Economy & Budget

You know the summer has started when the restaurant industry fires up its annual campaign to blame the minimum wage for the lack of summer job opportunities for teens looking to make some side money.

This year’s effort includes a new highlight: a billboard on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, featuring a jarring image of former child actress Amanda Bynes, suggesting that the distress visible on the celebrity’s face may be a reaction to minimum wage laws that are preventing teens from finding a job this summer. Read more...

Nearly half of all Americans in the private sector workforce have a firsthand appreciation of the value of small businesses to our economy. Why? Because they work for one. Read more...

Immigration reform and the “Gang of Eight’s” bill making its way through the Senate right now is big news, and for good reason. Our immigration system is broken. It needs to be fixed. Small business owners recognize this and realize reform will be good for their businesses, their communities and our economy. The Gang of Eight’s bill is a huge step in the right direction toward reforming the system, but it’s not perfect. No bill is.

Small businesses support many key provisions in the bill, including a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country and visas for both high and low-skilled workers.

However, the bill advancing to the full Senate for a vote doesn’t include the right amount of balance small businesses are looking for when it comes to determining whether a business owner has to verify the legal status of a worker. A program like E-Verify, which some businesses use to check whether the documents provided by employees match information in government databases, must include exceptions for very small businesses. Without that balance, the regulatory paperwork could become so burdensome as to tip those precarious scales in the wrong direction. And that’s not good for anyone. Read more...

In a June 4 interview published by Bloomberg News, Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, went out of his way to champion the legacy of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Zandi, who is arguably the nation’s most prominent economist, insisted that Bernanke deserves praise for the manner in which he "navigated the economy and the financial system through one of the darkest periods."
 
Zandi added that Bernanke’s labors have produced the first signs of fruitful progress. "Now we’re starting to see some sunlight breaking through," he said.
 
Oh, really? Zandi might be a whiz when it comes to crunching numbers, but it appears he has a hitherto unknown talent for spinning revisionist history. Contrary to Zandi’s song of Fed worship, Bernanke is not responsible for navigating the economy and the financial system through a period of crisis. In reality, he actually helped to steer the ship of state directly into the economic shoals.

Three years and 9,000 pages of legislation later, our economy has yet to see any benefits from the passing of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank).

Originally hailed as the answer to our subprime mortgage crisis, Dodd-Frank has not only failed to resolve the issue of “Too Big to Fail” (for which it was originally intended), but also failed to deliver any of the savings it claimed it would to consumers.

What has this colossal piece of legislation done, you ask? Other than force the community bank and credit union industry into alarming rates of foreclosure, and increase bank fees across the board for consumers, not much.

Even in a dysfunctional Washington, it will still come as a surprise that billions of dollars are on the brink of being spent on a weapon no American military commander can imagine using.  That’s the case of the bomb from yesteryear known as the B61.  As the budget debate continues in the days ahead, Congress is faced with a choice: to continue to spend money hand over fist for a nuclear bomb unneeded and unwanted by our military or to use that savings to invest in programs that support our troops and combat modern 21st century threats. Read more...

We’ve all heard the saying: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It is an apt way to summarize the current review of the regulation of the U.S. insurance industry. As the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance meets today, June 13, to discuss the impact of new and emerging international regulatory initiatives on U.S. insurers, panel members should remember that the U.S. insurance market is not only financially strong, but it also is already highly regulated and extremely competitive, all to the benefit of consumers. Read more...

Last year, the House Republican leadership made a point to criticize the Senate, controlled by Democrats, for not having passed a budget in four years.  I agreed with them.  They were right. 

One of the ideas I sponsored as a candidate was “No Budget – No Pay,” the idea that if Congress can’t do their job and pass a budget, they should not get a paycheck.  I proposed the idea after I was sworn in and, on a bipartisan vote, the House of Representatives adopted a version of the concept in January and it became law in early February.  If the Senate wanted to get paychecks and avoid a government shutdown, it would have to pass a budget.

As the Senate takes up their immigration reform bill this week, it is near impossible to watch the news, read a newspaper, or peruse the internet without encountering coverage on this politically hot issue.  One of the arguments in the immigration debate is our country’s need for more low-skill workers. Consequently, my House Small Business Subcommittee is holding a hearing today (June 12) to examine the affects seasonal foreign workers have on the U.S. economy and our small businesses.

Under the H-2B visa program, businesses are permitted to bring in temporary foreign workers to fill lesser-skilled, non-agricultural jobs Americans do not want.  Many of our tourism-related businesses rely heavily on this program because it allows them to significantly increase their workforce during their peak seasons.  For decades, and especially during the recent recession, H-2B workers have kept our small businesses competitive and it is crucial that this program is not regulated out of existence. Read more...

Last week, a high-level panel appointed by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon released its recommendations for a global development agenda when the Millennium Development Goals expire at the end of 2015 and when approximately one billion people will still be living in extreme poverty. 
 
The panel recognized the tremendous achievement the world has made in lifting 600 million people out of extreme poverty but also warned of rising global inequality. Their number one priority going forward:  Leave no one behind.  This should sound familiar to Washington’s “leave no child behind” agenda.  Hopefully this one will be more successful. Read more...