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

• “The Real Referendum” (New York Times)
• “Obamanomics: A Counterhistory” (New York Times)
• “I am a job creator: A manifesto for the entitled” (Washington Post)
• “Payroll Tax Cut Is Unlikely to Survive Into Next Year” (New York Times)

Barry Commoner, path-breaking scientist and social activist, passed away yesterday at the age of 95. I was fortunate enough to work for Barry in the late 1970s as a research assistant on two of his books, The Poverty of Power (1976) and The Politics of Energy (1979). Commoner, a botanist and biologist, was a founder of the environmental movement, along with peers such as Rachel Carson (The Silent Spring, 1962) and Margaret Meade. He believed that scientists have an obligation to share scientific information with the general public to enable them to participate in public debate on scientific issues. His work on the effects of nuclear fallout, documented through the collection of baby teeth and reinforced by a petition signed by 11,201 scientists worldwide, provided the scientific foundation for the adoption of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

Commoner also helped establish the roots of today’s BlueGreen Alliance of labor and environmentalists. He first began working with Tony Mazzocchi, a longtime leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers in the 1950s, who collected baby teeth from the children of members of his Long Island local union. Commoner’s work showed the connections between the environmental crisis and social and economic issues such as “poverty, injustice, public health, national security and war,”  and that the roots of the environmental crisis lay in excessive corporate power and flawed systems of production. He argued that only by changing those systems—for example, by replacing nuclear power, coal and oil with renewable energy—could the root causes of our environmental problems be eliminated. Not coincidentally, these same policies would create millions of new domestic jobs, reducing pollution, inequality and our trade deficit simultaneously. As Commoner established in The Closing Circle (1971), the first of his “four laws of ecology” was, “Everything is connected to everything else.” Indeed.

As you head into your weekend, here’s some of the thought-provoking content that EPI’s research team came across today:

• Plan Selection in Medicare Part D: Evidence from Administrative Data (National Bureau of Economic Research)
• Will pension plans stage a comeback? (Investment News)
• Shocked by the [NFL] refs? Where’ve you been the last 30 years? (Philly.com)
• No, NFL Owners Didn’t ‘Lose’ The Lockout Battle With Referees (Think Progress)

How does government pay compare with that in the private sector? The answer is pretty much what you’d expect: Wages and salaries are lower, but benefits are better. Overall compensation is, if anything, slightly lower, though this varies by class of worker; less educated workers are better paid in the public sector and more educated workers are better paid in the private sector. This again is not surprising when you consider that less educated workers in the private sector often earn poverty wages with no health benefits and government employers have little incentive to shift costs onto Medicaid and other government programs.

But anti-government ideologues have deep pockets, so a minor industry has sprung up trying to show that government workers are overpaid. The latest report in this genre comes from Citizens Against Government Waste, and is typical of its kind. The research was done by an outfit called John Dunham and Associates, a.k.a. guerrillaeconomics.com. It shows many of the tell-tale signs of shoddy research:

1. Anecdotal evidence. Somewhere, there’s a government worker making an obscene amount of money and abusing the system. But focusing too much on specific examples is a sure sign they aren’t representative. The CAGW report claims the average San Diego firefighter makes more than $180,000 per yearRead more

A Bloomberg article from yesterday highlighted the fact that a trust set up by Mitt Romney to benefit his children and grandchildren relied heavily on tax loopholes for maximum returns. Romney was able to avoid gift and estate taxes by relying on a vehicle known as an “intentionally defective grantor trust,” or IDGT, which tax planners sometimes refer to as “I Dig It.” This type of trusts allow donors to gift unlimited amounts to their children and grandchildren free of gift or estate taxes (the top gift tax rate is scheduled to return to 55 percent in 2013, after being cut significantly by President George W. Bush). The value of the Romney family trust is not counted, according to the article, as part of the $250 million that Romney’s campaign cites as his net worth.

Tax avoidance such as this relies heavily on the preferential treatment of capital gains in the tax code. As the article highlights, when a trust such as the one set up by Romney sells assets at a profit, the donors are able to pay relatively low capital gains rates on behalf of the trust. A Tax Policy Center report earlier this year that looked at the distributional effects of tax expenditures found that “relative to the population as whole, high-income taxpayers would lose the most from eliminating special rates for capital gains and dividends.” Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan have ruled out closing this costly and lopsided loophole Read more

In a recent paper assessing the likely impact of President Obama and Mitt Romney’s budget plans if they became law, we applied standard macroeconomic multipliers to estimates of each plan’s fiscal impulse.

As always, the very term “multipliers” brings out critics, and the ones we used for this study (and have used often in the past)—those from Moody’s Economy.com—seem to bring out even more. This is all very odd.

