This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

Barack Obama’s petulant criticism last Friday of Democrats who do not support his proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership reminds me of the old tongue-in-cheek advice to young lawyers: “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither is on your side, pound the other lawyer.”

The facts are definitely not on the president’s side. For two decades the trade deals negotiated by the last three presidents have lowered U.S. wages, lost jobs and generated a chronic trade deficit that requires our country to borrow more money every year in order to pay for imports. The president’s main argument that exports have risen, without mentioning that imports have risen much faster, is now transparently deceitful to anyone who can add and subtract.

Neither is the law in his corner. As did his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George Bush, he assures Americans that this deal will be different because, you see, it will protect workers. But the secret draft, which had to be revealed to Americans by Wikileaks, shows that once again a trade agreement will be used to enhance the power of multinational corporate investors over people who have to work for a living. As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pointed out recently, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which is charged with negotiating and enforcing the deal, does not even believe that murder and other brutal acts committed against labor union activists violate the “worker-protection” clauses to trade agreements.

So, like a lawyer trained to defend the indefensible, Obama is desperately pounding the opposition. They are “just wrong,” he says, without showing us why. He accuses them of “making stuff up”—that is, that they are liars. He whines that they are “whupping on me.” He charges, nonsensically, that they “want to pull up the drawbridge and isolate themselves.”

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In January of this year, I projected that the black unemployment rate would reach single digits by mid-2015. That happened this month as job growth of 223,000 in April was more in line with the monthly average in 2014. At 9.6 percent, the black unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since June 2008 and nearly two (1.8) percentage points below where it was this time last year. Though this is an important milestone, the rate remains above the annual average of 8.3 percent in 2007, meaning there’s still much further to go before we declare a full recovery for black workers.

Though the unemployment rate for black men fell to nearly the same rate for black women in April, black men and black women have made very unequal progress, as can be seen in Figure A. This is an amplification of the fact that although men lost more jobs than women during the recession, they have also rebounded faster in the recovery.

Figure A

Black unemployment rate by gender, December 2007–April 2015

	Black Men	Black Women
Dec-2007	10.0%	8.0%
Jan-2008	10.0%	8.2%
Feb-2008	9.0%	7.8%
Mar-2008	9.8%	8.7%
Apr-2008	9.2%	8.1%
May-2008	10.4%	8.9%
Jun-2008	10.7%	8.3%
Jul-2008	11.8%	8.3%
Aug-2008	11.4%	9.9%
Sep-2008	12.8%	9.9%
Oct-2008	13.3%	9.6%
Nov-2008	13.6%	9.7%
Dec-2008	14.9%	9.6%
Jan-2009	15.7%	10.1%
Feb-2009	16.5%	11.2%
Mar-2009	16.6%	11.0%
Apr-2009	18.4%	11.9%
May-2009	17.8%	12.4%
Jun-2009	17.5%	12.5%
Jul-2009	17.2%	12.7%
Aug-2009	17.7%	12.3%
Sep-2009	17.6%	13.3%
Oct-2009	18.3%	13.6%
Nov-2009	18.8%	13.0%
Dec-2009	18.4%	14.0%
Jan-2010	19.2%	14.1%
Feb-2010	19.2%	13.3%
Mar-2010	20.6%	13.5%
Apr-2010	18.7%	14.7%
May-2010	17.5%	13.6%
Jun-2010	18.4%	12.4%
Jul-2010	17.8%	13.7%
Aug-2010	18.1%	14.0%
Sep-2010	18.3%	14.0%
Oct-2010	17.6%	13.9%
Nov-2010	18.1%	14.4%
Dec-2010	17.3%	13.9%
Jan-2011	18.1%	13.7%
Feb-2011	17.6%	13.7%
Mar-2011	18.2%	13.6%
Apr-2011	18.6%	14.6%
May-2011	18.5%	14.3%
Jun-2011	17.9%	14.5%
Jul-2011	17.4%	14.4%
Aug-2011	18.6%	14.5%
Sep-2011	17.3%	14.7%
Oct-2011	16.6%	13.0%
Nov-2011	17.6%	13.9%
Dec-2011	16.7%	14.3%
Jan-2012	13.7%	13.4%
Feb-2012	15.6%	12.7%
Mar-2012	15.1%	13.1%
Apr-2012	15.0%	11.7%
May-2012	14.9%	12.3%
Jun-2012	15.3%	13.5%
Jul-2012	15.7%	12.6%
Aug-2012	15.1%	12.9%
Sep-2012	15.2%	12.1%
Oct-2012	15.5%	13.0%
Nov-2012	14.5%	12.3%
Dec-2012	14.8%	13.2%
Jan-2013	14.4%	13.2%
Feb-2013	14.2%	13.5%
Mar-2013	13.7%	12.6%
Apr-2013	13.8%	12.5%
May-2013	14.9%	12.2%
Jun-2013	14.7%	12.9%
Jul-2013	13.5%	11.4%
Aug-2013	14.8%	11.3%
Sep-2013	15.4%	11.0%
Oct-2013	14.0%	12.1%
Nov-2013	13.4%	11.5%
Dec-2013	12.7%	11.1%
Jan-2014	13.3%	11.0%
Feb-2014	13.7%	10.4%
Mar-2014	12.8%	11.7%
Apr-2014	12.0%	10.9%
May-2014	12.2%	10.7%
Jun-2014	11.7%	9.9%
Jul-2014	12.1%	10.8%
Aug-2014	11.7%	11.4%
Sep-2014	11.9%	10.2%
Oct-2014	11.6%	10.2%
Nov-2014	12.1%	10.1%
Dec-2014	12.0%	9.0%
Jan-2015	11.5%	9.3%
Feb-2015	11.3%	9.5%
Mar-2015	10.7%	9.6%
Apr-2015	9.7%	9.5%

