The Congressional Budget Office released their long-term budget outlook last Tuesday. On the spending side, growth has slowed relative to their previous long-term projection largely because of reduced projected federal health spending on Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the health insurance exchange subsidies. Given that the trajectory of federal spending in coming decades is almost entirely driven by health costs, this is a most welcome change.

On the revenue side, to no one’s surprise, things look considerably worse because of the tax cuts enacted by the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA)—otherwise known as the “fiscal cliff deal”. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were made permanent for 99 percent of taxpayers and the alternative minimum tax parameters were indexed to inflation. As a result, CBO projects that by 2038 federal revenues will be about 3.7 percent of GDP lower than previously thought. As Nicole Woo of Center for Economic and Policy Research has pointed out, the latest CBO report suggests strongly that in containing projected long-run deficits, the U.S. has a tax problem, not a spending problem.

An under-appreciated part of this tax problem is the continued tax avoidance (and sometimes outright evasion) by many U.S. multinational corporations. CBO assumes that corporate tax revenues will average 2.2 percent between 2014 and 2023—basically falling from 2.5 percent of GDP in 2015 to 1.9 percent by 2023. After 2023, CBO assumes that corporate tax revenues will remain at 1.9 percent of GDP, which is about what the average was between 1973 and 2012.

But the importance of corporate income tax revenues has steadily fallen since 1946. In the 1950s, corporate income tax revenue was about 4.5 percent of GDP and the average between 1946 and 1986 was 3.2 percent of GDP. If corporate tax revenues are higher by one percent of GDP after 2014, then the deficit would be reduced by about one percent of GDP every year (actually a little more because net interest payments would be slightly lower). Because of the reduced deficits, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be about 5 percent lower in 2040 than CBO’s projection.

A good start toward increasing corporate tax revenues was introduced in the senate yesterday by Senators Levin, Whitehouse, Begich, and Shaheen. The Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act (S. 1533) would close some corporate loopholes and provide measures to combat the corporate use of tax havens to evade paying U.S. taxes.

The results of the 2012 American Community Survey (ACS), released by the U.S. Census Bureau, show the lingering effects of the Great Recession, and further evidence of a recovery that has been both too slow and too tentative. Both median household income levels and overall poverty rates were virtually unchanged in 2012.

Income

Between 2011 and 2012, only a handful of states saw changes in inflation-adjusted median household income, consistent with a national median household income unchanged from 2011 (the increase of  0.1% nationally is not statistically significant). Our EPI colleagues explain clearly why we see this holding pattern in effect: “Given the tight relationship between the health of the labor market and incomes for most households, it is unsurprising that incomes for most households grew only slightly if at all in 2012 after deteriorating between 2007 and 2011.” Until we see significantly more robust job growth than that which has left us with a “jobs deficit” of over 8 million, improved income and poverty data (and improved well-being and economic security for American families in every state) will remain elusive.

Changes to median household income between 2011 and 2012 were statistically significant in only six states. In four of those states—Hawaii (4.8%), Illinois (1.4%), Massachusetts (1.6%), and Oregon (3.3%)—median household incomes grew modestly. In the other two—Mississippi (-1.6%) and Virginia (-2.2%)—incomes dropped slightly. In the remaining forty-four states (and the District of Columbia), median household incomes showed no significant change.1

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The Census released its annual income and poverty report this week, which, among other highlights, calculates the number of people who are kept out of poverty by various government assistance programs. While many of the headline numbers stayed the same, the number of people kept out of poverty by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) increased to an all-time high of 4 million people.1

The data arrived, coincidentally, as the House of Representatives announced it will be voting today to cut SNAP spending by 5 percent over the next 10 years, cutting 3.8 million people from the program by as early as next year. Understanding why SNAP has increased over the last five years helps us understand why it would be irresponsible–indeed cruel and stupid—to cut spending on the program now.

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The hot debate over whether the new iPhones incorporate substantial improvements, or will spur even larger profits for Apple, misses a fundamental point. Whether or not the iPhones constitute a breakthrough for Apple’s business, their production process does not constitute a breakthrough for the workers making them. Despite an 18-month old highly-publicized commitment by Apple to dramatically reform working conditions in its supply chain, these conditions still include widespread abuses of labor laws and common decency, as well as widespread violations of Apple promises and its supplier code of conduct. Three of the latest undercover investigations by China Labor Watch and a recent review of Apple reform promises I conducted with Scott Nova of the Workers Rights Consortium support this conclusion.

The first of the China Labor Watch studies was an in-depth investigation of conditions for workers making the new iPhones at Apple’s second largest supplier, Pegatron. The study, released July 29, found Pegatron in violation of 17 specific commitments made in Apple’s supplier code of conduct, and 86 labor rights violations overall in areas such as hiring practices, wages, hours worked, and living conditions. As one illustration, Apple has touted its success in ensuring that workers in its supply chain work no more than 60 hours a week, a dubious accomplishment at best, since the limit under Chinese law is 49 hours a week. China Labor Watch found even this weak standard has not been achieved.  At the three Pegatron factories examined, the average number of hours worked ranged from 66 to 69 hours per week, and in at least one factory these excessive hours were concealed because workers were forced to sign false time sheets.

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This is a big week for those interested in the Federal Reserve—which should be everybody. The Fed has been the only economic policymaking institution with any real power that has been actively trying to lower unemployment and push the economy back to full recovery from the Great Recession over the past two years. If you’re looking for a job, more hours, or the confidence that you can ask your boss for a raise and might actually get it (because there aren’t three well-qualified but jobless people lined up outside to take your slot), you really should be interested in the Fed and what it’s doing.

The first bit of big Fed news is Larry Summers’ withdrawing from consideration to replace Ben Bernanke as the next Chair of the Federal Reserve. This seemingly clears the way for Janet Yellen—the current Vice-Chair of the Fed—to be offered the position. If Yellen is not offered the slot, it would be a bizarre and consequential mistake. She is eminently qualified for the job, and, most importantly right now, she has the correct diagnosis for what is keeping the U.S. economy from full recovery from the Great Recession (a continuing shortage of aggregate demand) and is committed to using the Fed’s power to hasten this recovery (by continuing its program to buy assets to keep interest rates low and inflation expectations from falling).

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The U.S. Department of Labor issued final regulations today that extend minimum wage and overtime protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act to about two million previously excluded home care workers—personal care assistants for the frail elderly and the disabled, home health aides, and other direct support paraprofessionals working in the homes of patients and clients needing personal help with needs ranging from changing the dressings on wounds and administering non-injectable medications to personal hygiene and ambulation. The home care workforce is growing fast as the population ages and more people are cared for in their homes, rather than in costlier institutional settings. These jobs need to be decent jobs that pay a living wage.

Although domestic workers, like nannies, chauffeurs and housekeepers, were first covered by the FLSA in 1974, most home care aides have been excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections by the Act’s vague “companionship” exemption, which was never meant to cover people providing services for pay, while in the employ of a third party, rather than in a direct relationship with the patient or elderly client. An agency—and there are very large agencies, some employing tens of thousands of home care workers—could therefore ignore FLSA rules about paying for travel time when an aide moved between one client’s home and another’s, ignore the rules governing break time, and avoid paying time and a half for overtime when an aide worked more than 40 hours in a week. Some employers have even paid less than the miserably low federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

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Modest income growth in 2012 barely begins to offset lost decade driven by financial crisis and decade-long wage stagnation

This morning, the Census Bureau released its report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in 2012. It shows that from 2011 to 2012, median household income for non-elderly households (those with a head of household younger than 65 years old) increased 1.0 percent from $56,802 to $57,353. However, that modest growth barely begins to offset the losses incurred during the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2011, median household income for non-elderly households dropped from $62,617 to $56,802, a decline of $5,815, or 9.3 percent. Furthermore, the disappointing trends of the Great Recession and its aftermath come on the heels of the weak labor market from 2000-2007, where the median income of non-elderly households fell significantly, from $64,843 to $62,617, the first time in the post-war period that incomes failed to grow over a business cycle. Altogether, from 2000 to 2012, median income for non-elderly households fell from $64,843 to $57,353, a decline of $7,490, or 11.6 percent.

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Brad DeLong recently wrote an excellent piece contrasting the “Banking Versus Macroeconomics” camps in assessing how the U.S. responded to the financial crisis that peaked with the uncontrolled bankruptcy of Lehman five years ago. A quick summary:

“One camp, call it the Banking Camp, sees a central bank as a bank for bankers: its clients are the banks…and its functions are to support the banking sector and …to ensure that there is enough credit and liquidity in the economy that mere illiquidity rather than insolvency does not force banks into bankruptcy and liquidation. 

Another camp, call it the Macroeconomic Camp, sees a central bank… as the steward of the economy as a whole, with its primary responsibility not to preserve the health of the businesses that make up the banking sector but rather to maintain the health of the economy as a whole.”

This is a useful dichotomy, and one that can help explain differing assessments of how policymakers responded to the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/08.

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I don’t mean to pick on Joel Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor, but he has made himself such a caricature of self-styled school reformers who are undermining American public education that it would be a mistake not to respond to the claims on which he bases his efforts.

Last year, I addressed Mr. Klein’s conclusion that public education must be failing because he himself grew up in public housing as a “kid of the streets,” yet owed his success to great public schools; and if only children from public housing projects today had schools as good as his, they too would be successful.

The analysis, it turned out, was misleading. The New York City public housing in which the Klein family lived in the 1950s was segregated, constructed for white middle class two-parent households where the husband had a stable employment history and where market rents were charged with no public subsidy. Such housing projects no longer exist, and the conditions in which Joel Klein grew up bear no resemblance to those from which minority children in impoverished families come to school today.

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