We often use the Moody’s multipliers because they’re transparent and slightly more detailed than many others that have been published. But, what drives our results in determining whose budget plans provide a bigger economic boost is simply the relative ranking of these multipliers; specifically the estimate that tax cuts (particularly for high-income households) provide less dollar-for-dollar economic support than do spending increases. This is not controversial at all. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Council of Economic Advisers make similar relative judgments (see the tables here), and the general view that government purchases’ multipliers will lie above tax multipliers during economic circumstances like the present is buttressed by a number of academic papers in recent yearsRead more

The recently released State of Working America, 12th Edition, documents in a variety of ways how the last decade in the United States has been a lost decade for all but the very well-off. One manifestation of this lost decade is the decline in the share of households owning stocks.

First, it’s useful to point out that even with the “401(k) revolution,” a surprisingly small share of households ever held any significant amount of stocks. As the figure shows, at its peak in 2001, just more than half (51.9 percent) of U.S. households held any stock, including stocks held in retirement plans like 401(k)s. Furthermore, many of that 51.9 percent held very small amounts—just over a third (37.8 percent) had total stock holdings of $10,000 or more. (Read this snapshot for more on the “democratization of the stock market” that never actually happened.) And even those modest shares have since lost ground. By 2010, less than half (46.9 percent) of all households had any stock holdings, and less than a third (31.1 percent) had stock holdings of $10,000 or more.

The strong rebound in stocks since 2009 amidst persistently high unemployment highlights the disconnect between Wall Street’s financial markets and most people. The stock market simply has little or no direct financial importance to the majority of U.S. households. Since 1989, the top fifth of households consistently held about 90 percent of stock wealth, leaving approximately 10 percent for the bottom four-fifths of households. If you want to assess how the economy is performing for most households in this country, don’t look to the stock market, look to the labor market, and measures of job opportunities like employment and wage growth.

Unemployment remains far too high, and the culprit is clearly deficient spending in the economy. Yet, a full-throated call for aggressive Keynesian remedies for this (i.e., something like another Recovery Act) is far from the top-shelf item on the agenda. Instead, most policy attention in the race centers on which candidate would more rapidly reduce projected budget deficits—a policy maneuver that, in the next couple of years, would be all but guaranteed to lead to higher unemployment rates. This move away from a defense of Keynesian cures for high unemployment started a long time ago and has codified by the 112th Congress (Jan. 2011–present), when federal budget policies pivoted sharply toward austerity.

Republicans have clearly led the charge away from Keynesianism, vociferously decrying the increase in budget deficits since the Great Recession began and demanding a dollar of spending cuts for every dollar increase in the statutory debt ceiling. Democrats have (generally) been more ambivalent—calling for (and passing) some fiscal support while often rhetorically privileging deficit reduction over other policy goals. Given this partisan pattern, it’s somewhat unexpected to hear some commentators speculate that a Mitt Romney administration Read more

Yet another right-wing organization is attacking public employees and their pay. This time, it’s Citizens Against Government Waste, a corporate front for tobacco companies, defense contractors, Microsoft, and anyone interested in contracting out government services. Today, they issued a report card at the National Press Club that purports to grade states on public employee pay and argued that overpayments are the cause of unfunded pension liabilities.

These claims are bunk, and study after study has rebutted similar claims. If anything, public-sector workers, most of whom have college degrees or higher, are somewhat underpaid compared to comparable private-sector workers. EPI collected a series of such reports in Jan. 2011, but this has also been the finding of research from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, the National Institute on Retirement Security, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The CAGW paper also addresses public employee pension plans. Why are these plans underfunded? The biggest single reason is the stock market collapse of 2007–09. Read more

EPI’s recently released The State of Working America, 12th edition, explains in detail how the past 10 years have been a “lost decade” of income growth for the bulk of American families. How has this played out at the state level? Last week’s release of the American Community Survey (ACS) provides excellent data with which to see these trends by state.

According to the ACS, from 2000 to 2011, real median household income—i.e., adjusted for inflation—declined in 41 out of 50 states across the U.S. Figure A illustrates this change. The dark blue bars represent 2011 median household income values. The grey sections show what household income was in each state in 2000. (The light blue sections are the rare instances of median income growth.)

As the figure shows, household incomes rose in only a handful of states in the west-north-central region where the shale gas boom has been driving growth, and in the region surrounding Washington, D.C (which some attribute, in part, to growth in the lobbying industry). Of the 41 states where household incomes fell, 13 states had declines greater than 10 percent, with Michigan (-18.9 percent), Georgia (-14.7 percent), and Mississippi (-13.7 percent) experiencing the largest declines.Read more