Newly released data on corporate profitability for 2012 show the continuation of historic levels of profitability despite excessive unemployment and stagnant wages for most workers. Specifically, the share of capital income (such as profits and interest, which are hereafter referred to as ‘profits’) in the corporate sector increased to 25.6 percent in 2012, the highest in any year since 1950-51 and far higher than the 19.9 percent share prevailing over 1969-2007, the five business cycles preceding the financial crisis.

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Once a year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) publishes long-run debt projections under their assumptions about budget policy under future Congresses, known as the alternative fiscal scenario (AFS). It is used extensively by many—including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)—to argue that we face a catastrophe that can only be solved by effectively dismantling the social safety net and retirement systems that we have in place. But it’s also misleading.

Michael Linden at the Center for American Progress recently released a great analysis showing that this scary long-run debt projection is only scary because CBO assumes that future policymakers will make policy decisions that will make the deficit much worse. If you remove those assumptions to arrive at a more honest baseline, then the problem of an unsustainable rising debt mostly disappears.

But let’s back up a bit and marvel at the absurdity of long-term debt projections. Remember, these projected deficits are largely the product of CBO’s economic and demographic projections, coupled with assumptions about decisions made by future policymakers and long-term health costs. Moreover, economic, demographic, and other budgetary projections are most reliable in the near-term, and their margin of error compounds with time.
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What our economics experts were reading today:

• ‘Trickle-down consumption’: How rising inequality can leave everyone worse off (Washington Post)
• Is Job Polarization Holding Back the Labor Market? (Liberty Street Economics)
• It’s All About the Taxes (The People’s Pension)
• Sweatshops still make your clothes (Salon)
• Americans Widely Back Government Job Creation Proposals (Gallup)
  

In a previous blog post, my colleague Andrew noted the encouraging revenue targets in Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray’s (D-WA) Senate Democratic FY2014 budget resolution—revenue that would partially replace sequestration and minimize the per dollar drag of total deficit reduction. But unfortunately the budget, like many others before it, strives to hit stringent deficit reduction targets and in the process ends up having an adverse impact on the economy and job growth by 2014 relative to current policy. This focus on deficit reduction targets likely led to another unfortunate aspect of the Murray budget: its surprisingly large cuts to non-defense discretionary (NDD) programs.

The NDD budget is vitally important to the country, and includes security funding for areas like homeland security, veterans’ affairs, nuclear weapons and foreign operations; safety net programs including housing vouchers and nutrition assistance for women and infants; most funding for the enforcement of consumer protection, environmental protection and financial regulation; and practically all of the federal government’s civilian public investments, such as infrastructure, education, training, and research and development.Read more

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced, and the Senate passed, a Senate Democratic FY2014 budget resolution, which would purportedly place the public debt ratio on a more-than-sustainable trajectory down to 70.4 percent of GDP by fiscal 2023. The Murray budget deserves credit for mitigating the macroeconomic drags posed by sequestration, modestly increasing infrastructure investment and proposing substantial revenue increases. But in the end, the budget’s fixation with ten-year deficit reduction targets would result in premature near-term austerity.

The Murray budget proposes to raise an additional $923 billion in revenue over the next decade relative to current law. It also assumes that temporary tax provisions that would cost $954 billion to continue over the decade will either expire or be paid for—so against a current policy baseline in which these “tax extenders” are continued, the budget would raise $1.9 trillion.1 Revenue increases exert an economic drag, particularly while the economy remains weak, but are much less damaging per dollar than spending cuts. The Murray budget would use these revenue increases to partially replace the front-loaded, poorly designed sequester; in that context, the tax increases would help avert near-term austerity that is much more damaging. The budget would also slightly increase government spending in 2013 and 2014 relative to current policy—which assumes the sequester is repealed—and raise tax revenues in 2014.2Read more

The student workers who recently went on strike at McDonald’s in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania took a big chance. They could have been fired and then deported from the country. Instead, they got their boss fired and got a meeting with the head of the State Department program that brought them to the U.S. But they aren’t finished: they want to make sure that what happened to them never happens to foreign students again.

My colleagues and I met with four of the young workers last week, who came from Peru, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina. All had been recruited into the State Department’s J-1 summer work travel visa program by GeoVisions, a State Department-approved sponsor, which promised them three months of steady wages for slinging Big Macs, decent housing and a cultural experience, followed by a month of travel wherever they wanted to go.

What they and 14 other students got was an unpredictable mix of work hours—as little as four hours in a week for some and 25 hours in a row for others. They were required to live in the basements of homes owned by their boss, Andy Cheung, who packed six into one house and eight into another, jammed together with little privacy—only a curtain to separate the beds of four young men from four women. They were cheated on wages they earned, overcharged for their housing and forced to walk to work on highways instead of riding in free transportation they’d been promised. At least one was actually in debt to Cheung after almost 3 months of work.Read more

Dylan Matthews at Wonkblog posts a graph from Robert Lawrence and Lawrence Edwards that purports to show manufacturing employment declines are simply a capitalist inevitability. It’s essentially this graph:

So, if manufacturing employment is always shrinking as a share of overall employment, the implicit argument is that nothing– say very large trade deficits that characterized the past decade and a half in the American economy – can really affect this trend one way or the other.Read more

A common theme has emerged in recent punditry and economic analysis: policymakers should begin withdrawing support for growth and jobs because the economy is rapidly improving. In recent months one can find several examples of commentators urging the Federal Reserve to abandon its efforts to boost activity and jobs and begin tightening to forestall (so far completely hypothetical) inflation. And any call for fiscal support for job creation on a real scale is greeted with hand-wringing about its riskiness—as can be seen in much reaction to the  Congressional Progressive Caucus’s “Back to Work” fiscal 2014 budget alternative (BTWB, henceforth), which would invest $2.1 trillion in job creation measures over 2013-2015.

