China’s decision to devalue its currency last week means that it has chosen to export its unemployment problem, rather than take the hard steps needed to restructure its domestic economy. Over the past decade, trade deficits caused by currency manipulation by about 20 mostly Asian countries, predominantly China, has eliminated between 2.3 million and 5.8 million U.S. jobs. The yuan fell 4.4 percent in the first three days after China announced its devaluation, and a cumulative drop of 10 to 15 percent is possible over the next two weeks, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. A devaluation of the yuan of between 4.4 to 15 percent, if it persists, would likely increase U.S. trade deficits sufficiently to eliminate between 190,000 and 640,000 U.S. jobs. There is growing, bipartisan support from both Republicans and Democrats for new policies to end currency manipulation and to reverse the damage it has done to the U.S. economy. Congress should take immediate steps to pass tough laws to end currency manipulation and to ensure that injured domestic workers and companies obtain timely relief from unfairly traded imports.

To evaluate the costs of China’s currency devaluation, I use the results of C. Fred Bergsten and Joseph E. Gagnon’s study for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which used the Federal Reserve Board’s macroeconomic model to assess the effects of a 10 percent depreciation of the trade-weighted value of the U.S. dollar. China is America’s largest trading partner, responsible for 21.3 percent of total U.S. trade, based on the trade weights used in the Federal Reserve’s Broad Index of the U.S. dollar. Thus, a 4.4 percent devaluation of the yuan (or renminbi, as it is also known) translates into a 0.9 percent appreciation of the real U.S. dollar. Likewise, a 10 percent devaluation would increase the U.S. dollar by 2.1 percent, and a 15 percent devaluation would increase the value of the dollar by 3.2 percent.

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In the Washington Post Fact Checker column today, Glenn Kessler got really exercised about Bernie Sanders’ totally accurate description of a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on job losses that will occur if spending caps in the Budget Control Act (BCA) are not loosened in coming years. In the end, Kessler’s “fact check” is much more misleading than anything Sanders and his staff released.

The CBO provided a range of estimates of job losses that would occur in 2016 and 2017 if these spending caps are not lifted (alternatively, one could describe these as job gains that would be realized if the caps are lifted). The high end of these estimates was 800,000 jobs in 2016 and 600,000 in 2017. That’s how much higher total employment in the United States could be if the caps were lifted, relative to a counterfactual baseline where the caps stay in place.

So, what has Kessler so angry? First, that Sanders cited the high end of the CBO range—even though he and his staff are clearly identifying it as the high end. Kessler writes:

First of all, note that the Sanders’ statement says that “as many as” 1.4 million jobs would be lost. That’s a signal that a politician is using the high-end of a range.

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Eighty years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. Four and a half years later—after the German invasion of Poland but still two years before Pearl Harbor propelled the United States into war—65-year-old Ida May Fuller received the first Social Security check for $22.54. She would live to be 100 years old.

Fuller might seem like a historical footnote, but history matters, and not just because the Social Security program was born in the midst of the Great Depression and the first benefit check was paid out even as the country was poised on the brink of war.

By any measure, Fuller got a bargain. She paid into the program for three years and collected benefits for 35 years. This was by design: Social Security’s pay-as-you-go structure allowed the first generation of seniors to collect benefits even if they hadn’t had a chance to contribute meaningfully into the program. Fuller herself was unsure if she was eligible for benefits, later saying she dropped by the Rutland, Vermont, Social Security office on a whim, remembering that contributions had been deducted from her paycheck. (Fuller, who never married, had had a long career as a teacher and legal secretary.)

Most of the benefits claimed by retirees are paid out of current workers’ contributions, not advanced savings in the Social Security trust fund (contrary to popular belief). This means that each generation earns a “return” on contributions that is linked to productivity and wage growth and not subject to the vagaries of financial markets. The trust fund is more like a checking or contingency savings account than a retirement savings account, expanding and contracting to accommodate demographic booms and busts. Thanks to advance planning, we accumulated enough in the trust fund to get us through the peak retirement years of the large baby boomer generation, another legacy of World War II.

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On Tuesday, China announced the largest one-day devaluation of its currency in more than two decades. Make no mistake—although authorities claimed this policy was a shift toward more market-driven movements, the value of the currency is tightly controlled by China’s central bank. By choosing to devalue its currency, Chinese officials are trying to solve their domestic economic problems—including a massive property bubble, a collapsing stock market, and a slowing domestic economy—by exporting unemployment to the rest of the world. The United States, which is the largest single market for China’s exports, will be hardest hit by the devaluation of the yuan. Manufacturing, which was already reeling from the 20 percent rise in the value of the dollar against major currencies in the last 19 months, can expect to see even faster growth in imports from China.

