In a teaser for a talk he gave yesterday about poverty and the congressional fight over Emergency Unemployment Compensation, Sen. Marco Rubio’s office circulated a ‘fact sheet’ that was as ill-informed and self-contradictory as the speech that followed it. For example, the fact sheet said we need unemployment assistance, but hinted that it shouldn’t be in the form of weekly benefit checks:

“Unemployment assistance must remain an important part of our social safety net, but these programs have to do more than simply provide a paycheck; they must be reformed to help people secure middle class jobs. … [W]e should redirect funds away from the federal government and steer them directly to states, while at the same time incentivizing work through a new, direct wage enhancement credit for lower income workers and the working poor.”

Unemployment insurance does not, in fact, have to do more than provide a check. It is intended to do one very important thing: provide income to people who have lost jobs through no fault of their own while they continue to search for new employment. It is not job training. It won’t provide a college degree or a license to practice a profession. It’s meant to keep people in their homes with food on the table until they can find a new job. And finding a job isn’t easy when there are three workers searching for each vacant position. UI has an ancillary benefit, in that it increases aggregate demand and supports jobs that would be lost without it, but its fundamental purpose is to help deserving people survive hard times with dignity. And that benefit depends precisely on checks being sent to the jobless, cashed, and spent.

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Tomorrow’s release of jobs data will mark six full years since the official beginning—and four-and-a-half years since the official end—of the Great Recession. Some initial (though traditionally pretty noisy) signs indicate it could be a decent month of job growth.

My colleague Heidi Shierholz released a paper today to remind job market watchers just how far from a healthy labor market we are, and how it will take a very long time for even objectively great monthly job numbers to dig the U.S. labor market out of the deep hole it remains in.

You should read it—it has lots of great labor market indicators. I’ll just highlight one—the “jobs gap.” This is a simple measure of how many jobs the U.S. economy needs to return to immediate pre-Great Recession health (i.e., the labor market conditions that prevailed in December 2007). This jobs gap (pictured below) remains enormous. With 1.3 million jobs needed just to replace those lost during the Great Recession, and another 6.6 million jobs needed to provide work to soak up potential workers added since December 2007, the combined jobs gap is 7.9 million. This is down from its maximum value of 11.3 million reached in September 2010, but it indicates we’re less than a third of the way to full labor market recovery.

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My colleague Elise Gould recently showed that to lessen poverty is to lessen income inequality by raising wages of low and moderate income workers. This post adds some more data to the argument that raising wages for low-wage workers is an essential component of any anti-poverty strategy.

The recently released Council of Economic Advisers report on the War on Poverty highlights this by noting that ‘market poverty’—measuring poverty without accounting for government aid in the form of transfers and tax credits—is higher now than in 1967, and that only increased government support allowed poverty to fall:

“A measure of “market poverty,” that reflects what the poverty rate would be without any tax credits or other benefits, rose from 27.0 percent to 28.7 percent between 1967 and 2012. Countervailing forces of increasing levels of education on the one hand, and inequality, wage stagnation, and a declining minimum wage on the other resulted in “market poverty” increasing slightly over this period. However, poverty measured taking antipoverty and social insurance programs into account fell by more than a third, highlighting the essential role that these programs have played in fighting poverty.”

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I couldn’t agree more with Paul Krugman’s blog post this morning when he says, “the main cause of persistent poverty now is high inequality of market income.” We looked at precisely this question in the latest edition of State of Working America. (And the White House Council of Economic Advisors cited our work on this in their War on Poverty 50 Years Later Report, released today.)

In the roughly three decades leading up to the most recent recession, looking at the officially measured poverty rate, educational upgrading and overall income growth were the two biggest poverty-reducing factors, while income inequality was the largest poverty-increasing factor. Relative to these factors, the racial composition of the U.S. population over this period (the growth of nonwhite populations with higher likelihoods of poverty) and changes in family structure (the growth of single mother households) have contributed much less to poverty, particularly in recent years.

The figure below plots the impact of these economic and demographic factors on the official poverty rate from 1979 to 2007. The impact of income inequality and income growth were quantitatively large, but in the opposite directions. Had income growth been equally distributed, which in this analysis means that all families’ incomes would have grown at the pace of the average, the poverty rate would have been 5.5 points lower, essentially, 44 percent lower than what it was. 

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In the current issue of The American Prospect, I review Patrick Sharkey’s Stuck in Place, a 2013 book that helps explain the persistent failure of educational policy to spur the upward mobility of low-income African American youth.

It is now well understood that many characteristics of children from low-income families—poor health, housing instability, inadequate pre-literacy experiences when young and inadequate after-school enrichment opportunities when older—make it difficult to take advantage of even the best classroom instruction. A quarter of a century ago, William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged showed that the harm is magnified when children with these disadvantages are concentrated in urban ghettos where jobs have vanished, violence, drugs, and stress are commonplace, and there are few adult role models of academic success.

Building on Wilson’s work, Sharkey demonstrates that the harm is exacerbated when families live in such low-income neighborhoods for multiple generations. Indeed, a child’s chance of success may be harmed as much or more by having a mother who grew up in a poor neighborhood than by growing up in a poor neighborhood him or herself. And, Sharkey shows, between black and white children who live in poor neighborhoods, blacks are more likely to have done so for multiple generations.

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Jim Tankersley has an amusing piece about Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, who is trying to distract attention from JPMorgan’s London Whale fiasco, its $13 billion settlement of charges relating to abusive trading in mortgage backed securities, and its role in the Madoff Ponzi scheme, by talking about the ”skills gap.“ Tankersley is appropriately skeptical about the so-called skills gap, which has become the chief excuse of the 1% for wage stagnation and rising inequality. His story’s first line is: “Jamie Dimon has no problem finding skilled workers to hire.”

Dimon himself admits, there’s not much evidence of a skills gap in the banking business: “If I travel all around America, a lot of people talk about the skills gap. We don’t see it ourselves that much.” So what about the rest of American industry? Apparently, Dimon doesn’t really know much, other than hearsay: “But if you go to Silicon Valley, they will talk about nothing but the lack of—they used to call them computer engineers, now they call them software writers. If you go to some of the manufacturing companies, they’ll talk about the lack of technical skills.” Silicon Valley companies do “talk” about a skills gap, but the claim that there are severe IT shortages is contradicted by a good deal of economic evidence that suggests the talk is self-serving.

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The post originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

New Year’s Day, 2014, marks the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Agreement created a common market for goods, services and investment capital with Canada and Mexico. And it opened the door through which American workers were shoved, unprepared, into a brutal global competition for jobs that has cut their living standards and is destroying their future.

NAFTA’s birth was bi-partisan—conceived by Ronald Reagan, negotiated by George Bush I, and pushed through the US Congress by Bill Clinton in alliance with Congressional Republicans and corporate lobbyists.

Clinton and his collaborators promised that the deal would bring “good-paying American jobs,” a rising trade surplus with Mexico, and a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration. Instead, NAFTA directly cost the United States. a net loss of 700,000 jobs. The surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the the flow of undocumented workers into the United States.

Nevertheless, Clinton and his Republican successor, George Bush II, then used the NAFTA template to design the World Trade Organization, more than a dozen bilateral trade treaties, and the deal that opened the American market to China—which alone has cost the United States another net 2.7 million jobs. The result has been 20 years of relentless outsourcing of jobs and technology.

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On January 1^st, thirteen states raised their state minimum wages, lifting the pay of more than 4.5 million workers. Eight of these states (Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington), have state minimum wages that are “indexed” to inflation so that every year, the minimum wage is automatically increased in order to protect the purchasing power of minimum-wage workers’ incomes. Colorado also automatically increases its minimum wage based on inflation, with the increase occurring each July.

In the remaining 5 states (California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island) citizens voted to raise their state minimum wages during the past year. Voters in New Jersey also chose to index their state minimum wage to inflation so that in January of 2015, New Jersey’s minimum wage workers will see the same paycheck protection afforded workers in the 9 other states with inflation indexing.  The table below details all of these increases.

As the table shows, these increases will give more than $2.7 billion in additional wages to affected workers over the course of the year.  For the states that voted to raise their minimum wages, these additional wages represent a modest, but valuable injection of dollars into the pockets of workers who typically rely on every penny they earn and are likely to spend those dollars right away. For the states with indexing, these new wages ensure that minimum wage workers can still afford the same volume of goods and services that they bought the previous year.

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In keeping with what is as of now an annual tradition to produce some serious click-bait—and to cut through the “conventional wisdom” of inside the Beltway talking heads and commenters—we hereby present our best and worst economic policy ideas of 2013.

Reflecting the fact that fiscal policy in 2013 is a mess, the number of bad ideas on this list far exceed the number of good ones. (A 9-to-4 bad-to-good ratio seemed about right.) We’ll go ahead and put our best foot first.

Best Ideas

1.  “Inequality is the defining economic challenge of our time.” This was said by President Obama in a major address in December. In a period of wide—and rising— income inequality, wage stagnation, a tepid economic recovery, and fiscal policy mired in austerity,  it is absolutely essential to begin put the rise in inequality at the center of policy debates.

2.  Talking about expanding benefits, finally. While the conversation about Social Security in Washington has for far too long focused on how to cut benefits, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Tom Harkin both rose up, not just to defend the current level of benefits, but to call for expanding them. This is absolutely the conversation we need to have. Retirement insecurity is growing as two legs of the three-legged “retirement stool” (pensions and personal savings) have become increasingly wobbly. Moreover, since the last major Social Security reform in 1983, the wealth of the bottom 60 percent of Americans actually declined. Even as our country has gotten 63 percent richer, millions of retirees are increasingly dependent on their benefits to get by. It’s a good thing we’re starting to consider increasing their benefits.

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EPI is taking a much-needed break for the holidays. Working Economics will be back on January 2nd. Meanwhile, here’s what we read today:

• Senate Bill Would Lower Contractors’ Compensation Cap (Wall Street Journal)
• How America’s harshest immigration law failed (MSNBC)
• Victims of Misclassification (New York Times)

And don’t forget to check out the 13 Most Important Charts of 2013.