In a previous post and economic snapshot, I and others noted the historical symmetry of the rise and fall of union density across the last century and its uncanny mirror image—the fall and rise of the share of income going to the top ten percent. The juxtaposition of the two lines suggests less a direct causal relationship than an emblematic one—between the trajectory of the workers’ bargaining power on the one hand, and trajectory of rent-padded top incomes on the other.

Updating this data through 2012 only confirms this dismal pattern. Union membership fell to 11.3 percent in 2012, and to a measly 6.6 percent in the private sector. As the last business cycle battered working Americans, the very rich just got richer—hoarding all of the income gains of the recovery, and reaching income shares unseen in the last century (19.3% for the top one percent, 35.8 percent for the top five percent, and 48.2 percent for the top ten percent).

Here’s what we read today. Share what you’re reading in the comments.

• Will work for free: How unpaid internships cheapen workers of all ages (PBS Newshour)
• Looting the Pension Funds (Rolling Stone)
• I worked all week for free?!: The horrifying, true story of $0 paychecks (Salon)
• Why I Miss Pork-Barrel Politics (Slate)
• Government Shutdown Jeopardizes WIC Program (Huffington Post)
• Mr. Zuckerberg Goes to Washington (Dissent)
• Rep. Jeff Denham: U.S. must provide a ‘pathway to citizenship’ (Modesto Bee)

The September release of the Census Bureau’s income and poverty numbers (and I link to them here only to remind us all that the federal shutdown has made the unavailable) add one more data point to a lost decade punctuated by the recessions of 2001 and 2007, and also to a longer trajectory—stretching back to the 1970s—of starkly unequal income growth.

That growing inequality is underscored by plotting the Census data (reporting average family income by income percentiles) alongside the top incomes estimates of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (recently updated through 2012).

There are some bumps in the “crosswalk” between these data sources1 and, for this reason, I include the “top 5 percent” estimate from both. That aside, the big picture is at once familiar and depressing.  Over the long postwar era (1947-2012), we see steady and shared income growth running into the 1970s—and then suddenly fanning out as the top incomes (in green) take off. Over that long half-century, incomes (in real, inflation adjusted 2012 dollars) at the 20^th percentile do not quite double; those for the top .01 percent of earners grow almost tenfold.

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EPI has posted items recently on both the individual mandate and the employer mandate contained in the Affordable Care Act (or the ACA, or Obamacare). The summary version of these posts is simply: individual mandate, good; employer mandate, potentially flawed, not operative yet.

The longer versions follow.

On the individual mandate, we noted that it makes health reform more efficient than it would be without any such anti free-rider provision. And since the GOP hates efficient health reform, they have predictably made attacking it a center-piece of their, um, “strategy” in the most recent fiscal showdown.

On the employer mandate we noted two things. First, the claim that there has been a large shift towards part-time work since the passage of the ACA is just not true. Sure, some employers have cut hours in recent years, but the overall trend is toward a decline in the share of workers who are involuntarily part-time. Second, this failure to see any discernible shift towards part-time work makes sense given that the employer mandate in the ACA has been delayed for a year—meaning that employers will pay no penalty before 2015.1 Of course, this fact doesn’t mean that no employers are cutting hours while falsely blaming the ACA.

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A stunning reminder that elite opinion is far from where it needs to be on wages is a Washington Post editorial from last month recommending a minimum wage of just $8.00 in 2015, up from the $7.25 level set in 2009. The Post’s editorial board, in fact, argued that a full-time, full-year worker should earn an income that is two-thirds of the poverty line for a family of four—a level set in 1959. The poverty line, however, is fixed only by inflation and does not reflect any general improvements in overall living standard. So, while economic productivity has more than doubled since 1959 (it rose 150 percent in fact), what we consider a poverty income has remained the same. In effect, the Washington Post’s editorial board is saying a low-wage worker should earn one-third less than a poverty-level income based on living standards two-thirds of a century earlier. Note that $8.00 in 2015 is a wage roughly nine percent less (inflation-adjusted) than what a low-wage worker (at 10^th percentile) earned in 1973, despite the fact that low wage workers are far more educated and productive now than then.

Given the shutdown of the federal government, the September employment and unemployment figures were not released as scheduled. With no new data, it is useful to step back and look at the broader employment situation.

