Mike Bloomberg Gives Debunked Excuse For Opposing Paid Sick Leave Legislation

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg (I) has promised to veto his city council’s final version of paid sick leave legislation, and is using flawed reasoning to defend his decision to do so.

Bloomberg claims that the legislation, which would provide five days of paid leave for employees of companies bigger than 15 people, would “hurt small businesses and stifle job creation… Supporters claim it will only take effect if the economy is healthy, but there is never a good time to make New York City less competitive. The bill is short-sighted economic policy that will take our city in the wrong direction, and I will veto it.”

It’s a good thing that the council has enough votes to override Bloomberg’s veto, because his reason for opposing the law doesn’t add up. Several studies have demonstrated that paid sick leave has no effect on job creation. In fact, a survey by Public Citizen found that when San Francisco enacted paid sick day legislation (a bill that required far more businesses to comply), it saw a jump in business expansion and employment growth (PDF):

But after implementation of the paid sick-leave law, San Francisco experienced an increase in employment. A study by the Drum Major Institute found that employment in San Francisco increased 3.5 percent between the start of 2006 and the start of 2010. In San Francisco’s five closest neighboring counties, employment fell 3.4 percent during the same period. The same study found that despite predictions to the contrary, the number businesses in San Francisco grew by 1.64 percent between 2006 and 2008 while falling by 0.61 percent in neighboring counties. San Francisco also experienced growth within both large and small businesses, and within the retail and food service industry during this period. (These industries expected to be affected most by the ordinance.)

The impact on businesses themselves was minor. A majority reported that understanding and implementing the ordinance was either “not difficult” or “not too difficult.” Additionally, while only 14 percent of businesses reported a negative impact on profits, more than 70 percent reported that the law had either no impact or a positive impact on their profitability. Productivity, and thus profitability, suffers when workers are forced to come to work when they are sick. One study on the impact of illness on productivity estimates that businesses lose twice as much money to workers who show up at work while sick than when workers stay home due to an illness.

Another study of Connecticut, done by the Center for American Progress, found much the same thing, noting that “full use of this leave would cost an employer only 0.4 percent of their sales revenue on average. Without paid sick days, employees come to work unhealthy, costing employers $160 billion per year due to lower productivity levels.”

There are myriad benefits to paid sick leave outside of workforce productivity; it helps families, is good for morale, and helps people recover from illness. Business efficiency can’t be the only end goal. But if Bloomberg is inspired by business interests alone, then he should still feel compelled to support the law. Three million Americans workers missed a day at their job because of illness in the month of February alone. It’s likely many did so without pay; 40 percent of private sector workers and 80 percent of low-income workers have no paid sick leave, and are likely to pick coming to work sick over missing a day of wages. That means they’re spreading illness to customers, getting more people sick, and being less efficient overall.

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Former Bush Official Slams Social Conservative Leader For Opposing Marriage Equality

Nicole Wallace, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, called out social conservative leader Gary Bauer for his outdated opposition to marriage equality during a discussion on Fox News Sunday about the Supreme Court’s upcoming hearings on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8.

In a contentious segment, Bauer described the effort to legalize same-sex marriage as a “radical movement” that is “trying to redefine marriage so it is a profoundly unconservative thing.” He accused supporters of marriage equality of being brainwashed by a “full-court blitz by the popular culture” and the “elites,” who, he charged, “intimidate” and “cower people into no longer defending marriage as being between a man and a woman.”

Wallace pushed back against the claims, noting that a growing number of conservatives have evolved in favor of equality and predicting that the Court will come down “on the side of freedom” when it hands down its ruling in June:

WALLACE: Chris, Chris, the biggest problem that Mr. Bauer faces, not just this morning but moving forward is that more than 65% of his own base, self-describing Evangelical Christians, under the age of 33, support marriage equality. 80% of people in this country, right, left, Democrat, Republican, man, woman, support marriage equality. More than 60% of all Americans, everyone, supports marriage equality. And that very some activist court that he railed against, with such hostility this morning always sides on the side of freedom. They are the same court that overturned gun bans, for overreaching. They’re the very same court that overturned campaign finance reform for overreaching, so we can despise the courts for its activism when we don’t like their behavior, but we can’t say that this is a court that always sides on the side of liberals.

Watch it:

Indeed, a Washington Post poll released on Monday found that 58 percent of Americans now believe it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to get married, including 81 percent of young people, and 52 percent of Republican-leaning Independents. More conservatives, Evangelicals, Republicans, and senior citizens support marriage than did nine years ago.

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President Obama goes on Record opposing Marbury v. Madison

For a guy who graduated from Harvard Law, Barack Obama is not really very well versed on his right or his legal history. Today about the Supreme Court's review of Obamacare, Obama offered this beautiful and completely ahistorical nugget:

Eventually, I am convinced that the Supreme Court is not what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step will take a law which was passed by a large majority of a democratically elected Congressto tilt.

Look, I'm not here to debate the finer points of Marbury v. Madison with everyone, but the fact remains that that more than 200 years ago, it's not exactly since the judgment rendered "unprecedented and extraordinary" for the Supreme Court to overturn the laws passed by Congress (regardless of the size of most). In fact, it happens all the time. That's the whole point of the doctrine of judicial review, first announced in Marbury and confirmed without serious challenge since then.

I seriously would like to know, and I hope that the press Obama gets on the record on this – it is President Obama the assertion that the Supreme Court's only role in the revision of the legislation is to double-check the count on the roll-call vote to ensure that a majority in fact voted for the law and to check the President's signature for possible falsification? Because, I mean, if that's what we're going to go back, I'm open to having that discussion, but we want to figure out what to do with several hundred SCOTUS decisions taken a decidedly different view.

Of course, in making these comments expose Obama is once again as a cynical hack that itself is devoid of anything resembling shame. The partial birth abortion In 2003 United States Congressional ban law of 2003 by the significantly greater margins than Obamacare. When the Supreme Court refused to this law, which was adopted by a "democratically elected Congress", pitched then-Senator Obama a hissy fit over the fact that the absolute Supreme Court had argued that the clear will of Congress (and the vast majority of the American people).

When its own legislation on the game, however, Obama seems suddenly ready to go back and virtually every Supreme Court precedent in the past 200 years to stripping the Court of their power to close at each question than whether the roll-call was good tallied undo. Of all the most terrible thing is that if a Republican had said this, the media are busy trying to paint them as an uneducated rube would be that unaware of Marbury v. Madison was-if Obama it says, it is presented as a thoughtful defense of his brilliant law.

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