If all Barack Obama proposals are made law it will add $5.06 an hour in mandated costs to employment which is a disaster if you make $7.25

If you make $50 an hour - not so much. The "here's some cake, don't worry somebody else is picking up the tab" is no longer working. It would be nice if the administration understood labor economics. But the real fear is they do  but don't care. Dependent and frightened is Dem's best voter profile.

We see the same factors at work today in the left’s repeated attempt to offer government largesse or regulatory requirements to pay for the things American workers now view as out of reach. Rather than wrestling with the question of child care in the era of the two-income household and the importance of upbringing, we see demands for national child-care and pre-kindergarten programs to fill the gap. Rather than questioning whether everyone really needs a four-year college education, progressives want to embark on a massive debt-forgiveness program, pouring taxpayer dollars into the heavily insulated halls of higher ed. Concerned about your birth control? Don’t worry, we’ll make your employer cover it. Here is a cake for you to have, and to eat, and someone you don’t know somewhere else will pay for it, eventually.

But there is no “someone else.” The progressive approach—to which everyone has effectively assented—merely disguises the problems of wage stagnation, redirecting those funds toward health care, housing, energy, education, and more, to the detriment of take-home pay. And all the while, liberals have ignored and continue to ignore the possibility that the increase of regulations, incentives, and mandates would have any trade-offs.

That includes the president. In his State of the Union, he proudly announced that “Since 2010, America has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and all advanced economies combined.” But in the next breath, Obama insisted on more mandated benefits. “Today, we’re the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers,” he said. “Send me a bill that gives every worker in America the opportunity to earn seven days of paid sick leave. It’s the right thing to do.” It also costs money. Investors Business Daily’s Jed Graham calculates that seven days of mandated paid leave would add 30 cents per hour in compensation costs, bringing Obama’s six-year total to $5.06 had all his proposals been made law. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry has observed, the reason America has done better over the past five years might have more than a little to do with the fact that our private sector is far less encumbered by mandates and regulations than those of all other advanced economies. If we adopt their policies to a greater degree than we already have, we can add their economic stagnation to our income stagnation.