Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its analysis of the American Health Care Act (AHCA)—legislation designed to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The House of Representatives passed the AHCA earlier this month, in its second attempt at doing so , before the CBO released a score. The bill makes substantial changes to current law, which have large effects on both the costs of care and the coverage rates. I’m going to walk through some key provisions and their effects on specific populations, and compare these effects to those in the version of the AHCA that the CBO scored in March. The bottom line is that, if the AHCA becomes law, the number of uninsured Americans will grow by 23 million by the year 2026—just a bit lower than the 24 million more people who would have been uninsured under the original bill. This is the result of about 14 million fewer people on Medicaid, 6 million fewer with nongroup insurance coverage, and 3 million fewer with employer-sponsored health insurance; substantially fewer people will be on nongroup coverage under the House-passed bill than in the originally-score bill, while more will be covered by employers, likely because of provisions that make the nongroup market considerably less desirable.

The total change in coverage from all these sources is shown in the figure below, copied in its entirety from Figure 2 in the CBO cost analysis. The share of each age group without coverage under current law is shown in the first bars of each set in dark blue, under the March 23 CBO score in the second set in the lightest blue, and under the legislation passed by the House is shown in the third set (mid-tone blue). The three sets of bars on the left show coverage rates for nonelderly adults below 200 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL), while the three sets of bars on the right show coverage rates for those above 200 percent of FPL. The width of the bars represents the relative size of the population, so you can see that adults between 19 and 29 years of age are more likely to be lower income, while those between 30 and 64 years of age are more likely to be higher income. In general, low-income adults are more likely to be uninsured under current law, but that difference is exacerbated under the proposed legislation. However, no group is spared. While low-income people face much higher rates of uninsurance, even significant shares of high-income young and middle-aged adults will be less likely to be covered.

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Breaking a promise not to cut Social Security, the Trump administration released a budget that would slash Social Security payments for disabled workers by shrinking many of the federal government’s disability-based programs by $72 billion over the next decade. Press coverage has emphasized that the budget avoids large cuts for programs that benefit mostly older workers, but this is inaccurate—especially for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which disproportionately benefit older Americans.

It is true that the Trump administration is desperate to cut programs like food stamps that overwhelmingly benefit poor children, but it is incorrect to claim that the administration’s draconian budget reductions spare older people. In fact, the administration’s budget cuts are remarkably comprehensive in their cruelty across the age distribution. Cuts to Social Security disability payments will especially burden older Americans, as they are precisely the individuals most likely to be disabled. Do you know people with cancer advanced enough that it prevents them from working? Or how about a family member with diabetes or arthritis? These and other illnesses prevent older Americans in particular from holding steady employment.

The figure below shows that the share of the population receiving disability insurance payments indeed rises rapidly with age. Nearly one-in-ten (9.9 percent) people between the ages of 50 and 65 receives SSDI, in contrast to the small shares of younger individuals receiving these payments. As a result, nearly three quarters of those receiving Social Security disability are between the ages of 50 and 65.

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Today, the House Committee on Ways and Means is holding a hearing on President Trump’s budget proposals, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin providing testimony.

In the past, Mnuchin has claimed that in the Trump administration’s tax plan, “there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.” This claim has been dubbed the “Mnuchin rule.” However, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found that both the Trump campaign and House GOP “Better Way” tax plans flagrantly violate this rule. Tax Policy Center (TPC) estimated that 47 percent of the Trump campaign tax plan would go to the top 1 percent while 76 percent of the House GOP tax plan would go to the top 1 percent in their first years, and this regressivity just grows over time. And the scarce details from the administration on their tax plan have not deviated much from the campaign plan.

Despite this, yesterday at the 2017 Peter G. Peterson Fiscal Summit, Mnuchin again echoed (see 2:08 in the video) this claim, stating that “the president’s objective is to create a middle-income tax cut, it’s not to create tax cuts for the high-end.”

