Meanwhile, Mitch Landrieu Is Going To Do To New Orleans’ Economy What He Wants To Do To The Robert E. Lee Statue

Bill DeBlasio and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake are the two worst mayors in the country. That’s pretty obvious. Yes, Rahm Emanuel is bad, but those two are the heavyweight moron mayors.

But Mitch Landrieu is coming up on the outside, and he’s making a hell of a run for the lead. Give him time and he’ll get there.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu plans to sign a measure that requires some city contractors to pay their workers higher wages.

Known as the “Living Wage Ordinance,” the measure was authored by Jared Brossett. City Council unanimously approved the ordinance on August 6.

The new law applies to companies with city contracts worth $25,000 or more, or companies that have received grants of $100,000 or more to pay employees involved in city-contracted work.

Under the new measure, these companies would be required to pay their workers at least $10.55 an hour and provide a minimum of seven paid sick days.

That ordinance doesn’t hit the restaurants and hotels just yet, but it’s getting there. It’s just the first in what will be a never-ending effort to crank up the minimum wage in New Orleans. Rather than focusing on creating an environment that creates good jobs, Mitch, Brossett and the gang are busy trying to make lousy jobs pay good-job wages. Which will fail, repeatedly, and therefore create incentives for doubling down on bad policy until New Orleans has a $15 across-the-board minimum wage like Seattle does – with the attendant economic destruction.

In the meantime, it’s a fiscally irresponsible bill that will force all city contractors to charge New Orleans, which cannot pay its cops or firefighters and is in hock to them to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, more for the same services the city is currently receiving. Those contractors are also quite likely to employ fewer people, meaning it will be harder for unskilled workers to find jobs in the city.

Landrieu inherited a booming economy from his predecessor, as incompetent and ridiculous as Ray Nagin was. He’s busily making every stupid mistake a mayor can make and failing to focus on the issues the city needs to focus on – infrastructure, job skills and education, crime and public safety. Instead we have confederate statues and minimum wage laws.

New Orleans was on the comeback trail after Hurricane Katrina. It’s in decline again. And there is little leadership in that city to stop it.

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