Redstate

I saw one more paragraph that I think is very informative.

This isn't about issues; it's about perceptions. To be a black Republican is almost a disgrace at this point. Blacks don't identify the right with lower taxes or a strong national defense. They identify it with hate crimes and whatever else the Democrats have chosen to project through their virtual monopolization of black media.

I know much of the African-American community is liberal on issues too, but we are losing votes from people who agree with us.  Even when we push for school choice, strong local government (i.e. police and safety), and lower taxes we are written off because we are Republican.  We need to break this suspicion even if it means compromising on some things.  One idea: We should support affirmative action for one more generation.  We can be ideologically consistent by saying that we are against entitlement, but at the same time we recognize that there are still people alive who lived through segregation.  If we continue to be shut out of the African-American community, it will be our loss.  It is our move and we need to start moving.

This isn't about issues; it's about perceptions.

That is certainly true.

"F**K Republicans"...that's the opening line in one of Mr. Nadler's 2002 ads aired on black radio.  Not sure I'd recommend sticking him in the same room with "top republican honchos"

man, no wonder people think Republicans can't handle money -- they're all the time buying used bridges from guys like Richard Nadler.  if this guy's who I think he is you might want to look a little deeper before you buy.  especially how he got interested in the issue of racially targeted advertising.  I believe '00 was a particularly good year for him.

I think more GOP advertising on black channels is a good idea though...   why should the GOP get a bad rap when Brewer, Berry and King probably weren't even registered to vote.

guess I better go clean the coffee off my monitor now.

About the claim by Crawfish: got a link to really document that? I do see that Nadler DID ruffle GOP feathers with an independent ad in Missouri in '00, where a woman tired of public school pathologies listed a few problems, including "a little too much diversity."

That regrettable gaffe aside, Nadler has done some serious work and his ideas deserve consideration, then action, in this crucial election year.

Nadler had more to say earlier this year in a piece he wrote in Insight.

Today, roughly 10 percent of blacks vote Republican. But 27 percent are self-described conservatives, 44 percent are pro-life, 55 percent favor across-the-board tax cuts, 58 percent support private Social Security accounts and 70 percent favor school choice.

And among Hispanics, 36 percent are self-described conservatives, 61 percent were in favor of the Bush tax plan of 2001, 65 percent are pro-life and 83 percent support school vouchers. Yet fewer than one Latino in three votes Republican.

In other words, minority affinity for key Republican platform issues exceeds minority affinity for the party that champions them by factors of two, three, five and even more.

...Can (the GOP) target communications to these groups in a cost-effective way? ...yes...on a mass basis, blacks and Hispanics (unlike whites) are two of the easiest groups in the nation to target. Both have culture-specific media.

...The point is not that minorities reject our core issues. It is that they do not associate the Republican Party with those issues.

It is at this point that Republicans typically pack it in. Minorities are just too ignorant for outreach or too enculturated or too propagandized or too ... something. But our outsourced consultant from Mars wields more curiosity than the average Republican operative. He asks, "If minorities, and especially blacks, dissociate the GOP from its platform positions, with what issues do they associate us?"

A day of urban-contemporary radio, an evening of Univision, and the veil is lifted. In these venues Republicans rarely are presented in our own voices - but we are there. Democratic consultants, advertising as often as four times per hour in close races, define Republicans as bigots who drag minorities to their death from pickup trucks, who put guns into their children's hands, incarcerate them without evidence and deny them an education. We are the demons who prevent blacks from voting and who burn crosses on lawns. Republicans are not recognized as the party of national defense, right to life, low taxes, entrepreneurship or school choice for a simple reason: We are not portrayed as such in the venues minorities watch and audit. And the response of minority voters to what they see and hear is, in fact, rational.

....So stated, the response becomes clear: Break the monopoly! Re-establish the GOP brand. Reattach the Republican Party label to its signature issues, and attack the Democratic Party on theirs. And do so in the same venues, with the same frequency and the same passion, that Democrats use. It is they, after all, who are the experts."

FWIW, Nadlet describes himself thusly: "a consultant with Access Communications Group of Kansas City and an adviser to the Republican Leadership Coalition. He has written policy analysis for the Cato Institute, National Review, Policy Review and the Heartland Institute..."

