New wage boost puts squeeze on teenage workers across Arizona
Employers are cutting back hours, laying off young staffers
Chad Graham
The Arizona Republic
Feb. 10, 2007
Oh, for the days when Arizona's high school students could roll pizza dough, sweep up sticky floors in theaters or scoop ice cream without worrying about ballot initiatives affecting their earning power.
That's certainly not the case under the state's new minimum-wage law that went into effect last month.
Some Valley employers, especially those in the food industry, say payroll budgets have risen so much that they're cutting hours, instituting hiring freezes and laying off employees.
Well suprise, suprise. What did you brain dead libs think was gonna happen? I'm sorry I can't conceal my outrage at this economic lunacy. Wake up socialist morons! Let the markets work!
And teens are among the first workers to go.
Companies maintain the new wage was raised to $6.75 per hour from $5.15 per hour to help the breadwinners in working-poor families. Teens typically have other means of support.
Mark Messner, owner of Pepi's Pizza in south Phoenix, estimates he has employed more than 2,000 high school students since 1990. But he plans to lay off three teenage workers and decrease hours worked by others. Of his 25-person workforce, roughly 75 percent are in high school.
"I've had to go to some of my kids and say, 'Look, my payroll just increased 13 percent,' " he said. " 'Sorry, I don't have any hours for you.' "
Messner's monthly cost to train an employee has jumped from $440 to $580 as the turnover rate remains high.
"We go to great lengths to hang on to our high school workers, but there are a lot of kids who come in and get one check in their pocket and feel like they're living large and out the door they go," he said. "We never get our return on investment when that happens."
For years, economists have debated how minimum-wage increases impact the teenage workforce.
The Employment Policies Institute in Washington, which opposed the recent increases, cited 2003 data by Federal Reserve economists showing a 10 percent increase caused a 2 percent to 3 percent decrease in employment.
It also cited comments by notedeconomist Milton Friedman, who maintained that high teen unemployment rates were largely the result of minimum-wage laws.
"After a wage hike, employers seek to take fewer chances on individuals with little education or experience," one institute researcher told lawmakers in 2004.
Tom Kelly, owner of Mary Coyle Ol' Fashion Ice Cream Parlor in Phoenix, voted for the minimum-wage increase. But he said, "The new law has impacted us quite a bit."
I would say that this guy qualifies as the biggest idiot to come down the pike, but it is a very, very crowded pike. This dolt owns a restaurant and voted for a minimum wage increase?!?!?! This is why I could never be a lib. Way too stupid. Somebody wake Ted Kennedy from his coma and show this to him.
It added about $2,000 per month in expenses. The store, which employs mostly teen workers, has cut back on hours and has not replaced a couple of workers who quit.
Kelly raised the wages of workers who already made above minimum wage to ensure pay scales stayed even. As a result, "we have to be a lot more efficient" and must increase menu prices, he said.
While most of the state's 124,067 workers between the ages of 16 and 19 made well above $5.15 per hour before the change, the new law has created real-life economic opportunities.
Liliana Hernandez brings home noticeably more under the new law. The 18-year-old, who attends Metro Tech High School in Phoenix and works part time at Central High School, is saving the extra money, maybe to put towards buying a used car.
Hernandez said she deserves the raise just like any other Arizona worker even if she still lives with her parents.
"I'm doing the best I can and working hard like everyone else," she said.
In the months leading up to last November's vote, advocates of the new law maintained that it would help Arizona create a "living wage" for some of the poorest workers.
The Economic Policy Institute estimated that 145,000 Arizonans would receive a pay raise. That was how many made $5.15 to $6.74 per hour.
At one press conference, a mother described how she was unable to afford basic school supplies for her son.
Opponents, however, said there was little talk about teenage workers. "Everyone wanted to focus on the other aspects of the minimum-wage campaign," said Michelle Bolton, Arizona state director of the National Federation of Independent Business.
An Employment Policies Institute study determined that 30.1 percent of affected workers in Arizona fell between the ages of 16 and 19.
"Workers affected by the minimum-wage increase are less likely to be supporting a family than the typical Arizona worker," it stated. "For example, 30.4 percent of the workers are living with their parent or parents, while only 7.6 percent of all Arizona workers are in this category."
John Weischedel, a senior at the East Valley Institute of Technology in Mesa, knows he is lucky to be making $8 per hour at an auto dealership and learning technical skills. So are most of his friends who make $9 or more per hour while still attending high school.
After the minimum-wage law went into effect, "a couple of my friends got laid off - they worked in fast food," he said. "They're going to wait until they're out of high school to find other jobs."
Matt Dempsey contributed to this article.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
The real truth about global warming...
Libs love to ignore facts, logic and rationality. Well here is some that is staring you right in the face. I have never been Limbaughesque in that I out and out deny global warming, just that there isnt enough proof that it is caused by man. Well, here is some more proof. Enjoy.
From
From
February 11, 2007
An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged
When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.
The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.
Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.
So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.
The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.
What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.
Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.
Kind of an inconvenient truth, eh Algore?
He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.
The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.
In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.
Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark’s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it “A new theory of climate change”.
Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.
The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark’s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature’s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.
The Chilling Stars is published by Icon. It is available for £9.89 including postage from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585
More liberal nonsense
Dixie Chicks could bring political edge to Grammys
Sun Feb 11, 2007(I'm not posting their whole article, just the first page)
By Dean Goodman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Grammys could take a rare step into the political arena on Sunday if the Dixie Chicks win the coveted album-of-the-year award, as observers of the music industry's biggest honors are predicting.
The Texas country trio is reveling in its new outsider status after picking a fight with President George W. Bush in 2003, and watching its popularity plummet as the Republican-leaning country music establishment snubbed the chart-topping group.
The Chicks' first album since the brouhaha, "Taking the Long Way," yielded five Grammy nominations, including three for the wry single "Not Ready to Make Nice." The acclaimed album was the ninth-biggest seller in the United States last year, even if its commercial success fell short of its predecessors.
Grammy voters love underdogs and comeback stories, which could help the Dixie Chicks add to their collection of eight Grammys. But politically charged music arising from such turbulent times as Vietnam and Watergate has traditionally been ignored at awards time.
Indeed, for a liberal-leaning recording industry full of rebels and other creative misfits, there has been little acknowledgment in recent years that an unpopular conservative president is embroiled in a war that has cost the lives of more than 3,120 U.S. military personnel and over 50,000 Iraqis.
"I think people are paranoid," former Grateful Dead member Mickey Hart told Reuters. "I think that if they speak out, they think they're gonna get whacked by the government. It's pretty oppressive now. Look at the Dixie Chicks. They got whacked."
Here is the whole reason I posted this article. This shows what a lifetime of illicit drug use will do to your mind. This Grateful Dead idiot(and I love thier music by the way) actually thinks the government did something to the Dixie Chicks!?!?!? Mr. Hart, the government did absolutely nothing to the Dixie Chicks. THEIR FANS DID!!!!!!! They quit buying their albums and going to their concerts moron!!! That is all. Do they or any other musician types think there are no repurcussions for political statements they make (From their fan bases)? This type of faulty logic is why I can't (and no one should be for that matter) liberal. The bottom line with Natalie Maines is that she was stupid enough to shit where she eats. Now she and her bandmates have to live with the mess she created.
Not exactly "whacked" Mafia-style. Chicks' Singer Natalie Maines ignited the controversy when she said during a London concert that she was ashamed to hail from the same state as Bush. Continued...
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