When asked about the role of government in the first presidential debate on Wednesday, both candidates touched on the importance of teachers, revealing what they would try to do to address the loss of teachers over the last several years due to recession-induced state and local budget shortfalls.

President Obama:

“But what I’ve also said is let’s hire another hundred thousand math and science teachers … and hard-pressed states right now can’t all do that. In fact, we’ve seen layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers over the last several years, and Governor Romney doesn’t think we need more teachers. I do, because I think that that is the kind of investment where the federal government can help.”

Mitt Romney:

“Well, first, I love great schools. Massachusetts, our schools are ranked number one of all 50 states. And the key to great schools: great teachers. So I reject the idea that I don’t believe in great teachers or more teachers. Every school district, every state should make that decision on their own.”

Romney’s comment that school districts and states should make their own decision on whether to hire teachers ignores the fact that budget shortfalls over the last four years due to a loss of revenues caused by the recession have meant school districts have been forced to lay off teachers. It’s hard to imagine this is a choice any state or school district actually wanted to make. Read more

Jim Tankersley really strikes out in his column yesterday. He levels the charge that the Baby Boom generation has somehow put the nation into unsustainable debt and calls them, only half-jokingly, “parasites.”

As a member of Generation X, I used to enjoy some good-ol’ hating on the Baby Boomers, but it turns out that such generational finger-pointing is really silly. The prime exhibit offered in defense of the parasite charge is a comparison between federal debt as a share of GDP in 1965 and 2012. It’s 37.9 percent in 1965 and 74.2 percent in 2012 so, voila! Parasites!

Here’s a similar chart. Look closely at what happened between 1965 and 2007—debt held by the public is lower in 2007 than 1965. So, the charge must be somehow that the Baby Boomers’ mooching in the past five years is the real culprit, right?

Or, more likely, some very large economic event happened between 2007 and 2012 that caused Federal borrowing to rise. What could that have been? Oh yeah, the Great Recession.

And this one is hard to hang on the entire Baby Boom generation.

As a general rule, if you find yourself blaming large macroeconomic trends on the moral failings of entire generations … you are surely barking up the wrong tree.

Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences between these two surveys.

BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other economic indicators (such as GDP). Read more

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

• “Footnoting the [presidential] debate!” (Wonkblog)
• “Women Still Missing From Medicine’s Top Ranks” (New York Times)
• “Ex-Clinton staffer backs [Charlie] Bass: [Erskine] Bowles says GOP rep has ‘the guts’” (Concord (NH) Monitor)

Last night, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made news by substantially “etch-a-sketching” the tax policy he had been running on since the GOP primaries began. In making up policy on the fly, he promised that his tax cuts would be entirely revenue-neutral, that he would cut taxes on the middle class, and that he would not cut taxes on high-income earners. Taken together with his specific tax cutting plans, these pledges violate basic rules of arithmetic.

Early on in the debate, Romney disputed President Obama’s claim that the former governor’s central economic plan was a $5 trillion tax cut on top of extending the Bush-era tax cuts:

“First of all, I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.”

I’ve gone over these numbers before, but it’s worth a quick refresher about the broad thrust of what’s wrong with this claim: Romney is hugely specific about just how he’ll cut taxes (mostly for high-income earners) but refuses to specify any real-world offset though the “base-broadening” that he’s promising. Read more

Jobs were, not surprisingly, a big topic in last night’s presidential debate. President Obama, however, did not seize the opportunity to discuss his administration’s job creation record and substantive job creation proposals—in particular the American Jobs Act (AJA), which would provide a quantifiably substantial economic boost but has largely been stonewalled by the House of Representatives for more than a year.