Both parties appeal to specific groups in terms the general population is apt to regard as extreme.  The Republicans can use this fact to their advantage here, going beyond running their own advertising on urban contemporary and Spanish language media to monitoring the other side's ads and making sure everyone in the mainstream media knows about them well before the election.

The objective here is not just to increase support for Republicans in minority communities but to decrease support for Democrats elsewhere by tying them to the most extreme-sounding ads.  Obviously it does no good to do this unless enough time remains before the election for the media storm to develop, so media aimed at minorities needs to be monitored closely starting well before Labor Day.

keep looking, there's more.  I don't know anything about crawfish's thing though.  

think about this for a minute Matt.  you're talking about hiring a guy with a history of pissing off both black people (by making ads that pander to white racism) and white people (by making ads that pander to black racism), to make lots more ads that pander to black racism, based on a sales pitch that politicizes the murder of James Byrd in order to tell you that people are calling you names behind your back.  

no offense but that seems painfully naive to me.   do you think dems routinely make ads that accuse repubs of dragging blacks behind their trucks?  or do you think he's talking about one ad, specifically attacking a republican who actually defended or was an apologist in some way for Byrd's killers?  are the scary horror stories about the evil democratic bogeymen corrupting the minds of the poor innocent black folks something that happens constantly or something that happens about as often as people like Nadler get in trouble for making racist ads?  hey, it obviously pays.  

if the GOP wants to persuade black voters that it's not trying to buy their votes but to earn them, this is probably not a good strategy.  like I said in an earlier post, if you want to know how your party treats black people call the Urban League in September and ask them how things are going with the big minority-owned business program the White House unveiled with such fanfare in July.

tying dems to the most extreme-sounding ads?  

dude, do you have any idea at all what Rush Limbaugh and Mike Savage say every single day?  you want the mainstream media to get worked up about an occasional attack ad on a local GOP candidate in the middle of that?

Getting a good education...is that race specific or is it a concern for all "races"

Housing? Welfare? Same-sex marriage? National Defense? Military? Health care? Tort reform?

Care to delineate the "races" of those issues?

Getting a good education...?  Education is paid for with jobs.

Housing?  Paid for with money from jobs.

Welfare?  Only needed if jobs are scarce.

Same-sex marriage?  Has nothing to do with race.

National Defense?  Military?  Paid for with taxes from people with jobs and the companies they buy stuff from.

Health care?  In this country, you don't have access to affordable health care without jobs.

Tort reform?  Nothing to do with race.

See the pattern?

It's telling that Redstate's least recently updated topic category is "Economy" -- there's the problem with the GOP right there.  Everything pales in comparison to jobs, and the GOP hasn't been worth diddly on job growth for the past 80 years.  Instead, they've opposed minimum wage hikes for the past 30.  No wonder so few blacks vote Republican.

Hmn, I somehow get the feeling that you're very concerned with jobs.

There are two sides to that coin, though:

1. How many jobs are there per worker?
   
   
2. How much do those jobs pay?

(I'm switching over to jobs per worker rather than absolute jobs, because it's not meaningful to compare the absolute number of jobs if the working population isn't constant. 100 jobs is full employment if you only have 100 workers. 100 jobs is scandalously inadequate if you have 500 workers.)

Instead, they've opposed minimum wage hikes for the past 30.

This actually undermines your previous point. Increasing the minimum wage reduces the number of jobs. Sure, the people who still have jobs are making more, but that doesn't help the ones who are out of work.

Plain English: If the minimum wage is too high, employers can't afford as many employees, or they outsource those jobs overseas.

Economic jargon: If the minimum wage is higher than the equilibrium wage, then the market will not clear and you get a surplus of labor.

It sucks, but it's one of those nasty real-world trade-offs that we all have to live with.

but are actually created, then maybe you just might realize that the government doesn't create jobs, the private sector does.

