Seattle raised its minimum wage to $13 an hour in 2016. A new study shows that the increase actually hurt jobs and wages for low-paid workers. The Supreme Court is weighing in on the matter, and it could have a big impact on the future of the minimum wage. Ben Shapiro explains why the Supreme Court should have left the matter to the free market, and why government intervention in the labor market should not be the answer to free market forces. He also points out that government intervention is not the answer, it s the opposite of what the left has long sought: more government control over the market, which is what we should be focusing on, not more government intervention, in order to force businesses to hire more low-income workers. Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio and host of the Daily Show with Bill Maher, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and NPR. He is also a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard and The Huffington Post, and has been featured on CNN, NPR, CBS, NPR and the BBC. and many other publications. He can be found online at bit.ly/BenShapiroShow and on social media at . He is a frequent guest on CNN and NPR, and he's on the Tonight Show with Alex Castellanos and The FiveThirtyEight, where he hosts a podcast called . and is the author of the book, The Fair Pay Project, Fair Pay, which you can find him online at . as well as his new book, Fair Pay: Fair Pay and Fair Rights, which he co-authored with his wife, Amy Poehler, is out in the new book Fair Paypal, which you should check out here. And you can get a free copy of his book, "Fair Pay, Thank You, Ben Shapiro, and much more! Thanks to Ben Shapiro for being a supporter of this podcast. . And thank you for listening to Ben's work and for supporting Ben Shapiro's work on this podcast and other great work, Ben's excellent work on his work on the podcast, Thank you Ben Shapiro and I hope you enjoy this podcast, Ben is a real friend of mine. Thank you for supporting the podcast and I really really do appreciate it, Ben and I appreciate you, too, Ben, too much, Ben really really really appreciate it. - - Teddy, too. --
00:00:14.000Seattle actually ended up embracing $13 per hour, raising the minimum wage from $9.47 in 2014 to $11 in 2015 to $13 in 2016.
00:00:23.000Under the theory that an increase wouldn't throw people out of work, wouldn't encourage part-time hiring, and would inflate salaries enough to allow more affordability in the Seattle housing market.
00:00:32.000A new study demonstrates that, as usual, central planning of the economy leads to precisely the reverse of the results the central planners seek to achieve.
00:00:40.000According to a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, quote, using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly wage, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13
00:00:53.000Reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9%, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by only around 3%.
00:01:00.000Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees' earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016.
00:01:11.000Evidence attributes more modest effects to the first wage increase.
00:01:14.000We estimate an effective zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage levels, comparable to many prior studies.
00:01:19.000In other words, restaurants didn't fire anybody.
00:01:22.000They just put them on part-time shifts and cut back their hours.
00:01:24.000That shouldn't be a surprise since that's exactly what happens every time the government places an extra burden on employers.
00:01:29.000One of the great myths of minimum wage movement, and the central planning movement as a whole, is that
00:01:34.000Business owners aren't operating at a slim margin, but raking in dollars to hide in their Scrooge McDuck money bins, depleting the potential income of their employees.
00:01:43.000Thanks to competition, and competition is fierce in industries that employ minimum wage workers, profit margins are never enormous.
00:01:49.000Even in 2013, a booming year for the restaurant business, Capital IQ estimated the average profit margin for restaurants at 2.4%.
00:01:56.000Profitability varies by chain as well and by local franchise.
00:01:59.000Even leftists were taken aback by Seattle's sizable minimum wage increase.
00:02:03.000Jared Bernstein of the Leftist Center on Budget and Policy Priorities derided the minimum wage increases in Seattle as quote, beyond moderate.
00:02:25.000Seattle barely had any jobs under the $11 threshold before the legislation passed.
00:02:30.000But that wasn't true of $13-an-hour jobs.
00:02:32.000And the regulations essentially priced a good deal of full-time, low-wage labor out of the market.
00:02:37.000Furthermore, the economy right now in Seattle is strong.
00:02:39.000What happens during a downturn, when businesses have to shed costs?
00:02:43.000Government intervention isn't the answer to the free market.
00:02:45.000The free market is the answer to the free market.
00:02:47.000But don't expect the left to admit they're not merely punishing evil businessmen, they're skewing the entire labor market and hurting a broad swath of people, including minimum wage employees.
00:04:29.000Okay, so let's begin with the big news of the day, which is that President Trump's travel ban has largely been upheld at the Supreme Court level.
00:04:57.000The Supreme Court issued a ruling on Monday morning that would grant petitions for certiorari and grant stay applications in part on President Trump's travel ban.
00:05:07.000His travel ban said that he was going to ban travel for indefinitely from these six majority Muslim countries and put a 90-day hold on immigration so that he could get a better handle on vetting procedures.