The devaluation of the yuan (also known as the renminbi) will subsidize Chinese exports, and act like a tax on U.S. exports to China, and to every country where we compete with China, which is already the largest exporter in the world. It will provide rocket fuel for their exports, transmitting unemployment from China directly to the United States and other major consumers of imports from China. Already in 2015, the U.S. manufacturing trade deficit has increased 22 percent, which will continue to hold back the recovery in U.S. manufacturing, which has experienced no real growth in output since 2007.

The Chinese devaluation highlights the importance of including restrictions on currency manipulation in trade and investment deals like the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which includes a number of well-known currency manipulators. Millions of jobs are at stake if a clause to prohibit currency manipulation is not included in the core of this “twenty-first century trade agreement.” This devaluation by China, which is not a member of the TPP, will raise pressure on other known currency manipulators that are in the agreement—such as Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore—to devalue their currencies, which could more than offset any benefits obtained under the terms of the TPP.

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I was caught off guard by all of the recent attention and coverage given to Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ positions on immigration. Not because his views were widely discussed (he is running for president, after all), but because the criticisms he was subjected to were often mistaken or even intentionally misleading.

So what did Senator Sanders actually say about immigration? In an interview with Sanders, Vox.com editor Ezra Klein brought up the concept of an “open borders” immigration policy. Sanders rejected the notion—open borders and unlimited immigration, of course, being a position that no elected official supports. Sanders went on to point out—a point which he later reiterated to journalist Jose Antonio Vargas and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce—that in some cases the importation of new foreign workers can negatively impact the wages of workers in the United States. Note that Sanders didn’t say immigrants are taking jobs or lowering wages. He was specifically referring to non-immigrant, temporary foreign worker programs, also known as “guestworker” programs, which are full of flaws that employers take advantage of to exploit American and migrant workers alike, and to pit them against each other in the labor market.

The reality is that what Sanders supports on immigration is careful and nuanced, and it’s the correct path forward for American immigration policy. In a nutshell, Sanders is strongly in favor of legalization and citizenship for the current unauthorized immigrant population, which will raise wages and lift labor standards for all workers, and he’s against expanding U.S. temporary foreign worker programs, which allow employers to exploit and underpay so-called guestworkers. Limiting guestworker programs will reduce wage suppression and improve labor standards for U.S. and migrant workers alike.

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The White House is reportedly considering an executive order that would require that federal contractors provide their employees with seven days of paid sick leave.  This is a step in the right direction: The United States remains alone among our economic peers worldwide in failing to give all workers access to earned paid sick time. Through this executive order, President Obama can lead by example, and start to shift the paradigm towards giving more American workers and their families the right to take paid leave to care for their own or their family members’ health needs.

Currently paid sick days laws are or will soon be in place in 24 jurisdictions across the country, including four states: Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, and Oregon. The evidence from these jurisdictions has been overwhelmingly positive. The first jurisdiction to set a paid sick days standard was San Francisco, where employers have been required to offer earned paid leave since 2007. Fears that the law would impede job growth were never realized. In fact, during the five years following its implementation, employment in San Francisco grew twice as fast as in neighboring counties that had no sick leave policy. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, San Francisco’s job growth was even faster in the foodservice and hospitality sector, which is dominated by small businesses and viewed as vulnerable to additional costs. Connecticut, meanwhile, became the first state to enact a sick-days standard in 2011. A year-and-a-half after the law took effect, researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that the law brought sick leave to a large number of workers, particularly part-time workers, at little to no cost to business. By mid-2013, more than three-quarters of employers expressed support for the law.

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The federal minimum wage has languished at $7.25 since 2009. As inflation erodes the real value of the federal minimum, twenty nine states (and D.C.) have taken it upon themselves to raise their state minimum wages. Some states have made small changes (such as Arkansas, which raised its minimum wage to $7.50), while others have moved forward more boldly (such as Massachusetts, where the state minimum wage will reach $11.00 by 2017.) Some passed incremental increases which will take place over two or three years, while others have automatic increases every year to account for inflation. Several enacted changes to their laws back in 2006, while others have jumped on the new wave of action that has taken place in the past few years. There is tremendous variation in minimum wage policy across the states, and EPI’s minimum wage tracker provides a simple and intuitive way to understand the breadth of state, local, and federal minimum wage policy.

Here are some interesting trends and data points worth noting:

Five states do not have a minimum wage. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee all defer to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 in the absence of any state laws. Wyoming and Georgia both have a state minimum wage lower than the federal minimum. The minimum wage in both of these states is $5.15, but the federal minimum wage applies.

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