For example, David Brooks criticized the BTWB on the (incorrect) grounds that the economy “is finally beginning to take off…[as there is no longer] a large and growing gap between the economy’s current output and what it is capable of producing.” And a recent column by Ezra Klein contained concerns from Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi that the BTWB  targets job growth too aggressively, meaning that: (a) the overall economy has recovered enough (or surely will) that it doesn’t need this boost; and (b) that recovery has been and will be sufficiently fast that even the estimates of how much fiscal support will boost jobs and growth are overstated.

We strongly disagree. The economy remains deeply depressed, and the coming year will see a significant drag on already inadequate growth from further fiscal contraction (sequestration on top of deepening discretionary spending cuts and expiration of the payroll tax cut). Given this, there’s no reason at all to think that fiscal expansion would be less effective than in the past 3-4 years, and there is certainly no reason to gamble on a robust recovery without policy help.Read more

David Brooks recently wrote a misguided column criticizing the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ Back to Work fiscal 2014 budget, which the House voted on yesterday. I am proud that EPI budget analysts and I worked closely with the CPC on the proposal’s development and analysis, so I want to clarify where Brooks went wrong.

Brooks and I disagree in two major areas: differing evaluations of the state of economic recovery and prospects for growth, and the role of rich people and the government in generating growth.

Brooks sees an economy that “is finally beginning to take off” and no longer has “a large and growing gap between the economy’s current output and what it is capable of producing.” In contrast, I see an economy with 7.7 percent unemployment, and unemployment projected by the Congressional Budget Office to be roughly 7 percent by the end of 2015. Current unemployment is comparable to that of the worst month of the early 1990s recession and substantially higher than that of the worst month of the early 2000s recession.

Furthermore, the U.S. economy in late 2012 was running $985 billion (5.9 percent) below potential output for the year—which is equivalent to each person losing $3,100 (annually). I will grant Brooks that this “output gap” is not currently growing larger. Nevertheless, the gap has not changed much in two years (it was 6.1 percent in the second half of 2010) and is now much higher than the worst quarters of the recessions in the 1970s, 1990s, and early 2000s (5.0, 3.6, and 2.1 percent respectively). In short, the gap is no longer “large and growing”; it is just “large and not shrinking” and looks relatively stable. The depressed economy is suppressing wage growth (there have been no improvements in wages and benefits for the large majority of American workers for more than ten years!) and we are scarring a generation of young people—both those in school as well as those searching for the bottom rungs of a career ladder. This state of affairs is unacceptable and, therefore, government policy should not accept it.Read more

In an effort to obtain a Grand Bargain on deficit reduction, the Obama administration has offered to accept a Republican proposal for a new inflation index—a chained CPI—in setting the annual cost of living adjustment (COLA) for Social Security benefits. This new inflation index would also apply to the indexation of income tax brackets. Since a chained CPI is expected to show lower inflation, the change in indexation will mean lower COLAs and greater revenues over time. This is the first of two posts articulating why accepting a chained CPI for calculating the Social Security COLA is a bad policy choice. The other post will address the chained CPI proposal in the context of Social Security policy. This post addresses whether a chained CPI is simply a “technical fix,” as some maintain, to obtain an accurate measure of inflation. I pay particular attention to my disagreements with my friends at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

A better measure of inflation?

Let’s be straight, a chained CPI is not a more accurate measure of inflation for setting the COLA for Social Security beneficiaries. There is a good argument to be made for any given reference population that a chained CPI index is more accurate than an unchained index. However, this “any given reference population” is an important caveat: applying a chained CPI for average consumers to calculate price increases faced by Social Security beneficiaries is not an improvement in accuracy since the expenditures of Social Security beneficiaries, especially the elderly, are very different than the average consumer. As experts have pointed out, indices based on the spending patterns of workers or the general population likely understate the impact of cost increases faced by Social Security beneficiaries because seniors and disabled people spend a greater share of their incomes on out-of-pocket medical expenses than do other consumers, and health costs have risen faster than overall inflation in recent decades. This has been documented in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) CPI-E inflation measure which uses consumption weights specific to the elderly and had 0.2 percent faster inflation from 1982 to 2007 than the measure currently used to index Social Security benefits.

So, what this means is that there are two known biases to current Social Security COLA indexation, the failure to chain expenditures (which overstates inflation) and the failure to adopt weighting particular to Social Security beneficiaries (which understates inflation). Yet too many inside the Beltway only seem interested in correcting the first. And why this narrow focus? The only rationale for imposing a new inflation measure on the elderly that only addresses the chaining bias is to reduce benefits.Read more