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Today, the Trump administration published their full budget request for fiscal year 2018. The budget is basically par-for-the-course with recent Republican budgets— doubling down on the austerity policies that have been harming American households for about a decade. But besides containing cruel cuts and deeply-dodgy economic assumptions, this proposal should also dispel any last remaining hope that fiscal policy under the Trump administration would boost, rather than drag, on growth and jobs. Were this proposal enacted, it would put a large and rapidly growing drag on economic growth going forward. All else equal, job-losses stemming from this budget’s spending cuts would total 177,000 in 2018, 357,000 in 2019, and 1.4 million in 2020. While it gets increasingly hard to estimate precise numbers further into the future, the fiscal drag just increases dramatically after 2020.

The economic intuition for why the Trump budget’s cuts would hinder growth is simply that they would reduce growth in economy-wide spending, or aggregate demand. It is always possible that the spending slowdown caused by the Trump budget could be neutralized by spending increases in other parts of the economy. Before the onset of the Great Recession, it was thought that this spending increase could be reliably engineered by the Federal Reserve lowering short-term interest rates. Since the Great Recession, however, the economy saw seven years of historically slow recovery even while the Fed held short-term rates at zero (and undertook other measures to boost growth). The reason for this slow growth despite expansionary monetary policy is clearly historically austere public spending.

This should make clear that while the Fed certainly has the ability to curtail growth by raising interest rates, their ability to offset a negative fiscal shock by lowering rates seems severely constrained. Given that a monetary policy response should not be relied on to neutralize the negative fiscal shock of the Trump budget and the AHCA, we think these estimated job-losses should certainly inform the debate. Further, the federal funds rate (the rate the Fed lowers to offset negative demand shocks) sits at just about 1 percent today, meaning the Fed simply doesn’t have much room to boost the economy in response to contractionary fiscal policy that begins next fiscal year and then ramps up. For reference, in the past five recessions, the peak-to-trough change in the federal funds rate as the Fed aimed to stop the contraction and spur recovery was over 3.5 percent.

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The president’s budget was released today and a House budget resolution will follow in June. Though the two plans will undoubtedly differ in certain areas—the president’s budget includes infrastructure and paid parental leave proposals that aren’t guaranteed to be taken up by the House—both will seek deep cuts to programs helping vulnerable citizens while calling for immense tax cuts for the wealthy.

The proposed budget and tax cuts come on the heels of the House effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and replace it with their American Health Care Act (AHCA), which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted would be “the largest transfer in modern U.S. history from low- and moderate-income people to the very wealthy,” should it become law. The White House is banking on this repeal passing, assuming $250 billion in supposed savings in the president’s budget.

Voters who believed Trump’s assurances that he opposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid may be surprised to learn that he wants to gut Medicaid (not just reversing the expansion embedded in the ACA, but essentially doubling the cuts in Medicaid called for in the House-passed AHCA), cut Social Security Disability Insurance, and hasten the exhaustion of the Medicare trust fund. Funding for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) would be slashed by $616 billion over the 10-year budget window, as Medicaid would be transformed from a coverage guarantee for low-income families and nursing home residents who have exhausted their savings into block grants or similar programs constrained by per capita spending limits at a time when Baby Boomers are aging into their peak Alzheimer’s years. The Medicaid cuts would do nothing to restrain health cost inflation but would leave sick kids and frail seniors to fend for themselves.

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Every year, retirement savers lose $17 billion because they receive bad advice from financial advisers—like being steered into investments that provide larger payments to the adviser but lower returns for the saver. Currently, that fleecing of retirement savers is legal. Unlike the strict requirements in place for lawyers and doctors, not all financial advisers are legally required to act in their clients’ best interest. Just over a year ago, the Department of Labor issued a rule (known as the “fiduciary rule”) that would close this loophole and require financial advisers to act in the best interest of clients saving for retirement. But the Trump administration has made its interest in weakening or rescinding this rule clear. Following direction from President Trump, the Department of Labor delayed the implementation of the rule by 60 days, from April 10th to June 9th, to conduct a new “examination” of the rule, despite the fact that the department has already conducted an exhaustive analysis.

Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta, after earlier saying he was actively seeking a way to further “freeze the rule,” has now stated that while the Department “should seek public comment on how to revise this rule,” they “have found no principled legal basis to change the June 9 date while we seek public input.” The fact that there will be no further delay is very good news. Further delay of the rule would have been a huge win for the financial industry and a huge loss for retirement savers all across the country, with every additional week of delay costing retirement savers $431 million over the next 30 years. However, while the rule’s fiduciary standard will take effect on June 9th, key compliance provisions built into the rule’s exemptions have been further delayed to January 1st, 2018. Moreover, the department has stated that it will not enforce the rule the during the gap period between June 9th and January 1st. This means the loopholes that allow financial advisers to take advantage of savers are not fully closed, and retirement savers will continue to be harmed during this period. Further, it is far from certain that the rule will in fact become fully applicable on January 1st. The Department has made clear (see Q4 in these Department of Labor FAQs ) that—as requested by the financial industry—they are considering proposing additional changes to the rule and delaying it beyond January 1st. Thus, we can expect further attempts in coming months to weaken and delay the rule—actions that would yet further harm retirement savers. In order to truly protect retirees and working people saving for retirement from predatory financial advisers, we need a fully applicable, vigorously enforced rule to protect their savings from the large losses that conflicted advice is causing.

One year ago, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a final rule to update the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime rules. The old rules—written by the Bush administration in 2004—have a loophole that leaves millions of salaried employees without the right to overtime pay (and even without the right to be paid the minimum wage). An employer may legally require salaried employees earning as little as $23,660 a year to work 70 or 80 hours a week with no additional pay. If an employer determines that a salaried employee works in an “executive, professional, or administrative capacity” the employee’s effective hourly pay could fall below $6.00 an hour.

If the new rule had taken effect on December 1, 2016, as planned, 4 million employees would have become entitled to overtime pay and another 9 million would have had their right to overtime pay strengthened and clarified. In 2017 alone, workers would have gotten $1.2 billion in extra pay.

But Republican politicians and big business groups sued to block the rule, and a U.S. District Court judge in Texas blocked the rule from taking effect, not just in Texas, but nationwide. Obama’s Department of Labor appealed the case, but the Trump administration has repeatedly delayed the appeal while it figures out whether to side with the employees or with big business.

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In January 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowed corporations, for the first time ever, to spend unlimited money on politics. Within a few months, Republican strategists and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hatched a plan to take advantage of the newly available corporate cash. They called it Project “RedMap,” or “Redistricting Majority Project.” Its goal was to use corporate money— much of it contributed secretly through the Chamber— to win Republican control of state legislatures in the Fall of 2010. That year’s elections were particularly important because the officials who came into office that year would be charged with redrawing legislative district boundaries based on the 2010 census.

The business lobbyists were more successful than they could have hoped. With their help, eleven states that had previously been governed by a combination of Democrats and Republicans became wall-to-wall Republican, with the GOP controlling both houses of the legislature along with the Governor’s mansion. Critically, this included a swath of traditional swing states with strong labor movements running from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin across the upper Midwest.

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Sixty-three years ago on Wednesday, the Supreme Court prohibited school segregation. In the South, Brown v. Board of Education was enforced slowly and fitfully for two decades; then progress ground to a halt. Nationwide, black students are now less likely to attend schools with whites than they were half a century ago. Was Brown a failure?

Not if we consider the boost it gave to a percolating civil rights movement. The progeny of Brown include desegregation of public accommodations and the mostly unhindered right of African Americans to compete for jobs, to vote, and to purchase or rent homes. Brown’s greatest accomplishment was its enduring imprint on the national ethos: the idea of second-class citizenship for African Americans, indeed for any minority group, is now universally condemned as a violation of the Constitution and of American values. None of these transformations came easily, and none are complete, but none would have happened were it not for Brown.

Yet the decision could not accomplish its stated purpose. Today, nearly half of all black students attend majority black schools, with over 70 percent in high-poverty school districts. New York is the most segregated state: two-thirds of its black students attend schools that are less than 10 percent white. A growing number are “integrated” with low-income Hispanics and other recent immigrants, but still isolated from the mainstream.