Regardless of what happened in September, we know roughly where the labor market is based on prior months’ data, and it’s not good. The labor market needs to add more than 8 million jobs to get back to the pre-recession unemployment rate, and at the growth rate we’ve seen for the last few months, we won’t fill that gap before the end of the decade. The unemployment rate has decreased substantially since its peak of 10% in the fall of 2009, but the vast majority of that decrease has not been because unemployed workers have found work. Instead, the unemployment rate declined because millions of jobless workers simply stopped looking for work, or never even started, because job opportunities are so weak (and if a jobless worker is not actively seeking work, they are not counted as unemployed). The weak employment situation has translated into very weak wage growth, since employers simply do not have to pay sizeable wage increases to get and keep the workers they need when workers do not have other options.  In other words, we have an anemic recovery due to an ongoing shortfall in demand, and the US labor market remains depressed.

For more on the effects of the shutdown, a blog post from EPI Policy and Research Director Josh Bivens provides some useful perspective on its macroeconomic impact in the context of a weak, fragile recovery.

Most Americans can be forgiven if they have lost the thread of today’s debate over the government shutdown—it has shifted radically in a pretty short time. Just a few weeks ago, the budget debate was primarily over the automatic spending reductions, known as sequestration. The administration and most congressional Democrats want to cancel the sequester for the next two or three years to keep fiscal policy from dragging too heavily on the still-fragile recovery. The Congressional Budget Office projects that canceling the sequester for 2014 could increase GDP by 0.2 percent to 1.2 percent, and employment could be 300,000 to 1.6 million higher. Republicans, on the other hand, want the sequester to remain in place (though they do want a special carve-out to keep it from cutting defense as heavily as its projected to in 2014). They also want to reduce mandatory spending (a category dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, though which also includes a number of other income support programs like unemployment insurance). House Republicans have already voted for a five percent reduction in spending on SNAP, the nation’s most important nutrition program for low-income adults and children.

As the end of the 2013 fiscal year approached not a single appropriations bill had been passed. While both the House and the Senate passed budget resolutions this year, the Republican leadership in the House refused to allow a conference committee to reconcile differences between the two to proceed. Given the failure to pass an appropriations bill, a continuing resolution (CR) was needed to temporarily fund the government or the government would shut down. On the first day of the new fiscal year, the government shut down because no CR had been enacted.

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One of the more baffling messages in the current debate over the economy and “Obamacare” is the hue and cry over the trend in part-time employment. The fact is that since the end of the Great Recession, the trend in part-time employment has been down, not up. The black line in the chart below shows the share of part-time workers in the labor force. The light blue region shows the level of workers who are part-time due to economic reasons. The navy blue region show the level of workers who are part time due to “non-economic” reasons (health, child care responsibilities, etc.). The vertical bars denote recessions, from peak to trough.

During the past two recessions part-time employment clearly increased, while such employment was either flat or falling after the end of the recessions. (Note that the official end date of a recession is the point at which the economy stops getting worse. It does not mean the economy has recovered yet, and the current economy clearly has not.)

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In a post on Wonkblog from yesterday morning, Dylan Matthews has an excellent interview with Michael Linden, a budget expert at the Center for American Progress. It’s definitely worth reading—not least for Linden’s correct (and therefore deeply depressing) point that in terms of discretionary spending, “We’ve already essentially adopted the Ryan budget.”

But, the simplistic Keynesian in me demands I disagree with something Dylan says about the influence of fiscal policy in the current economy:

“In 2009 it was easy to see how the multiplier on government spending, the GDP bang for the buck, would be pretty high. There were a lot of unused resources in the economy that government spending could spring into action. But during good economic times, the multiplier should be around 0. Obviously, we’re somewhere in between now, but where on the spectrum do you think we are?”

This is actually all pretty correct until that last sentence, particularly the “somewhere in between now”. Linden makes a very good empirical rebuttal to this by noting that today’s output gap is much, much closer to where it was in 2009 than zero, and, even this current output gap may well understate how much slack actually exists, since CBO has been steadily marking down potential output for reasons that may reverse if the economy recovered (see figure below from the famous DeLong/Summers fiscal policy paper).

I suspect Dylan knew he was heaving a softball question here, because he certainly knows there’s a lot of slack remaining in the economy. But it is important to note that the larger economic logic in his question isn’t quite right. Values of the multiplier really aren’t linear like that. If the multiplier on UI benefits in an economy with an output gap (a measure of economic slack) of 7 percent is 1.5 and the multiplier on these benefits in an economy with an output gap of zero is zero, this does not imply that the multiplier on these when the output gap is 3.5 percent is 0.75. I wish it did work like this, as it would make macroeconomic projections much easier.

