Vincent Gray’s statement in support of his veto of the Local Retailer Accountability Act was a collection of non-sequiturs, half-truths, vague promises, and nonsense. He divides his critique of the LRAA into six sections.

1. “The bill is not a living wage bill because it would raise the minimum wage only for a small fraction of the District’s workforce.” The Mayor says he wants, instead, “to raise the minimum wage for all District residents.” Of course, the District could do both: require a higher minimum wage for billion-dollar corporations and a lower one for other businesses, including mom and pop stores. But the fact is that Mayor Gray hasn’t put forward any minimum wage increase, and the level that Councilmember Tommy Wells has suggested is $10.25—far below a “true living wage.” Each member of a 2-parent family with two kids would need to earn nearly $20 an hour to have a true living wage in the District.
2. “The bill is a job killer, because nearly every large retailer now considering opening a store in the District has indicated they will not come here or expand here if this bill becomes law.” The Mayor should identify the expansions Target, Home Depot, Wegmans, Lowe’s, Walgreens, Harris Teeter, AutoZone and Macy’s will make if the bill doesn’t pass. If they have such plans, why haven’t they announced them? And how credible is this threat? What billion-dollar retailer would invest here with a minimum wage of $10.25 an hour but not with a minimum wage of $12.50 that gives a credit for other benefits? The Mayor is either being dishonest, or gullible, or is simply unwilling to stand up to corporate bullies.Read more

Here’s what we read today. Did we miss anything good? Let us know in the comments.

• Why Janet Yellen, Not Larry Summers, Should Lead the Fed (New York Times)
• How High 401(k) Fees Can Doom Your Retirement Plans (Slate)
• Dying Not Under a Bridge, Nor Living in an E.R. (The Atlantic)
• Public Universities Funding Less Low-Income Students Nationwide (Color Lines)
• Carwash Workers and Capitol Hill: Immigration in Limbo (In These Times)
• At Grandmother’s House We Stay (Pew Research)
• Problem of unpaid internships in Ontario is ‘massive,’ says student group (Toronto Star)
• Wynne Godley’s Crucial Warnings About the Trade Deficit Still Ignored (AmericanEconomistAlert.org)

If House Republicans were at all serious last July, then they should be putting the finishing touches on their “menu” of social welfare spending cuts that they plan to force the president to choose from in exchange for an increase in the debt limit. Presumably, with this “menu,” a large increase in the debt ceiling would require a large reduction in social welfare spending while a small debt ceiling increase would require a smaller spending cut. This means that House Republicans are again preparing to risk America’s credit rating to eviscerate important and popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

I recently showed that the rise in social welfare spending since 1975 was due to: (1) the steady rise in federal health spending, driven in large part by increasing costs in the private-sector delivery of health care goods and services, and (2) the jump in safety net spending during the 2007-2009 Great Recession as programs like unemployment compensation and SNAP  expanded (both because the recession pushed more people into eligibility and because Congress temporarily expanded the programs to blunt the impact of the downturn). Social welfare spending has fallen relative to GDP in the past couple of years as the economy slowly recovers, yet the unemployment rate is still over 7 percent, nearly 40 percent of the unemployed have been looking for work for over 6 months, and the labor force participation rate is at a 35 year low.

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In a recent Health Affairs article, we, along with coauthor Dave Graham-Square, examine a potential pitfall in the design and implementation of the tax subsidies individuals and families may receive through the new health insurance marketplaces beginning in 2014. Next month, eligible Americans will be able to apply for subsidies to purchase health insurance in the new state and federally facilitated insurance exchanges. The amount of subsidy is determined by a person or family’s income over the past year. A problem may arise at the end of the year if income changes substantially and the family’s subsidy levels are not adjusted accordingly. Families may owe large sums at tax time if the subsidies aren’t recalculated as income rises.

Our article examines the extent to which eligible families in California experience income changes, which could have substantial effects on their subsidy levels. Using two-year panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), matched to the California Simulation of Insurance Markets (CalSIM), we construct the projected demographic profile and participation of the state’s subsidized exchange population in 2018 to 2019.

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Next Tuesday, the 2012 income numbers will be released by the Census Bureau and will reveal whether or not U.S. households have begun to dig out of the hole left by the Great Recession.

Between 2007 and 2011, median household income dropped by 8.1 percent (Excel file). Unfortunately, Tuesday’s numbers are unlikely to show much of a rebound for the median household in 2012.