00:05:21.000Period has basically expired by now, and we're supposed to get a plan anytime now.
00:05:24.000But the travel ban was designed really to prevent the importation of Syrian refugees.
00:05:29.000It was designed to prevent the importation of people from countries like Yemen, where we don't know anything about the people.
00:05:35.000And the courts, the lower courts you recall, had ruled that this was improper, that it was discrimination based on religion, which is asinine, because again,
00:05:42.000You do not have constitutional rights if you live outside the United States and are not a United States citizen or green card holder.
00:05:48.000So if you're some random dude on a hilltop in Yemen, you do not have the right to enter the country.
00:05:52.000And you'll recall the rulings were so stupid that they went back to the campaign and they quoted Trump's tweets and they said, really what this is, it's an impermissible attempt to ban Islam.
00:06:00.000Well, now it gets to the Supreme Court level and the Supreme Court says, listen,
00:06:03.000We'll have a full hearing on the travel ban in October, but for now, all these lower court rulings are really dumb.
00:06:09.000So the court consolidated the various cases on the travel ban for hearing in October, and the court relieved temporary injunctions issued by those lower courts regarding people attempting to enter the country who, quote, lack any bona fide relationship with people, with a person or entity in the United States.
00:06:24.000So, there were two types of people who had filed injunctions against this particular travel ban.
00:06:32.000was the guy who has a mother-in-law in Yemen and he wants her to come in from Yemen.
00:06:35.000So the court says that person still has an injunction.
00:06:38.000So that person can still bring mother-in-law in.
00:06:40.000But the people who did not get an injunction are the universities.
00:06:42.000So universities sued and they said, well, if we can't draw from Yemen, then we're really going to just destroy the diversity of our universities.
00:06:50.000We need more people from Yemen who are unvetted.
00:06:52.000Otherwise, how the hell are we going to staff up this engineering department?
00:06:56.000It was always a silly argument, but the courts basically said this is a super silly argument because
00:07:01.000You may think you have an interest in bringing in unvetted immigration, but the government has the power over immigration.
00:07:15.000So effectively, this means the court tossed the cases brought by the universities, but left in place specific injunctions against preventing importation of relatives of American citizens from abroad.
00:08:04.000Very, very good for the Trump administration.
00:08:06.000That is a win for the Trump administration.
00:08:07.000They are rightly crying about it today as well.
00:08:09.000They should, because the lower courts are ridiculous.
00:08:11.000The lower courts were always ridiculous.
00:08:14.000So, good for the Trump administration for standing by its second executive order, and good for the court, mostly, for ignoring all of the stupidity of the lower court.
00:09:00.000There's a religious institution or person.
00:09:02.000That doesn't mean that you can discriminate against that religious institution or person.
00:09:06.000The opinion was delivered by Chief Justice Roberts.
00:09:08.000It had concurrences by Justice Thomas and Gorsuch.
00:09:11.000Only the far-left Justice Sotomayor and Ginsburg dissented.
00:09:13.000That means that Kennedy and even Kagan voted on behalf of the idea that churches should be allowed to receive public money for a playground, which is what this was.
00:09:20.000This church applied for a rubberized playground.
00:09:24.000When the state said, no, even though you're a good applicant, we're not going to allow you because you're a church.
00:09:28.000And so the court said, no, you're not allowed to do that.
00:09:31.000The key line in the decision says the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified solely because it is a church is odious to our constitution and cannot stand.
00:09:41.000So people are very excited about this case.
00:09:45.000There are a couple things that make me less excited about the case.
00:09:47.000One, there's significant limitation on the case's scope.
00:09:50.000So footnote three to this case is a bizarre footnote.
00:09:54.000And it says, this case really only applies to playground resurfacing.
00:10:48.000So, again, Gorsuch's main concern here is that the court is going to come back with school vouchers and say, well, sure, we don't really want to discriminate against churches, but the church is trying to push religion and we can't foster the church in pushing religion, so no school vouchers.
00:11:01.000That's what the court is leaving the door open to.
00:11:04.000Gorsuch says, and this is the most important line of his concurrence,
00:11:09.000Listen, I said he was terrific at the time.
00:11:11.000I mean, as soon as Trump appointed him, I wore a freaking MAGA hat on the show.
00:11:15.000Gorsuch says the Constitution, quote, guarantees the free exercise of religion, not just the right to inward belief.
00:11:20.000Generally, the government may not force people to choose between participation in a public program and their right to free exercise of religion.
00:11:27.000I don't see what it should matter whether we describe that benefit, say, as close to Lutherans by status,
00:11:32.000Or close to people who do Lutheran things by use.
