Government Knows Best in Action ... You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

The government knows best gang continually does amazing things.

Their ability to waste taxpayer money and achieve unintended and frequently undesirable outcomes is incredible.

Consider the state of New York's latest venture into the world of OPM 'doing good things' with other people's money way of 'public service.'

Minimum Intelligence is subtitled 'Boys in Albany outdo themselves:'

". . . get a load of the latest economic policy breakthrough in New York. As their political price for agreeing to Governor Andrew Cuomo's minimum wage increase, Republicans who run the state Senate have insisted on a new tax credit for businesses that hire teenagers.

Under Albany's budget deal, the minimum wage will rise to $9 from $7.25 an hour over the next three years. Businesses will receive tax credits that fully offset the increased cost for every teen they employ at the minimum wage next year. However, by 2016 the tax credit will only cover about 75% of the additional cost for teen employees—and nothing for adult workers.

Liberals who had supported the wage hike are now howling that the "compromise" wrought between Republicans and Democrats will merely encourage businesses to replace adult workers, many of them minorities, with teens from well-to-do families. The deal will also create both a wage ceiling and wage floor for teens because employers lose the credit if they increase pay above the minimum wage. The state estimates the tax credit for businesses will cost $20 million to $40 million annually, though that doesn't include the higher labor costs that businesses will pass onto consumers.

In other words, the deal manages to punish employers who will pay more for workers they hire, workers who won't be hired because they're priced out of the labor market, and taxpayers who will foot the bill for subsidizing business. Even if Republicans weren't willing to oppose the higher minimum wage because it does well in the polls, couldn't they have at least insisted on a teenage exclusion or sub-minimum wage?

That was a rhetorical question."

Summing Up

Now that's bipartisanship in action as the popular polling minimum wage increased is legislated in New York. Of course, that makes for a nice 'bipartisan' political headline.

But if we bother to look beyond the headline, it's just another reminder of why politics sucks.

And why what the government knows best gang does is so expensive for We the People.

The law of unintended consequences is alive and well in New York.

And the rest of the country and world, too.

Thanks. Bob.