The following reports on labor market policy were recently released:

Maybe you’ve had that early morning moment of anxiety when you wake up with a fever and a cough that won’t stop and you think ‘Should I go to work today?’  If you’re lucky, your employer offers a few paid days off in case of illness and you can roll over to get some much needed rest. Unfortunately, that is not the case for everyone. More than 41 million working Americans, in industries from fast food to health, education and social services, face the dilemma of taking time to recover from an illness or losing a day’s pay.

Currently, only seven cities in the United States and the state of Connecticut have laws mandating some type of paid sick leave. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds. To give a little context,

Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel
The Guardian, March 18, 2014

Dean Baker
CNN Money, March 18, 2014

Dean Baker
Truthout, March 17, 2014

Dean Baker
The Guardian, March 17, 2014

Fortunately for Mr. Will, he works for Jeff Bezos, a man who accumulated $32 billion (more than 40 percent of the annual food stamp budget) by assisting people in evading state and local sales taxes. (Under most state laws, people are obligated to pay sales tax on items they buy over the Internet, however enforcement is essentially zero. The amount of tax that Amazon customers have avoided as a result of purchasing over the web is at least an order of magnitude greater than Amazon's profits since it inception.) Given his background, Bezos would probably not be concerned that Will misrepresents facts to readers.

Will starts by complaining that President Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage would "do very little for very few." Since the Congressional Budget Office just calculated that the proposed wage hike would directly or indirectly raise the wages of 25 million workers, Will must be giving new meaning to "very few."  He then goes on to complain about the farm subsidies in the new agriculture bill, referring to the "geyser of subsidies" in  "the $956 billion farm legislation." Whatever the merits of the subsidies, they come to less than 10 percent of the total cost of the $956 billion figure highlighted by Will.

Will next complains about the increase in spending on food stamps, telling readers:

"Between 2000, when 17?million received food stamps, and 2006, food stamp spending doubled, even though unemployment averaged just 5.1?percent ." While some of this rise was attributable to increased outreach to eligible families, the employment picture had deteriorated sharply from 2000 to 2006, with the employment to population ratio dropping by 1.5 percentage points. This corresponds to 3.4 million fewer people working. (It's not clear what information Will thinks he is providing by giving the average unemployment rate for the period. If we are looking at changes, it is the endpoints that matter.) Also, food prices rose by 16 percent over this period, which explains a substantial portion of the increase in spending. (Will's source shows that the 2000 level of beneficiaries was a low-point driven by the strong economy of the late 1990s. The number of beneficiaries in 2006 was still below the number in 1995.)

We then get this great invention from Will:

"We spend $1 trillion annually on federal welfare programs, decades after Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that if one-third of the money for poverty programs was given directly to the poor, there would be no poor."