Because schools remain segregated, we have little chance to substantially boost the achievement of black children, especially those from low-income families. Of course, some children will always surmount their disadvantages and excel. But when separate schools concentrate students who are in poorer health and more frequently absent, who may be homeless or in unstable housing, and whose parents are less-educated, achievement lags when teachers are overwhelmed by non-academic challenges.

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In a previous post, we noted that annual work hours for all workers, especially low-wage African American workers and women, increased between 1979 and 2015. Working moms are significant contributors to this trend—half of all African American female workers are moms, as are 55.3 percent of Hispanic working women and 44.5 percent of white female workers. While all moms are working more hours per year and contributing more to their households financially, African American working moms are uniquely central to the economic well-being of their families.

To begin with, more than two-thirds of all African American working mothers are single moms, making them the primary, if not sole, economic providers for their families. By comparison, 29.6 percent of white working mothers and 47.9 percent of Hispanic working mothers are single.

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The unemployment rate has fallen steadily over the last several years, and many have said that the current rate of 4.4 percent means we are back to (or have even dropped below) full employment—meaning that pushing unemployment any lower would cause inflation to accelerate above the Federal Reserve’s preferred 2 percent target. That is why many observers have applauded the Fed’s recent decisions to raise rates, even though the rate hikes occurred before most workers have seen the economic recovery translate into consistently strong nominal wage growth.

The fact is that the headline unemployment rate continues to understate slack in the labor market. Today’s 4.4 percent unemployment rate is associated with a much lower prime-age employment-to-population ratio (EPOP)—the share of the working age population who is actually working—than in the recent past. While there may be reasons other than labor market slack for today’s lagging labor force participation, by looking just at the prime-age EPOP, we can at least eliminate any distortions caused by the wave of retiring baby boomers. The graph below shows that the prime-age EPOP averaged 81.2 percent in the five months the unemployment rate hit 4.4 percent in 1998 and 1999 (including one month in 2001), and 80.5 percent in the four months unemployment hit 4.4 percent in 2006 and 2007. On average, those nine months saw a 2.1 percentage point higher prime-age EPOP (80.7 percent) than the 78.6 percent we see today.

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Everyone who works in the education world—from researchers and policymakers, to teachers and school board members—is familiar with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly called the “Nation’s Report Card.” Every two years, scores from the NAEP on reading and mathematics tell us what students across the country and in every state know and can do. NAEP also paints a picture of progress over time in our children’s proficiency in these subjects and the degree to which race- and income-based gaps in educational achievement are narrowing. (For the record, we have continued to make progress on both subjects, and those gaps are narrowing, albeit much more slowly than we want or need them to.)

But even those of us who rely on NAEP, whether for research or policymaking purposes or otherwise, are probably a lot less conversant with other aspects of the assessments. In the past few weeks, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which oversees and manages NAEP, unveiled two new sets of findings that illuminate key realities relevant to children’s futures and provide important guidance for policy and practice. They could not be more timely.

Last week, the Board hosted an event at the Kennedy Center to discuss the results of the 2016 NAEP arts assessment. Every decade since 1997, eighth graders have been assessed for their skills in music and visual arts, the latter including both what they know about art and how well they can practice it. The good news, if you can call it that, is that our children haven’t lost ground on scores despite major cuts to art programs during the big recession; overall, they have held fairly steady since the last arts NAEP, in 2008.

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A vote in favor of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) today would be a vote to make the vast majority of Americans poorer, less healthy, and more financially insecure. The AHCA would cost 24 million Americans their health insurance coverage. The majority (14 million) would lose it to breathtakingly large cuts (almost $900 billion over the next decade) to the vital Medicaid program. Further, 7 million Americans would lose the coverage they get through their employer if AHCA passes.

