Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its annual Long Term Budget Outlook (LTBO), which projects federal spending, revenues, deficits, and debt over the next 75 years.  There are many points of controversy with regards to the LTBO, not the least of which is that it’s pretty ridiculous for CBO to pretend it knows what health care costs will look like in 2087. Personally, I think that CBO’s LTBO provides a lot more heat than light, and I would be the first to applaud if CBO decided to only release ten-year budget projections (in themselves subject to a huge margin of error).

Nevertheless, there is still value in looking at the change in projections from one year to the next.  The figure below clearly shows that over the past three years CBO’s extended current law budget projections—which assumes no changes are made to the law—have improved drastically.

2009: CBO projected that debt held by the public would rise from around 60 percent of GDP to just over 300 percent of GDP in 75 years.

2010: CBO markedly improves its 75-year outlook, which now shows debt rising to just over 110 percent of GDP.  This improvement largely reflected passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which prioritized reducing long-run deficits and slowing the rate health of care cost growth (the predominant driver of long-run deficits).

2011: CBO again improves its outlook, now projecting debt rising to 87 percent of GDP in the first 30 years but then actually falling to 75 percent over the next 45 years.  This improvement was largely due to three changes in CBO’s assumptions and projections: (1) lower costs for the new ACA health insurance exchange subsidies; (2) higher taxable wages due to the employer-sponsored health insurance excise tax (pushing worker compensation away from the tax-free health coverage); and (3) a slightly higher long-run economic growth rate.

The ultimate goal of budget reform is to reach “fiscal sustainability,” a point at which public debt is growing no faster than the economy (stabilizing debt relative to national income, i.e., ability to pay).  According to 2011 LTBO projections, the federal government had already achieved long-run “fiscal sustainability.”

2012: For the third straight year in a row, CBO favorably revises its long-run budget outlook: Starting in 2014, public debt is projected to fall by 0-3 percentage points each year.  The public debt is shown to be fully paid down by 2070, and within 75 years the federal government is projected to have accrued reserve surpluses equal to about a third of the economy.

This improvement is primarily due to two factors.  First, the Budget Control Act (the result of last summer’s debt ceiling crisis) cuts spending by over $2.1 trillion through 2021, and because of the way CBO indexes discretionary spending for inflation in its projections, it continues to reduce deficits in subsequent years.  And second, CBO changed the way it projects health care cost growth. In the past, it used the average growth rate over the last 25 years, but in this report it calculated a weighted 25-year average that puts more weight on recent years.  This new methodology does a better job of taking into account the fact that health care costs have been slowing recently, possibly evidence that the ACA has exceeded expectations.

Budget wonks will rightly point out that the projections in question are CBO’s extended baseline, which assumes no changes to current law.  This means that the Bush-era tax cuts expire next year, the sequestration cuts also go into full effect next year, the Alternative Minimum Tax will apply to more upper middle-income households, and Medicare reimbursements to doctors will be allowed to fall dramatically.  But with the exception of the sequestration trigger, all those other factors were also present when CBO made their projections in 2009, 2010, and 2011.  The fact is the fiscal outlook of the federal government has improved dramatically in the last three years.

More importantly, this report clearly shows that the path toward fiscal sustainability includes allowing some—if not all—of the Bush-era tax cuts to expire and fully implementing and protecting the Affordable Care Act.

New York Times columnist David Brooks went all out in heralding the “debt is evil” stigma in his column yesterday. Regrettably, this blanket condemnation of borrowing as intemperate or immoral, intergenerational theft is all too pervasive among Washington’s policymaking elite, and all too wrong: Not all debt is created equal and suggesting otherwise impedes sound fiscal policy.

Economic actors borrow money for a wide array of activities, and both businesses and households know better than to apply a universal value judgment to debt. Borrowing money for college tuition allows for human capital accumulation, which will hopefully yield a high rate of return; borrowing money to take to the casino is widely viewed as imprudent, as the expected rate of return at any casino is negative. Businesses borrow money to build factories, buy equipment, finance research and development, and engage in other productive activities that add value to the economy. Financial firms leveraging themselves the way of Long-Term Capital Management (using debt to proportionally magnify both risk and potential returns), on the other hand, adds systemic financial risk and zero—more likely negative—economic value. Similarly, there are good and bad reasons alike to run federal budget deficits. What matters much more than the accumulation of nominal debt is the purpose of the borrowing and the ability to repay the amount borrowed.