00:11:49.000That will not cater a gay wedding and the Colorado government has tried to persecute that bakery and the bakers say well that's a violation of our freedom of religion so Gorsuch is concerned and you can see that he's concerned that the court is about to decide
00:12:05.000Whether businesses can operate in a religious manner congruent with free exercise if they don't serve gay couples cakes, for example.
00:12:11.000So Gorsuch's point is that the court is leaving the door open to arguing that a state is not discriminating against a religious person, but only against doing religious things.
00:12:20.000Right, so just like in this case, the court is saying, well, the church was not doing a religious thing, so they can apply for the grant, they would also say, well, you know, when you operate a bakery, you're not doing a religious thing, and therefore we can crack down on you.
00:12:32.000That is dangerous logic, because the fact is that religion does pervade all the things that religious people do.
00:12:38.000As a religious person, everything I do in my life is pervaded by a certain religious sensibility and mission.
00:12:45.000Okay, because that's true of everyone who's religious.
00:12:47.000If you're a secularist, then your motivating ideology is secularism, and what you do is motivated by your secularism.
00:12:53.000If you're a religious person, especially if you're a practicing Jew, for example, every time you eat, every time you serve food, every time you say thanks and grace for serving food, you know, does that mean that you are now doing something that is forbidden or at least the government can bar because it's a religious activity?
00:13:09.000I'm not discriminating against you as a religious person, I'm just saying you can't be religious outside of the church.
00:13:15.000That doesn't wash, and that's what Gorsuch is saying.
00:13:17.000The left, by the way, would like to steamroll all religious practice into private.
00:13:21.000Justice Kagan is trying to say, well, running a playground isn't religious anyway, so it's a moot point.
00:13:25.000But the pedal is going to hit the metal when it comes to actual religious belief dictating how you behave, which is true of the vast majority of religious people.
00:13:35.000Then there is a third Supreme Court case, and this one's getting a lot less attention, but this one is just totally crazy.
00:13:40.000So, on Monday, the Supreme Court declared that birth certificates were no longer designed to list the biological parents of children.
00:13:45.000So over in Arkansas, they had a law that says that a married husband and wife, or the biological parents of a child, are listed on the birth certificate.
00:13:53.000The reason a married couple, husband and wife, are listed on the birth certificate
00:13:57.000is because they are presumably the biological parents of the child and because of that there's a provision in Arkansas law that says that if there's artificial insemination we make an exception and we allow the non-biological parents but the married parents to be listed on the birth certificate
00:14:15.000Now, there's a couple of lesbian couples, and they got their birth certificates.
00:14:18.000They were able to list their names on the birth certificates under the artificial insemination portion of the law, right?
00:14:24.000That portion of the law that applied only to men and women was struck down.
00:14:28.000They said that this is, it's obvious that if we can list non-biological parents for artificial insemination, we will do that for heterosexual couples and for gay couples.
00:14:37.000But that wasn't enough for the lesbian couples.
00:14:39.000The lesbian couples wanted to get their birth certificates not under the guise
00:14:43.000of the artificial insemination criteria but under the guise instead of normal biological parenting ideas.
00:14:50.000So the state of Arkansas rightly pointed out that the state of Arkansas had already issued valid birth certificates listing each child's biological mother and her spouse and that the artificial insemination statute applied to same-sex couples but that wasn't enough.
00:15:01.000So Arkansas, based on the rules of human biology, had determined that heterosexual spouses were typically the biological parents of their children.
00:15:44.000Because, for example, my good friend Andrew Breitbart, right, when he died, it turned out that he had a congenital heart defect.
00:15:50.000Well, he would have known that if he had looked at presumably his California birth certificate, which supposedly was supposed to list not just his mom, but also his dad.
00:15:58.000I don't know if it listed his dad, but he didn't know who his dad was.
00:16:00.000Presumably his dad had some sort of congenital heart defect.
00:16:02.000One of the purposes of having a birth certificate is that children can go back and look at the health issues that have impacted their parents.
00:16:09.000And that is one of the reasons for a birth certificate.
00:16:11.000But the court says, no, it hurts the feelings of gay people and therefore we have to issue birth certificates to same-sex spouses regardless of biological parentage, not under the artificial insemination statute, but under the general birth certificate statute.
00:16:24.000Court certificates are basically just another legal guardianship document now, or a second marriage certificate with a kid's name on it.
00:16:30.000Justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas, the three conservatives on the court, they dissented as well they should have.
00:16:37.000One of the things I hate, just as a general note, is I hate these term-ending decisions.
00:16:45.000This idea that the Supreme Court gets to sit there on high
00:16:49.000And then determine your rights and my rights is really stupid.
00:16:52.000We talked about the issue of judicial review and the idea of this infallible Supreme Court.
00:16:57.000We discussed that a couple of weeks ago on Big Ideas on Thursday.