Certainly, government can either create an atmosphere where jobs flourish (by trying to get out of its way) or where jobs stagnate (over regulation and taxation). Excuse this long quote, but I'm going put James Lileks' Parable of the Stairs here hoping you can grasp what most GOPer's take for granted when it comes to understanding how private money really works, and who it really belongs to:

The other day a young girl came to the door to solicit my support for her presidential candidate. I asked her why I should vote for this man. She was very nice and earnest, but if you got her off the talking points she was utterly unprepared to argue anything, because she didn't know what she was talking about. She had bullet points, and she believed that any reasonable person would see the importance of these issues and naturally fall in line. But she could not support any of her assertions. Her final selling point: Kerry would roll back the tax cuts.

Then came the Parable of the Stairs, of course. My tiresome, shopworn, oft-told tale, a piece of unsupportable meaningless anecdotal drivel about how I turned my tax cut into a nice staircase that replaced a crumbling eyesore, hired a few people and injected money far and wide - from the guys who demolished the old stairs, the guys who built the new one, the family firm that sold the stone, the other firm that rented the Bobcats, the entrepreneur who fabricated the railings in his garage, and the guy who did the landscaping. Also the company that sold him the plants. And the light fixtures. It's called economic activity. What's more, home improvements added to the value of this pile, which mean that my assessment would increase, bumping up my property taxes. To say nothing of the general beautification of the neighborhood. Next year, if my taxes didn't shoot up, I had another project planned. Raise my taxes, and it won't happen - I won't hire anyone, and they won't hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You see?

"Well, it's a philosophical difference," she sniffed. She had pegged me as a form of life last seen clicking the leash off a dog at Abu Ghraib. "I think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of trickling down." Those last two words were said with an edge.

"But then I wouldn't have hired them," I said. "I wouldn't have new steps. And they wouldn't have done anything to get the money."

"Well, what did you do?" she snapped.

"What do you mean?"

"Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?"

"They didn't give it to me. They just took less of my money."

That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:

"Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money."

Then she left.

And walked down the stairs. I let her go without charging a toll. It's the philanthropist in me.

Increasing the minimum wage reduces the number of jobs.

Not true.  That seems vaguely consistent with economic theory, but the labor market is not at all like a product market.  Increasing the minimum wage (within reasonable limits) decreases job turnover and increases productivity for the low-end workers affected, resulting in no net upward pressure on labor expenses.  When people are making a decent wage, they are less inclined to quit at the drop of a hat, which saves training expenses, and they are more likely to work harder, increasing the value of their work.

Those facts have been proven time and again in comprehansive economic studies, and when the fast food industry tried to discredit them, the attempt backfired.

Will Republicans ever stop treating the low-end labor market as if it were simple trade in an inhuman bulk commodity, and not living, feeling human beings?  Until they do, they will have no hope of attracting any but a sliver of the black vote.

Reading the debate, that the effect is "small", there were still lots of questions the article did not answer.

Loss of jobs when the minimum wage is raised is only one result. For business that operate with very small profit margins (like restaurants) the manager can't work with the fixed costs, so they have to look at those things they have day to day control of... that includes labor. Decisions have to be looked at very hard... raise the price of the product? Ok, but that may mean a drop off in customers. Shorten the hours of some of one's employees. As soon as the lunchtime/dinnertime rush is off, send some of them home, even if it means making the remaining people work harder. Don't take a chance on hiring teens who may be slower to learn and not as "hungry" to work hard. (teen employment rates have continued to plummet)

I didn't see anything in the article that the data dealt in things like shortened hours, doubling up of workshifts, raised menu prices, cut in benefits by shifting some full-time employees to parttime (they're still on the payroll while their cost to the employer is now less).

And certainly the article itself had a strange conclusion that this study of the 'moderate effects' of a raise in the minimum wage gives impetus to the argument for the "living wage."

No, workers are not "commodities"; however, they are a cost to the business and their benefit to the company will be measured by that cost. A company is not a charity, and a company that closes is not only a loss to its immediate employees, but affects jobs in the surrounding, supporting community.

Say, are you the John Schmitt fellow who wrote the article you linked to? Just wondering, since your login here starts with "js" and I figured it might be initials.

Let's see... I've been doing a quick and dirty search of the literature here. I quite agree that the Card and Krueger study was a startling revelation, but it looks like the response has been pretty evenly mixed. I'm seeing about an equal number of papers supporting the theory (that increases in the minimum wage will not increase unemployment) as opposed. For example, Partridge and Partridge (1999) suggests that minimum wage hikes increase long-term unemployment.