Brooks laments that the “federal government has borrowed more than $6 trillion in the last four years alone, trying to counteract the effects of the [dotcom and housing] bubbles.” Yes, the implosion of the housing market and the ensuing financial crisis and recession forced Congress to borrow heavily as the cyclical portion of the budget deficit ballooned and fiscal policy was used to arrest a steep economic contraction, propping up aggregate demand and the financial sector alike. The alternative, however, was a depression that would have swollen budget deficits regardless, while greatly impeding our ability to repay debt because of lost income and economic scarring reducing future potential income. Indeed, policymakers’ failure to restore full employment—which still necessitates much more deficit-financed stimulus—is producing such scarring effects: The U.S. economy is still running $861 billion—or 5.3 percent—below potential output and the Congressional Budget Office has downwardly revised projected potential output for 2017 by 6.6 percent since the onset of the recession. That is real, welfare-reducing economic waste resulting from insufficient public borrowing—borrowing that could have put productive resources to use instead of allowing them to atrophy.

Economists Lawrence Summers and Brad DeLong compellingly argue that given present U.S. economic conditions (where the Fed cannot singlehandedly stabilize the economy), deficit-financed stimulus is actually self-financing. Essentially, if nominal interest rates are below long-run trend real GDP growth adjusted for reduced economic scarring effects and improvements in the cyclical budget deficit resulting from stimulus, a dollar of debt more than pays for itself in the long-run. CBO projects real GDP growth will average 2.4 percent over the next 25 years, whereas the yield on 10-year Treasuries is only 1.55 percent (hovering around a record low); high bang-per-buck fiscal stimulus passes any reasonable cost-benefit analysis test so long as the economy remains mired well below potential in a liquidity trap.

What Brooks misses entirely is that any value judgment regarding debt boils down to the opportunity cost of debt and the value added of the tax or spending program being deficit-financed—particularly in ways that affect the ability to repay debt.

Example 1: The Bush-era tax cuts were entirely deficit-financed, adding some $2.6 trillion to the public debt between 2001 and 2010, while failing to produce even mediocre economic performance (the 2001-2007 Bush economic expansion was the weakest since World War II). Numerous economists believe that, between their dismal efficacy and the reduction in national savings they induced, the Bush tax cuts decreased long-run potential output.

Example 2: If the rate of return on infrastructure spending exceeds the cost of financing, it makes sense to borrow money to build a bridge, or better yet repair a bridge (the cost of repair increases with time and preventative maintenance is much more cost effective than rebuilding infrastructure from scratch). As my colleague Ethan Pollack points out, the case with infrastructure is a clear cut “win-win-win” because it raises potential future output, making the incurred borrowing relatively easier to pay back, and infrastructure spending increases actual present output and employment (reducing cyclical deficits). And today, the opportunity cost of infrastructure investment is at historic lows.

There is good debt and wasteful debt alike, just as both constructive editorializing and gibberish can be found scrawled across op-ed pages. Brooks’ failure to recognize any economic context or nuance only feeds the misguided debt hysteria that has pushed most of Europe back into recession and encouraged U.S. policymakers to give up job creation in favor of premature, counterproductive austerity.

Brad DeLong links to what he calls a “DeLong-Summers ‘Simplistic Keynesians’ Smackdown Watch“—a piece by Ken Rogoff calling “dangerously facile” those who argue for the “simplistic Keynesian remedy that assumes that government deficits don’t matter when the economy is in deep recession; indeed, the bigger the better.”

Since “simplistic Keynesianism” is a pretty good description of my diagnosis and remedy for today’s U.S. economic troubles, and since I don’t want to ever be “dangerously facile,” I read both the Rogoff commentary and the Reinhart, Reinhart, and Rogoff (2012) paper that it links to.  

I did learn one thing—it turns out that my earlier post about the likely provenance of a Rogoff claim about the potential damage from high public debt isn’t quite right—but the new provenance of this claim isn’t right either.

There’s not much particularly new in either piece. Instead, they recycle the finding that, looked at over several centuries, there is an odd threshold of debt-to-GDP ratios—90 percent—that sees growth beneath the threshold run about 1 percentage point higher per year than growth above the threshold. They then do the arithmetic and argue that every year that the public debt-to-GDP ratio is over 90 percent is a year of GDP growth 1 percent lower than it would otherwise be and voila, the damage from high debt has been documented.

