Why are we still paying baggage fees

https://youtu.be/sWLhbcEMWrY

Restaurateurs Weigh In on Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage

Ahead of what will undoubtedly be a shift for the local food scene, Eater asked Seattle-area restaurant owners to weigh in on the impending wage increase. Here's what Angela Stowell,Brendan McGill, and others have to say about how it might change the dining habits of residents and impact the future of restaurants.

Manu Alfau
Chef/Owner, La Bodega
I wish they would've done a little more research on how it would affect small businesses. I am all for people making more money, but I think it's meant for larger corporations like McDonald's, Target, Walmart to have this wage hike.

I don't think it's a bad thing but for smaller businesses, only the super strong will survive. It will mean that only owners who are willing and able to work every day at their own businesses to reduce labor costs will survive. I also have a five year lease, so I'll be able to make a decision about whether to sign or and go forward or not, but other businesses might not have that.

Jeremy Hardy
Owner, Coastal Kitchen and Mioposto
This is a game changer. The myriad of unintended consequences it too complex to really understand; even for restaurant veterans. There was incredible anger generated by a series of callous, recession causing, big-bonused bad actors on Wall Street while the rest of us were falling into the recession abyss. Those guys in Wall Street must be chuckling—like the invasion of Iraq the 15Now folks missed the target by about 3,000 miles. But we sit in the crossfire.
As a lifelong liberal I have always been angry when businesses and politicians decry the loss of jobs over a CPI $.40 minimum wage increase because that is ridiculous. This is different. We cannot survive if we continue doing business as usual. I hope the public will continue to support their favorite spots while everybody figures this thing out. We are going to adjust using all of the tools at our disposal; pricing, reducing menu offerings, look at operating hours, reducing labor where we can and certainly not opening another business in our beloved Seattle. Our business model will need to change. In a business whose goal is "to build community one relationship at a time" this reduction in labor is going to make that even more difficult.
We have raised 100's of thousands for schools, Lifelong AIDS Alliance, Mercy Corps, tsunami survivors, Darfur, the victims of Oso, and countless other non-profits over the years while providing health insurance, education reimbursements, and ongoing training for our employees. It falls somewhere between feeling sad and feeling betrayed that this grenade has been dropped on us.

Brendan McGill
Chef/Owner, Hitchcock, Hitchcock Deli
I think what people need to realize is that the money will have to come from somewhere. With a group like mine, where ethics in sourcing come before profits, we run a very slim margin. To pay my staff more, I need to either buy worse food or raise my prices, and I'm not willing to start buying commodity meats or fish from larger, questionably managed fisheries.

I'm supportive of livable wages and am honestly somewhat excited for this social experiment. If one hour of minimum wage can be used as a metric, things will go fine. If a roast beef sandwich made with high quality bread, hormone and antibiotic-free beef and aioli with organic and free range eggs now costs about one hour of minimum wage, my estimate is that after the wage hikes it will still cost about one hour of minimum wage. There seems to be a fallacy that instead of lining our richie-rich pockets, business owners will simply break off a little more for their employees. I barely get paid $15 an hour.

And the thing is, most of my employees already make $15 an hour, if not much more in the servers' case—it may be a base of $10-$14, plus tips from the pool, staff meals, or vacation pay. Without those factors being considered and fighting to stay in the black (as if every restaurant isn't perpetually fighting to stay in the black), we won't be able to show our staff the respect of allowing them an espresso drink whenever they're dragging, or to use the same high-quality foods for staff meals that we offer our guests. I've enjoyed not running a corporate ship the way the large hotels I've worked in operate: highly punitive where cost-control is concerned. For them it's about maximizing profits, but for me it's going to be about staying in business.

Angela Stowell
CFO/Owner, Ethan Stowell Restaurants
We fully support an increase of the minimum wage to $15, however, we feel that all W2 income should be considered when calculating that wage. Restaurants work on very small margins and Washington already has the highest minimum wage in the country at $9.32 an hour. Under this plan, servers and bartenders, who already make an average of $35-$40 and hour in W2 income, will see an immediate increase in their pay while the cooks, who make around $15 an hour, will have stagnant wages for upwards of seven years.

Behind the hype over Aetna’s minimum wage boost

$16 – is 16 the new $10.10??

While a firm’s decision to increase pay for lower-wage workers should certainly be applauded, it also begs the question: Why is the decision to pay workers $16 per hour breaking news?

My answer: because of the message it sends to investors and shareholders.

Business leaders are undoubtedly influenced by their investors and shareholders. Aetna made the business case for investing in their employees by committing to reduced turnover costs. Unfortunately, for some investors, a firm’s employees are viewed as liabilities instead of assets.

… Mark Bertolini took a bold stand by raising the wage floor to $16 an hour. Roughly 12 percent of the company’s U.S. workforce will directly benefit. In making this change, Bertolini made a larger point: these are the people that Aetna counts on to serve its customers. It is his belief that reducing turnover and improving the quality of customer engagement will yield significant returns on the estimated $14 million that these changes are expected to cost Aetna in 2015.