Regarding efficiency wages, workers will indeed be more productive when they feel they are being paid a good wage relative to the alternatives. If Company X pays better than Company Y, then the workers at Company X will be more loyal and work harder than the workers at Company Y, all else being equal. However, an increase in the minimum wage affects wages all over the state (or nation, as appropriate). If every company is paying the same (higher) minimum wage for a given job, the job is no longer percieved as particularly good.

If you want people to listen - AND HEAR - your message, then radio is the best medium.  When I had a store, I found that radio advertising, with short and specific messages, was the best way to spend my money.

And I recall a writer noting that he liked being interviewed on radio, because people are more likely to listen to what is said.

TV has an aura of wonder, but I'll bet that dollar for dollar, and minute for minute, radio delivers more punch to ANY market, African American or any other.

The Byrd ad isn't just one isolated ad, it was a campaign <a href=

Dang it, hit the post button when I didn't mean to.

The Byrd ad wasn't just one ad aimed at a Byrd apologist.  It was a campaign run by the NAACP in 18 markets and the NY Times against Bush in 2000.

It said that his refusal as governor of Texas to pass hate crime laws was the equivilant of killing Byrd all over again.

Never mind the fact that hate crime laws would have had no impact on the punishment of those who killed Byrd, considering two of them got the death penalty.. can't give much more punishment than that.  (The third took a plea in exchange for testimony).

I was expecting something like an actual suggestion that one or more Republicans "drag black men to their death behind pickup trucks with Confederate flags" rather than an ambiguous use of passive voice -- something that happens an awful lot in political speech.  I figured the "for fun on weekends" thing was Nadler's hyperbole, but also that he must have been discussing something more egregious than the politicization of Byrd's death by his daughter in an effort to pressure GW about hate crimes legislation.  I also forgot that the GOP thinks of the NAACP as an arm of the Democratic party rather than an distinct organization with a separate but overlapping agenda.  

may we assume that you (madanthony) oppose the use of ambiguity and misleading rhetoric in general, but are not in a position to prevent their use by the GOP?

states with minimum wages greater than the federal minimum do better:  in quantity of businesses, number of employees, total payroll, or average payroll.

Your concerns are valid concerns, they just aren't applicable to the reality of what happens when the minimum wage is increased.  It's counterintuitive that increased productivity would make up for the increased labor costs, but I fear that the racists within our party depend on the "obvious conclusion" more than benefits us.

We can either realize the truth about the minimum wage, that people do work harder, are absent less, and stay on the job longer, or we can continue to write off almost all of the Black voters.

Another factor that is probably not being considered is that when the minimum wage goes up, workers have more money to spend, which means a lot in a consumer-driven economy.

That was pretty funny.

Let's not forget that Republicans are "against" civil rights altogether .... a "toned down" Al Sharpton repeated a common charge in his convention speech:

"This court has voted five to four on critical issues of women's rights and civil rights. It is frightening to think that the gains of civil and women rights and those movements in the last century could be reversed if this administration is in the White House in these next four years.

I suggest to you tonight that if George Bush had selected the court in '54, Clarence Thomas would have never got to law school. - full text

These things are thrown about all the time from the other side to the point that it's just taken for granted among an unfortunately large number of people.  I don't think perception can be changed just by buying ad time on black radio, but it would be a step in the right direction.  This Administration, via HUD, has done a great deal to promote minority home ownership, and that would make a nice radio ad.  It would be great to counter the ideological smear campaign with some solid facts, and I think the President's Urban League speech was a good first move.

"We should support affirmative action for one more generation."

We are probably stuck with it for another 100 years --- but supporting parts of the liberal agenda is always a losing proposition. Bush increased federal funding of education to record levels. Do liberals give him credit? No. They bash him for not doing enough. Bush created a huge drug entitlement (something liberals have been promising for most of my lifetime). Do liberals give him credit? No. They bash him for not doing enough.

It's always better to stand for conservative principles and get bashed for that. You can never give enough, or be civil enough, or compromise enough to satisfy modern liberals.

Here's the really short critique of NCLB.

NCLB costs a lot to do right. The feds paid for the new tests and the new bureaucracy, but not for classroom improvements. Without real increases in funding, NCLB, as it was sold, will not work.