Or not. We’ve already noted why we think this threshold, while it might be an interesting (if odd and deeply atheoretical) curiosity, has no relevance to current U.S. policy debates (and yet somehow the 90 percent scare-mongering won’t stop—see David Brooks’ latest invocation of it).

The main reason for this judgment is that the causality between slow growth and high public debt is extremely two-way. There have almost surely been times when exogenous decisions to add to public debt have hampered countries’ growth. But there have also surely been times (and many more times, in my guess) when slow growth has led directly to rising debt-to-GDP ratios. And when this is the case, noting a simple negative correlation between GDP growth and a particular debt-to-GDP threshold tells us nothing about how dangerous—or, more likely, useful—a policy of further fiscal support would be.

And, there is no doubt that the increase in public debt over the past four years in the U.S. is directly the result of the Great Recession, and not a cause of it. Further, adding to this public debt going forward (so long as it was intelligently spent on job creation) would not only not harm the economy, it would reduce the debt/GDP ratio.

To be blunter, applying results gleaned from the over 80 percent of the country-years in their high-debt sample period that began before World War II, as well as the other clear-as-day cases where high debt was driven by slow growth (Japan in the 1990s and 2000s) does nothing to aid policy analysis about fiscal support in the here-and-now.

The authors even miss an obvious clue regarding those episodes in their data where high debt is driven by slow growth—the failure of elevated public debt to lead to upward pressure on interest rates. High public debt-to-GDP ratios combined with no upward pressure on interest rates is a key tell that it’s likely that below-potential growth is driving the debt ratio and not vice-versa.

Further, if interest rates are not pushed up by rising debt-to-GDP ratios, there is no mechanism for rising debt to impede growth. The authors gloss over this—just noting that “the growth-reducing effects of public debt are apparently not transmitted exclusively through high real interest rates.” More likely, the growth-reducing effects of public debt are simply non-existent when economies are deeply depressed.

Lastly, the paper makes a mistake that I think is key to understanding why policymakers keep getting blindsided by bad news (like the last two-months’ poor job growth) that just should not be that surprising: it assumes that economies naturally heal themselves from recessions, and quite quickly.Read more

One hallmark of the first 30 years after World War II was the “countervailing power” of labor unions (not just at the bargaining table but in local, state, and national politics) and their ability to raise wages and working standards for members and non-members alike. There were stark limits to union power—which was concentrated in some sectors of the economy and in some regions of the country—but the basic logic of the postwar accord was clear: Into the early 1970s, both median compensation and labor productivity roughly doubled. Labor unions both sustained prosperity, and ensured that it was shared. The impact of all of this on wage or income inequality is a complex question (shaped by skill, occupation, education, and demographics) but the bottom line is clear: There is a demonstrable wage premium for union workers. In addition, this wage premium is more pronounced for lesser skilled workers, and even spills over and benefits non-union workers. The wage effect alone underestimates the union contribution to shared prosperity. Unions at midcentury also exerted considerable political clout, sustaining other political and economic choices (minimum wage, job-based health benefits, Social Security, high marginal tax rates, etc.) that dampened inequality. And unions not only raise the wage floor but can also lower the ceiling; union bargaining power has been shown to moderate the compensation of executives at unionized firms.

Over the second 30 years post-WWII—an era highlighted by an impasse over labor law reform in 1978, the Chrysler bailout in 1979 (which set the template for “too big to fail” corporate rescues built around deep concessions by workers), and the Reagan administration’s determination to “zap labor” into submission—labor’s bargaining power collapsed. The consequences are driven home by the two graphs below. Figure 1 simply juxtaposes the historical trajectory of union density and the income share claimed by the richest 10 percent of Americans. Early in the century, the share of the American workforce which belonged to a union was meager, barely 10 percent. At the same time, inequality was stark—the share of national income going to the richest 10 percent of Americans stood at nearly 40 percent. This gap widened in the 1920s. But in 1935, the New Deal granted workers basic collective bargaining rights; over the next decade, union membership grew dramatically, followed by an equally dramatic decline in income inequality. This yielded an era of broadly shared prosperity, running from the 1940s into the 1970s. After that, however, unions came under attack—in the workplace, in the courts, and in public policy. As a result, union membership has fallen and income inequality has worsened—reaching levels not seen since the 1920s.

By most estimates, declining unionization accounted for about a third of the increase in inequality in the 1980s and 1990s. This is underscored by Figure 2, which plots income inequality (Gini coefficient) against union coverage (the share of the workforce covered by union contracts) by state, for 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009. The relationship between union coverage and inequality varies widely by state. In 1979, union stalwarts in the northeast and Rust Belt combined high rates of union coverage and relatively low rates of inequality, while just the opposite held true for the southern “right to work” states. A large swath of states—including the upper Midwest, the mountain west, and the less urban industrialized states of the northeast—showed lower-than-national rates of inequality at union coverage rates a bit above or a bit below that of the nation. More importantly, as we plot the same relationship in 1989, 1999, and 2009, those states move as a group towards the less-union coverage, higher-inequality corner of the graph. The relationship between declining union coverage and rising inequality is starkest in the earlier years (between 1979 and 1989). After 1999, union coverage has bottomed out in most states and changes in the Gini coefficient at the state level are clearly driven by other factors, such as financialization and the real estate bubble.

MORE: View interactive graphic of union decline and rising inequality in the U.S.

Colin Gordon is Professor of History at the University of Iowa and a Senior Research Consultant at the Iowa Policy Project

It was good to see Joe Nocera’s column today affirming Tim Noah’s recent call for a revival of the labor movement, saying “if liberals really want to reverse income inequality, they should think seriously about rejoining labor’s side.” I would add that such a revival is necessary to rebuild the middle class and to preserve our democracy.

I’m proud that EPI has provided a lot of great research addressing the role of unions in the economy, ranging from: the impact on firms and competitiveness; the impact on the wages and benefits of union and nonunion workers; the impact on wage inequality; the flawed nature of the current process for choosing union representation; and much more. Here’s a brief guide:

• See a talk by Paul Krugman addressing the problem of income inequality, including the problem of eroded unionization. Krugman expresses some of the same sentiment as Nocera, paraphrasing “we didn’t know what we were missing until they were gone.” Pieces by Tom Kochan and Beth Shulman, and by Harley Shaiken, echo his arguments.
• Testimony by me, and another by Rutgers professor Paula Voos, articulate the importance of unions for American workers and the role unionism can play in rebuilding the middle class.
• Matt Vidal and David Kusnet provide 12 case studies from a variety of industries, including nursing, meatpacking, and janitorial, to show how unions can benefit workers and communities while making companies more productive. They also illustrate the damage inflicted when union representation is removed.
• Professor John DiNardo of the University of Michigan describes his and other research that unionization does not cause businesses to fail. Using a ‘regression discontinuity’ technique, DiNardo compares places that unionize to those that don’t and finds that differences in representation election outcomes were very similar: The near-losers are a very good “control group” for firms where the workers have just won the right to bargain collectively. DiNardo says: “This research provides evidence that this causal effect of union recognition is zero and has been zero since at least the 1960s, which is how far back we can go with the available data. In short, the biggest fear voiced by employer groups regarding unionization—that it will inevitably drive them out of business—has no evidentiary basis.”
• EPI Research and Policy Director Josh Bivens  shows why unions are not to blame for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, and that in fact, the real culprits are manipulated currency rates that make U.S.-made goods overly expensive. A dysfunctional health care system that burdens responsible employers with outsized costs, and high executive and managerial salaries, also contribute to any lack of competitiveness.
• Richard Freeman of Harvard University, perhaps the world’s leading labor market economist (I think so at least), writes that an overwhelming majority of workers say in surveys that they want a stronger collective voice on the job, and believe that a union would be good for their firm as well. Freeman’s findings “suggest that if workers were provided the union representation they desired in 2005, then the overall unionization rate would have been about 58%.”
• To get a picture of the broken process of union representation elections where employers freely intimidate workers, read Kate Bronfenbrenner’s report. Private-sector employer opposition to workers’ efforts to form unions has intensified and become more punitive than in the past. Employers are more than twice as likely to use 10 or more tactics—including threats of and actual firings—in their campaigns to thwart workers’ organizing efforts.
• Last, see the statement in support of the Employee Free Choice Act by me, along with Richard Freeman of Harvard and Frank Levy of MIT, citing the recent unprecedented growth of inequality in household income and the urgent need to give workers more bargaining power. Forty prominent economists signed the original statement, including three Nobel Prize winners, agreeing that the reform would be an overall benefit to the economy, and would provide a boost to workers when they need it most. Other economists later added their voices by signing the same statement, which resulted in close to 200 more signatories. The statement is available for download in both its original and updated versions.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen recently illustrated how much overt racial bigotry against blacks has been reduced. He used the case of Wesley A. Brown, the first African American graduate of the United States Naval Academy. Brown was the first to “successfully endure the racist hazing that had forced the others to quit.” When Brown joined the Naval Academy, if blacks dared to enroll, they were harassed to force them out. Today, there is a building in the Naval Academy named in Brown’s honor.

Cohen is correct. Today, black children know that there is no occupation that is categorically off limits to them. They can grow up to be president, an idea that seemed farfetched just a few years ago.

On the other hand, the picture Cohen painted would have looked starkly different had he focused less on interpersonal discrimination and more on institutional discrimination. By “institutional discrimination,” I am referring to the ways that the normal policies and practices of social institutions like the educational system, the labor market, and the criminal justice system serve to maintain racial inequality.

Cohen celebrates the end of legally enforced segregation, but fails to acknowledge that we still live with a great deal of de facto racial segregation. A large number of our neighborhoods are racially segregated, which means that many of our schools are racially segregated. Segregation concentrates black children not merely in majority-black schools, but also in schools where a majority of students are in poverty. While, in theory, there are no limits facing black children, children born into economically disadvantaged families, in economically disadvantaged communities, who then attend economically disadvantaged schools have the odds stacked against them.

One reason black families are disproportionately economically disadvantaged is because blacks are still about twice as likely as whites to be unemployed. This was the case in the 1960s, and it remains true today. This basic relationship holds true at all education levels. Black high school dropouts are about twice as likely to be unemployed as white high school dropouts. Black college graduates are about twice as likely to be unemployed as white college graduates. Research shows that employers still have a preference for hiring whites over blacks.

Our criminal justice system is another site where policies and practices systematically disadvantage blacks. As the book Dorm Room Dealers illustrates, white middle-class youth use illicit drugs and sell illicit drugs, but this population is much, much less likely to be incarcerated for these offenses than are poor black youth engaging in the same activities. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow goes into greater detail about how our illicit drug policies and practices produce institutional discrimination against African Americans.

Cohen is correct. There is no better time to be black in America than today. While this is a true statement, we also still have a long way to go before there is equal opportunity for all.

Business groups and conservatives constantly attack the federal government for overregulating. They claim that businesses are “drowning in a sea of regulations” and that job creation and profitability are being sacrificed in favor of a nanny state. Workplace safety rules, in particular, have been a favorite target of the Chamber of Commerce and other business associations, but the fact is that the federal government regulates too little, not too much. Most of the 4,500 workplace fatalities and 50,000 occupational disease deaths each year could be prevented with better rules, more diligent employers, and better enforcement by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The Center for Public Integrity has begun publishing Hard Labor, a series of articles exploring this reality, and the first two stories make for compelling reading. One describes the consequences of OSHA’s inability to issue a combustible dust standard to protect against the kind of fires and explosions that have killed 130 workers since 1980, injured another 800-plus, and caused more than 450 accidents. Factory managers ignore hazards in plain sight—for example, piles of metallic dust that crackle with static electricity and ignite into small fires every week. Nothing is done to prevent the build-up, despite the past occurrence of catastrophic explosions at the same company that left some workers dead and others with gruesome, debilitating injuries. Finally, the critical elements come together and instead of a small fire, another terrible explosion occurs as airborne dust ignites, and more workers die from horrendous burns.

OSHA has no standard that addresses this hazard in spite of the pleas of union representatives and the urgings of the federal Chemical Safety Board, which has jurisdiction to investigate explosions and recommend preventive standards but has no power to issue them. OSHA hasn’t regulated, and workers continue to be burned, disfigured and killed unnecessarily.

Industry representatives resist any new standard, reflexively making the same tired arguments about flexibility and cost they always make. But as the story points out, in the case of grain dust explosions, an industry that fought OSHA’s efforts to issue a standard now realizes that the standard has saved workers’ lives and saved the companies money. The National Grain and Feed Association, which at one point sued OSHA to block the grain dust rule, recognizes today that the standard was win-win regulation, and that the grain industry is financially better off as a result of the rule and the unprecedented reduction in deaths and injuries it achieved.

The second Hard Labor story focused on the weakness of OSHA’s enforcement of the rules it already has on the books. Violations that cause the death of a worker result in an average fine of less than $9,000, and companies contest every citation, no matter how justified. The chances of an executive being indicted as a criminal for intentional or recklessly indifferent acts or omissions that kill their employees are infinitesimal, and the penalties are tougher for someone who harasses a wild burro on federal land than for an employer who sends a worker into a known hazard that causes the worker’s death.

The Center for Public Integrity is doing a real service by publishing these stories that reveal just how weak OSHA’s standards and enforcement are, and how light the regulatory burden that OSHA imposes really is. In the case of workplace safety and health, we need more regulation, not less.

Just once, I wish Mary Williams Walsh would write a story about public employee pensions that included key information that isn’t convenient to an agenda of doing away with or greatly reducing public employee pensions. Every story she writes, including her most recent, seems designed to scare the public, make public employees look bad, their unions look greedy, and government administrators seem weak or stupid.

In her most recent piece, Walsh lends great support to those claiming that public pension plans are erring (or even dissembling) in using assumptions about annual rates of return for their assets that are unrealistically high. The further claim is that using more “reasonable” rates of return (i.e., lower ones) will show the “true” crisis in public pensions.

Walsh writes: “The typical public pension plan assumes its investments will earn average annual returns of 8 percent over the long term, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Actual experience since 2000 has been much less, 5.7 percent over the last 10 years, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.”

This may seem like bloodless analysis, but it’s not—it’s giving great aid to a bogus argument forwarded by ideologues that are deeply hostile to public pension plans on principle. Because most plans look to be in decent shape based on current actuarial standards that justify assuming 8 percent rates of return, these ideologues have to claim that these assumptions are somehow wrong. But pointing to returns over the past 10 years as evidence of this is ridiculous because it completely ignores the fact that the U.S. and world economies experienced the biggest financial downturn in 80 years! How can Walsh be surprised that returns over a period that included two recessions have been subpar? This isn’t front-page news or news at all. It would be news if returns over that period had met expectations.

Even more serious is Walsh’s distortion of the National Association of State Retirement Administrators’ report, which was a very positive statement about the returns public employee plans have achieved:

Although public pension funds, along with most other investors, have experienced sub-par returns over the past decade, median public pension fund returns over longer periods exceed the assumed rates used by most plans. As shown in Figure 1, median annualized investment returns for the 20- and 25-year periods ended June 30, 2011, exceed the most-used investment return assumption of 8.0 percent. For example, for the 25-year period ended June 30, 2011, the median annualized return was 8.5 percent.

Walsh quotes the professed doubts of Edward McMahon, a fellow at the anti-government Empire Center for New York State Policy, that even a 7 percent return on investment can be safely assumed. But McMahon is not a neutral observer; he’s a right-wing, anti-union ideologue with an agenda to do away with public employee defined benefit pensions altogether. It is not news to me that the Empire Center has long wanted to cut public employee benefits and compensation, but Walsh would have done most readers a service by mentioning that to her readers.

Just once I wish Walsh would cite Dean Baker’s opposing analysis, which is based on the fact that the stock market is currently priced low enough, as measured by the ratio of prices to earnings, to justify expected returns of 8 percent or more. As Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points out, individuals who sold Social Security privatization with visions of never-ending 8-10 percent stock market returns back when price-to-earnings ratios were at historic highs (hence making inflated returns hugely unlikely) now have the gall to attack pension plans that expect returns of 7.5 percent when price-to-earnings ratios have returned to historic norms (norms generally consistent with long-run returns of 8 percent).

What does this detour into what people claimed during fights over Social Security privatization have to do with the attack on public pensions? Earlier, I referred to ideologues like McMahon pushing the claim that projected returns of 8 percent for public pension plans are unrealistically high. How do I know this claim is ideology instead of professional judgment? Well, because in 2003 McMahon claimed that replacing public pensions with 401(k) plans would be fair for employees because they could expect returns of 9.75 percent.

In short, what at first seem like wonky debates over appropriate rates of return have actually degenerated into misinformation campaigns waged by committed opponents of public pensions. The rates these plans are assuming today are in line with actuarial practice and (much more importantly) economically reasonable. I’m sorry that this view doesn’t advance the much juicier story of a fiscal crisis coming, but it’s based on the facts.

A majority of Alabama’s politicians apparently believe that they can improve their state economy by chasing away the undocumented workers who live there. By making them criminals (turning them into illegal aliens), denying them basic services like water and electricity, and terrifying their families, they hope to rid the state of people they see as a burden on taxpayers and competitors for scarce jobs. Well, after a year’s application of this medicine (June marks the first anniversary of the passage of HB 56), how’s the experiment coming along? Has the economy been jump-started or even improved?

Apparently not.

Let’s start with job creation. Has Alabama created more jobs than its neighbors over the last year? No; in fact, it’s both below the regional average and well below the national average. Alabama’s employment growth has been only one-seventh the national average (0.2 percent vs. 1.4 percent). The United States has regained about 43 percent of the jobs lost at the bottom of the recession; Alabama has only recovered about 9 percent of the jobs it lost.

^{Figure 1: Source: EPI analysis of Local Area Unemployment Statistics public data sets}

Has it made the state or its workers richer or better off? No, apparently not. Even with fewer workers, personal income per worker fell in Alabama during the two quarters that followed enactment of HB 56, while in the neighboring states, it was unchanged.

^{Figure 2: Source: EPI analysis of Current Employment Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income and Product Accounts public data}

How about unemployment? Has chasing away all of those immigrants opened up tens of thousands of existing jobs for native Alabamans and cut the number of unemployed more than Alabama’s neighbors? No, not exactly. Compared to all four of its neighboring states (Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida), Alabama’s unemployment fell a little faster over the past year—2 percentage points vs 1.7 percentage points—but Alabama lost 52,000 workers from its labor force in less than a year while the labor force grew in the four neighboring states. Alabama doesn’t have a positive story to tell.

^{Figure 3: Source: EPI analysis Local Area Unemployment Statistics public data series}

Far from being an economic panacea, the early returns suggest that HB 56 has not been good for Alabamans in terms of job creation or personal income. Immigrant-bashing isn’t the path to prosperity.

There have been some interesting responses by conservatives to the new data Natalie Sabadish and I have released on the CEO-to-worker pay ratio. Apparently, our study reporting that CEO pay has fallen during the fiscal crisis and is far down from the dizzying heights of the tech bubble in 2000 is taken to mean that that any concern about the growth of top incomes is now out-of-date and inappropriate.

Conservative columnist Wynton Hall at Breitbart.com writes:

“A graph by the Economic Policy Institute  shows that while the relative pay of CEOs shot up in the 1990s, it has since fallen by nearly half, a trajectory that hardly supports the class warfare rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street and the Obama Administration.”

And Greg Mankiw also touted our findings, writing, “The relative pay of CEOs skyrocketed during the 1990s and has since fallen by about half.”

The attention and the recognition of the accuracy of our empirical work are much appreciated. A few comments are in order. First, it seems that these folks are celebrating that a non-problem, at least in their view, has been solved. After all, I don’t recall conservatives being upset by the roughly $20 million CEO pay packages in 2000 or the $18 million CEO packages in 2007. So, it is hard to understand why they feel so gratified by CEO compensation packages averaging $11 or $12 million in 2011.

Second, while it is true that the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio fell from 411.3 in 2000 to 209.4 in 2011, that still means that CEO compensation is spectacularly high. For instance, that means that the average CEO earns in 10 hours what a typical worker earns in an entire year. Moreover, as we reported in our study (page 4):

“CEO compensation in 2011 is very high by any metric, except when compared with its own peak in 2000, after the 1990s stock bubble. From 1978–2011, CEO compensation grew more than 725 percent, substantially more than the stock market [which grew less than 400 percent] and remarkably more than worker compensation, at a meager 5.7 percent.”

The trend in CEO compensation since 1965 is in the figure. Two measures are presented, one where stock options granted are included and the other where stock options exercised are included. In either measure of CEO compensation, the growth between 1978 ($1.3 or 1.4 million), 1989 ($2.5 or 2.6 million), or 1995 ($5.6 or $6.2 million) and 2011 ($11.1 or $12.1 million) is pretty astounding and very hard to justify. Exactly how does one justify/explain that CEO compensation has doubled since 1995?