6 -Time Travelling for Jobs

When I last posted I was busy amending the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Actually I was making suggestions as to how just by altering that one suite of laws and regulations we can stimulate business to create jobs!  At no, that means zero, cost to the taxpayer. In addition the money that it would cost businesses would be the very money from their record profits that they are not investing back into the economy. To policy geeks,  it would essentially accomplish what the Fed is trying to do with near zero interest rates and their Quantitative Easing program.

But wait!  There’s more things we can to make the FLSA a tool for creating jobs and recovering our economy.

While we are busy amending FLSA, let’s make a couple of major conceptual revisions.  How about, getting rid of separate rules for part-time and full-time? There may be items such as pension calculations where number of hours worked matter, but as an employer when you hire someone, they are an employee. Think of the impact that would have on something like the ACA. Right now we have a rule that says you must work 30 hours/week to get employer based health care. Would it not be a lot easier that if you hire someone, you must provide Health Care? This would force employers to maximize the hours available for workers, rather than trying to keep people under that magic 30 hour limit. And while that may seem to be a job killer it does have some positive impacts as well. It frees employees up to make their own choices about how many hours they work. Some families may choose to have each parent work fewer hours so to spend more time with their kids. Empowering people and giving them an opportunity to have some degree of choice about their lifestyle is critical to reducing stress from people’s lives.

OK, there we have most of the discoveries about how to create jobs just by changing one law. No new taxes, no tax cuts; just change a law to bring it closer to current productivity levels as compared to the past 30 years. It also would help towards closing the income gap.  In Part 7, I will go into an explanation of needed changes to Minimum wage as the last piece of the FLSA changes.

Increasing taxes on wealthy people will impact a handful of jobs. Literally.  Wealthy and not so wealthy people do not, and will not hire people to work in their businesses using their own money. Salaries to employees are paid from the business account. Sure, they may hire a cook, a caretaker, or a driver using their own money, but those jobs do not add up to a significant part of the workforce. And of course, the business only hires people if they need those persons to make more money than they make without that person. And, I never hear mentioned, is that employee salaries are deducted from taxes.  Keep this in mind when thinking about Minimum Wage.