Undeterred by their failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Republicans look set to move on to the next item in Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda—tax reform. This post helps set the stage for the upcoming tax reform debate and explains why “tax reform” will in the end likely just become a deficit-financed tax cut for the rich and corporations that expires in 10 years—a decade of free money for groups that don’t really need it and a problem for policymakers to deal with in the future.

Understanding why this deficit-financed, 10-year tax cut is the most likely outcome requires some understanding of the “budget reconciliation” process (apologies). Budget reconciliation allows the Republicans to avoid the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for a filibuster, and hence will almost surely be needed to pass any tax cut. To begin the reconciliation process, Congress first passes a budget resolution with topline spending numbers that includes reconciliation instructions. These instruct the relevant committees to make changes to mandatory spending or revenues in order to achieve some budgetary target—for instance, decreasing revenues or the deficit by so-many billion over a specified time period.

Here, Republicans in Congress face a choice. They originally planned to use the fiscal year 2017 budget to repeal the ACA, and so wrote reconciliation instructions that were basically deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window. They could do this because, although repealing the ACA would mean large tax cuts for the top 1 percent, these could be paid-for with cuts to Medicaid and subsidies that helped people afford insurance in the ACA marketplace exchanges. If Republicans wanted revenue-neutral tax reform—perhaps following through on the popular mantra of “broaden the base, lower the rates”—they could simply repurpose those instructions. But this is unlikely to work for them.Read more

President Donald Trump recently told the Wall Street Journal that his administration won’t label China a currency manipulator in a semi-annual U.S. Treasury report that is due this week. Crucially, he has also forwarded no alternative mechanism to deal with the misaligned U.S.-China exchange rate. This essentially means that Trump has turned his back on working Americans who have lost millions of manufacturing jobs since China entered the WTO in 2001, and have experienced growing competition with imports from China and other low wage countries that reduced the wages of all non-college graduates by $180 billion per year in 2011 alone.

In a campaign speech in Monessen, PA last June Trump outlined a 7-step program that he “would pursue right away to bring back our jobs.” In step five, he promised to “instruct my Treasury secretary to label China a currency manipulator,” a commitment he repeated many times last year.

There has been some debate over whether or not the Chinese is currently actively manipulating its currency. What there is no debate over is whether or not the U.S.-China exchange rate is severely misaligned, and that this misalignment costs jobs in U.S. manufacturing. While China has been a net seller of foreign exchange reserves over the past two years (meaning that it has not engaged in direct manipulation over this time), it maintains well in excess of $3 trillion in total reserves, which have a depressing effect on the value of its currency.

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The H-2A visa program allows farmers anticipating shortages of U.S. seasonal workers to be certified by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to recruit and employ foreign workers with temporary, nonimmigrant visas. DOL certified 165,700 jobs to be filled by H-2A workers in fiscal 2016, up 14 percent from 145,900 in fiscal 2015.1 The H-2A program in 2016 is two-and-a-half times larger than it was a decade ago in 2006, when 64,100 jobs were certified.Read more

This article was originally posted on Confined Space.

The fact that most OSHA chemical standards are old, outdated and don’t protect workers very well is something that government, labor and industry can generally agree on.  There is less agreement, however, on what needs to be done about that problem. But it’s a question that needs to be addressed, as an estimated 50,000 workers die every year from occupational disease, mostly related to chemical exposure, and almost 200,000 are sickened.

Rachel Cernansky, writing in the New York Times today about “America’s Toxic Workplace Rules” asks “Why does the [Labor] department’s Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration allow workers to be exposed to dangerous chemicals at limits far higher than those set for everyone by the Environmental Protection Agency” and what will Trump’s Labor nominee, Alexander Acosta, do about it?

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Under current law, employers can give workers time off—paid or unpaid—whenever they want to, for any reason. They can, for example, reward employees who work overtime by giving them unpaid time off at a later date. The employer pays time-and-a-half for the overtime when it’s worked, and then can give an equivalent amount of unpaid time off to repay the employees for the extra time away from their home and family. That’s what a family-friendly employer can do now, with no legislative change required.