Two things that will have pushed the income numbers in a positive direction are average weekly hours worked, which increased by 0.3 percent in 2012, and the share of the population that is employed, which grew by 0.3 percent when considering the entire 16+ population and 0.8 percent when considering just “prime-age” workers (workers age 25-54). However, those increases will be at least partially offset by the fact that due to the weak labor market, workers were earning less per hour in 2012 than they did in 2011. (Real hourly wages for the median worker dropped by 0.6 percent in 2012.) Putting these factors together, my back-of-the-envelope calculation is that, in 2012, median household income likely grew somewhere between zero percent and one-half of one percent.

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The United States has experienced increasing economic inequality since the late 1970s. New data released this week confirm that the Great Recession was only a blip on the road toward growing income inequality. Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty updated their now-famous data on cash, market-based income, allowing one to track trends in inequality in the United States between 1913 through 2012.

As illustrated in the graph below, the share of income going to the top 1 percent has surpassed its 2007 peak of 18.3 percent and is now 19.3 percent—the highest share since 1928.

At the same time, the Piketty and Saez data show that the Great Recession has battered incomes for the bottom 90 percent so badly that they are now back to the same levels that prevailed in 1966.

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It was reported earlier this summer that congressional Republicans planned on demanding that the Obama administration choose from a “menu” of mandatory spending cuts in exchange for raising the country’s statutory debt limit. “Mandatory spending” (or the even less flattering “entitlements”) is a budget wonk’s way of referring to programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Compensation as well as for important programs for low-income individuals and families such as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI, a means-tested benefit for the low-income blind, disabled, and elderly).

Before looking ahead at some of the specific proposals for “entitlement reform,” it is instructive to look back at spending on these programs in recent decades to see which have been growing and which have not, and to examine the sources of this growth. The GOP narrative, after all, on why these popular programs must be cut is that they are allegedly spiraling out of control. This post examines whether or not there’s any evidence for this view.

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In a recent blog post, we introduced a calculator showing how much higher your wages (for a stylized definition of “your”—more on this below) could be if they had kept pace with economy-wide productivity, defined as economic output produced in a given hour of work. Why is this relationship between wages and productivity interesting? Well, for decades following World War II, wages across the board closely tracked productivity. In recent decades, however, while average wages (almost) track productivity growth, wages for the vast majority of Americans have not. So, telling people what this wedge between productivity and wage-growth means in dollar terms seems like a useful way to make rising inequality less abstract and more salient.

The calculator itself is pretty spare, so I figured I’d take this blog post to explain a little more about our methods. First, we constructed the actual wage distribution for 2012 by using the BLS’s CPS-ORG data (Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group).

Next, when somebody inputs their own wage into the calculator, we use this 2012 distribution to figure out where they fall in the overall wage distribution. Specifically, we are looking at where that wages falls with respect to the ventile cuts in that distribution—that is, for instance, between the 55^th and 60^th percentile of the wage distribution. Next, we look at that same point in the wage distribution of 1979.

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What we read today, as well as some good pieces from Labor Day:

• Detroit, Labor Day and a Hard Day’s Night (The Hill)
• The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (Spectrum)
• Hispanic College Enrollment Surges in 2012 (Census.gov)
• Labor, Then and Now (New York Times)
• Why business needs a stronger labor movement (MSNBC)

The nation has made great progress in race relations in the last 50 years. But in some respects, we’ve gone backwards, and we continue to do so.

A case in point is a Wednesday interview with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show.

Host Susan Page asked the secretary about his views on racial integration. I was a panelist on the program, and was asked to comment.

Ms. Page’s specific question concerned a lawsuit in Louisiana. This is what Secretary Duncan said about the broader issue of racial integration:

“I fundamentally think the need for integration and more integrative schools is very real, and there are things that we can do. Obviously, there are housing patterns that present challenges.… But I was fortunate to go to an integrated school, you know, all the way through K-12.

And I don’t think I could do a job like this was I not, you know, didn’t have that kind of opportunity. And far too many children today are denied that opportunity. So, yes, we want to do everything to make sure they’re, you know, getting rigorous course work and have great teachers and are academically prepared for college. But you want children to grow up comfortable and confident with other people who come from different backgrounds from them.

And if they don’t have those opportunities—not that you can’t learn it as an adult, but it’s much harder. So whatever we can do to continue to increase integration in a voluntary way—I don’t think you could force these kinds of things—we want to be very, very thoughtful and to try to do more in that area quite frankly.”

It was a shocking statement in two respects, but typical of how even many liberals who claim to support racial justice today think of integration.

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