California Insider

Tom McClintock's argument against raising the minimum wage.

An excerpt:

If a simple legislative act increasing the minimum wage to $7.75 is all that is needed to improve the lot of the working poor by just a little, then why not raise it to $10 an hour and get them to the poverty level? For that matter, why not raise it to $50 an hour, assuring every working Californian a comfortable living? The truth is that if your labor is worth $6.75 an hour and the minimum wage is raised to $7.75, you simply become unemployable. The first rung of the ladder is gone, and there's no place to start.

Proponents of this policy apparently believe that it is better not to have a job paying $7.75 an hour than to have one that pays $6.75. The French minimum wage is twice that of our federal minimum wage, and the result has not been greater prosperity. Quite the contrary, France's unemployment rate is twice the American rate, and it hovers at an intractable 40% within those communities that recently rioted for days.

John Gartner on the immigrant spirit:

America is an amazing natural experiment -- a continent populated largely by self-selected immigrants. All these people had the get-up-and-go to pull up stakes and come here, a temperament that made them different from their friends and relatives who stayed home. Immigrants are the original venture capitalists, risking their human capital -- their lives -- on a dangerous and arduous voyage into the unknown.

Not surprisingly, given this entrepreneurial spirit, immigrants are self-employed at much higher rates than native-born people, regardless of what nation they emigrate to or from. And the rate of entrepreneurial activity in a nation is correlated with the number of immigrants it absorbs. According to a cross-national study, "The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor," conducted jointly by Babson College and the London School of Economics, the four nations with the highest per capita creation of new companies are the United States, Canada, Israel and Australia -- all nations of immigrants. New company creation per capita is a strong predictor of gross domestic product, and so the conclusion is simple: Immigrants equal national wealth.

62 percent of California voters disapprove of the job George W. Bush is doing as president, according to the latest Field Poll. That's his worst rating ever in the state, and worse than every recent US President except Jimmy Carter at the end of his term (66 percent) and Richard Nixon just before he resigned (70 percent).