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Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Arizona v. U.S. left only a narrow opening for states to pass and enforce immigration-related legislation. Nevertheless, the enactment of immigration-related state laws and resolutions in 2013 increased by 83 percent compared with the first half of 2012. California has been a leader, passing numerous laws that would benefit immigrant workers and protect labor standards for U.S. workers. Despite extensive media coverage of the TRUST Act and two other bills—one that would grant “domestic workers” overtime pay (which became law last week) and another permitting unauthorized immigrants to obtain drivers’ licenses—four others would protect the labor and employment rights of California’s unauthorized immigrant workers and temporary foreign workers (“guestworkers”). If Governor Jerry Brown signs these four bills, the new laws will ameliorate some of the worst abuses immigrants suffer, including human trafficking, wage theft, and employer retaliation against workers who organize or report illegal acts to authorities. Comprehensive federal immigration reform that protects vulnerable foreign workers from abuse remains a longshot in the near-term, so these are welcome developments for the state with the largest population of immigrants.

An estimated 1.85 million unauthorized immigrants work in California, meaning a tenth of the workforce is particularly vulnerable to exploitation on the basis of immigration status. It is difficult for unauthorized workers to enforce minimum wage and overtime laws because employers use the threat of deportation to prevent labor organizing and to keep workers from complaining. Employers can report the undocumented to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or require them to update or provide documentation for their “I-9” file, or run their name through E-Verify, the government’s electronic employment verification system. This increases the likelihood they’ll be fired and/or deported.

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I have been getting versions of this question a lot. It is very hard to answer with any precision, so, below are some very imprecise thoughts.

First, the shutdown would have to go on for quite a long-time (say at least a month) to affect the trajectory of aggregate macroeconomic statistics like gross domestic product (GDP) or employment growth. For one, the majority of what the federal government spends money on (including the health insurance coverage expansions contained in the ACA!) will not be affected by the shutdown. Transfers payments like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc…will continue to flow, as will essential discretionary spending.

Given the relatively restricted scope of the shutdown in terms of government spending, it stands to reason that it would have to go on for a a month or so before there would be enough of a mechanical fiscal drag to start significantly affecting the path of macroeconomic aggregates. A very, very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate would be that the strictly mechanical impact of a month of the shutdown would subtract 0.1-0.2 percentage points off of GDP growth for (fiscal) 2014.* So, if the government shutdown lasts a month and the economy was set to grow 3 percent in 2014 without the shutdown, the mechanical drag from the shutdown would result in actual growth of 2.8-2.9 percent. Of course, if one focused on the effect of the shutdown only in the fourth quarter of (calendar) 2013, it will matter quite a bit more (multiply that 0.1-0.2 by 4, so, a one-month shutdown would reduce fourth quarter GDP growth by about 0.4-0.8 percent, which is not peanuts for a quarterly growth number).

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People wrongly think the economy is like the weather, a natural force outside of our control. So thinking about problems like high unemployment and declining wages leave people feeling hopeless because they seem to result from large historic forces that we can’t affect like globalization.

The truth, however, is that the economy isn’t like the weather: It’s entirely man-made and the rules are set by politics, not God or nature. Globalization is real, but the terms of globalization—the rules for how the internationalization of trade and production operates and affects workers and companies—are set by politicians and the organizations they’ve created through international treaties. We can change those rules and shape globalization so it does less harm to working people in the United States and around the world.

One of those rules changes would prevent companies from manipulating their currencies to make their exports cheaper while simultaneously making goods imported from other countries more expensive. China, Japan, and other countries have done this for years, buying hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars to weaken their own currencies and making it cheaper and easier to export goods to the United States. This strategy has been very successful, and together, China, Singapore, Taiwan and several other countries, including Japan, export hundreds of billions of dollars more to the United States in manufactured goods than we send to them, leaving us with a huge trade deficit that costs jobs and undermines wages here. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that foreign currency manipulation has cost the United States between one million and five million jobs.