The US Economic Outlook Stinks Because We're Using An Obsolete Definition Of 'Working Age Adults'

Much of the pessimism about future growth stems from the aging of the U.S. population: the baby boomers, the largest generation in American history, are beginning to retire, leading to much lower labor force participation rates among adults, a trend that began even before the Great Recession and has accelerated since:

Credit Suisse

Credit Suisse suggests a different way of looking at this situation. They point out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that there will be increasing numbers of older Americans continuing to work past traditional retirement ages.

This chart indicates that older Americans will be more willing to work through their sixties and into their seventies in 2022 than in 2012:

Credit Suisse argues that this change in the behavior of older Americans, and the increased desire of younger Americans to go to college, means that our current definition of "working age adults" is obsolete. If we change our definition of working age adults from the current standard of people between the ages of 15 and 64 to people between 20 and 69, growth rates in the working age population suddenly become far more promising over the rest of this decade:

Who makes minimum wage? | Pew Research Center

Who makes minimum wage? | Pew Research Center: "People at or below the federal minimum are:

• Disproportionately young: 50.6% are ages 16 to 24; 24% are teenagers (ages 16 to 19).
• Mostly (78%) white; fully half are white women.
• Largely part-time workers (64% of the total)."

Just over half (51%) work in the leisure and hospitality industry, about 16% in retail, 9% in education and health services, and the rest scattered among different sectors. Broken down occupationally, the picture is similar: Nearly 44% are in food-preparation and serving-related occupations; 15% are in sales and related occupations, and the rest are scattered.

They’re also more likely to live in the South than anywhere else. In the West South Central states (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana)...
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STOCKS GO WILD AFTER AWESOME JOBS REPORT: Here's What You Need To Know

Today was great.

First the scoreboard:

Dow: 14,973, +142.3 pts, +0.9%
S&P 500: 1,614, +16.8 pts, +1.0%
NASDAQ: 3,378, +38.0 pts, +1.1%

And now the top stories:

• It's jobs day in America.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. employers added 165,000 nonfarm payrolls in April.  This was much higher than the 140,000 expected by economists.  Even better, the March number was revised up to 138,000 from 88,000, and the February number was revised up to 332,000 from 268,000.

So, what about the "sell in May and go away" rule? "We want to take the other side of this trade for multiple reasons," said JP Morgan's Tom Lee reiterating his bullishness.  Among other things, he noted that hedge funds were quite bearish already.  This wasn't the case going into the previous three Mays.  Lee also added that falling gas and commodity prices would act as a big stimulus to the economy.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/closing-bell-may-3-2013-2013-5#ixzz2SGkqCebA

Jobs and Rate

The United States economy created an estimated 165,000 jobs in April, averting fears of a sharp slowdown and pushing the unemployment rate to its lowest level since the end of 2008.

The latest jobs figures from the Department of Labor paint a brighter picture of the overall economy than other recent data, which had been weaker and prompted economists to warn of a spring swoon for the third year in row. Those worries had been heightened after the March jobs report, which initially showed the economy to have added just 88,000 jobs, much fewer than had been expected.

On Friday, however, the government sharply revised upward its estimates for job creation in February and March, concluding that the economy actually generated 332,000 jobs in February and 138,000 in March. The unemployment rate, which is based on a separate survey, fell by 0.1 percentage point to 7.5 percent, from 7.6 percent in March.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/business/economy/us-adds-165000-jobs-in-april.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=print

Unemployment at 4-Year Low as U.S. Hiring Gains Steam

Awesome!

The economy picked up speed in February, creating jobs at a pace that would substantially lower the unemployment rate. But Washington could put a stop to that.

Even as analysts hailed a better-than-expected jobs report on Friday that pointed to an acceleration in growth, they warned that stronger employment gains are being put at risk by sequestration, the automatic spending cuts being imposed by the federal government.

“They’re doing their best to get in the way,” Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight, said of lawmakers and other officials. “But the good news is that the economy is carrying plenty of momentum going into sequestration.”

The Labor Department reported that the economy added 236,000 jobs in February as the unemployment rate sank to 7.7 percent, down from 7.9 percent in January and the lowest level since December 2008.

Wall Street expected no more than 165,000 additional jobs in February, and the surprise helped lift the Dow Jones industrial average to another new nominal record, its fourth for the week. It closed at 14,397.07.

Jobs: Bush's First Term vs. Obama's First Term - Business Insider

Who created more jobs!!  Way to go President Obama!

Jobs: Bush's First Term vs. Obama's First Term - Business Insider: "The left side of the chart shows the first Bush years. The right is Obama's.
The red line represents the trajectory of private sector jobs, while the blue and green lines represent the trajectory of state and local government jobs. All are set at 100 to the beginning, just for the sake of normalizing each number to the same point.
As you can see, under Bush's first term, private sector jobs never got to their start point, while public sector jobs soared.
Under Obama private sector jobs have now easily surpassed the level they were when he started, while public sector employment is way down, with no comeback having yet commenced."

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Withdrawal of a Congressional Research Report on Tax Rates Raises Questions - NYTimes.com

Of course this won't be read in the conservative worlds, and the same theory will perpetuate.  Oh, well!!  Some people are not incline to learn and grow - and 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks!'

