Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Hillary Clinton Proposes to Harm Disabled Workers
Hillary Clinton Proposes to Harm Disabled Workers
Mar 18, 2025 6:51 PM

“Most of economics can be summarized in four words: ‘People respond to incentives,’”says economist Steven E. Landsburg. “The rest mentary.”The same can (mostly) be said aboutelectoral politics: Politicians respond to incentives.

Politicians are often derided for following the crowd rather than leading on public policy. But in doing so they are often acting rationally. To gain votes you have to give people what they want, even if want they want is ultimately harmful.

When we can see or predict the destructive e of such policies there is a tendency to assume the politicians motives were dishonorable. But more often than not, politicians who endorse bad policies have noble motives —even if it is nothing more thanthe desire to give voters what they asked for.

I believe that is true in the case of Hillary Clinton, who became the first major presidential candidate to ever mend paying all disabled workers the minimum wage. I assume her motives are perfectly pure, even though the result would lead to increased unemployment for disabled workers.

Currently, if you want to hire someone, the minimum you can pay a worker is either zero or the federally mandated minimum wage. You can get away with paying nothing at all if you call the job an “internship” ply with a half-dozen government requirements. Otherwise, you must pay the worker $7.25 an hour.

But there is an exception to that rule. In 1938 Congress instituted what’s known as the 14c exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which allows employers to obtain a special wage certificate from the Department of Labor that waives their obligation to pay disabled individuals the federally mandated minimum wage.

With this exemptionan employer can pay a mensurate wage,” a sub-minimum wage paid to a worker with a disability that is based on his or her individual productivity (no matter how limited) in proportion to the productivity of experienced workers who do not have disabilities performing essentially the same type, quality, and quantity of work in the vicinity where the worker with a disability is employed.

How is mensurate wage determined? As the U.S. Department of Labor explains:

In very simple terms, if the worker with a disability is 60% as productive when performing a particular job as is the experienced worker who does not have a disability performing the exact same job, mensurate wage for that worker with a disability would be at least 60% of the prevailing wage (the wage rate paid to the experienced worker who does not have a disability).

Here’s an example of how it works: In awidget factor the average worker can produce 100 widgets an hour, for which they earn$8 an hour. A disabled worker, however, may only be able to produce 50 widgets an hour. Because their productivity is only 50 percent of the average, they get half the average pay: $4 an hour.

Based on this standard, the employer has nothing to gain by hiring disabled workers and would do so simply out of charity. Instead of paying one fully productive worker, they could hire two disabled workers at 50 percent functionality. But the employer would gain no real benefit and so has no incentive to exploit disabled workers. Indeed, the employers who most often qualify for the exemption are non-profits like Goodwill Industries whose goal is to provide job skills and opportunities for the disadvantaged.

But some progressive disability rights activists decry this system as unfair. They point out that there may be little to no economic benefit for someone who may only earn a few dollars for their labor. On this point they are mostly right. But no one is expecting disabled people to be able to support themselves financially on $1 an hour. And they miss the reason this exemption is necessary and beneficial:work is about more than money — it’s also about the dignity of contributing to the world, to using our vocations to serve ourfellow man.

By eliminating the 14c exemption we would be telling disabled workers that since their productivityis not able to meet the threshold for the minimum wage, they musteitherwork for pensation (like unpaid interns) or else not beallowed to work at all.

It’s bad enough the government already sends this message to low-skilled workers. Why would we want to tell disabled workers they too aren’t worthy of having a job?

Politicians like Clinton have an obvious incentive to pander to voters who decry “inequitable pay.” But noble motives are no excuse for harming those who are most in need of the dignity of work.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Is there a connection between opioid use and unemployment?
For the past several years the U.S. has been undergoing an opioid epidemic. Opioidsare drugs, whether illegal or prescription, that reduce the intensity of pain signals reaching the brain and affect those brain areas controlling emotion, which diminishes the effects of a painful stimulus. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in 2013 there were more than249 million prescriptionsfor opioid pain medication written by healthcare providers. This is enough for every adult in America to have a bottle of...
Cronyism fueled the murder of a Slovak journalist
“Slovakia has been living through one of the most turbulent times in its young history,” says Martina Bobulová in this week’s Acton Commentary. “It has been almost a month since the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, which have put these events in motion.” Much has changed in past four weeks – the nation went to the streets and the country experienced the biggest public protests since the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Robert Fico’s third...
Radio Free Acton: Discussion on Communism in Cuba; Tech & work part II: Growing technology in agriculture
On this episode of Radio Free Acton, Acton’s director of programs and education, Paul Bonicelli, talks to John Suarez, research director at the Center for a Free Cuba. This talk is a preview of an ing event at Acton on April 17: Communism in Cuba, its international impact, the democratic resistance and U.S. Cuba policy. Then, on the next Tech and the Future of Work segment, Dan Churchwell, Acton’s associate director of program outreach, speaks with Kevin Scott, a soybean...
The Social Capital Index: A geography of ‘associational life’ in America
In recent decades, America has experienced a wave of economic and social disruption. In our search for solutions, however, we tend to look only at the surface, assessing the architecture of particular policies or stroking our chins over economic measurements like Gross Domestic Product. But what if we had a deeper view of the dynamics beneath the surface? What if we had way to measure, assess, and observe the state of“associational life”in America (as Alexis de Tocqueville may have called...
Unemployment as economic-spiritual indicator — March 2018 report
Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...
How growth rates affect the wealth of nations
Note: This is post #74 in a weekly video series on basic economics. In the previous video in this series we learned a basic fact of economic wealth—that countries can vary widely in standard of living. How can we explain wealth disparities between countries? The answer, as Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution university explains, is growth rates. Tabarrok examines the growth rate of the U.S. economy and considers what would life be like if our economy had grown at an...
Fifty years later, cities still suffer the economic effects of the 1968 riots
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the riots that began in 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The riots—sometimes referred to as the Holy Week Uprising or King assassination riots—spread through 110 cities across the United States. As historian Peter B. Levy notes, Fifty-four cities suffered at least $100,000 in property damage, with the nation’s capital and Baltimore topping the list at approximately $15 million and $12 million, respectively. Thousands of small shopkeepers saw their...
Video: Dispelling myths about economic inequality
The lure of socialism lies in its promise of “equality,” a hazily defined concept that educational and political leaders transform into an even more ambiguous social goal. The word itself triggers the innate sense of fairness and equity cherished by everyone raised under the influence of Western culture. The Bible, after all, repeatedly warns believers to have no respect of persons when meting out justice, which Aquinas ranked as “foremost among all the moral virtues.” But do modern-day social engineers...
Virtues, once again
“Crisis of Responsibility: Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It,” by David L. Bahnsen; Foreward by David French; PostHill Press, 2018; 170 pp.; $26. It’s been a long, hard slog on humanity’s path to the current century and its peculiar predicaments. Along the way, there have been numerous guidebooks to assist our respective generations’ quests for living honorable lives in the face of varyingly difficult circumstances. To list them, in fact, would create a magnificent bibliography...
Remember the intangibles: A caution to the 21st-century economist
Today’s economists have no shortage of confidence, offering models and measurements aplenty. But are the tools of the field keeping pace with the actual forces and factors at work? bination of economics with statistics in plex world promises a lot more than it delivers,” economist Russ Roberts recently wrote. “We economists should be more humble and honest about the reliability and precision of statistical analysis.” Indeed, in our plex economy, what can economists actually know? In a new essay at...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved