Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of March 20, 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.

Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
loading...

Jobs Will Be Lost

According to FOX News, 38% of private employers will cut workers if the minimum wage is raised like President Obama and the Democrats want.

 

Thirty-eight percent of America’s private employers say they will lay off workers if Congress agrees to raise the minimum wage to $10.10, according to a new survey by the nation’s largest privately held staffing firm.

Fifty-four percent of employers who are paying their workers the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour say they would reduce hiring, while 65 percent say they would raise prices on their goods and services to offset the bumps in pay.

Of the 1,213 business and human resources professionals surveyed by Express Employment Professionals last month – which include whose who pay their employees the minimum wage as well as those who do not – 19 percent say they’d fire workers, 39 percent would reduce hiring and 51 percent would raise prices on their services to make up the salary costs.

“As with any such policy change, there are upsides and downsides. But based on this survey, there’s no denying that raising the minimum wage will result in layoffs, reduced hiring, and higher prices at a large chunk of American companies,” Bob Funk, CEO of Express and the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas, said. “How severe will those effects be? That remains to be seen, but policymakers will certainly want to be mindful of this reality as they legislate.”

Last month, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that said that while raising the country’s minimum wage might boost the incomes of millions of Americans, it would simultaneously mean hundreds of thousands of fewer workers.

According to the CBO, a graduated boost in the minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016 would lead to an estimated decline in employment of 500,000 workers by the second half of that year.

That figure is the central estimate in a range of possible outcomes, but it is more likely than not that the law would lead to less employment.

According to the report, there is a 70 percent chance that the law would lead to anywhere from a slight decline in employment to a decline of 1 million workers.

USPS

The US Postal Service is $100 billion dollars in debt and it's time for Republicans to do something. According to FOX News, Darrell Issa hopes he can convince fellow Republicans that delivering the mail six days a week doesn't make sense anymore.

It might feel like first-class postage is going up every few weeks, but the U.S. Postal Service nevertheless is in need of a bailout.

Frank Todisco, chief actuary for the Government Accountability Office, told a House committee last week that the agency had $100 billion in debt and unfunded health benefit liabilities at the end of the last fiscal year.

At this stage, even the Postal Service admits it needs help.

"Despite our efforts and our hard work, we cannot return the organization to profitability or secure our long term financial outlook without the passage of comprehensive reform legislation," Jeffrey Williamson, United States Postal Service executive vice president, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee recently.

Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has ideas for how to fix it, and says part of that is convincing members of his own party that six-days-per-week mail delivery doesn't make sense.

"Much of what I have to do is to get my fellow Republicans to swallow the pills of five-day delivery -- going to the curb for delivery, right-sizing the size of the post office, quite candidly changing their medical retirement system to make it streamline with the rest of the workforce in America, by putting them on Medicare and out of a very expensive private program that you and I pay for," Issa told Fox News.

Delaware Democratic Sen. Tom Carper and Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn have a bill with bipartisan support in the Senate. The Senate proposal would move to five-day delivery after 2017, keep all processing facilities open for at least two more years, and allow the U.S. Postal Service to recover overpayments into the federal pension system.

"Not only does our bill modernize the Postal Service and give it the tools and resources it needs to make tough but necessary business decisions to cut costs and increase revenue, but it also directly addresses the source of the Postal Service's two biggest financial liabilities -- retiree pension costs and health care costs -- so taxpayers won't be left on the hook for these obligations in the future," Carper told Fox News.

As for the challenges of getting such an overhaul passed during an election year, Issa says the time is now.

"There is no better time than in an election year for people to call up and say I don't want to be paying out of my general tax revenue for somebody else's junk mail being delivered," Issa said. "That kind of message will cause people to make a reform this year."

Personally, I'd be fine with mail only being delivered 3 or 4 times a week.

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.

More From News/Talk 95.1 & 790 KFYO