Yesterday, my colleague Josh Bivens outlined the contours of this weekend’s 11th hour budget deal, concluding that Congress mostly monkeyed around with upper-income taxes—a politically contentious “fiscal cliff” component, but the least economically significant—leaving large swathes of scheduled fiscal restraint in place (or merely delayed a few months). For months, Josh and I have been arguing that the only real challenge facing Congress is the reality that the budget deficit closing too quickly—as it has been since mid–2010—threatens to push the economy into an austerity-induced recession. To this effect, “cliff” was a doubly misleading metaphor, as there was no single economic tipping point (underscored by President Obama signing the deal on Jan. 2, after the misguidedly hyped Jan. 1 “cliff plunge” had passed) and the legislated fiscal restraint was comprised of fully separable policies rather than an all-or-nothing dichotomy.

Viewed through the proper lens of avoiding premature austerity instead of compromising over tax policy for the top 2 percent of earners, Congress predictably failed to adequately moderate the pace of deficit reduction; short of sharply reorienting fiscal policy to accommodate accelerated recovery, U.S. trend economic growth will continue decelerating into 2013—slowing to anemic growth insufficient to keep the labor market just treading water.1 Absent substantial (seemingly remote) additional spending on public investment and transfer payments, the labor market will almost certainly deteriorate this year, regardless of what happens with sequestration and the pending debt ceiling fight. Read more

Occupational injuries and illnesses are overlooked contributors to the overall national costs of all diseases, injuries, and deaths. My recent study published in the Milbank Quarterly, “Economic Burden of Occupational Injury and Illness in the United States,” estimates these costs to be roughly $250 billion a year. This amount exceeds the costs of several other diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) for the same year.

The medical costs associated with occupational disease and injury ($67 billion) are very large, but are exceeded by the productivity costs ($183 billion), which include current and future lost earnings, fringe benefits, and home production (e.g., cooking, cleaning, rearing children and doing home repairs). These costs do not in any way account for the pain and suffering caused by this heavy toll of injury and illness. They also gloss over the horror of many of the truly gruesome workplace injuries that occur, including suffocation in corn siloes, drowning in sewer pipes, electrocution, and being ground up or crushed in machinery.

By contrast, Rosamond and colleagues1 have estimated the total cost of all cancers, including medical costs and lost production, to be $219 billion in 2007, $31 billion less than the combined cost of occupational injury and illness. Yet by most accountsRead more

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.