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The core argument of the hysterical Republican diatribe against Obamacare is that it will push Americans down a slippery slope into the nightmare of, gasp, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!! The phrase regularly trips from the lips of GOP reactionaries. Here’s Texas Senator Ted Cruz in his recent 22-hour speech: “Socialized medicine is—and has been everywhere it has been implemented in the world—a disaster. Obamacare–its intended purpose is to lead us unavoidably down that path.” Congressman Marlin Stutzman (R-IND) tells us, “Obamacare is a perfect tool to crush free enterprise and force all Americans into a socialist health care system.”

These mantras are not really about health care. They are conversation-stoppers. They are designed to flood the mind with murky images of indifferent bureaucratic sloth, incompetent if not sadistic doctors and nurses, dingy overcrowded waiting rooms and other grim scenes from a dystopian medical horror movie. The purpose is to convince the public that as bad as our health care system is, real change would make it worse.

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The National Parks–Yellowstone, Yosemite, Great Smokey Mountains and all the rest—are shutting down, along with much of the government, because what Politico called a “hard-line faction of House GOP lawmakers” can’t accept the results of the last election or the fact that Congress enacted the Affordable Care Act. They are carrying obstructionism to a disastrous new low.

This is a personal nuisance, since my wife and I planned a seven-night stay in Yellowstone that would have started Saturday night. Luckily, we checked ahead and learned that, as this Q and A from Bloomberg News recounts, everyone will be kicked out of the park, vacation be damned!

“Q. What about my trip to Yellowstone?

A. You’re out of luck. According to the Interior Department’s shutdown contingency plan: “All areas of the National Park and National Wildlife Refuge Systems would be closed and public access would be restricted.”

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At the beginning of the year, Andrew Fieldhouse and I tried to document lots of the ways that the GOP House had managed to smother a full recovery from the Great Recession. The list was pretty impressive, but a key theme was that the GOP kept using the leverage of various fiscal decision points (reaching the debt ceiling, the expiration of tax cuts, the drawdown of the Recovery Act, etc…) to push for austerity on the spending side of government. And their tactic worked—the current economic recovery has seen historically slow growth in public spending, and by now the entire gap between today’s economy and a healthy one can be attributed to this austerity, full stop.

When we wrote our list, I had hoped any strategic gain to the GOP Congress stemming from throttling the recovery was over—the 2012 election had come and gone, and going forward from there it is not exactly obvious why slow economic growth is damaging to just one party or the other.

Obviously, I was wrong.

The new exploitation of external fiscal deadlines (the need for a “continuing resolution” to fund federal governmental operations after October 1 and reaching the debt ceiling in mid-October) concerns both a further ratcheting down of spending, but also the delay of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

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Paul Krugman and Mark Thoma have been discussing (see here and here) the views of the (increasingly influential) very rich on this fall’s fiscal debate. They hypothesize that rising inequality has led to exorbitantly large incomes for a select few, and that these select few don’t understand the value of social insurance because they reap little-to-no benefits from programs like Medicaid, and SNAP, for example. The top 1 percent, after all, rarely realize the benefits of social insurance, since the likelihood that they experience unexpected income losses to the extent that they fall below the middle class living standards is slim. More often, social insurance benefits those who may be in the middle and lower classes, and experience unexpected income losses (like a lay off). Complaining about insurance simply because you don’t think you will need it is a pretty pithy argument, but let’s ignore that for now.

Thoma and Krugman go further, noting that rising inequality seems to have confirmed the top one percent’s notion that they are the indispensable economic engine of the U.S. economy, who take risks and work the hardest and should justly reap the benefits. They push for lower taxes (even though their current tax rate is one of the lowest in history) because they don’t think anything should impede their productivity, and they demand respect for being the “job creators” in society. In the context of this fall’s showdowns over the federal budget and the debt ceiling, not only is this take wrong, but it is totally divorced from the reality the broad middle-class faces—a reality of high joblessness from an anemic recovery, and meager wage growth over the last 30 years.

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EPI co-founder and board member Robert Reich has a new documentary, open in theaters nationwide today, called Inequality for All. Everyone should go see this important film.

The film explores the growth of economic inequality, and draws heavily on the work that EPI has done over the past 25 years.

In the decades following World War II, workers’ wages by-and-large rose alongside productivity. But since the 1970s, that relationship has broken down. While CEOs and financial executives have seen their pay skyrocket, wages have been flat for ordinary Americans (even those with a college degree) for the past decade. Add to that a minimum wage that has less purchasing power than it did in 1963 and it’s easy to see why Americans are concerned with economic inequality. It’s a challenge that came about thanks to policies set by those with the most economic power, and it’s something that can be fixed.