Costs would skyrocket for those who still needed coverage in the nongroup market. A 64 year-old making 175 percent of the federal poverty line would pay $12,900 more each year for the health insurance plan’s premiums under AHCA, but would also face deductibles and co-pays that would cost thousands more than they do currently. For the entire nongroup market, out-of-pocket costs after premiums would rise by $25 billion each year by 2026 if AHCA is passed.

On top of this severe degradation of health and financial security, the AHCA would also drag on job growth in coming years. This drag would occur because the AHCA cuts to Medicaid and insurance subsidies reduce growth in economic activity and job creation far more powerfully than the AHCA tax cuts boost this growth. By 2022, this drag could lower employment by 1.8 million unless some countervailing macroeconomic boost neutralized the AHCA job losses. This drag on job growth would felt in nearly every congressional district.

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A Senate vote on House Joint Resolution 66 may come as early as tomorrow. H.R. 66 would put roadblocks in front of states setting up convenient low-cost individual retirement accounts (IRAs) for workers who aren’t covered under an employer-based plan such as a 401(k) or a traditional pension. These plans, sometimes called “Secure Choice” plans, are well advanced in many states, including California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland and Oregon. They’re designed to make it easy for workers whose employers don’t offer retirement plans—shockingly, around half of all workers—to contribute to low-cost IRAs through automatic payroll deductions. Workers who stand to benefit are disproportionately low-wage workers and small business employees.

Support for meddling with these useful, if limited, programs tends to split along party lines, though at least one Republican, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, has publicly opposed H.R. 66 and a similar bill and others appear on the fence.

Passage of the bill in a GOP-controlled Congress would belie the party’s claim to respect states’ rights. Republicans have historically supported retirement savings accounts, and the state plans only offer a low-cost, hassle-free way for uncovered workers to do something they can do already—contribute to an IRA. So why are some members of Congress trying to derail the state initiatives? They claim to be concerned about workers, but it should come as no surprise that the mutual fund industry is behind H.R. 66, presumably because state plans offering low-cost investment options could serve as a nudge to employers to rethink the high-cost funds they offer in their 401(k)s.

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After President Trump’s first 100 days in office, it’s clear that his promises to help the working class were little more than a campaign ploy. His dismantling of Obama-era regulations like the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule and deregulation of the financial industry reveal what he really cares about—lining the pockets of America’s ultra-rich.

Nothing demonstrates his disdain for working people more than his budget proposal. In it, he cuts 31 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s budget, which ensures people across the country have clean air and water, and 21 percent from Department of Labor programs that provide job training to seniors and disadvantaged youth. Instead of helping working people, Trump’s budget imposes a hiring freeze on crucial federal agencies and calls for many more staff to be laid off from public sector jobs—the largest reduction in the federal workforce since World War II.

The FY 2018 People’s Budget: A Roadmap for the Resistance by the Congressional Progressive Caucus stands in stark contrast to Trump’s budget. The People’s Budget is a plan to actually help working Americans who have felt left behind by an economy rigged against them. Our budget, is a roadmap for the resistance, investing in the progressive priorities and kitchen table issues that matter to real people: infrastructure to create jobs and ensure public safety; education to help our kids reach their full potential; and sustainable energy to protect our precious environment.Progressives in Congress fully want to make investments in our future generations and protect programs that improve the lives of people every day. We believe our budget should strengthen Social Security and Medicare and invest in job growth through infrastructure, education, and research and development, while responsibly reducing our deficits and cutting wasteful spending and redundant programs where they exist.

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On Monday morning, members of Congress in the House and Senate made public the text of omnibus appropriations legislation to fund the U.S. government through September 2017. The legislation includes a “rider” provision that will double the size of the H-2B nonimmigrant visa program, a temporary foreign worker (or “guestworker”) program that brings up to 66,000 migrant workers per year to the United States for up to nine months at a time to perform low-wage seasonal jobs in industries like landscaping, forestry, housekeeping, seafood processing, and construction. The fact that the legislation was unveiled on May Day makes it sadly ironic, because if President Trump signs it without pressuring congressional leaders to remove this H-2B rider, it will become the latest example of Trump’s aggressive anti-worker agenda. There is still a chance that the final version of the bill might not include it, but it’s a longshot unless Trump demands that Republican leaders in Congress take it out.

