Economic expansion versus economic recovery
Piggybacking on my colleague Josh Bivens’ recent post refuting claims that the economy is “holding up surprisingly well,” it seems some in the press corps could benefit from a primer on economic expansion versus economic recovery. Rebounds in certain economic indicators, particularly stock indices and housing prices—very incomplete metrics of overall health being buoyed by the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing asset purchases—are too often being conflated with or contributing to a “recovery” that presupposes the economy is recovering.
Part of this confusion likely reflects misidentification of the affliction at hand. The U.S. faces a sharp aggregate demand shortfall stemming from the housing bubble’s implosion and a jobs crisis that resulted from this pullback in spending by households, businesses and government. On these fronts, the U.S. is mostly oscillating between recovery and backwards progress, and “treading water” tends to be a better characterization than recovery since the end of 2010, after the Recovery Act’s boost faded and the federal government joined state and local governments on the austerity bandwagon.
Previewing the Social Security Trustees Report
The number of disabled worker beneficiaries grew by 187 percent between 1980 and 2010, much faster than the 39 percent growth in the workforce. Much of this can be explained by the aging of the Baby Boomers, who were 45-64 in 2010 (peak years for disability), and the rise in the number of insured women, according to recent testimony by Social Security Chief Actuary Stephen Goss (pdf). (An additional factor was the increase in Social Security’s normal retirement age (pdf) from 65 to 66, which delayed when beneficiaries are shifted from disability to retirement benefits.)
However, age-adjusted incidence rates also increased from 3.1 percent in 1980 to 4.4 percent in 2010.1 This and the fact that the Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund is projected to run out in 2016 has brought a flurry of negative attention to the program. Advocates are bracing for more when the Social Security Trustees Report is released tomorrow.
Much of the media coverage focuses on workers with seemingly minor impairments who apply after losing their jobs, giving the impression that DI is luring people out of the workforce and causing a drain on public resources. In a particularly misleading story, National Public Radio dubbed the disability program a “hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.” But as a new report from the Center for American Progress (pdf) points out, DI benefits are a modest lifeline for disabled workers, and the difficult and lengthy application process makes it highly unlikely that workers with real options will choose this route. Even among the more than half of applicants who are rejected, relatively few find jobs later (pdf), though the fact that some applicants who nearly qualify manage to engage in “substantial gainful activity” suggests that DI does have a modest dis-employment effect.
Economic policy is largely being driven by obstructionism, not economic advisers
President Obama is reportedly planning to nominate economist Jason Furman to replace Alan Krueger as the head of the Council of Economic Advisers. Like Krueger and, for that matter, Austan Goolsbee and Christina Romer who previously served this administration in the same capacity, Furman boasts an impressive resume, with a Harvard economics doctorate as well as stints at the Brooking Institution, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), and the CEA under President Clinton, among others. If you’re still of the incorrect belief that tax cuts largely pay for themselves (looking at you, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell), do yourself a favor and read his CBPP report explaining the mechanics and empirics of “dynamic scoring” (pdf) and why invoking it as a talisman doesn’t mean one can claim anything one finds politically expedient.
The Beltway coverage of this news is overly focused on the inside baseball politics between the CEA and the National Economic Council, where Furman has been serving as Deputy Director since January 2009. But it’s important to step back and remember that economic policy in recent years has been principally driven not by well-qualified economists with the CEA, NEC, or elsewhere in the executive branch, but instead by conservative congressional obstructionism. Jason Furman’s appointment to the CEA will not alter the troubling reality that the United States is on an autopilot course of premature, excessive austerity and intentionally poorly designed sequestration spending cuts. But even if the ghost of conservative saint Milton Friedman rose up and warned the GOP against such austerity, today’s conservatives in Congress would declare him an apostate and continue their destructive course.
Ongoing joblessness: A national catastrophe for African American and Latino workers
As my colleague Heidi Shierholz has noted, the recent “hold steady” jobs report represents an ongoing disaster for all workers. But historically, and since the Great Recession, unemployment has inflicted significantly more pain on black and Hispanic workers. EPI recently released five reports on unemployment through the recession that reveal the depth of suffering among black and Hispanic workers in states with large minority populations, focusing particularly on black and Hispanic unemployment in Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Texas. Coupled with historic barriers to employment for people of color, the economic collapse of the recession and painfully slow recovery have taken a much greater toll on African Americans and Hispanics than whites.
The figure below shows the significant disparities in black-white and Hispanic-white unemployment in the U.S. over the last 34 years. African American unemployment rates have almost always been at least twice—and sometimes more than two and a half times—that of whites since 1979. Even at the depths of the Great Recession, when white unemployment was much higher, the black unemployment rate was 1.88 times that of whites. At this disparity’s peak in 1989, the black unemployment rate was 2.71 times the white unemployment rate. Likewise, Hispanic unemployment rates have been at least one and a half times (and, throughout the 90s, more than twice) that of whites since 1979. The Hispanic-white unemployment gap peaked in 1998 when the Hispanic unemployment rate was 2.12 times that of whites. At the end of 2012, the black unemployment rate was more than twice (2.11) that of whites, and the Hispanic unemployment rate stood at more than one and a half times (1.56) that of whites.
No cause for relief—austerity will indeed drag hard on the economy in 2013 and 2014
The normally excellent Neil Irwin and Ylan Q. Mui at Wonkblog are mostly wrong, I think, in arguing that the economy is “holding up surprisingly well” in a year of austerity. The data they cite to make this judgment are rising prices in both the stock market and home prices and falling gasoline prices.