That’s why earlier this year, we launched inequality.is. The site walks you through how inequality affects you, how it affects the economy, how we created it, and what we can do to fix it. It even features a guest appearance from Robert Reich. (See also this blog post from Elise Gould for more about the site.)

Once you see Inequality for All, come back here for a more in-depth look at how this came about—and what we can do about it:

• A Decade of Flat Wages
• CEO Pay in 2012 Was Extraordinarily High Relative to Typical Workers and Other High Earners
• The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes
• Rising Income Inequality and the Role of Shifting Market-Income Distribution, Tax Burdens, and Tax Rates
• Fix it and forget it: Index the minimum wage to growth in average wages
• Occupy Wall Streeters are right about skewed economic rewards in the United States
• Failure by Design
• Everybody wins, except for most of us

On Twitter, Atrios demanded more talk of the platinum coin as a solution to the looming showdown over the debt ceiling. For those who don’t remember what the platinum coin idea is all about, check this out—a very good explanation of the issue, as well as a link to a good Chris Hayes segment on it.

But the thirty-second version runs like this: currently, to fund governmental activities, the Treasury draws on an account at the Federal Reserve. The account is fed by both tax revenues and the proceeds from selling bonds (debt). But, because the United States has a statutorily imposed limit of how much outstanding debt is allowed, once this limit is reached on issuing new debt, Treasury can no longer sell bonds and deposit these proceeds, and  hence the account at the Federal Reserve will dwindle. By October 17 (current guesstimate) it will be too small to finance that day’s governmental activities. A suggested way around this has been to have Treasury mint a coin (which has to be platinum for a reason too boring to note in depth) with a denomination of $1 trillion, deposit it at the Federal Reserve and, voila, governmental outlays can continue.

It’s true that the idea of minting a trillion dollar platinum coin as a solution to our nation’s problems sounds like something out of the Simpsons. But, the thing to realize is that while it is indeed a phony accounting solution, what it resolves is a phony accounting problem.

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In a recent speech marking the five-year anniversary of the financial crisis, President Obama hailed the falling federal deficit by pointing out that, “our deficits are going down faster than any time since before I was born.” The reduction in the deficit between 2012 and 2013—from 6.8 percent of GDP to 3.8 percent—is the largest deficit reduction in the past 60 years. Contrary to how too many pundits and politicians think about the economy, that’s not a good thing. This rapid contraction in the budget deficit has sucked purchasing power out of the overall economy even while it remains severely demand-constrained following the Great Recession.

The figure below shows the federal deficit, which has been steadily falling relative to GDP since 2009, versus the trend in the output gap, an indicator of how close to full recovery the economy is. The output gap is the difference between what economic output would be if resources were fully employed (potential output) and actual output, expressed as a percent of potential output.  The stagnation in the output gap—which is mirrored by stagnation in the share of working-age adults who are employed since the official recovery began—is caused in large part by the steep contraction in budget deficits.

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Earlier this week I wrote a post with a graph showing just how austere public spending has been in the last 5 years relative to historical episodes of recession and recovery. Paul Krugman coincidentally posted a piece making the same point a couple hours later (which just might have given it a bit more reach).1

This was the graph I posted (which is also in a paper I co-authored with Hilary Wething):

Note that the difference between today’s level of public spending and what would have prevailed had just the normal historical experience following recessions held is absolutely enormous. Had we tracked this normal historical experience we would have about $800 billion more public spending and the economy would be essentially back to pre-recession health.*

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Here’s what we read today. Share interesting articles in the comments!

• The Mismeasure of Poverty (New York Times)
• Cashier or Consultant? Entry Labor Market Conditions, Field of Study, and Career Success (Yale University, pdf)
• Washington Post Beats Up on Disabled Workers, Again (CEPR)
• 5 reasons Republicans should support Janet Yellen (CNN Money)
• How Bad Data Warped Everything We Thought We Knew About the Jobs Recovery (The Atlantic)

Last week, Brad DeLong posted what he called his “Seven Cardinal Virtues Of Equitable Growth.” I (pretty much) applaud them all: manage the macroeconomy; boost public and private investment; shift from value-subtracting industries (health care administration, prisons, finance, carbon energy) to value creating sectors; create a carbon tax; more immigration; obtain more equality of opportunity in 50 years by obtaining substantial equality of result right now; a well-functioning economy will need a larger government (addressing health-care finance, pensions, education finance, research and early-stage development) relative to the private economy than the twentieth century did. But, like many of my colleagues on the center-left, Brad overlooks what I see as the key economic challenge of our time—generating broad-based wage growth.

