The U.S. Treasury announced today, for the 12^th time, that the Obama Administration has determined that neither China, nor any other “major trading partner of the United States met the standard of manipulating the rate of exchange between their currency and the United States dollar for purposes of preventing effective balance of payments adjustments or gaining unfair competitive advantage in international trade…”

This political document ignores the fact that China purchased $681 billion in total foreign exchange reserves between December 2012 and June 2014, and more than $2 trillion since this Administration took office. Currency manipulation by China and approximately 20 other countries has increased the U.S. trade deficit by $200 to $500 billion. Elimination of currency manipulation would create 2.3 million to 5.8 million U.S. jobs, without raising public spending at all (indeed, reducing the trade deficit through currency re-alignment would reduce the federal budget deficit).

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A Wall Street Journal blog post this morning describes an Obama administration initiative to combat long-term unemployment. In the opening sentence, the author follows a too-common convention in describing the long-term unemployment rate as “sticky.” Sometimes the adjective is “stubborn.”

I know that this will sound like quibbling, but in this case adjectives really matter for understanding the problem. As a paper I co-wrote shows pretty clearly, the long-term unemployment rate (LTUR) has not been sticky or stubborn for years. In fact, the LTUR has fallen faster than one would expect given the overall pace of labor market improvement. It is true that the LTUR remains too high, but that is because it skyrocketed during the Great Recession and in the six months after its official end. But the LTUR has since then not become resistant to wider labor market improvement.

The concrete policy implication of recognizing this is that by far the most important thing that can be done to lower the still too-high LTUR is to maintain support for economic recovery more broadly. In today’s far too narrow macroeconomic policy debate, this simply means the Fed should not boost short-term interest rates until the labor market is much, much healthier (including a much lower LTUR).

In regards to the Obama administration effort as described in the WSJ, it seems to mostly consist of jawboning corporations to discard human resources strategies that might disadvantage the long-term unemployed for no reason other than their long duration of joblessness. This is a good idea. There seems to be some real evidence that employers have begun using automatic filters based on the duration of joblessness to screen potential hires—and this can disadvantage the long-term unemployed even though there is no evidence that the productivity or employability of long-term unemployed workers has been damaged by the Great Recession and long recovery.

Basically, because there have been so many potential hires for each vacancy in the economy for so long, employers figured they had to sort these potential hires somehow. Many seem to have chosen a pretty dysfunctional strategy of simply sorting based on unemployment duration. The Obama administration initiative is in a sense an effort to save employers from their own bad decisions.

However, we should be clear that even this employer discrimination has not kept the LTUR from falling faster than overall labor market improvement would predict. And, we should also be clear what would be the most powerful tool to rob employers of the ability to sort potential hires in the queue for vacancies like this: a return to genuine full employment.

I’ve spent several years studying the evolution of residential segregation nationwide, motivated in part by convictions that the black-white achievement gap cannot be closed while low-income black children are isolated in segregated schools, that schools cannot be integrated unless neighborhoods are integrated, and that neighborhoods cannot be integrated unless we remedy the public policies that have created and support neighborhood segregation.

When Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August, I suspected that federal, state and local policy had purposefully segregated St. Louis County, because this had occurred in so many other metropolises. After looking into the history of Ferguson, St. Louis, and the city’s other suburbs, I confirmed these were no different. In The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of its Troubles, the Economic Policy Institute has now published a report documenting the basis for this conclusion, and The American Prospect has published a summary in an article in the current issue.

Since a Ferguson policeman shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, we’ve paid considerable attention to that town. If we’ve not been looking closely at our evolving demographic patterns, we were surprised to see ghetto conditions we had come to associate with inner cities now duplicated in almost every respect in a formerly white suburban community: racially segregated neighborhoods with high poverty and unemployment, poor student achievement in overwhelmingly black schools, oppressive policing, abandoned homes, and community powerlessness.