But Rep. Martha Roby wants a better, more “flexible” deal for employers. She wants them to be able to withhold the overtime pay until the employee takes compensatory time off (comp time), only paying it out if they can’t agree on a mutually convenient time to take the leave by the end of the year. Roby has introduced a bill, H.R. 1180, “The Working Families Flexibility Act,” to give employers that new right, while pretending to do something for employees.

Why should Rep. Roby stop there? I’d like to propose the “Working Families Super Flexibility Act.” My new bill takes the ideas of H.R. 1180 one step further, providing the greatest possible flexibility to employers and employees. Instead of receiving wages at the time they perform their work, employees can agree to receive credits toward future time off, which will be deposited in a “comp time bank.” The employees will have the freedom to use these credits whenever they want, as long as their employer agrees on the dates for leave. If no mutually convenient time is found before the end of the calendar year, the employees will finally get their earned wages—assuming that the company hasn’t gone out of business (as 400,000 do each year)—and the employer will collect all accrued interest.

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The New York Times had an article recently about academics and financial advisers who want to bring back a Baroque-era investment vehicle—the tontine—where an annual dividend is split among surviving investors (the Washington Post had a similar story two years ago). The present-day appeal of the tontine is partly based on its supposed transparency. It’s unlikely, however, that potential investors would be able to accurately predict the payouts they might receive, which would depend on their health relative to that of others in the pool, among other variables. Still, it’s a morbidly interesting excuse to think about insurance markets and innovative retirement schemes.

Gambling on other people’s death isn’t unique to tontines. The AIDS epidemic created a secondary market in life insurance policies, allowing ill policyholders to tap some of their benefits to pay for health care and living expenses. Though this may have served a useful function in a country with inadequate social insurance—especially pre-Obamacare—it’s hard to feel sorry for investors who lost big after the discovery of antiretroviral drugs.

Tontines, like Social Security, traditional pensions, and life annuities, insure against the risk of living longer than expected in retirement. The problem of outliving one’s savings has gotten worse as Social Security benefits have been trimmed back and private sector employers have replaced traditional pensions with 401(k)-style savings plans. In theory, 401(k) savers can insure against longevity risk by purchasing life annuities, but few actually do. There are several reasons for this, starting with the fact that few have significant savings to begin with—a problem exacerbated by current low interest rates that lock annuitants into low annual payments. In addition, potential buyers must navigate complex and tricky insurance markets and face prices driven up by adverse selection and asymmetric information, the classic problem of markets for individual insurance whereby people at greater risk (of living longer, in this case) are more likely to purchase insurance and have an incentive to conceal information to avoid higher risk-adjusted premiums, leading to higher prices for all consumers and a shrinking market

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For decades, early childhood education advocates and the scientists, economists, and philanthropists who back them have been waiting for the federal government to step up to the plate and do what’s responsible, moral, and economically wise: make high-quality early childhood education a reality for everyone. With no indication that this is happening, even less so now, we need to focus on more promising pathways.

A smart path forward might combine adapting high-quality state-level strategies across more states and bubbling up lessons from pioneering districts. The latter help ensure a targeted focus on community-level needs and assets, and some offer timely lessons on how to link early childhood to the elementary years and beyond.

Recent presidents have all expressed support for investments in early childhood education. Still, even the strongest advocate, President Obama, left a legacy that includes higher standards and more funding but far too little of either to ensure all children a strong start. President Trump’s early childhood agenda consists so far of his daughter’s proposal to use tax deductions for the costs of child care to boost resources for the middle-class and wealthy families that can already afford it, while neglecting working-class and poor parents who can’t and expanding the budget deficit. Other policies he has advanced would compound problems for disadvantaged students. His “skinny budget” would strip public schools of key resources and, had the repeal-and-replace of Obamacare passed, it would have deprived millions of children of the physical and mental health care needed to succeed in them.

A recent study that I presented at the 2017 Federal Reserve Community Development Research Conference found that gaps in kindergarten readiness between high- and low-income children are enormous, and that they haven’t budged in the past 10-15 years—highlighting the need for more intensive policy responses. Other, more hopeful findings may point the way. Data from the same study indicate that parents are increasingly doing their part—reading to their children, singing with them, and playing games—regardless of their social class. So even though today’s low-social class parents are poorer and working odd hours at low-wage jobs, they are devoting the time and resources that science indicates are critical for child development.

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