While Brad buries the goal of equitable wage growth in the grander category of “obtaining substantial equality of result right now,” I think economists and policymakers must explicitly focus on generating broad-based wage growth when discussing income inequality. This issue must be front and center, or we will never generate the policies needed to achieve the broadly shared prosperity we all want.

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It is taken as a given that the annual fiscal policy dramas of the past few years (last year it was the “fiscal cliff,” the year before it was running up against the statutory debt ceiling, and this year it’s debt ceiling again plus the need to pass a “continuing resolution” to fund the federal government over the next year) are “bad for the economy.”

The general idea that these fiscal policy fights have hurt the economy’s recovery from the Great Recession is clearly right. However, far too many people get the story wrong about how these annual fiscal dramas have slowed recovery. In short, it’s not that they introduce damaging “uncertainty.” Rather, it’s that they have led to smaller budget deficits, which have sucked purchasing power out of an economy that remains severely demand-constrained.

This may sound doubly strange—the corrosive impact of “uncertainty” is now essentially an official talking point for the Beltway pundit class, and the most treasured cliché of economic commentary is that reducing the budget deficit is nearly always and everywhere a good thing.

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The Congressional Budget Office released their long-term budget outlook last Tuesday. On the spending side, growth has slowed relative to their previous long-term projection largely because of reduced projected federal health spending on Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the health insurance exchange subsidies. Given that the trajectory of federal spending in coming decades is almost entirely driven by health costs, this is a most welcome change.

On the revenue side, to no one’s surprise, things look considerably worse because of the tax cuts enacted by the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA)—otherwise known as the “fiscal cliff deal”. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were made permanent for 99 percent of taxpayers and the alternative minimum tax parameters were indexed to inflation. As a result, CBO projects that by 2038 federal revenues will be about 3.7 percent of GDP lower than previously thought. As Nicole Woo of Center for Economic and Policy Research has pointed out, the latest CBO report suggests strongly that in containing projected long-run deficits, the U.S. has a tax problem, not a spending problem.

An under-appreciated part of this tax problem is the continued tax avoidance (and sometimes outright evasion) by many U.S. multinational corporations. CBO assumes that corporate tax revenues will average 2.2 percent between 2014 and 2023—basically falling from 2.5 percent of GDP in 2015 to 1.9 percent by 2023. After 2023, CBO assumes that corporate tax revenues will remain at 1.9 percent of GDP, which is about what the average was between 1973 and 2012.

But the importance of corporate income tax revenues has steadily fallen since 1946. In the 1950s, corporate income tax revenue was about 4.5 percent of GDP and the average between 1946 and 1986 was 3.2 percent of GDP. If corporate tax revenues are higher by one percent of GDP after 2014, then the deficit would be reduced by about one percent of GDP every year (actually a little more because net interest payments would be slightly lower). Because of the reduced deficits, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be about 5 percent lower in 2040 than CBO’s projection.

A good start toward increasing corporate tax revenues was introduced in the senate yesterday by Senators Levin, Whitehouse, Begich, and Shaheen. The Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act (S. 1533) would close some corporate loopholes and provide measures to combat the corporate use of tax havens to evade paying U.S. taxes.

The results of the 2012 American Community Survey (ACS), released by the U.S. Census Bureau, show the lingering effects of the Great Recession, and further evidence of a recovery that has been both too slow and too tentative. Both median household income levels and overall poverty rates were virtually unchanged in 2012.

Income

Between 2011 and 2012, only a handful of states saw changes in inflation-adjusted median household income, consistent with a national median household income unchanged from 2011 (the increase of  0.1% nationally is not statistically significant). Our EPI colleagues explain clearly why we see this holding pattern in effect: “Given the tight relationship between the health of the labor market and incomes for most households, it is unsurprising that incomes for most households grew only slightly if at all in 2012 after deteriorating between 2007 and 2011.” Until we see significantly more robust job growth than that which has left us with a “jobs deficit” of over 8 million, improved income and poverty data (and improved well-being and economic security for American families in every state) will remain elusive.

