Venango County Tea Party Patriots

A non-partisan, non-profit, non-member, association dedicated to educating the public and promoting the principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free market economics, and all other lawful activities.

Fiscal Responsibility

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Raising the Minimum Wage

The plan on the table in Congress would raise the federal minimum wage above $10 an hour (which is higher than all existing state rates). Obamacare’s mandate on employers, however, is already scheduled to raise the hourly cost of hiring a full-time worker past $10 an hour.

The idea behind a minimum wage is to help low-income workers. But Obamacare’s mandates will hurt the job prospects of these very workers—and raising the federal minimum wage would further limit the number of jobs available.

Combining federal (or state) minimum wage rates, payroll taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, and soon Obamacare’s employer mandate, employing a worker full-time will cost a minimum of $10.30 an hour. The government has made hiring more costly without raising workers’ pay.

Unfortunately, this will make entry-level jobs harder to get. And these jobs are important. For the majority, they are stepping stones to higher pay and higher-skilled positions.

Read more.

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HHS Spends $2.7 M to Study Impact of TV on Vietnamese Villages

The “interesting” part is these villages have no electricity!

he Department of Health and Human Services is spending $2,797,979 on a study that brings television to more than a dozen remote villages in Vietnam to study its impact on their culture and reproductive behavior.“In cooperation with the Vietnam government, we have selected 14 villages in a remote, mountainous area of Vietnam that currently lacks electricity,” according to the grant description for ‘Television and International Family Change: A Randomized Experiment.’

“Treatment villages will receive televisions and generators with gasoline to operate the televisions. Control villages will not receive generators or televisions.”

The principal investigator of the study, Dr. Rukmalie Jayakody of the Penn State Population Research Center, tells CNSNews.com that while groundwork for the study began in 2010, the televisions and generators were just installed this past August.

The televisions used in the study will only receive four channels. “What villages have access to is not cable television or satellite television, but just Vietnam TV,” Jayakody says.

Read more.