Paul Krugman has been talking capital-bias and rising profit-shares recently. I was going to write about the implications of this for Social Security and Medicare, but he got there first. Below, I put some (very rough) numbers on how much a rising capital-share of income impacts the current financing of these programs.

The broad issue in a nutshell is that a rising share of overall income in recent years (even decades) has been accruing to owners of capital rather than to workers (or, if you like, accruing to owners of physical and financial capital rather than to owners of human capital). I might immodestly note that there are substantial sections on this topic in both the wages and the incomes chapter of The State of Working America, 12th Edition.

For now, I’ll just talk about some of the interesting tidbits from State of Working America and then sketch out one implication of these rising capital-shares for current fiscal policy debates.

First, the rise in the capital-share (again, the share of overall income claimed by owners of financial capital) really does seem to be happening. In State of Working America, we generally focus lots of attention on the corporate sector of the economy—a sector that accounts for about three-quarters of all private activity. For technical reasons, looking at trends within the corporate sector gives the clearest picture as to whether or not there really has been a substantial shift away from labor and toward capital owners. So has there been such a shift? Read more

The House and Senate passed a budget deal over the long weekend. Headlines reported it as a deal about the “fiscal cliff.” It wasn’t. It had some good and some bad elements, but it did nearly nothing to address the actual problem that was always meant to be described by the (terribly misleading, but also terribly sticky) phrase “fiscal cliff.” This problem is simply described: the still-weak U.S. economic recovery would have been damaged by the range of tax increases and spending cuts that were set to begin taking effect on Jan. 1, 2013, because these would have reduced overall demand in the U.S. economy, and weak demand remains the reason why unemployment is too high. And this problem was at-best deferred and at-worst ignored in the deal made this weekend (note that Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin has made this exact point).

We tried to describe this problem and even put numbers to each of the main components of the “fiscal cliff” in a September report. Some key punchlines of this analysis were that the problem posed by the “fiscal cliff” was that deficits would shrink too quickly in the coming year, and that while the Bush-era tax cuts for upper-income households were the most politically contested part of the cliff, it was the automatic spending cuts (including the end of extended unemployment insurance benefits) and the payroll tax increase that were, by far, the most economically damaging parts of the cliff. In fact, the fate of upper-income tax rates was almost irrelevant, one way or the other, to economic recovery in the coming year.

So what did Congress do in this deal? They mostly monkeyed around with upper-income tax rates. Which leaves the large bulk of the fiscal contraction set for the coming year still in place, or just temporarily delayed. In short, it is very odd to describe what happened over this long weekend as a deal that addressed the “fiscal cliff.” Read more

The White House continues to maintain that it is investing in the middle class going forward, yet this clearly is not true. This is important to understand as we move toward further budget deals that could make matters worse.

The White House statement on the fiscal deal says: “This agreement will also grow the economy and shrink our deficits in a balanced way – by investing in our middle class, and by asking the wealthy to pay a little more.” And an accompanying fact sheet claims: “this agreement ensures that we can continue to make investments in education, clean energy, and manufacturing that create jobs and strengthen the middle class.”

As my colleague Ethan Pollack has pointed out, this is inconsistent with President Obama’s frequent bragging point that his budget brings the non-security portion of the budget down to record-low levels—“the lowest level since President Eisenhower.” The fact is that if you lower domestic discretionary spending, you necessarily are reducing public investments in education, research and infrastructure. As a reminder, here’s Ethan’s analysis of infrastructure, education and research and development spending in the Obama Fiscal 2013 budget:

So, if we really want to invest in the middle class—as the president claims to—we will have to increase domestic discretionary spending, not cut it further as his most recent and prior budget requests have done (the president also offered to cut domestic discretionary spending by another $100 billion in the recent negotiations). Fighting to preserve social insurance (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) benefits that the broad middle class depends on and making the public investments we need for growth and equity requires winning the battle over more revenues in the budget negotiations ahead. We should all be clear about that.