H-2B visas are sponsored—in other words owned and controlled—by the employers who hire H-2B workers. In practice that means H-2B guestworkers cannot switch employers if they are cheated or abused. For H-2B workers, losing their visa makes them instantly deportable, which is why they often work for low wages in poor conditions without complaining. In addition, EPI research has shown how H-2B wage rules have often allowed H-2B workers to be paid less than local average wage rates for similarly situated U.S. workers, and how H-2B workers earn no more than undocumented workers on average. Moreover, there are numerous cases of litigation, reports in the media, and government audits documenting how migrants employed through the H-2B program are often exploited and robbed by employers, and even are victims of human trafficking. Because U.S. workers are forced to compete with vulnerable H-2B workers, in turn, this degrades wages and working conditions for all workers in major H-2B occupations. Thus, there’s no question that the H-2B program needs major reforms to protect migrant and American workers—but any push to expand H-2B should be made through the regular legislative process and after a full debate in Congress, so that members are accountable for their votes—not as a fly-by-night provision on a must-pass spending bill.

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Included in President Trump’s announcement of his tax plan earlier this week is a promise to provide “tax relief for families with child and dependent care expenses”. Without more details about his plan, however, it’s near-impossible to judge, but we make an attempt nonetheless.

Various news outlets and advocates have speculated that Trump’s initial interest in reforming Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (DCFSA) has since shifted to address a more widely utilized tax credit, referred to as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (see here, here, and here).

There are three central questions to ask when facing reforms billed as improving access to effective, high-quality child care and education: (1) Does the policy allow all parents the option to stay home with their infants, newly adopted children, or new foster children? (2) Does the policy relieve the cost burden of early child care and education for low- and middle-income families? (3) Does the policy improve quality by investing in the early care and education workforce?

Given the wording of the president’s plan outline, it would appear his efforts will focus on (2) affordability—by either reforming or expanding the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC)—while remaining silent on (1) parental leave policies and (3) improving child care quality. Right off the bat, his hint at child care reform misses key components, and we will show you below that improving affordability through current tax programs misses the target.

Relying on the tax system to improve access to affordable, high quality child care has a number of limitations. As a whole, using the tax system to expand access to affordable child care is especially misguided for three key reasons. First, many families do not have the cash on hand each month to pay out-of-pocket and wait for the end of the year’s tax return. Second, not all current tax credits benefiting household with children are refundable, meaning they are useless if a family owes no taxes. Finally, existing tax programs for child care are not well targeted. In a zero sum world of child care subsidies, many families who arguably don’t need assistance are getting a large share of it.

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Besides the labor secretary, President Trump will name countless federal officials responsible for advocating for working people. One of the most important agencies to which Trump will nominate officials is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which protects the rights of private sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions.

On April 25, POLITICO reported that the Trump administration is considering Minneapolis attorney Doug Seaton to fill a vacancy on the NLRB. Seaton is a well-known union-avoidance consultant, otherwise known as a “persuader” or, more accurately, a union buster.

When workers seek to organize and bargain collectively, employers often hire so-called “persuaders” to orchestrate and roll out time-tested, anti-union campaigns. Union-avoidance consultants do exactly what their job titles describe: they help employers keep their businesses union-free, by either defeating union organizing campaigns or assisting with decertification efforts to unseat an existing union.

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In 2015, 4,836 workers died on the job. That’s nearly five thousand husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers who walked out their door in the morning and never came back home.

April 28 is Workers’ Memorial Day—an international day of remembrance for workers killed, disabled, or sickened by their work. And as highlighted by the AFL-CIO’s 2017 Death on the Job Report, it is also an opportunity to highlight the preventable nature of most workplace deaths and injuries, and a day of action to fight for improvements in workplace safety.

One important way we can honor the memories of our fallen loved ones is by learning from what happened, and enacting laws and regulations to make workers safer in the future. In fact, many workplace safety laws and regulations are passed in memory of workers who died on the job.

