After years of hearing the Chamber of Commerce and certain other business groups complain about the regulatory burden government imposes, far too many Americans (and politicians) are probably convinced that regulations are excessively burdensome to businesses. Not so, according to two important new pieces of information.

First, after examining 185 nations on 10 key factors, the World Bank’s latest “Ease of Doing Business” study ranks the U.S. No. 4 overall and No. 1 among the 25 largest economies. In the words of the World Bank, “A high ranking on the ease of doing business index means the regulatory environment is more conducive to the starting and operation of a local firm.” Unlike so many business trade associations and lobbyists, the World Bank recognizes that the regulatory environment includes many rules that enhance and protect business activity, and the U.S. ranks especially high in protecting investors, enforcing contracts, and getting credit.

A second fact that contradicts business complaints about burdensome regulations is that corporate profits, which were $1.75 trillion in the third quarter of 2012, are at an all-time high (higher as a percent of GDP than at any time in our history). That corporate America’s bottom line is doing extraordinarily well should, at a minimum, make one skeptical of the seemingly endless studies by business groups which somehow find that regulations are damaging them.

That leads to the central question: Given that the U.S. has one of the most welcoming regulatory environments in the world, why aren’t U.S. businesses creating more jobs instead of hoarding the historic profits they’ve accumulated? The answer, as most economists know, is slack demand. Without customers able and willing to spend, businesses won’t invest. The solution is the same as it was at the start of the recession: because financially squeezed consumers can’t spend and businesses won’t, it is the responsibility of the federal government to make large enough investments in infrastructure and human capital to lift the economy and protect our future prosperity.

The Wall Street Journal’s owner and editors hate unions, so it is no surprise that the newspaper published an editorial on Tuesday gloating over Michigan’s enactment of “right-to-work” legislation to ban contracts between labor unions and employers that require all employees covered by the contract to pay union dues or their equivalent. The editorial is so full of untruths, half-truths and right-wing extremist ideology that a full response would wear out both author and reader. But let’s take a brief look at how the 1 percent defends this ugly attack on employee rights and economic security.

The heart of the editorial is the contention that right-to-work-for-less laws are good for workers, families and state economies, which it supports with various pseudo-scientific studies, including one by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance that—ludicrously—claims the typical Michigan family of four would have had annual income $54,224 greater in 2008 if Michigan had enacted a right-to-work-for-less law in 1977. In 2008, median income for a family of four was about $78,000, so the Journal is proposing that it would have been roughly $132,000! Curiously, only four states had median household income over $100,000 in 2008, and not one was right-to-work-for-less. Read more

Here’s some reading material for you from items EPI’s research team skimmed through today:

• “State Trends in Premiums and Deductibles, 2003–2011: Eroding Protection and Rising Costs Underscore Need for Action” (Commonwealth Fund)
• “Dems hold the middle ground. GOP is on fringe.” (The Plum Line)
• “Right to Work” Isn’t a Civil Right. But Unionizing Should Be” (New Republic)
• “Former Bank of England Official Criticizes British Policies” (Economix)
• “Sheldon Adelson: ‘I’m Basically a Social Liberal‘” (Washington Wire)
• “AIG WRAP-UP: Treasury Sells Final Shares of AIG Common Stock, Positive Return on Overall $182 Billion AIG Commitment Is Now $22.7 Billion” (Treasury Department)

Here’s some thought-provoking content that EPI’s research team enjoyed reading today:

• “The Real Long-Term Budget Challenge” (Economix)
• “The Conventional Wisdom Re Growth is Unwise” (Jared Bernstein)
• “It’s Official: Austerity Economics Doesn’t Work” (New Yorker)
• “What Does the New Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Paper Tell Us?” (Rortybomb)
• “A failure of leadership: Snyder’s about-face on right-to-work betrays voters” (Detroit Free Press)

This month, the National Council of La Raza’s (NCLR) Monthly Latino Unemployment Report focuses on the important issue of underemployment. “Underemployment,” as The State of Working America states, is “a more comprehensive measure of slack in the labor market than unemployment.”

The book goes on:

Underemployment includes workers who meet the official definition of unemployment as well as: 1) those who are working part time but want and are available to work full time (“involuntary” part timers), and 2) those who want and are available to work and have looked for work in the last year but have given up actively seeking work (“marginally attached” workers). While this is the most comprehensive measure of labor underutilization available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it does not include workers who are underemployed in a “skills or experience” sense (as in, say, a mechanical engineer working as a barista).