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Last week, I noted that two recent data releases—the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances and the Forbes 400—painted a stark picture of growing wealth concentration in the U.S. economy. Specifically, I looked at the single largest conglomeration of family financial wealth in the Forbes 400, the combined net worth of the six Walmart heirs, and compared it to that held by typical American families.

If you arrange American families by net worth in ascending order, you would have to aggregate the net worth of the bottom 42.9 percent (52.5 million) of American families to equal the net worth held by the six Waltons. Further, you would need to add together more than 1.7 million American families that all had the median U.S. net worth ($81,200 in 2013) to equal the Walton family holdings.1

In this post, I’ll do the same calculations, but look just at non-white families. It is a stark fact that racial wealth gaps in the U.S. economy are enormous. For example, the median white family had net worth of roughly $142,000 in 2013, while the median net worth of non-white families was just $18,100.

So, arranging non-white families by ascending order of net worth, one would need to aggregate the net worth of the bottom 67.4 percent of non-white families to match the net worth of the Waltons.2 And it would take 7.9 million families that had the median net worth of non-white families to match the Waltons’ wealth.

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For most foreign workers who come to work temporarily in the United States, paying private labor recruitment agencies or individual recruiters (also known as foreign labor contractors or FLCs) in order to find and get a job—as a landscaper, teacher, computer programmer, or almost any other occupation—has become an inescapable part of the process. Recruiters connect workers abroad—who may sometimes be in remote locations and rural villages—with employers in the United States for a fee, which is either collected from the employer, the worker, or both. As the Migration Policy Institute has noted, this cross-border and cross-jurisdiction contracting activity “creates many opportunities for exploitation and abuse.” The UN International Labour Office’s Director-General Guy Ryder has gone further, calling this market “anarchic and in need of proper coordinated regulation.”

The principal reasons that the recruitment market is “anarchic” are its almost total lack of transparency, and the absence of any regulation to ensure fairness and accountability. One result is that migrants can be charged unreasonably high fees to get hired for short-term jobs. The migrants either have to get loans from friends and family, or take out mortgages on their home or land, or borrow the money directly from recruiters at exorbitant interest rates, which leaves the migrant workers heavily indebted.

In most temporary foreign worker programs, workers don’t have the right to switch employers, regardless of whether the employer steals their wages, confiscates their passports, or locks them inside of a factory. Because the employer controls the visa, if the migrant worker decides to quit or escape, he or she becomes instantly deportable. This arrangement leaves workers vulnerable to debt bondage. Countless examples can be cited of abuse and human trafficking perpetrated by recruiters and facilitated by the international labor recruitment system.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported another month of solid job growth in September, bringing this year’s average to over 225,000 jobs per month—the highest average monthly job growth since 1999. As the jobs recovery consistently grinds on, more attention is shifting toward the absence of wage growth in the recovery. Wage stagnation is part of a longer-term trend that has been well-documented in EPI’s research. Last month’s Census Bureau report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage in 2013 provided more evidence of weak wage growth following the recession. In my previous analysis of data from the Census report, I also identified how uneven that growth has been for different groups of women. Median real (ie, inflation-adjusted) annual earnings for African American women working full-time full-year in 2013 were 3.3 percent below the 2009 level, compared to 0.2 percent and 0.5 percent lower for white and Hispanic women, respectively.

Given the magnitude of that disparity, I sought to confirm it using hourly wage data for full-time full-year workers from the CPS ORG files, the data source for EPI’s signature research on wage trends. Based on that analysis, I identified similar racial disparities in women’s hourly wage growth.

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The Financial Times recently reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent $30 million to influence the upcoming elections, backing mostly Republicans candidates. The Chamber, upset with the so-called anti-business attitude of the Obama administration, wants a Congress that will cut corporate taxes. This rhetoric suggests that U.S. corporations have become so unprofitable they need tax relief in order to stay in business. So let’s take a look at corporate profitability.

