Today, the Trump administration published their full budget request for fiscal year 2018. The budget is basically par-for-the-course with recent Republican budgets— doubling down on the austerity policies that have been harming American households for about a decade. But besides containing cruel cuts and deeply-dodgy economic assumptions, this proposal should also dispel any last remaining hope that fiscal policy under the Trump administration would boost, rather than drag, on growth and jobs. Were this proposal enacted, it would put a large and rapidly growing drag on economic growth going forward. All else equal, job-losses stemming from this budget’s spending cuts would total 177,000 in 2018, 357,000 in 2019, and 1.4 million in 2020. While it gets increasingly hard to estimate precise numbers further into the future, the fiscal drag just increases dramatically after 2020.

The economic intuition for why the Trump budget’s cuts would hinder growth is simply that they would reduce growth in economy-wide spending, or aggregate demand. It is always possible that the spending slowdown caused by the Trump budget could be neutralized by spending increases in other parts of the economy. Before the onset of the Great Recession, it was thought that this spending increase could be reliably engineered by the Federal Reserve lowering short-term interest rates. Since the Great Recession, however, the economy saw seven years of historically slow recovery even while the Fed held short-term rates at zero (and undertook other measures to boost growth). The reason for this slow growth despite expansionary monetary policy is clearly historically austere public spending.

This should make clear that while the Fed certainly has the ability to curtail growth by raising interest rates, their ability to offset a negative fiscal shock by lowering rates seems severely constrained. Given that a monetary policy response should not be relied on to neutralize the negative fiscal shock of the Trump budget and the AHCA, we think these estimated job-losses should certainly inform the debate. Further, the federal funds rate (the rate the Fed lowers to offset negative demand shocks) sits at just about 1 percent today, meaning the Fed simply doesn’t have much room to boost the economy in response to contractionary fiscal policy that begins next fiscal year and then ramps up. For reference, in the past five recessions, the peak-to-trough change in the federal funds rate as the Fed aimed to stop the contraction and spur recovery was over 3.5 percent.

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The president’s budget was released today and a House budget resolution will follow in June. Though the two plans will undoubtedly differ in certain areas—the president’s budget includes infrastructure and paid parental leave proposals that aren’t guaranteed to be taken up by the House—both will seek deep cuts to programs helping vulnerable citizens while calling for immense tax cuts for the wealthy.

The proposed budget and tax cuts come on the heels of the House effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and replace it with their American Health Care Act (AHCA), which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted would be “the largest transfer in modern U.S. history from low- and moderate-income people to the very wealthy,” should it become law. The White House is banking on this repeal passing, assuming $250 billion in supposed savings in the president’s budget.

Voters who believed Trump’s assurances that he opposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid may be surprised to learn that he wants to gut Medicaid (not just reversing the expansion embedded in the ACA, but essentially doubling the cuts in Medicaid called for in the House-passed AHCA), cut Social Security Disability Insurance, and hasten the exhaustion of the Medicare trust fund. Funding for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) would be slashed by $616 billion over the 10-year budget window, as Medicaid would be transformed from a coverage guarantee for low-income families and nursing home residents who have exhausted their savings into block grants or similar programs constrained by per capita spending limits at a time when Baby Boomers are aging into their peak Alzheimer’s years. The Medicaid cuts would do nothing to restrain health cost inflation but would leave sick kids and frail seniors to fend for themselves.

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Every year, retirement savers lose $17 billion because they receive bad advice from financial advisers—like being steered into investments that provide larger payments to the adviser but lower returns for the saver. Currently, that fleecing of retirement savers is legal. Unlike the strict requirements in place for lawyers and doctors, not all financial advisers are legally required to act in their clients’ best interest. Just over a year ago, the Department of Labor issued a rule (known as the “fiduciary rule”) that would close this loophole and require financial advisers to act in the best interest of clients saving for retirement. But the Trump administration has made its interest in weakening or rescinding this rule clear. Following direction from President Trump, the Department of Labor delayed the implementation of the rule by 60 days, from April 10th to June 9th, to conduct a new “examination” of the rule, despite the fact that the department has already conducted an exhaustive analysis.

Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta, after earlier saying he was actively seeking a way to further “freeze the rule,” has now stated that while the Department “should seek public comment on how to revise this rule,” they “have found no principled legal basis to change the June 9 date while we seek public input.” The fact that there will be no further delay is very good news. Further delay of the rule would have been a huge win for the financial industry and a huge loss for retirement savers all across the country, with every additional week of delay costing retirement savers $431 million over the next 30 years. However, while the rule’s fiduciary standard will take effect on June 9th, key compliance provisions built into the rule’s exemptions have been further delayed to January 1st, 2018. Moreover, the department has stated that it will not enforce the rule the during the gap period between June 9th and January 1st. This means the loopholes that allow financial advisers to take advantage of savers are not fully closed, and retirement savers will continue to be harmed during this period. Further, it is far from certain that the rule will in fact become fully applicable on January 1st. The Department has made clear (see Q4 in these Department of Labor FAQs ) that—as requested by the financial industry—they are considering proposing additional changes to the rule and delaying it beyond January 1st. Thus, we can expect further attempts in coming months to weaken and delay the rule—actions that would yet further harm retirement savers. In order to truly protect retirees and working people saving for retirement from predatory financial advisers, we need a fully applicable, vigorously enforced rule to protect their savings from the large losses that conflicted advice is causing.

