Labor

Top congressional Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Bernie Sanders, held a press conference earlier today to officially introduce their "Fight For $15" minimum wage legislation, dubbed the Raise the Wage Act.  Among other things, the bill primarily serves to more than double the federal minimum wage from it's current level of $7.25 to $15 by 2024. 

A new report from the Hoover Institution written by Senior Fellow Joshua Rauh and entitled "Hidden Debt, Hidden Deficits: How Pension Promises Are Consuming State And Local Budgets," does a masterful job illustrating the true severity of America's public pension crisis, a topic to which we've dedicated a substantial amount of time over the past couple of years. 

Submitted by Michael Lucci via IllinoisPolicy.org,

New Bureau of Labor Statistics data show Illinois’ black residents have an unemployment rate of 12.7 percent, more than double the state’s overall rate.

ConvergEx's Nicholas Colas asks "Can the US economy get back to the 3% GDP growth it enjoyed in the 1980s – mid 2000s?"

White House economic policy makers say “Yes”.

 

Most professional economists say “No”.

 

History says, “Worker productivity drives economic growth, not politicians or economists.  Fix productivity and you can get to 3%.”

History may not be laconic, but it has a point.

A long, long time ago, back in 2008 when most of today's hedge fund analysts were still stressing over what to wear to prom, a man named Bernard Madoff was arrested for bilking unsuspecting investors out of $65 billion.  Madoff ran what is traditionally referred to as a ponzi scheme in which new investments were solicited as a means to fund massive redemptions that otherwise would have resulted in a collapse of his fund long before the FBI finally caught up with his scheme. 

But, Madoff was eventually caught and in 2009 he was sentenced to 150 years in prison for his scheme.