahead because they earn much more when they are working.”
MCViewPoint 