Withdrawal of a Congressional Research Report on Tax Rates Raises Questions - NYTimes.com: "The Congressional Research Service has withdrawn an economic report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording."

The decision, made in late September against the advice of the agency’s economic team leadership, drew almost no notice at the time. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, cited the study a week and a half after it was withdrawn in a speech on tax policy at the National Press Club.

But it could actually draw new attention to the report, which questions the premise that lowering the top marginal tax rate stimulates economic growth and job creation.

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Romney Misstates Reason For Unemployment Rate Drop

Another fact he got wrong!
Romney Misstates Reason For Unemployment Rate Drop: "Labor force is actually up since the start of the year."
But the labor force has actually grown since the start of the year

While the unemployment rate has declined

In fact, a key reason for the decline in the unemployment rate is a substantial increase of the number of part-time workers

UPDATE: An aide says Romney was referring to the labor force participation rate

The rate is the share of the overall population who have entered the job market — and it has declined since the start of the year, meaning that the labor force growth has not kept up with population growth.

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Drop in Jobless Figure Gives Jolt to Race for President - NYTimes.com

Drop in Jobless Figure Gives Jolt to Race for President - NYTimes.com: "
"
The jobless rate abruptly dropped in September to its lowest level since the month President Obama took office, indicating a steadier recovery than previously thought and delivering another jolt to the presidential campaign.

The improvement lent ballast to Mr. Obama’s case that the economy is on the mend and threatened the central argument of Mitt Romney’s candidacy, that Mr. Obama’s failed stewardship is reason enough to replace him.
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The Romney tax plan, in one chart

A while back, Ezra posted a chart detailing the differences between the Romney and Obama tax plans, while emphasizing how small the sliver of the population that got big cuts from Romney (and big hikes from Obama) is. But there are new estimates, detailed earlier Wednesday, from William Gale and Adam Looney of the Tax Policy Center of the Romney plan’s impact if it’s paid for with cuts to tax breaks, and if it’s not. So I thought I’d apply the same charting approach to the new figures:

The blue bars indicate how the plan would affect after-tax income if the rate cuts are paid for with tax break cuts, and the red bars show its effects without making up the lost revenue. The top 0.1 percent see incomes that are 8.6 percent higher without paying for the rate cuts, and 4.4 percent higher if they’re fully financed. Meanwhile, the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers see incomes fall by 1.1 percent if the rate cuts are paid for by cutting tax breaks.

Mayor Emanuel on growing Chicago

OBAMA: The Government Jobs Slayer - Business Insider

OBAMA: The Government Jobs Slayer - Business Insider: "Little known or distributed fact: President Obama is a government job slayer.  That’s right.   When compared to both GW Bush and Bill Clinton, President Obama is absolutely crushing the size of the government workforce.  While Presidents Bush and Clinton added well over 500,000 government jobs during their first terms, President Obama has cut more than 500,000. "

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Americans Say They’re Better Off Since Obama Took Office - Bloomberg

Say What!!!!



Americans Say They’re Better Off Since Obama Took Office - Bloomberg: "A plurality of Americans now say they are better off than they were when President Barack Obama was inaugurated, providing a surprising lift to Obama’s re- election campaign despite troublesome economic news.

Forty-five percent of those surveyed in a Bloomberg National Poll say they are better off than at the beginning of 2009 compared with 36 percent who say they are worse off. In March, poll respondents split almost evenly on that question after having been decidedly negative since the aftermath of the worst recession in seven decades."

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No Joke: George W. Bush Writing a Book on Economic Growth - Robert Schlesinger (usnews.com)

Sometimes you have to ask yourself if something is genuine or whether the keen minds behind The Onion have managed to hack reality. To wit: Former President George W. Bush is writing a book on—wait for it—strategies for economic growth.

The Center for American Progress's Pat Garofalo caught this little tidbit and nicely summarized why the idea of Bush writing a book on economic growth is ludicrous.

8.1!!! U.S. unemployment update

U.S. Added Only 115,000 Jobs in April; Rate Is 8.1%

 

The nation’s employers produced a net gain of 115,000 positions, after adding 154,000 in March, the Labor Department said Friday. April’s job growth was less than economists had been predicting.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee,immediately seized on the numbers, arguing that the lackluster report demonstrated that President Obama’s stewardship over the economy was lacking. “We should be seeing numbers in the 500,000 jobs created per month,” he said. “This is way, way, way off from what should happen in a normal recovery.”

The White House accentuated the positive in the report, while acknowledging that it fell short of what was needed. “Today’s employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” said Alan B. Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, “but much more remains to be done to repair the damage caused by the financial crisis and the deep recession.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/business/economy/us-added-only-115000-jobs-in-april-rate-is-8-1.html?_r=1&hp#h[]

Stocks Rally to Pre-Crisis Heights

Stocks climbed to new heights in part on rosy retail sales data, pushing the broad market to levels last seen in June 2008 and the Nasdaq composite index past the 3,000 milestone for the first time since 2000.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/business/stocks-rally-to-pre-2008-heights.html?ref=business