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Source: EPI analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey

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Between April 2014 and April 2015, job gains for black men far outpaced those of black women (an increase of 7.6 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively). As a result, black men’s unemployment rate declined 2.3 percentage points over the last year, compared to a decline of 1.4 percentage points for black women. Since the end of 2014, employment growth for black women has slowed even further, leaving black women’s unemployment rate 0.5 percentage points higher in April 2015 than it was in December 2014. Meanwhile, black men’s unemployment rate was 2.3 percentage points lower in April 2015 than December 2014.

Although caution should always be used in placing too much emphasis on a single month of data, the last four months raise some questions about whether the recovery has stalled for black women and why.

Recent debates over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have highlighted the failure of the treaty to include a provision to stop countries from actively weakening the value of their own currency in order to run trade surpluses.

The way this currency management works is that countries (most notably China, though there are many others as well) buy assets denominated in dollars—mostly U.S. Treasuries. This boosts the demand for dollars in global markets and weakens demand for the Chinese renminbi. This in turn increases the value of the dollar, which makes U.S. exports expensive in global markets and makes foreign imports cheaper to U.S. consumers. The result is that exports are suppressed while imports grow and the U.S. trade deficit widens.

Opponents of including a currency provision in the TPP have made a number of bad arguments, and one of them is that currency management was once a problem, but isn’t anymore. They often point to recent appreciation of the Chinese currency as evidence that the problem of currency management is behind us. But this is incorrect—the evidence that currency management is still a problem is simply that foreign purchases of dollar-denominated assets remained strong in 2014. There is zero doubt that absent this continued intervention, the U.S. dollar would weaken. Further, the nearly $1 trillion in purchases of dollar denominated assets that has characterized each year since 2008 has led to a large stock of dollar assets held by foreign investors and governments, and this large stock (over and above the annual flow of dollar purchases) also keeps the value of the dollar stronger than it would otherwise be.

Further, two pieces of recent evidence suggest strongly that excess dollar strength could be becoming a real drag on recovery. In the first quarter numbers on gross domestic product, the rising trade deficit knocked 1.3 percentage points off the economy’s annualized growth rate. Then trade data for March came in showing a very large rise in the deficit. Finally, today’s jobs report shows that growth of employment in manufacturing has stagnated in the last quarter (rising at an average monthly rate of less than 2,000 jobs), after rising at an average monthly rate of 18,000 in 2014.

This post is crossposted on the National Women’s Law Center’s Womenstake Blog.

Here’s a Mother’s Day gift idea for Congress: Rather than getting mom flowers or chocolate, how about passing a policy that increases economic security for families, injects billions of dollars into communities, and ensures that women and people of color are paid more fairly?

That’s just what the Raise the Wage Act would do. Introduced last week by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Robert “Bobby” Scott (D-VA), the Raise the Wage Act would increase the minimum wage from $7.25 to $12 per hour by 2020 and then “index” it to median wages, so that the minimum would automatically go up as overall wages rose, beginning in 2021. It also would gradually phase out the lower tipped minimum cash wage so that tipped workers would be paid the regular minimum wage before tips—something that only happens in a handful of states today. Federal law currently allows employers to pay tipped workers a pre-tip wage of just $2.13 per hour, a policy that leaves tipped workers nearly twice as likely to live in poverty as other workers.