The first figure below shows corporate profits (left axis) and corporate taxes (right axis) as a percent of national income since 1946. Corporate profits have bounced around over the last 68 years between 8 percent of national income and 14 percent. The high point over this period, however, was just last year. Furthermore, corporate profits as a percent of national income have been steadily rising since President Obama took office, though much of that is due to the recovery in corporate profits after the Great Recession. At least before taxes, corporations appear to be doing rather well in terms of profitability.

The figure also shows total taxes on corporate income as a percent of national income. Since 1946, corporate taxes have steadily decreased in relation to national income. In 2013, corporate taxes were at a level below the high point reached in the last Republican administration. The data suggests that corporate taxes have not been keeping up with corporate profitability.

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Integrity Staffing Solutions, which runs a warehouse operation for Amazon, makes employees go through a “security check” at the end of each working day, where they are searched for stolen goods. Even though employees spend 25 minutes being processed—and would be fired if they tried to skip the screening—Integrity doesn’t pay them a penny for their time. The employees sued and won, and the case has gone to the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, the Justice Department and Labor Department have filed a brief that takes the side of the Amazon subcontractor over its employees. This is a shame.

Over the past year, President Obama and Secretary of Labor Tom Perez have seemingly done everything within their power to lift wages and discourage the exploitation of workers. Obama has issued executive orders raising the minimum wage and requiring decent labor practices from federal contractors, Perez has issued a rule covering home-care workers under the minimum wage and overtime rules, and Obama directed Perez to update overtime rules so more salaried employees would have the right to overtime pay. So why are they fighting the employees in this case?

It doesn’t look like a matter of legal principle to me. Certainly, the application of the Portal to Portal Act, which frees employers from the obligation to pay for certain preliminary and postliminary activities such as traveling to the work site or changing from a uniform into civilian clothes, isn’t obvious in this case. The court of appeals found that the search for stolen property was integral and necessary to the business operation of the warehouse, and that seems right to me. If the screening isn’t “integral and necessary” to the business operation, why would the employer fire employees who skip it? If making employees remove work clothes and shower after work to remove toxins has to be compensated (and the Supreme Court has said that it does), why isn’t making them remove belts and shoes and other clothing to prevent theft? (Cases finding that making employees—and everyone else—go through airport security screenings aren’t analogous because the employees are only being required to do what everyone has to do. It isn’t integral and necessary to the business operation, it’s a general requirement of federal law.)

So if it’s a close legal question, why didn’t the Obama administration side with the workers and ask the Supreme Court to uphold the Court of Appeals decision in their favor? I’m afraid it’s because the federal government is doing the same thing as Integrity, and doesn’t want to be sued. The brief of the United States includes a “Statement of Interest” explaining why it wanted to file a friend of the court brief. Here’s what it says, in part:

“The United States also employs many employees who are covered by the FLSA, 29 U.S.C. 203(e)(2)(A), and requires physical-security checks in many settings. The United States accordingly has a substantial interest in the resolution of the question presented.”

In other words, as an employer, the government wants to be able to get away without paying its own workers for their time. This is wrong.

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Last night, the American Enterprise Institute’s Jim Pethokoukis, with whom I occasionally agree on matters of fiscal policy, took to Twitter to “clarify” the fiscal implications of many progressive priorities.

Basically, Pethokoukis is arguing that federal spending levels as high as some (slightly-caricatured version of) progressives have called for would require a broad-based tax hike on all Americans.

There’s plenty to dislike about this claim, but the most important issue is that no progressives I know are arguing for a specific federal spending level for all occasions. Instead, we want federal spending levels that are consistent with our policy priorities. So, for example, in times of weak aggregate demand, spending should temporarily rise to finance safety net programs, aid to state and local governments, and public investments to put people back to work. When the economy gets going again and we are near full employment, federal spending should then pull back. Over the longer run, spending levels should be sufficient to preserve the social insurance programs we have (which are not particularly generous), as well as finance needed public investments, vital safety net programs, and the efficient running of government. (So no phony savings like slashing the budget of the IRS.)

The liberal end game is 30% of GDP spending, financed by a VAT and other taxes.

— James Pethokoukis (@JimPethokoukis) October 6, 2014

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