Those who watched the debate saw Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney ding Obama on some of the trends that my colleagues here at EPI are constantly analyzing: A) a high unemployment rate (though he misspoke and said it was rising—it’s not); B) millions of unemployed workers (though he overstated by saying 23 million are unemployed—12.5 million were unemployed in August; Romney was likely conflating unemployment with the number of people underemployed); and C) insufficient job creation measures (something I wouldn’t disagree with, though Romney’s budget proposals would have the opposite effect of creating jobs in the near-term). And despite this last point on his budget’s employment impacts, Romney promised, again unsurprisingly, that as president he would Read more

The evidence continues to mount that HB-56, Alabama’s extreme anti-immigrant law, is anything but the economic cure-all that proponents claimed it would be. In fact, the economic data suggest that the law is only exacerbating the state’s stagnating economy and setting Alabama up for even greater trouble down the road.

As Figure A shows, Alabama’s employment levels have essentially flat-lined since the end of the recession. HB-56, the law that would allegedly “free up jobs for other Alabama workers” and “put thousands of native Alabamians back in the work force” has done nothing to jump-start job growth. Table 1 shows the change in employment from Sept. 2011, the month before the law went into effect, to Aug. 2012. With the exception of Mississippi, which lost employment, Alabama had the slowest job growth in the region over the period—less than half the rate of job growth for the nation as a whole.

Read more

Annie Lowrey’s recent piece in the New York Times on the likely year’s end expiration of the 2 percentage-point employee-side payroll tax cut has sparked a welcomed broadening of the discourse over the so-called “fiscal cliff.” The punditry’s discussion of expiring provisions and pending spending cuts has, for months, been overly and narrowly focused on the looming sequestration cuts and expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts while ignoring the single largest pending fiscal headwind: expiration of the remaining ad hoc stimulus.

In our recent paper on the coming fiscal obstacle course (the “fiscal cliff” is a truly terrible metaphor as it implies a binary policy choice), my colleague Josh Bivens and I estimate that—should they all lapse—expiration of the payroll tax cut, emergency unemployment insurance, and recent expansions of refundable tax credits would shave 1.4 percentage points from real GDP growth in 2013 and lower employment by more than 1.6 million jobs, relative to full extension. This is not to suggest that the remaining ad hoc stimulus necessarily be continued in its existing form—the fiscal obstacle course represents an opportunity to fundamentally reorient fiscal policy to be Read more

Tonight, President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney will square off in Denver in the first presidential debate. In preparation, we’ve compiled some of our most relevant analyses of the economy and economic policy from the past few months:

BUDGET

• The so-called “fiscal cliff” isn’t one piece of take-it-or-leave-it legislation; rather, it’s a series of separable tax and spending provisions. Our experts identify which ones should be allowed to phase out (and perhaps be replaced by fiscal support that would more efficiently support economic recovery).
• States are facing $55 billion in budget shortfalls this year, and Romney’s proposed spending cap would decimate budgets further.
• Despite what Romney’s budget plan says, economic growth will come nowhere close to offsetting his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy.
• Would Romney or Obama do more to promote job growth in the near term? We analyze the macroeconomic impacts of both their budget proposals.
• Extending all of the Bush-era tax cuts will provide a massive windfall for the top 1 percent of households.

HEALTH CARE

• Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has increased employer-sponsored health insurance and dependent ESI coverage for young adults—even in a poor labor market.
• Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate, has proposed a Medicare voucher that will shift around 11 percent of costs to seniors in 2023 (and even more in later years).

JOBS

• The economy would have added another million jobs in 2012 if Congress had fully enacted Obama’s American Jobs Act.
• More than three years after the end of the Great Recession, public-sector job loss resulting from state and local austerity continues to be a major drag on the recovery.
• The labor market’s struggles have meant declining wages and fewer opportunities for young graduates. Graduating in a bad economy also means long-lasting economic consequences for the Class of 2012.

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

• “Leaders at Work on Plan to Avert Mandatory Cuts” (New York Times)
• “The Policy Priorities and Issue Preferences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders” (National Asian American Survey)
• “Paul Ryan Was Never a Moderate on Social Security” (Huffington Post)
• “Congress just let the farm bill expire. It’s not the end of the world … yet” (Washington Post)
• “If Congress Goes Over the Fiscal Cliff Your Taxes Will Likely Go Up” (TaxVox)