Unintended consequences
Cry Wolf Quotes
…we urge you to be sure that these proposals don’t take away the incentive for unemployment claimants to accept part time and temporary jobs when permanent jobs are unavailable. At present, claimants resist such jobs, because earnings from 2 or 3 days of work will often disqualify them from any unemployment benefits. If claimants] lose their health insurance for weeks in which they are disqualified from unemployment benefits, they will have even less incentive to accept work when it is available.
The bottom line remains that employers will have little motivation to hire low-skilled workers—those whose inexperience and lack of productivity does not warrant a wage meeting or exceeding the proposed living wage amount. These workers, who most desperately need experience, will be the ones left most vulnerable. Instead of being able to establish a foothold in the job market, they will have to rely on other means to provide for themselves—most often state-assisted.
…it still is true that the young people of today in this country look to the people who have succeeded in spite of every handicap such as that, as their inspiration for doing things. I think we do not want to kill off that spirit of individualism. I use the term ‘individualism’; I know it is sneered at a lot, but I know if is still a respectable term and I think we ought to cultivate it instead of sneering at it.
New York State’s past independent pioneering activities in social legislation, while commendable in many respects…have already produced discriminatory differentials between the cost of doing business in New York and such costs in neighboring States [sic]. We can see no justification for deliberately increasing those differentials at this time by continuance of such pioneering.