But rising stock prices are actually pretty irrelevant to most American families, and today they mostly reflect the stunningly high profit margins of American corporations. These profit-margins in turn are boosted by extremely weak wage-growth, as inflation-adjusted wages for the vast majority of American workers have fallen in each of the last three years. In short, one could easily make the case that today’s high stock prices are actually mostly a sign of bad news for American workers.
Why we should tax overseas corporate income
This week, we learned that Apple is sitting on over $100 billion in untaxed overseas cash, and this cash will remain untaxed until and unless Apple repatriates this income (that is, brings the cash home to the United States).
In a blog post, Jared Bernstein asked about how we can stop this sort of international tax avoidance. The simplest and most direct way of taxing offshore income would be to simply end deferral entirely. Taxing the overseas income of U.S. multinationals would raise revenue, helping ease current budget pressures, and eliminate incentives for complicated tax avoidance schemes.
Not only do millionaires have low tax rates, so do many corporations, with some large corporations paying less in taxes than the typical middle-class American taxpayer. So how do large multinational corporations avoid paying taxes? The full answer is as complicated as the tax code; the short answer involves profit-shifting and deferral.
Differences between House Republicans’ and Senate Democrats’ proposed funding allocations reveal their priorities
Although the House and Senate have yet to reconcile their respective budget resolutions, the House Appropriations Committee forged ahead and recently approved a GOP spending plan for fiscal year 2014, capping base discretionary funding at $967 billion—the level set by the sequestration. The committee also defeated a Democratic proposal that would have set the top-line discretionary funding allocation at $1.058 trillion—the same level of spending called for in both President Obama’s budget request and the Senate budget resolution.
We know that the two chambers of Congress will not likely reach agreement on spending levels for FY2014. But where exactly do they differ? The chart below indicates that there are very minor differences between the House and Senate on Defense, Homeland Security, and Military Construction-Veterans Affairs appropriation levels. (The latter two allocations are the only without disagreement between the two chambers.) The biggest relative differences occur in funding levels for the Financial Services and General Government, Labor-Health and Human Services-Education, and State and Foreign Operations subcommittee allocations. The biggest dollar difference in proposed appropriations between the two chambers is for the Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee allocation, which the House GOP recommends funding $44 billion below both the Senate and the administration’s budget requests for FY2014.
In one chart: we have a demand problem, not a skills problem
The large increase since 2007 in the unemployment and underemployment rate of young college grads, along with the large increase in the share of employed young college graduates working in jobs that do not require a college degree, underscores that today’s unemployment crisis did not arise because workers lack the right education or skills. Rather, it stems from weak demand for goods and services, which makes it unnecessary for employers to significantly ramp up hiring.
The figure below, from this report on the labor market prospects of the Class of 2013, gives unemployment and underemployment rates for college graduates under age 25 who are not enrolled in further schooling. The unemployment rate of this group over the last year averaged 8.8 percent, but the underemployment rate was more than twice that, at 18.3 percent. In other words, in addition to the substantial share who are officially unemployed, a large swath of these young, highly educated workers either have a job but cannot attain the hours they need, or want a job but have given up looking for work.
Unemployment and underemployment rates of young college graduates, 1994–2013*
| Underemployment | Unemployment | |
|---|---|---|
| 1994 | 10.7% | 5.5% |
| 1995 | 11.5% | 6.1% |
| 1996 | 10.2% | 5.8% |
| 1997 | 8.0% | 4.0% |
| 1998 | 7.8% | 4.5% |
| 1999 | 7.8% | 5.1% |
| 2000 | 7.1% | 4.4% |
| 2001 | 9.7% | 6.1% |
| 2002 | 9.5% | 5.9% |
| 2003 | 11.9% | 6.7% |
| 2004 | 11.2% | 6.2% |
| 2005 | 10.5% | 5.7% |
| 2006 | 9.2% | 5.2% |
| 2007 | 9.9% | 5.7% |
| 2008 | 11.2% | 6.2% |
| 2009 | 18.7% | 9.8% |
| 2010 | 19.8% | 10.4% |
| 2011 | 19.5% | 10.1% |
| 2012 | 18.4% | 8.7% |
| 2013 | 18.3% | 8.8% |
* Latest 12-month average: March 2012–February 2013
Note: Underemployment data are only available beginning in 1994. Data are for college graduates age 21–24 who do not have an advanced degree and are not enrolled in further schooling. Shaded areas denote recessions.
Source: Authors' analysis of basic monthly Current Population Survey microdata
Apple’s advice on corporate tax reform: more tax breaks, please!
Yesterday it was revealed that Apple has shifted roughly $74 billion in profits out of the reach of the IRS in the last three years, mostly by holding this cash offshore. Amazingly, Tim Cook’s response to the congressional investigation that documented this is to call for corporate tax “reform” that will provide further benefits to both his firm and corporations in general. In his testimony (pdf) in front of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations today, Cook bulleted his preferred corporate tax reform:
“….comprehensive [corporate tax] reform should:
- Be revenue neutral;
- Eliminate all corporate tax expenditures;
- Lower corporate income tax rates; and
- Implement a reasonable tax on foreign earnings that allows free movement of capital back to the US.”
So, the first and third prongs of this reform agenda are to raise no additional revenue and to lower corporate tax rates. The second prong (eliminate corporate tax expenditures) has some merit, for sure.
What we read today
An oped from Wilma Liebman, former chairwoman of the NLRB, tops our list of what we read today:
- Clearing NLRB nominees is a clear step forward (Politico)
- The 1 Percent Are Only Half the Problem (New York Times)
- Do Extended Unemployment Benefits Lengthen Unemployment Spells? (pdf, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)