On Jan. 1, nearly a million workers in 10 states will see the value of their paychecks preserved against inflation. Workers in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington are protected each year by automatic indexing of their state’s minimum wage. Indexing links the value of the state minimum wage to inflation so that as prices go up, so does the amount that minimum-wage workers must be paid. Low-wage workers in Rhode Island will also see a small boost to their incomes in 2013 thanks to a one-time increase in their state’s minimum wage that was enacted this past June.

Table 1 summarizes the increases taking place on New Year’s Day. They range from 10 to 15 cents, with the exception of the 35 cent one-time increase in Rhode Island. Across these 10 states, roughly 855,000 workers will be directly affected, meaning that they currently earn a wage between the existing minimum and the new minimum. Another 140,000 workers with wages just above the new minimum are also likely to see a small raise as employers adjust their overall wage ladders to reflect the higher wage floor. These wage increases translate into an additional $290 million in new wages for low-wage workers, with average increases in annual pay ranging from $190 in Missouri to $510 in Rhode Island.

For a low-wage worker, these increases are a vital protection against rising costs. In states without indexingRead more

As International Migrants Day passes and 2012 comes to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on a number of impressive victories guest workers won this year against employers who exploited, abused, trafficked and robbed them. Although these legal battles have been inspiring, most employer abuses of guest worker programs and guest workers themselves occur with impunity. Even when guest workers have their day in court, the victories are sometimes just moral ones and the victims are not made whole financially. Overall, the guest worker issues litigated in American courts this year are somber reminders that many employers are using these programs to erode labor standards.

The employer abuses that have been exposed and confirmed through court proceedings—and the judgments that vindicated foreign guest workers in 2012—occurred across visa categories and skill levels. The following are some examples:

• On Dec. 17, a federal jury in California awarded a group of 350 Filipino teachers $4.5 million in damages for the economic exploitation they suffered at the hands of their labor recruiter. The teachers came to the United States through the H-1B visa program for college-educated workers, and according to the American Federation of Teachers, the Filipino teachers paid their recruiter “about $16,000—several times the average household income in the PhilippinesRead more

With headlines like “Boehner drops effort to avoid ‘fiscal cliff’” saturating the Internet today, a little clarification is sorely needed: Speaker of the House John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) so-called “Plan B” may have been many things, but it was certainly not a plan to avoid an austerity-induced  recession in  2013—which is what people should be talking about, anyway, when they refer to “avoiding the fiscal cliff.” The plan would have mitigated less than one-third of the pending fiscal drags from the various components of the fiscal obstacle course (our preferred alternative to the doubly-misleading “cliff” metaphor). For the millionth time: The fundamental challenge facing policymakers is that budget deficits closing too quickly in the next couple of years will kill the anemic economic recovery, so the pace of deficit reduction must be moderated. But Boehner’s failed plan was instead fixated on accelerating the pace of deficit reduction relative to current policy.

Boehner’s Plan B consisted of two bills. The first, the Spending Reduction Act of 2012 (H.R. 6684), which narrowly passed 215-209 yesterday, would replace scheduled sequestration spending cuts for fiscal year 2013 to the Department of Defense budget with deeper sequestration cuts to nondefense discretionary spending as well as a host of mandatory spending cuts, including: Read more

In the interest of cobbling together random listicles to drive traffic to our website continuing our efforts to educate everyone about the good and bad of economic policy and analysis, here’s our list of some of the silliest economic ideas of 2012. There is a strong fiscal theme to these, which is predictable, as the “fiscal cliff” is one of the most written-about, yet least well-understood, economic policy issues in recent memory.

