In The Spotlight Blog

While everyone in Wisconsin is right to be concerned about violent crime, I find that some people believe there’s a magic-wand solution. They feel that if only we passed yet one more law, we could end the tragedies that result from people choosing to ignore the law and shoot others. This came up when I was talking to people in Appleton this past week. A woman asked whether I had voted for some particular gun-control law that she favored. My answer was simple: No. It wasn’t a good law. I voted for a better solution to the problem of “straw buyers,” a bill offered by Sen. Grassley of Iowa. It would have cracked down on attempts by felons to illegally purchase firearms, increased penalties for gun trafficking, required the Department of Justice to explain its failure to prosecute gun cases, and improved the existing Criminal Background Check System. No magic wand – just better enforcement of the law we have.

Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted over the weekend not to unionize with the United Auto Workers. The Wall Street Journal says it’s “the best news so far this year for the American economy.” It’s important news for taxpayers outside the auto industry. The Journal explains why: “The failure reflects how well the plant's workers are doing without a union, to the tune of $27 an hour including benefits. The defeat also speaks to the harm the UAW has done to itself by driving GM and Chrysler to bankruptcy and pushing companies like Caterpillar to move new production from union plants.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that the ridiculously misnamed “Affordable” Care Act will reduce work. As the agency itself said of Obamacare: “By providing subsidies that decline with rising income (and increase with falling income) and by making some people financially better off, the ACA will create an incentive for some people to work less.” The Wall Street Journal put it this way: “A key factor is people scaling back how much they work and instead getting health coverage through the Affordable Care Act. . . . Some workers might decide they were better off working fewer hours because a smaller paycheck might qualify them for Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income Americans that some states are expanding under the health law, while other workers might eye the law's income-based subsidies toward the cost of private insurance premiums and decide to change their hours to affect their eligibility. Meanwhile, higher-income workers whose tax rates were increased to help pay for the law may also choose to work less, the CBO said.”

resident Obama wants to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. “Give America a raise,” he demanded of employers in his State of the Union speech, telling them, “Americans will support you” as their labor costs – and their products’ prices – shoot upward. The president claimed this was a matter of helping poor families. The numbers, however, show that very few families must get by on minimum wage. Only 2.8% of all workers earned the minimum wage in 2012, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, and more than half of those were under 25 years old. A quarter were teenagers. New 2013 Census data from economist Keith Hall at the Mercatus Center shows how most minimum wage workers are far from the heart-wrenching straw man that the president deploys: