In a speech today at the Center for American Progress, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Alan Krueger, laid out a compelling argument that rising inequality is a danger not just to the middle class, but to the recovery from the Great Recession and to the long-term growth of the U.S. economy.  Krueger showed, with the help of some excellent charts, that the polarization in income in the U.S. has already shrunk the middle class dramatically and that the median household’s income is lower today than it was 10 years ago. Data from around the world support a connection between increased equality and increased economic growth and between income equality and economic mobility.

EPI has been sounding the alarm about the rise in inequality for many years, and a useful tool on our website shows the history of how national income has been shared between the bottom 90 percent and the top 10 percent, going back to 1917. As Krueger pointed out, the problem began in the late 1970s. From 1979 to 2008, income in the U.S. grew steadily – by an average of $10,401 per capita. But all of that income growth went to the top 10 percent, and the top 1 percent increased its annual income by more than $1.1 trillion. The nation grew substantially wealthier, yet the bottom 90 percent did not share in that increase at all – in fact, its income declined.

Krueger pointed to a number of contributing causes for this rising inequality, including globalization, which pits U.S. workers against a huge and more poorly paid labor force in the developing world, tax policy, the failure to increase the minimum wage, and a decline in unionization. We have no choice about whether our economy will be closely linked to the rest of the world, although we could manage the relationship better. But the other matters – tax policy, the minimum wage and unionization – are entirely within our control.

Tax policy should not advantage the rich, who have already taken a much bigger share of the national economic pie than they did when our economy was at its strongest and fairest. Krueger announced his adherence to the Buffet Rule, which holds that people making more than $1 million a year should not pay a lower share of their income in taxes than middle-class families.  He recommended repealing unnecessary tax cuts for the wealthy and returning the estate tax to its 2009 levels.

Mitt Romney and President Obama both agree that the minimum wage should be raised, but they surely disagree about how to reverse the decline in unionization – or even whether it’s a bad thing. Krueger cited evidence that the primary effect of unions on the wage structure is to lift lower class families into the middle class. That is clearly a positive outcome, and efforts to weaken unions, through “right-to-work” laws like one being debated in Indiana, or federal legislation to make it harder to organize new unions, will worsen income inequality and should be opposed.

Inequality in America is worse than in all but a handful of developed countries; and it is getting worse fast. Krueger and the Obama administration are absolutely right to focus public attention on it.

Ezra Klein asks a number of former chairs of the White House Council of Economic Advisors if presidents can create jobs. Since this allows me to channel one of the greatest Saturday Night Live skits ever, let me point out that the question is moot.

The right question is: Are the policies pushed by presidents or candidates appropriate to the economic problems and challenges actually facing the country?

So, was the Obama administration right to advocate for substantial fiscal support as soon as they entered office? Absolutely – the economy was losing around 750,000 jobs a month by the time they took the reins of policymaking, even as the Federal Reserve’s conventional recession-fighting tools were exhausted. Were they right in advocating for further substantial fiscal support this fall? Again, absolutely yes – the Fed’s recession-fighting tools remain ineffective even while unemployment hovered over 9 percent. The proper criticism of their actions is, of course, that they have not been aggressive enough in their advocacy for more fiscal support.

What does this mean for Mitt Romney’s job prescription to cut (spending and taxes) and deregulate? That it’s a fundamental misdiagnosis of what actually ails the U.S. economy. The mammoth job loss we experienced during the Great Recession didn’t occur because taxes went up or regulations proliferated in Dec. 2007 – the job-losses happened because spending by households and businesses collapsed in the face of the bursting housing bubble.

From Flickr Creative Commons by Secretary of Defense

Klein is right that many things besides presidential policy preferences and even policy actions determine job growth in the economy. But, this does not mean that they’re irrelevant to economic performance, and I fear far too many of Klein’s readers will come away from this column with the impression that they are; or even worse, that there’s little information available to voters to assess who would be the better economic manager. That’s not right – the president sets the agenda and it’s hugely important to know what this agenda is and whether or not it’s appropriate for the economic challenges facing us.

Klein’s also right that it would be nice if there was an easily-tracked single benchmark that reliably graded presidential performance, but that such a benchmark doesn’t exist. That said, answering the right question – are candidates proposing solutions consistent with the problems – isn’t really so hard.

Sometimes it seems like policymakers think that points are given for degree of difficulty. The Washington Post reports a number of policies are being considered by the Obama administration to “reward companies that choose to bring jobs home” and eliminate tax breaks “for companies that are moving jobs overseas.”

The impulse behind these ideas seems fine to me – the U.S. economy continues to “leak” too much demand to the rest of the world in the form of chronic trade deficits.

But, as the article notes, designing tax-based solutions to this problem will be quite complex and would take huge amounts of money to actually move the dial on this problem.*

If only there was a policy solution that was simple, could happen even without a gridlocked Congress, and would actually move the dial on the problem of large trade deficits dragging on growth.

But there is! Allow the dollar to fall in value sufficiently to move the trade deficit much closer to balance. Currently the biggest impediment to this happening is the policy of major U.S. trading partners (China is the linchpin) of managing the value of their currency to keep it from rising against the dollar – this results in Chinese exports gaining cost-advantages in both the U.S. and third-country markets where Chinese-produced goods compete against U.S.-produced ones.

Presumably this issue came up in Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s meeting with Chinese leaders yesterday, but this issue has “come up” between the U.S. and China for a decade with no movement. As Joe Gagnon and Gary Hufbauer have pointed out, however, there is no need to wait for China on this one – the U.S. could solve this currency management unilaterally.

Engineering a decline in the dollar’s value costs taxpayers nothing, can be done without moving through a gridlocked Congress, would actually provide significant help to the job market in coming years, and requires no Byzantine redesign of the tax code.

So, yes, one probably shouldn’t bet on it happening.

*_{Yes, there are ways that features of the U.S. tax code provide some incentive for production abroad rather than at home – and these should be removed. But this is surely a second- or even third-order driver of trade flows, at best.}

Catherine Rampell of the New York Times recently looked at job growth by education and interprets the data as suggestive of the “polarization” of employment where employer demand is growing at the most and least-educated categories but falling for those in the middle. Rampell uses this analysis to argue that “college is worth it.” My analysis of the employment trends in recent years, elaborated below, runs directly counter to a common interpretation of the “polarization” hypothesis, which is that we have a growing unmet need for college graduates. I’m all for giving everyone the opportunity to get the most training and education they want. And, I’m sure that there are plenty of economic and non-economic (i.e., health, citizenry) ways we’d be better off with more college graduates. I’m just not persuaded that economic data are screaming out that we need to greatly accelerate the supply of college graduates.

I’m not much of a fan of the hypothesis that recent technological change is leading to a “polarization” of wages. I’m especially suspicious when analysts lump all college graduates together in their analysis, combining those with four-year college degrees (22 percent of employment) and those with advanced or professional degrees (11 percent of employment). This is because college graduates (those with bachelor’s degrees only) have not fared well in the labor market for at least 10 years—real wages are no higher than 10 years ago—while those with advanced degrees have seen their wages grow strongly. I have covered this ground in Education is Not the Cure for High Unemployment or for Income Inequality. In fact, those economists who argue that employment and wages are polarizing, such as Larry Katz of Harvard or David Autor of MIT, are pretty clear that employment outcomes for about half of college grads are part of the “middle” that’s faring poorly. That’s why it is misleading to use those analyses to argue that having more people go to college is the answer to growing wage inequality or middle-class wage stagnation; getting onto the better wage track requires either getting an advanced or professional degree (not just a college degree) or joining a clear subset of college graduates. That being the case, the arguments of those seeing “polarization” in the data lay out a very narrow track to good earnings and, in my view, further raise the issue of the need to make sure that those without college degrees, and many with college degrees, have good quality jobs.

More extensive elaboration of these issues will have to wait for another time to explore. Now, it is worth digging into Rampell’s analysis, especially since it reaches conclusions contrary to two blog posts (read here and here) where I presented data showing that the falling unemployment among college graduates (unfortunately, because of data availability, using all college graduates, bachelor’s or higher) over the last two years was primarily due to labor force shrinkage rather than strong employment growth. For context, it should be noted that in earlier work I documented that the unemployment rate doubled for every educational group during the period of rising unemployment, including those with a college degree or further education.

Rampell presents the absolute employment growth over the last 12 months (December over December), noting college graduate employment was up over a million, high school graduate employment down about 550,000 and employment up by roughly 125,000 for high school “dropouts.” I take this a step further in Table 1 and look at changes over the last two years (from when unemployment peaked) and improve the analysis by using quarterly data (less volatile) and calculating percent growth in employment (necessary since the education groups are different sizes, “dropouts” being less than one-fourth the size of college graduates).

Table 1: Employment growth by education, ages 25+

Both years have a different pattern. Over the last four quarters there was weak employment growth for the middle two education groups and stronger growth at the top and bottom ends. The year before, however, saw weaker employment growth among college graduates (up 0.5 percent) than for those with high school (up 1.0 percent) or “some college” (up 0.9 percent). Looking over the last two years as a whole one finds employment growth better the higher the education level. This is not strong evidence of “polarization,” or even the bastardized version of the hypothesis (the one where all college graduates are presumed “winners”).

The best way to analyze these trends is to examine the employment rates (employment divided by population) of each group, as done in Table 2. This scales the changes to the size of the population involved. Overall, the employment rate has not changed over the last two years, rising just 0.1 percent. Unemployment fell by 1.2 percentage points, from 9.9 percent in 2009:4 to 8.7 percent in 2011:4, but that is entirely explained by a shrinkage of the labor force. Interestingly, the employment rate has declined for all but the “dropouts” and has declined the most for those with a college degree (or more) and those with “some college.” As observed at the start, these results run directly counter to a common interpretation of the “polarization” hypothesis, that we have a growing unmet need for college graduates and that one of our key challenges is to greatly accelerate the supply of college graduates.

Table 2: Changes in employment-to-population ratio, 2009-11

The National Labor Relations Board’s recent decision on D. R. Horton, Inc. and Michael Cuda is a great reminder that the NLRB protects much more than the right to organize a union – as important as that is. The National Labor Relations Act, which the NLRB enforces, gives employees the right to engage not just in collective bargaining through a union, but also in what it calls “concerted activity for mutual aid or protection” — actions taken by one or more employees in pursuit of a collective goal to address wages or working conditions.

In the Horton case, non-union employees wanted to enforce their right to overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act, through a collective or “class” action. But the employer had required the employees to give up the right to bring any claims on a collective basis in order to keep their jobs. The NLRB found the employer guilty of an unfair labor practice by requiring employees to waive “their right to collectively pursue employment-related claims in all forums, arbitral and judicial.”

The NLRB protects the right of employees to join together and enforce their right to overtime pay, and employers can’t take that right away. The same is true for the right to receive the statutory minimum wage or to receive tips that employees have earned.

Similarly, employers violate the National Labor Relations Act if they punish employees who join together to complain about unsafe working conditions, or discrimination in the workplace, or being forced to commit illegal acts. The employees don’t have to join or form a union, they simply have to act together for mutual aid or protection regarding the terms and conditions of their employment.

President Obama’s bold and controversial recess appointment of three new members of the NLRB ensures that this vital agency will continue to function and protect the rights of employees, union and non-union alike. Congressional Republicans had tried to prevent these appointments, knowing that, with only two members, the NLRB would not have a quorum to decide cases. To his credit, Obama decided that the rights of working Americans are too important to sacrifice to congressional gridlock.

Economists were very well represented in Foreign Policy‘s annual roundup of 100 top global thinkers (accounting for 21 percent of the honorees). Among the dismal scientists recognized, economic consultant and New York University professor Nouriel Roubini was given due credit for his consistently bearish but prescient economic warnings over the past four years. Considering his prognostications regarding the housing market implosion, financial sector meltdown, prolonged high unemployment, and sickly economic recoveries in the advanced economies, among other fronts, Roubini’s economic insight clearly commands gravitas. As such, it’s worth highlighting Dr. Doom’s choices for the best and worst economic policy ideas:

Best idea: “Let’s start taxing the rich more—the Buffett Rule—as inequality is now at 1929 levels and increasing further.”

Worst idea: “A front-loaded fiscal austerity that will sink us in a severe recession.”

Hear, hear. There may be a visceral backlash against (or tone-deaf indifference to) these very same sentiments when espoused by progressive economic think-tanks, but shouldn’t everyone be listening to Nouriel Roubini?

From Flickr Creative Commons by presidential office

It’s worth noting that Roubini recently articulated other pertinent policy prescriptions in a report The Way Forward, coauthored with Westwood Capital Managing Partner Daniel Alpert and Cornell University Law Professor Robert Hockett. Their three-pronged plan for economic recovery proposed:

• A $1.2 trillion, five-to-seven year program of heavy public investment, thereby putting Americans back to work building a more competitive economy (at relatively little cost).
• Comprehensive debt-restructuring to detoxify the real estate market and financial intermediation.
• Global reforms to re-balance the world economy, particularly reversing fiscal austerity programs in surplus nations (e.g., Germany) and increasing domestic  Chinese demand (through a combination of currency appreciation, improved labor market standards, and budget reforms).

Yup, the global economy would be in far better shape if Dr. Doom was steering economic policymaking. It’s a pity the United States is heading further and further down the austerity path instead of learning from the dismal European experience.

In his Iowa caucus speech Tuesday evening, former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) pushed for deep tax cuts for the wealthy, $5 trillion in budget cuts over five years, a cap on government expenditure at 18 percent of the economy, and a balanced budget amendment “as a guarantee of freedom for this country.”

This isn’t just radically conservative—it’s a farcical proposal bordering on Ron Paul-levels of delusion. (No, we’re not all Austrians now.) To reiterate: arbitrarily capping government expenditure at 18 percent of GDP isn’t just undesirable, it’s infeasible and absolutely crazy. Federal spending has exceeded 18 percent of GDP since 1966 (roughly the inception of Medicare and Medicaid). As the population ages and health care costs continue to spiral, federal spending will have to rise, not fall, if voters want government to continue providing health care to seniors, impoverished children, and the disabled (polling strongly suggests they do). The House Republican 2012 budget—which proposed ending Medicare and eviscerating Medicaid—wouldn’t even reduce federal spending below 18 percent of GDP by 2040. Under a current policy baseline, spending is projected to be about 22.5 percent of GDP over fiscal years 2012-21. Wrenching expenditure down to 18 percent of GDP would therefore slash nearly 5 percent of GDP, or $8.7 trillion, from the budget over the next decade (cutting $1 in $5 dollars of expenditure). But even deeper budget cuts would be needed to achieve $5 trillion in cuts over five years anytime soon (in the first five years, the cap would only cut $3.7 trillion, relative to current policy).

From Flickr Creative Commons by Gage Skidmore

But it gets worse! Santorum’s spending cap is also tied to a balanced budget amendment, and his tax plan wouldn’t raise anywhere close to 18 percent of GDP in revenue. An extension of current tax policies—the starting point for Santorum’s sweeping tax cuts—is projected to raise revenues of only 17.6 percent of GDP over the next decade. From there, the alternative minimum tax would be repealed; the top tax rate would be reduced to 28 percent (while retaining major tax preferences and expanding exemptions); capital gains and dividends taxes would be further reduced to 12 percent; the estate tax would be repealed; the corporate tax rate would be halved to 17.5 percent and fully eliminated for manufacturers; and businesses would get even bigger tax breaks on foreign profits, research, and investment. Not a cheap wish list. While we haven’t scored it yet, it wouldn’t be surprising if Santorum’s tax plan fails to raise even 16 percent of GDP, forcing much deeper budget cuts. (Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute ballparks the annual static revenue loss between $550 billion and $700 billion, or between 3.4 and 4.3 percent of GDP.)

This could easily sink the U.S. economy. As Europe is discovering, the notion that spending cuts increase growth (i.e., expansionary austerity) is totally bunk in today’s context of high unemployment, low interest rates, and large output gaps. Spending caps and balanced budget amendments are terrible fiscal policies because they obstruct counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization and instead force pro-cyclical spending cuts. According to the private forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers, “If actually enforced in fiscal year (FY) 2012, a [balanced budget amendment] would quickly destroy millions of jobs while creating enormous economic and social upheaval.”

Senator Santorum’s plan wouldn’t just exacerbate future recessions—it would preclude a return to full employment and likely trigger another deep recession. What part of prolonged mass underemployment, widespread economic insecurity, and trillions of dollars in forgone national income represent a guarantee of freedom?

It is shocking that in the wake of a deep economic crisis brought on by irresponsible financial practices, Congress would stymie the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by not approving a director. President Obama was right to insist that the American public be protected by making a recess appointment of Richard Cordray. Cordray has excellent credentials.

An unchecked financial industry played a key role in bringing on the Great Recession—the worst economic downturn the country has seen since the depression of the 1930s. This American Life documented the anything-goes attitude in the financial industry prior to the recession. The show reported that “to make a mortgage-backed security, you needed mortgages. Lots of them.” People making securities “needed to buy up as many mortgages as possible.” They threw all standards and requirements out of the window. Mortgage loans were made to anyone, even 23 dead people in Ohio.

This American Life cited the experience of Mike Garner, a bartender who was made into a banker overnight to feed mortgages to Wall Street:

Mike Garner’s bank did not care all that much how risky these mortgages were. This was a new era. Banks did not have to hold on to these mortgages for 30 years like they used to. They didn’t have to wait and see if they’d be paid back. Banks like Garner’s would just own the mortgages for a month or two. And then they sold them on to Wall Street. And then Wall Street would sell them on to the global pool of money.

“The actual guys cruising strip malls all across Nevada buying mortgages from brokers– their commission depended on selling more loans,” so they too encouraged the recklessness. At every step in the process of producing mortgage-backed securities people were making a lot of money . . . until the bubble burst.

And then, millions of homeowners were stuck with loans they could not afford, loans that would lead them to foreclosure.

Although it has been going on for years, the foreclosure crisis is probably less than half over according to a recent analysis by the Center for Responsible Lending. CRL finds that of mortgage loans made from 2004 to 2008, 2.7 million have ended in foreclosure. But another 3.6 million homes remain at risk of foreclosure. These foreclosures hurt not only the person owning the loan but the entire community. The neighboring homeowners experience declining property values. The cities obtain less in tax revenue to provide city services.

Most foreclosed homes were owned by whites—1.5 million in CRL’s analysis—but the research also suggests that Latinos and African Americans were targeted when brokers and banks began their desperate search for more and more mortgages. Latinos and African Americans were more likely to end up with mortgage loans that were very profitable to the financial services industry but more expensive and risky for the consumer.

Among borrowers with good credit scores (FICO scores of 660 or higher), Latinos and blacks were more than three times as likely as whites to be given a higher-rate subprime loan. They were two to three times as likely as whites to be saddled with a prepayment penalty. Latinos were nearly twice as likely as whites to be given an adjustable rate mortgage. Thus, even Latinos and blacks with good credit ratings found themselves in bad loans.

These bad loans that were disproportionately sold to Latinos and blacks may help explain why we have seen such a dramatic loss of wealth among these groups since the start of the recession. For most Americans, their home is their main source of wealth. Latinos and blacks were more likely to be given loans that would end in foreclosures, loans that would dramatically reduce their level of wealth.

The figure shows that 5.1 percent of loans made to whites from 2004 to 2008 ended in foreclosure. For African Americans, the rate of foreclosure is 9.8 percent. For Latinos, it is 11.9 percent, more than double the white rate. Further, an additional 13.7 percent of loans to Latinos are seriously delinquent—delinquent for more than 60 days or in the foreclosure process. Among African Americans, 14.2 percent of loans are in this situation, as opposed to 6.8 percent of loans to whites.

Mortgages are only one type of financial product. There are many other products and services where there have been reports of abuses. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to protect consumers from these dangers. We are currently struggling to recover from the ravages of a financial meltdown fueled by abusive lending.  In appointing Cordray, the president did the right thing.

On the heels of Mitt Romney’s narrow eight-vote victory in the Iowa caucuses Tuesday, the Tax Policy Center has put out a timely distributional analysis of the tax components of his economic plan. Over the course of his campaign, TPC notes, Romney has proposed “permanently extending the 2001-03 tax cuts, eliminating taxation of investment income of most individual taxpayers, reducing the corporate income tax, eliminating the estate tax, and repealing the taxes enacted in 2010’s health reform legislation.”

According to TPC, Romney’s tax plan would result in a significant increase in the deficit. Against a scenario in which the Bush tax cuts (and other provisions) are allowed to expire, the Romney plan would lower revenue by $600 billion in calendar year 2015, about a 16 percent cut. Assuming all expiring tax provisions are extended, his plan would reduce revenues by $180 billion in the same year.

How would people fare under the Romney plan? Distributional tables show the majority of the benefits from the proposed tax changes would go to those at the top of the income scale. Using a current policy baseline scenario, almost 60 percent of the share of total federal tax changes would go to those in the top 1 percent, and one-third of changes would go to those in the top 0.1 percent. (The figure below shows distributional effects under both a current law and current policy scenario.) Tax units making over $200,000 would see over 80 percent of the benefits. It is important to bear in mind that the top 1 percent of households received 65 percent of all income gains over 2002-07; these are generally not households struggling to make ends meet.

In contrast, many lower-income taxpayers would actually see their taxes increase because the Romney plan would allow the American Opportunity tax credit and portions of the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit to expire. In fact, according to the TPC analysis, over half of the taxpayers facing a tax increase under Romney’s plan actually make less than $30,000 a year.

It’s not like we haven’t trod this path before. The Bush-era tax cuts blew a hole in the budget and failed to generate even mediocre economic results for middle-class households. Yet Romney’s tax plan, like many others being put forth in this election, doubles down on dangerous tax cuts, while heavily weighting the benefits toward the wealthy.

Inequality means that some income earners claim a larger slice of the pie than others. Some people might argue that this is not such a big problem if everyone has an equal shot at winding up at the top. Some even claim that this is the essence of the American Dream; that regardless of where you begin, if you work hard, you can have all the opportunities to succeed.

Unfortunately, income mobility—movement between income classes—is less common than purveyors of the American Dream would have you believe. An article by Jason DeParle in today’s New York Times discusses important findings from five large studies, including research by Markus Jantti and coauthors and Miles Corak, which both show mobility in the U.S. lags behind its peers. Significant other research has demonstrated a similar lack of mobility in the U.S.

In a world of perfect mobility, people will be able to move up in the income distribution with hard work and dedication, regardless of where in the distribution they started out. One way of thinking about this is by looking at college completion rates by income status and eighth grade test scores. If all it took were high test scores to get ahead, no matter what your income, you would have an equal opportunity to graduate from college. These data tell another story: High-income students who have low test scores are more likely to graduate from college than low-income students with high test scores.

Other research demonstrates that mobility is more restricted for some groups than others. African Americans who start out in the bottom 25 percent of the income distribution are nearly twice as likely to remain there than whites.  In addition, white Americans who start out in the bottom 25 percent are about four times more likely to make it to the top 25 percent of the income distribution than blacks.

As DeParle notes in his article, the notion of the American Dream is actually less common in the U.S. than in many peer nations. Look at the relationship between a son’s earnings and his father’s earnings. The likelihood of a son staying in the bottom 40 percent of the wage distribution if his father was in the bottom 20 percent is higher for those in the U.S. than in peer countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom). The U.S. also boasts lower rates of upward mobility because a lower share of sons with low-income fathers end up in the top 40 percent of the wage distribution than in similar countries.

A new paper by Katharine Bradbury released last fall looks at changes in mobility across time. The figure below shows the percent of those in the poorest and richest quintiles that move up or down and those that move far over the subsequent 10 years.

While it is not clear that mobility has fallen, it is evident that mobility has not increased. Although many argue that income inequality is acceptable in the U.S. if mobility is also greater, this clearly shows that mobility has not increased enough to offset the drastic rise in inequality over the last 30 years.