One year ago, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a final rule to update the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime rules. The old rules—written by the Bush administration in 2004—have a loophole that leaves millions of salaried employees without the right to overtime pay (and even without the right to be paid the minimum wage). An employer may legally require salaried employees earning as little as $23,660 a year to work 70 or 80 hours a week with no additional pay. If an employer determines that a salaried employee works in an “executive, professional, or administrative capacity” the employee’s effective hourly pay could fall below $6.00 an hour.

If the new rule had taken effect on December 1, 2016, as planned, 4 million employees would have become entitled to overtime pay and another 9 million would have had their right to overtime pay strengthened and clarified. In 2017 alone, workers would have gotten $1.2 billion in extra pay.

But Republican politicians and big business groups sued to block the rule, and a U.S. District Court judge in Texas blocked the rule from taking effect, not just in Texas, but nationwide. Obama’s Department of Labor appealed the case, but the Trump administration has repeatedly delayed the appeal while it figures out whether to side with the employees or with big business.

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In January 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowed corporations, for the first time ever, to spend unlimited money on politics. Within a few months, Republican strategists and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hatched a plan to take advantage of the newly available corporate cash. They called it Project “RedMap,” or “Redistricting Majority Project.” Its goal was to use corporate money— much of it contributed secretly through the Chamber— to win Republican control of state legislatures in the Fall of 2010. That year’s elections were particularly important because the officials who came into office that year would be charged with redrawing legislative district boundaries based on the 2010 census.

The business lobbyists were more successful than they could have hoped. With their help, eleven states that had previously been governed by a combination of Democrats and Republicans became wall-to-wall Republican, with the GOP controlling both houses of the legislature along with the Governor’s mansion. Critically, this included a swath of traditional swing states with strong labor movements running from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin across the upper Midwest.

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Sixty-three years ago on Wednesday, the Supreme Court prohibited school segregation. In the South, Brown v. Board of Education was enforced slowly and fitfully for two decades; then progress ground to a halt. Nationwide, black students are now less likely to attend schools with whites than they were half a century ago. Was Brown a failure?

Not if we consider the boost it gave to a percolating civil rights movement. The progeny of Brown include desegregation of public accommodations and the mostly unhindered right of African Americans to compete for jobs, to vote, and to purchase or rent homes. Brown’s greatest accomplishment was its enduring imprint on the national ethos: the idea of second-class citizenship for African Americans, indeed for any minority group, is now universally condemned as a violation of the Constitution and of American values. None of these transformations came easily, and none are complete, but none would have happened were it not for Brown.

Yet the decision could not accomplish its stated purpose. Today, nearly half of all black students attend majority black schools, with over 70 percent in high-poverty school districts. New York is the most segregated state: two-thirds of its black students attend schools that are less than 10 percent white. A growing number are “integrated” with low-income Hispanics and other recent immigrants, but still isolated from the mainstream.

Because schools remain segregated, we have little chance to substantially boost the achievement of black children, especially those from low-income families. Of course, some children will always surmount their disadvantages and excel. But when separate schools concentrate students who are in poorer health and more frequently absent, who may be homeless or in unstable housing, and whose parents are less-educated, achievement lags when teachers are overwhelmed by non-academic challenges.

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In a previous post, we noted that annual work hours for all workers, especially low-wage African American workers and women, increased between 1979 and 2015. Working moms are significant contributors to this trend—half of all African American female workers are moms, as are 55.3 percent of Hispanic working women and 44.5 percent of white female workers. While all moms are working more hours per year and contributing more to their households financially, African American working moms are uniquely central to the economic well-being of their families.

To begin with, more than two-thirds of all African American working mothers are single moms, making them the primary, if not sole, economic providers for their families. By comparison, 29.6 percent of white working mothers and 47.9 percent of Hispanic working mothers are single.

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The unemployment rate has fallen steadily over the last several years, and many have said that the current rate of 4.4 percent means we are back to (or have even dropped below) full employment—meaning that pushing unemployment any lower would cause inflation to accelerate above the Federal Reserve’s preferred 2 percent target. That is why many observers have applauded the Fed’s recent decisions to raise rates, even though the rate hikes occurred before most workers have seen the economic recovery translate into consistently strong nominal wage growth.

The fact is that the headline unemployment rate continues to understate slack in the labor market. Today’s 4.4 percent unemployment rate is associated with a much lower prime-age employment-to-population ratio (EPOP)—the share of the working age population who is actually working—than in the recent past. While there may be reasons other than labor market slack for today’s lagging labor force participation, by looking just at the prime-age EPOP, we can at least eliminate any distortions caused by the wave of retiring baby boomers. The graph below shows that the prime-age EPOP averaged 81.2 percent in the five months the unemployment rate hit 4.4 percent in 1998 and 1999 (including one month in 2001), and 80.5 percent in the four months unemployment hit 4.4 percent in 2006 and 2007. On average, those nine months saw a 2.1 percentage point higher prime-age EPOP (80.7 percent) than the 78.6 percent we see today.

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