Chad’s Morning Brief: What the CBO Says About Raising the Minimum Wage, Marriage Laws and the Religious, and Other Top Stories

Chad’s Morning Brief: What the CBO Says About Raising the Minimum Wage, Marriage Laws and the Religious, and Other Top Stories

Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of February 19, 2014. Give me your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am. Remember, you can listen online at KFYO.com or on your iPhone/Android with the radioPup App.

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500,000 Jobs Lost

The White House must really be hating the Congressional Budget Office lately. Recently the CBO claimed that Obamacare created a disincentive to work which sent the Dems into spin control and yesterday the CBO announced that a wage increase would lift pay, but cost thousands of jobs.

According to FOX News, 500,000 jobs would be lost if the minimum wage is  raised to $10.10 an hour.

A plan by President Obama and fellow Democrats to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would cost roughly 500,000 jobs but increase wages for roughly 16.5 million Americans, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

The report was immediately met with sharp Republican criticism for the wake hike plan.

“While helping some, mandating higher wages has real costs, including fewer people working,” said a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. “With unemployment Americans' top concern, our focus should be creating -- not destroying -- jobs for those who need them most.”

The CBO analysts said their estimate of employment losses was approximate. They said the actual impact could range from a very slight employment reduction to a loss of one million workers.

Increasing the minimum wage has emerged as a key part of Obama’s second-term agenda, with the president restating his intentions just hours before the release of the report, at a public event in suburban Maryland.

The White House was quick to respond to the report, with Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, telling reporters on a conference call,“CBO’s estimate doesn’t reflect the overall consensus view of economists who say [the increase] would have minimum or no impact on employment.”

Furman said the report is “essentially confirming the consensus” that such an increase would reduce poverty and overall increase wages for moderate- to low-income families. But he acknowledged some “respectful disagreement” between the CBO and the White House about the employment impact.

He also said “zero would be a perfectly respectable estimate” for the number of workers who would lose their jobs as a result of the increase.

Still, Republicans argued the report puts authoritative weight behind their argument that such an increase would cut jobs because companies would have to spend more on wages.

"This report confirms what we've long known,” Boehner’s office said.

Gay Marriage and Religious Businesses

National Review came out with a great piece yesterday about gay marriage and businesses who refuse service to gay weddings.

For years now, a central argument of those in favor of same-sex marriage has been that all Americans should be free to live and love how they choose. But does that freedom require the government to coerce those who disagree into celebrating same-sex relationships?

A growing number of incidents show that the redefinition of marriage and state policies on sexual orientation have created a climate of intolerance and intimidation for citizens who believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman and that sexual relations are properly reserved for marriage. Now comes government coercion and discrimination. Laws that create special privileges based on sexual orientation and gender identity are being used to trump fundamental civil liberties such as freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion.

These laws add sexual orientation and gender identity (dubbed SOGI) to the list of protected classes such as those grouped by race, sex, and national origin. Unfortunately, these sexual orientation and gender laws have serious flaws. They frequently fail to protect the civil liberties of Americans, especially our religious liberty. These SOGI laws tend to be vague and overly broad without clear definitions of what conduct can and cannot be penalized. The definitions can be entirely subjective: Boise and other cities in Idaho now prohibit even indirect acts that make another person feel he is being “treated as not welcome.” And increasingly these local SOGI laws have criminal penalties, unlike the landmark Civil Rights Law of 1964.

Under the newer laws, family businesses — especially photographers, bakers, florists, and others involved in the wedding industry — have been hauled into court because they declined to provide services for a same-sex ceremony that they viewed as a violation of their religious beliefs.

Yes, Americans must be free to live and love how they choose, but we should not use government to penalize those who think and act differently. Protecting religious liberty and the rights of conscience does not infringe on anyone’s sexual freedoms. All Americans should remain free in the public square to act in accordance with their beliefs about marriage without fear of government penalty.

In addition to the well-known examples of Christian adoption and foster-care agencies that have been forced to stop providing those services because they object to placing children in same-sex households, the examples below show how government has penalized citizens trying to run their businesses in accordance with their beliefs.

You can read the entire article by clicking on the link above. What do you think about this?

Other Top Stories:

These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com.

Filed Under: gay marriage, Minimum Wage, religion
Categories: Chad's Afternoon Brief

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