The Card/Krueger study has been very sucessfully brought to its knees. And Kruger and Card's response to the indictment and follow-up study that was unable to recreate their results has never been very convicing to me. (The monopsony thing has always seemed increadibly weak and grasping at straws.) Their absolutely atrocious methodology I think showed that they would be willing to massage data and use sketchy techniques to get the result they wanted.

The JEC has a good rundown on the problems with the book:

http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/against/against.htm

http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/illusion.htm

A way of describing the Card and Krueger results always stuck with me. Would you take a medication where the theory says it would kill you and a hundred studies showed the same result, except for one study that had some of the worst methology you could imagine? And to make it worse, what if there was another medication that fixed the same condition, solved it better, with fewer negative side-effects, and was almost universally considered a better alternative. Wouldn't it be beyond dumb to chose the dangerous alternative to the superior one?

The EITC is a program that is targeted at the working poor, unlike the minimum wage. Even if it didn't decrease employment, it still isn't very well targeted instead capturing a large number of teenagers living at home. The minimum wage working poor is almost a myth the group is so small.

And the link in your signature fails the smell test. If your numbers show that Carter did a better job on the economy than Reagan, there is something wrong with your numbers. The test would be to ask anybody if they would trade the 1984 economy for the 1980 one. I bet you would be hard pressed to find even ten percent of the country that would do that. And since the economy is defined by the welfare of the people, those isolated jobs numbers must not be a very good barometer of the economy.

Besides, the economy responds to policies not parties. Trying to lump all Repub into one group and Dems into another is inappropriate. That would be putting the likes of Nixon and Bush 41 into the same group as Reagan who belongs more in a group with Kennedy. And it would be putting Clinton in a group that few others Dems would be close to. As has happened with many Dems, they string Clinton up as being a terrible Democrat, call him a Republican, but they are also willing to take his economic numbers that were driven by a Republican capital gains tax cut, not Reich's delusions of falling interest rates.

I just finished reading the Prospect article. How can it outright lie? I can understand policy disagreement, but this sentence is enough to know that the author is just making stuff up: "The study itself was innovative and careful, and exemplified high professional standards in research design and implementation."

The study used a phone call instead of payroll records. This created some very strange data points. The research was some of the sloppiest you could expect, and it is amazing that it was ever published.

And I just saw who wrote that tripe. Of course, somebody from EPI, the labor-backed economics institute. After Schmitt feels free to throw around bias and backhanded data fabrication claims, he then fails to disclose his own vested interest. What a piece of work.

Unions like minimum wage increases because it prices their competitors out of the market for them. Instead of union workers having to compete with somebody willing to work for less, they run to government to try and make it illegal to work for less.

Total employment in the higher minimum wage states increased by 6.2 percent from January 1998 to January 2004, 50 percent greater than the combined job growth of 4.1 percent for the other states where the federal minimum wage prevailed; and

Retail employment grew by 6.1 percent in the minimum wage states versus 1.9 percent in the other states.

-- Fiscal Policy Institute

Don't let the racists fool you:  this is not a labor/business issue, it is a basic economic well-being issue for the poor.  We capitulate to the racists at our peril.  We need to strengthen the party by taking advantage of the ovbious truths, not eliminate any hope for minority support by continuing to pretend there is evidence against it.

but also that he must have been discussing something more egregious than the politicization of Byrd's death by his daughter in an effort to pressure GW about hate crimes legislation

Right.  I'm sure it was just a coincidence that an ad aimed at a Republican governor who happened to be running for president ran the month before the presidential elections, and despite concerning a state issue, ran in 18 markets and in the NY Times.  I'm sure they expected that it would have no influence over the presidential election.

Was Nadler's characterization a little over the top?  Yes.  Was the ad tasteless and a mischaracterization of the actual legal issues of the case?  Yes.

This all goes a little far from the original article. The point that African-Americans recieve alot of anti-republican advertising, both from Democrats and from groups whose interests are closely aligned with the Democrats (such as the NAACP), and that the Republicans may benefit from countering those ads, seems valid to me.

Let me read the report first, but I can almost guarantee you that the report makes the a correlation/causality sin.