Changes to median household income between 2011 and 2012 were statistically significant in only six states. In four of those states—Hawaii (4.8%), Illinois (1.4%), Massachusetts (1.6%), and Oregon (3.3%)—median household incomes grew modestly. In the other two—Mississippi (-1.6%) and Virginia (-2.2%)—incomes dropped slightly. In the remaining forty-four states (and the District of Columbia), median household incomes showed no significant change.1

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The Census released its annual income and poverty report this week, which, among other highlights, calculates the number of people who are kept out of poverty by various government assistance programs. While many of the headline numbers stayed the same, the number of people kept out of poverty by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) increased to an all-time high of 4 million people.1

The data arrived, coincidentally, as the House of Representatives announced it will be voting today to cut SNAP spending by 5 percent over the next 10 years, cutting 3.8 million people from the program by as early as next year. Understanding why SNAP has increased over the last five years helps us understand why it would be irresponsible–indeed cruel and stupid—to cut spending on the program now.

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The hot debate over whether the new iPhones incorporate substantial improvements, or will spur even larger profits for Apple, misses a fundamental point. Whether or not the iPhones constitute a breakthrough for Apple’s business, their production process does not constitute a breakthrough for the workers making them. Despite an 18-month old highly-publicized commitment by Apple to dramatically reform working conditions in its supply chain, these conditions still include widespread abuses of labor laws and common decency, as well as widespread violations of Apple promises and its supplier code of conduct. Three of the latest undercover investigations by China Labor Watch and a recent review of Apple reform promises I conducted with Scott Nova of the Workers Rights Consortium support this conclusion.

The first of the China Labor Watch studies was an in-depth investigation of conditions for workers making the new iPhones at Apple’s second largest supplier, Pegatron. The study, released July 29, found Pegatron in violation of 17 specific commitments made in Apple’s supplier code of conduct, and 86 labor rights violations overall in areas such as hiring practices, wages, hours worked, and living conditions. As one illustration, Apple has touted its success in ensuring that workers in its supply chain work no more than 60 hours a week, a dubious accomplishment at best, since the limit under Chinese law is 49 hours a week. China Labor Watch found even this weak standard has not been achieved.  At the three Pegatron factories examined, the average number of hours worked ranged from 66 to 69 hours per week, and in at least one factory these excessive hours were concealed because workers were forced to sign false time sheets.

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This is a big week for those interested in the Federal Reserve—which should be everybody. The Fed has been the only economic policymaking institution with any real power that has been actively trying to lower unemployment and push the economy back to full recovery from the Great Recession over the past two years. If you’re looking for a job, more hours, or the confidence that you can ask your boss for a raise and might actually get it (because there aren’t three well-qualified but jobless people lined up outside to take your slot), you really should be interested in the Fed and what it’s doing.

The first bit of big Fed news is Larry Summers’ withdrawing from consideration to replace Ben Bernanke as the next Chair of the Federal Reserve. This seemingly clears the way for Janet Yellen—the current Vice-Chair of the Fed—to be offered the position. If Yellen is not offered the slot, it would be a bizarre and consequential mistake. She is eminently qualified for the job, and, most importantly right now, she has the correct diagnosis for what is keeping the U.S. economy from full recovery from the Great Recession (a continuing shortage of aggregate demand) and is committed to using the Fed’s power to hasten this recovery (by continuing its program to buy assets to keep interest rates low and inflation expectations from falling).

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The U.S. Department of Labor issued final regulations today that extend minimum wage and overtime protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act to about two million previously excluded home care workers—personal care assistants for the frail elderly and the disabled, home health aides, and other direct support paraprofessionals working in the homes of patients and clients needing personal help with needs ranging from changing the dressings on wounds and administering non-injectable medications to personal hygiene and ambulation. The home care workforce is growing fast as the population ages and more people are cared for in their homes, rather than in costlier institutional settings. These jobs need to be decent jobs that pay a living wage.

Although domestic workers, like nannies, chauffeurs and housekeepers, were first covered by the FLSA in 1974, most home care aides have been excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections by the Act’s vague “companionship” exemption, which was never meant to cover people providing services for pay, while in the employ of a third party, rather than in a direct relationship with the patient or elderly client. An agency—and there are very large agencies, some employing tens of thousands of home care workers—could therefore ignore FLSA rules about paying for travel time when an aide moved between one client’s home and another’s, ignore the rules governing break time, and avoid paying time and a half for overtime when an aide worked more than 40 hours in a week. Some employers have even paid less than the miserably low federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

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