Take, for example, the Miner Act of 2006—a mine safety law enacted after the deaths of 21 miners within the first few months of that year. The Senate report explaining the necessity of the enhanced mining safety provisions states that, “these tragedies serve as a somber reminder that even that which has been done well can always be done better.” Or California’s 2016 Workplace Violence Prevention in Health Care regulation, promulgated to protect health care workers against workplace violence after the deaths of a psychiatric technician and a registered nurse who were killed during patient assaults. Documentation supporting the regulation states that, “the deaths of theses health care workers demonstrate the need for better security measures, procedures, and practices.”

The foundational step in enacting new worker safety rules is recording and reporting workplace incidents, because if we don’t know about the problems, we cannot solve them. For example, many people may be surprised that in 2016, the private-sector jobs with the highest rates of injuries included not only tractor-trailer truck drivers and warehouse laborers, but also nursing assistants. And the top five public-sector occupations with the highest rates of injury included sheriff’s patrol officers and firefighters, but also janitors, cleaners, and teacher assistants.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is responsible for tracking workplace injuries and illnesses, and issuing new rules and regulations to keep workers safe going forward. But OSHA cannot read minds: it requires employers to record and report injury and illness rates in their workplaces. Yet, many employers evade their statutory recording and reporting duties, sweeping deaths and injuries under the rug to avoid liability. That is one reason why OSHA enacted a recordkeeping rule last year, enhancing its enforcement powers to issue citations and fines to employers who fail to maintain these critical injury and illness records.

Yet, one of the first things President Trump and congressional Republicans did this year was overturn OSHA’s recordkeeping rule, and establish that OSHA can never promulgate a similar rule again unless Congress specifically authorizes it to do so.

So now workers may not only die at work, they could die in vain. Or lose a limb, lose their eyesight, or develop lung cancer from exposure to toxins. And instead of honoring their tragedies by recording and reporting them to learn what we can do better, much if it could all quietly brushed under the rug. Without any evidence of the problems of the past, we can have no solutions for the future.

What will happen next year if, because OSHA’s enforcement powers have been stripped down, workplace tragedies go unreported? Sadly, it’s something we all should think about during this Workers’ Memorial Day. And who knows, one day the person who wakes up, goes to work, and never comes home could be someone you love. Wouldn’t you want their death to mean something? Check the vote count for overturning OSHA’s rule to see if your congressperson or Senator agrees.

Alexander Acosta will not be the secretary of labor that working people need, and for that reason, senators should oppose his confirmation. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said, the test is not whether Acosta is better than Andrew Puzder, a truly abysmal, insulting choice to lead the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). The test must be whether he will be a strong advocate for working Americans, someone who will use the power of his department to improve their lives. The evidence from Acosta’s confirmation hearings and his past service in the government shows that he will not. The best we might hope for is that he will not politicize the agency and will be a caretaker until an administration that believes in the Labor Department’s mission is elected. That is not enough.

It isn’t even clear that Acosta will be a good caretaker of the agency whose mission is to foster and promote the welfare of the nation’s job seekers, wage earners, and retirees. At Acosta’s confirmation hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked whether Acosta would defend the DOL against the draconian 21 percent budget cut called for in President Trump’s preliminary budget. Acosta refused to say he would, despite professing concern about reducing the already tiny number of OSHA compliance officers in New Hampshire. Even Scott Pruitt, who spent years in state government attacking and suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before his appointment as EPA administrator, cared enough about his mission to publicly oppose the EPA budget sent to Congress by Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. DOL’s Wage and Hour Division has fewer than 1000 inspectors for 7.3 million workplaces, and wage theft is a nationwide epidemic costing workers tens of billions of dollars a year. Yet Acosta would not commit to work to preserve the meager resources devoted to protecting workers from abuse.