00:17:00.000But the fact is that there's a much better case the legislature should be allowed to do more and the Supreme Court should be allowed to do less rather than we sit around and wait to hear whether Justice Kennedy took his brand this morning, which is basically what the Supreme Court amounts to.
00:17:13.000All of the media outlets line up to get the dicta from the Supreme Court, to get the opinions from the Supreme Court, and they line up and then they just wait eagerly to hear what these all-wise beings have to say about the Constitution.
00:17:26.000There's a reason that separate officers of the court and of the legislature and the president all swear an oath to the Constitution, that is, that the Constitution was not supposed to be the sole repository of the Supreme Court.
00:17:38.000Unfortunately, that's what it has become.
00:17:42.000Before we continue here, I want to talk about the media's frustration with the fact that Trump is continuing to get some policy things done.
00:17:48.000Like, now he's actually starting to get some policy things done.
00:17:51.000At least the travel ban was now upheld by the Supreme Court.
00:17:53.000It looks like Trumpcare is going to move through the Senate.
00:17:56.000And the media is frustrated because they don't know how to handle all of this.
00:17:59.000Like, Trump is unpopular, but they don't understand why that isn't stopping.
00:18:03.000The EPA from rolling back regulations.
00:18:05.000We'll talk about that in just a second.
00:18:06.000But before we do that, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Zeal.
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00:19:59.000Three weeks ago, when there was a lot of news about Comey and Trump-Russia and all this stuff, and Fox News was ignoring the news, then the ratings for Fox News went down.
00:20:07.000CNN, lately, has been ignoring the real news that's happening in the universe in order to continue to focus on Trump-Russia, and their ratings are now down.
00:20:14.000The rule of the story is, as we here believe at The Ben Shapiro Show, is you cover the news, you don't decide what news is important based on who you would like to win.
00:20:22.000There is news that is important, and there is news that is not important, and that news remains important, despite your own political partisan interests.
00:20:30.000So, CNN is very frustrated, they're very angry, because Fox & Friends had an interview with Trump, and granted, it's a typical Fox & Friends interview, it's just a softball interview with President Trump.
00:20:39.000Brian Stelter at CNN, who hates Trump, he came out and he said this is just an infomercial.
00:20:44.000The bottom line is that you might look at this and see propaganda from Fox.
00:20:48.000I prefer to think of it as an infomercial.
00:21:36.000What hard things do you want to tackle at this point?
00:21:39.000During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office, enchanted you the most about serving in this office, humbled you the most, and troubled you the most?
00:22:29.000I mean, obviously, you all remember the media bias was just insane in favor of Obama.
00:22:32.000Now they're mad that there's media bias in favor of Trump, because they think you have to universally be on the anti-Trump page in order to make all this happen.
00:22:38.000And that's why they're so bewildered, because after months and months, after a year of coverage, almost, on the Trump-Russia stuff, it turns out there is nothing there.
00:22:46.000And not only is there nothing there, it turns out that the blowback is actually affecting the guy who they loved, President Obama, Adam Schiff.
00:22:54.000Representative Schiff from out here in California who's been hot and heavy on the Trump-Russia stuff, even he is now being forced to acknowledge that it's Obama who blew it on the Russia investigation, that if really there was a problem of Trump-Russia, Obama should have announced it much earlier.
00:23:08.000It's a big problem for them, and I'll explain why in a second.
00:23:11.000Did Obama fail in his duty to this nation?
00:23:14.000I think the Obama administration should have done a lot more when it became clear that not only was Russia intervening, but it was being directed at the highest levels of the Kremlin.
00:23:23.000And indeed, Senator Feinstein and I were repeatedly trying to make that case to the administration, initially when they didn't want to make attribution, they didn't want to publicly talk about Russia's role.
00:23:33.000And later, after we issued our own statement, and they did attribute the conduct to Russia,
00:23:40.000I was urging that they begin then the process of sanctioning Russia, the administration talking more forcefully.
00:23:46.000Given the seriousness of this, I think the administration needed to call out Russia earlier and needed to act to deter and punish Russia earlier.
00:23:55.000And this is the way that this is going to work all the way through, right?
00:23:57.000So the Democrats were talking Trump-Russia, Trump-Russia, Trump-Russia, and then it turns out that Obama knew about Trump-Russia and didn't say anything about Trump-Russia for two reasons.
00:24:04.000One, he felt he didn't have enough information yet, supposedly, and two, because he was afraid that if he said anything it would blow back on Hillary because there'd be suggestions that Obama was trying to rig the election for Hillary Clinton.
00:24:15.000In any case, the Democrats are just in complete disarray over the Trump-Russia stuff, but
00:24:21.000One wing of the party has no choice but to continue talking about it.
00:24:24.000I'll explain why in a second, but for that, you have to go over to dailywire.com and become a subscriber.
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