First, all the bad ideas about the so-called “fiscal cliff”:

1. The problem posed by the “fiscal cliff” is one of too much debt
2. The “cliff” is a big monolith that we either go over or we don’t
3. The “cliff” is mostly about the upper-income Bush tax cuts
4. The economy goes over the “cliff” on Jan. 1
5. The debt ceiling is one of the issues that must be resolved in debates about the “cliff”
6. Resolving the “cliff” requires a deal on long-term debt reduction
7. Financial markets will punish us for not striking a grand bargain to defuse the “cliff”

1. You can’t tax the rich enough to make a dent in the deficit
2. Raising the Medicare eligibility age is a good idea for deficit reduction
3. Switching to a “chained” consumer price index to calculate the Social Security cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) is a technical improvement
4. Contractionary fiscal policy might actually not be contractionary
5. Only defense spending and tax cuts provide a boost to the economy
6. We’ll “turn into Greece” if we don’t reduce deficits

1. The economy’s real problem is a skills gap
2. The Federal Reserve is risking inflation in its efforts to help the U.S. economy Read more

If House Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor act like Thelma and Louise and drive their convertible over the “fiscal cliff,” some of the only victims in the early weeks of 2013 will be the 2 million unemployed Americans currently receiving Emergency Unemployment Compensation. They will have a hard landing when Congress suddenly cuts them off from the unemployment insurance checks that are temporarily paying their bills and keeping a roof over them and their families.

Unlike in some previous budget fights, the current law says that no benefits will be paid beyond Dec. 28; there will be no phase-down for those who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks. One week, they receive unemployment insurance—the next, they won’t. And hundreds of thousands of others who would have become newly eligible for EUC in 2013 will receive nothing once their regular state benefits are exhausted.

This will also have an immediate effect on the economy, as both EPI economists Heidi Shierholz and Larry Mishel, and the Congressional Budget Office have shown. Ending $30 billion in EUC payments will remove $48 billion of economic activity from the economy, and take 300,000 to 400,000 jobs along with it.

A number of commentators, including my colleague Algernon Austin, have pointed out that a proposed cut in the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) would disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics. Proponents have countered that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a means-tested program managed by the Social Security Administration that could be exempted from the COLA cut.

While it’s true that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to qualify for SSI benefits, exempting SSI  from the COLA cut wouldn’t change the fact that blacks and Hispanics still rely on Social Security for a larger share of their incomes than whites. SSI, while a critical lifeline for some, is a much smaller program, representing just 17 percent of the benefits blacks and Hispanics receive from both Social Security and SSI together (calculations are based on tables 3.C7A and 3.C8 in the 2011 Social Security Administration’s Annual Statistical Supplement, which exclude children under 15).

Not only does Social Security represent a greater share of black and Hispanic income, but black and Hispanic beneficiaries tend to be younger than white beneficiaries, with a greater likelihood of receiving disability and survivor benefits (see previously cited tables and this Social Security Administration fact sheet). Disabled beneficiaries and others receiving benefits over long periods face the steepest cuts from the proposed COLA cut. Among retirees, the worst hit will be women across racial and ethnic groups as well as Hispanics, due to longer life expectancies.

The New York Times is reporting that President Obama is backing off his pledge to allow the Bush tax cuts on income more than $200,000 ($250,000 for couples) to expire, instead proposing to only allow the tax cuts on income above $400,000 to expire. Though not quite as bad as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s preemptive cave last summer in proposing to shift the threshold from $200,000 to $1 million, this is still a really bad idea.

Beyond the revenue loss, it’s simply ridiculous to claim that households making up to $400,000 are “middle class”; as we’ve shown before, even households up to the $200,000–250,000 threshold probably shouldn’t be considered “middle class.” Yes, it’s notoriously hard to pin down an exact definition of “middle class,” but it is clearly intended to characterize households that fall roughly in the middle of the income distribution. Yet, as the below graph shows, all the thresholds mentioned above include households whose income falls well outside the area where most households are concentrated.

This isn’t surprising. More than 87 percent of taxpayers make less than $100,000 a year, according to IRS data, and the average household makes roughly $50,000 a year. This means that households making between $200,000 and $400,000 are making between four and eight times what most American households earn. Stretching the definition of “middle class” to include households with more than $200,000 is to render the term meaningless.