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Today, President Trump is set to unveil a proposal that serves as his opening bid for the upcoming debate over tax “reform.” Unsurprisingly, the president is proposing straightforward tax cuts for the rich, which will need to be temporary because they will increase the federal budget deficit. It’s being reported that the centerpiece of the proposal is a cut to the rate faced by both corporations and “pass-throughs” to 15 percent, accompanied by the claim that the tax cuts will pay for themselves (“pass-throughs” are businesses that pay no direct taxes but whose owners pay individual taxes on the dividends and other income they receive from the business). There are three important things to note about these proposed changes.

First, they would clearly be a windfall to already-rich households. The incidence of corporate tax cuts falls disproportionately on owners of businesses and other capital, and this type of income is incredibly concentrated at the top, with the top 1 percent alone claiming 53 percent of it in 2013.

Second, these tax cuts will not trickle down. There is simply no payoff to low- and middle-income families from cutting the corporate tax rate. We’ll touch on this more in an upcoming paper, but briefly, corporate tax cuts are terribly inefficient fiscal stimulus relative to nearly any other tax cut or spending increase. And the textbook channel through which they boost long-run growth—boosting savings—will not materialize. The U.S. and global economies are glutted with savings, so boosting incentives to save helps nothing.

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Undeterred by their failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Republicans look set to move on to the next item in Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda—tax reform. This post helps set the stage for the upcoming tax reform debate and explains why “tax reform” will in the end likely just become a deficit-financed tax cut for the rich and corporations that expires in 10 years—a decade of free money for groups that don’t really need it and a problem for policymakers to deal with in the future.

Understanding why this deficit-financed, 10-year tax cut is the most likely outcome requires some understanding of the “budget reconciliation” process (apologies). Budget reconciliation allows the Republicans to avoid the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for a filibuster, and hence will almost surely be needed to pass any tax cut. To begin the reconciliation process, Congress first passes a budget resolution with topline spending numbers that includes reconciliation instructions. These instruct the relevant committees to make changes to mandatory spending or revenues in order to achieve some budgetary target—for instance, decreasing revenues or the deficit by so-many billion over a specified time period.

Here, Republicans in Congress face a choice. They originally planned to use the fiscal year 2017 budget to repeal the ACA, and so wrote reconciliation instructions that were basically deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window. They could do this because, although repealing the ACA would mean large tax cuts for the top 1 percent, these could be paid-for with cuts to Medicaid and subsidies that helped people afford insurance in the ACA marketplace exchanges. If Republicans wanted revenue-neutral tax reform—perhaps following through on the popular mantra of “broaden the base, lower the rates”—they could simply repurpose those instructions. But this is unlikely to work for them.Read more

President Donald Trump recently told the Wall Street Journal that his administration won’t label China a currency manipulator in a semi-annual U.S. Treasury report that is due this week. Crucially, he has also forwarded no alternative mechanism to deal with the misaligned U.S.-China exchange rate. This essentially means that Trump has turned his back on working Americans who have lost millions of manufacturing jobs since China entered the WTO in 2001, and have experienced growing competition with imports from China and other low wage countries that reduced the wages of all non-college graduates by $180 billion per year in 2011 alone.

In a campaign speech in Monessen, PA last June Trump outlined a 7-step program that he “would pursue right away to bring back our jobs.” In step five, he promised to “instruct my Treasury secretary to label China a currency manipulator,” a commitment he repeated many times last year.

There has been some debate over whether or not the Chinese is currently actively manipulating its currency. What there is no debate over is whether or not the U.S.-China exchange rate is severely misaligned, and that this misalignment costs jobs in U.S. manufacturing. While China has been a net seller of foreign exchange reserves over the past two years (meaning that it has not engaged in direct manipulation over this time), it maintains well in excess of $3 trillion in total reserves, which have a depressing effect on the value of its currency.

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The H-2A visa program allows farmers anticipating shortages of U.S. seasonal workers to be certified by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to recruit and employ foreign workers with temporary, nonimmigrant visas. DOL certified 165,700 jobs to be filled by H-2A workers in fiscal 2016, up 14 percent from 145,900 in fiscal 2015.1 The H-2A program in 2016 is two-and-a-half times larger than it was a decade ago in 2006, when 64,100 jobs were certified.Read more