African Americans generally have the highest rates of underemployment among the major racial and ethnic groups. However, for much of 2009, Latinos had a slightly higher rate. This year, the Latino underemployment rate has averaged about 20 percent, while the black rate has averaged about 23 percent, and the white rate about 12 percent.

NCLR’s report also pulls apart the underemployment rate to examine the rate of involuntary part-time work. The share of workers who want full-time work but only have part-time work out of all workers is another important measure of hardship. Many of these individuals are struggling to make ends meet.

If one examines this involuntary-part-time rate from Nov. 2011 to Oct. 2012, Latinos have the highest rate. The share of Latino workers who only have part-time work but desire full-time work is 10.3 percent. For blacks, it is 7.7 percent, and for whites it is 5 percent. We need much stronger job creation to put these part-time workers in full-time jobs.

Here’s some of the interesting content that EPI’s research team browsed through today:

• “The Forgotten Millions” (Paul Krugman)
• “Bills Placing Limits on Unions Advance in Michigan Legislature” (New York Times)
• “Underemployment: The Real Jobs Crisis: Monthly Latino Employment Report” (National Council of La Raza)
• “Degree Inflation? Jobs That Newly Require B.A.’s” (Economix)
• “The Effects of Health Reform on Small Businesses and Their Workers” (Urban Institute)
• “Taxing Businesses Through the Individual Income Tax” (Congressional Budget Office)
• “The Gospel of Wealth Fails the Inequity Test in Primates” (Scientific American)

Among the U.S.-born, black women had the strongest birth-rate decline from 1990 to 2010, according to a recent report from Pew Social and Demographic Trends. The birth rate—the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44—declined 29 percent for blacks, 25 percent for Asians, 21 percent for Hispanics, but only 5 percent for whites.

In 1990, the black birth rate was 26.1 points higher than the white rate. In 2010, it was only 4 points higher. If this trend continues, the black birth rate will soon equal the white rate.

Michigan’s Republican-controlled House and Senate forced through “right-to-work” legislation on Thursday, making the Great Lakes State the latest battleground over worker rights. The move, of course, comes after recent GOP-led anti-union measures were passed in Wisconsin and Indiana. Michigan stands to join 23 other states with RTW laws, which make it illegal for collective bargaining agreements to require nonunion employees to pay fees (even though these nonunion employees get all of the same benefits as their unionized peers under negotiated contracts). Since the actual effect of RTW laws is to restrict workers’ rights—by making it illegal for them to enter voluntary contracts with unions to collect union dues—the name is misleading. Even more misleading, however, are claims that these laws boost a state’s economy.

RIGHT-TO-WORK 101: Why These Laws Hurt Our Economy, Our Society, and Our Democracy

Union members and their supporters are well aware of RTW’s consequences, which is why Read more

A vital goal of economic policy should be to raise the living standards of the millions of American households who have seen their wages and living standards stagnate or decline over the last few decades. Fundamental to this is an economy that produces good, well-paying jobs. The biggest obstacle to this, currently, is the jobs crisis driven by a shortfall in aggregate demand. Additional factors though, written into our current policies, mean that even when the economy does recover, there is no reason to believe that the jobs it produces will actually be well-paying jobs.

The New York Times business section ran a story yesterday on low-wage workers and declining unionization rates, making the key points that:

1. We are neither building an economy in which most workers earn enough to adequately support their families nor are we sufficiently using government tools to help subsidize the lower class
2. The decline in unionization rates is adding to the woes of low-wage workers Read more

It’s true that the fiscal cliff poses a significant threat to the economy if left completely unaddressed deep into 2013. But although the two most well-known components of the cliff (which is better described as a “fiscal obstacle course”) are the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the sequestration cuts, neither scheduled change poses nearly as large a danger to the economy in the immediate future as a failure to raise the debt ceiling.

Last year, President Obama allowed congressional Republicans to hold the economy hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling until their demands to cut spending were met. Obama eventually agreed to cut roughly $2 trillion in spending, including $800 billion from the discretionary spending caps and $1.2 trillion from the sequester (which includes discretionary and some mandatory spending). This set a dangerous precedent that the minority party could use the debt ceiling to extract policy concessions from the majority.

FULL ANALYSIS FROM EPI: Budget battles in the lame duck and beyond

Appearing to recognize this dangerous precedent, the president has now proposed defusing the debt ceiling by allowing any president to raise the debt ceiling, with only a two-thirds vote in Congress able to prevent the increase. This is a positive development, as are Read more