Passing the Raise the Wage Act would especially help women, particularly women of color. Women are the majority (56 percent) of workers who would benefit from increasing the federal minimum wage to $12 by 2020. As shown in the figure below, 30 percent of working women—roughly 20 million—would get a raise. The gains are even more substantial for working women of color, 37 percent of whom—8.6 million—would see their pay increase. (All of these statistics are available in EPI’s analysis of the proposal.)

Fig. 1

Share of selected groups that would get a raise by increasing the federal minimum wage to $12 by 2020

	Share of each group that would get a raise by increasing the federal minimum wage to $12 by 2020
Women	29.6%
Working moms	27.3%
Single moms	39.6%
Women of color	37.1%

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Source: EPI analysis of Raise the Wage Act using Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata

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While policy makers in Washington are at least paying lip service to the need to lift the stagnant wages of America’s middle class, politicians in state capitals across the country are cutting the wages and benefits of public employees and school teachers, passing so-called “right-to-work” laws to weaken unions, and cutting back on unemployment insurance with the aim of forcing jobless workers to take any job, no matter how poor.

Indiana is a leader in this sorry parade. It passed right-to-work two years ago, and now the legislature has repealed (with the support of a governor with aspirations for national office) the state’s eight-decade old prevailing-wage law, which required contractors on state-funded construction projects to pay their construction workers the average wage in the locality where the work is done. Like the federal Davis-Bacon Act, the rationale for the law was straightforward: The state government should not be in the business of driving down wages. When it pays for construction work, rather than forcing a race to the bottom, it should respect local area standards.

But powerful interests, from the Koch Brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council to the Associated Builders and Contractors, like the idea of a race to the bottom. From their perspective, the best wage is the lowest wage they can get away with, since companies’ profit margins will be higher with every dollar that isn’t paid to a construction worker. Indiana politicians are dancing to the tune the Kochs are calling.

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In We Can Afford a $12 Federal Minimum Wage in 2020, Larry Mishel, John Schmitt, and I explain that raising the federal minimum wage to $12 by 2020 is an eminently achievable and worthwhile goal. As the paper explains, $12 in 2020 would equal a modest 11 percent increase in purchasing power over the 1968 minimum wage, yet would essentially be the same as the 1968 minimum’s value as a percentage of the typical worker’s wage. In other words, raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would simply restore the 1968 relationship between what minimum-wage workers were paid relative to what typical workers were paid—and in doing so, would raise the wages of more than a quarter of all working Americans.

Raising the federal minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would also bring the U.S. minimum wage more in line with the rest of the developed world. This relationship between the minimum wage and the median wage—also known as the “Kaitz index”—is tracked by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As shown in the figure below, according to the OECD, in 2013, the United States had the third-lowest minimum-to-median wage ratio among developed countries—only Mexico and the Czech Republic had lower Kaitz indices. However, if the United States raised its minimum wage to $12, and other countries’ minimum-to-median ratios were to remain unchanged, the United States would move to the eleventh spot. 1

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The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report last Friday touting the benefits of international trade for the American economy. The paper provides an interesting review of research on a range of trade’s economic effects, yet the report is largely irrelevant to current trade policy debates. Worse, when its findings are related to current trade policy debates, they are often reported in ways that could mislead readers.

The weaknesses of the report generally fall into one of three areas.

First, the overwhelming focus of the report touts the benefits of trade flows qua trade flows, and often even compares outcomes relative to a hypothetical scenario where trade barriers were raised so high that the U.S. economy became completely autarkic. Academics might find this interesting, but nobody in today’s economic debate argues for increasing U.S. trade barriers, let alone to historically never-seen levels. The CEA acknowledges this explicitly by noting that barriers to foreign imports coming into the U.S. economy are already extremely low and unlikely to be reduced significantly by treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Several times, the report alludes to potential benefits of the TPP and other treaties in pulling down barriers to U.S. exports abroad, but fails to mention what is by far the most important barrier to U.S. export success—several major trading partners (including some proposed TPP partners) managing the value of their own currencies for competitive gain vis-à-vis the United States.

Second, the report spends very little time on the most important non-currency issue regarding trade policy: the distribution of gains and losses. When the report does cite research on distribution, it is woefully incomplete, looking only at how the benefits from trade are distributed while ignoring the costs. The research on the comprehensive costs and benefits of this issue is pretty clear:  trade with labor abundant trading partners, like many of those in the proposed TPP, tends to lower wages for the majority of U.S. workers and provide gains only to the upper end of the income distribution.

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