Increasing New Jersey’s minimum wage helps the economy and the state’s lower-income earners
With New Jersey joining several other states in considering raising its minimum wage, it is appropriate to do some myth-busting around the minimum wage, in particular addressing myths around who comprises the minimum-wage workforce, and what the employment impact of increasing the minimum wage would be.
EPI’s analysis of the New Jersey proposal shows that 307,000 workers will be directly helped by raising the New Jersey minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $8.50 an hour (because their current wages fall between those points), with another 233,000 workers benefiting indirectly (those whose wages are slightly above the new minimum wage who would see their wages increased modestly). The prevailing misconception is that most minimum-wage workers are middle-class teenagers working part-time for extra spending money. The facts tell a different story. Of those workers benefiting from the proposed minimum wage increase, slightly over half (55 percent) are female, more than four in five (85 percent) are 20 years of age or older, and nearly four in five (79 percent) work more than part-time (29 percent work mid-time, between 20-35 hours a week, and 50 percent work full-time, 35-plus hours a week). More than 3 in 4 workers (76 percent) benefiting from an increase in the minimum wage have a high school diploma or more—and nearly half (46 percent) of workers affected are white non-Hispanic (as seen in Figure 1). Over 282,000 New Jersey children have a parent who would benefit from increasing the minimum wage.
Figure 1: Source: EPI Analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey, ORG data
GDP impact and job creation
The EPI analysis of the impact of the proposed minimum wage increase shows that those workers benefiting (both directly and indirectly) from increased wages, will see an additional $439 million in wages in the first year following the proposed minimum wage increase. For those benefiting, the average increase in their annual income would be $810.
In the first year following the increase in the minimum wage, we estimate that increased spending by workers who see a raise will boost GDP by $278 million. Wage increases resulting from indexing to inflation would result in further GDP boosts in future years. Economists widely recognize the relationship between GDP growth and employment growth. Our model shows that 2,420 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs would be created in the first year as a result of the GDP boost resulting from New Jersey’s proposed minimum wage increase. These jobs would be concentrated within New Jersey, since lower-income workers disproportionately spend their wages locally to meet the immediate needs of their families.
The minimum wage as defense against further erosion of wages
As seen in Figure 2, New Jersey saw significant erosion of low wages (those at the 20th percentile) between 2009-2011. New Jersey’s $0.60 erosion of wages at the 20th percentile was the 11th greatest wage loss of all states, exceeding the national low-wage erosion by $0.14. With unemployment rates remaining high, employers do not have to provide wage increases to get and keep the workers they need. Since well over half (56 percent) of those receiving additional income as a result of the proposed minimum wage increase fall in the bottom two income quintiles, it is clear that slowing this wage erosion would significantly help lower-income workers.
Figure 2: Source: EPI analysis of Current Population Survey, ORG data. Note, “Low Wage” = wage at the 20th percentile. Figure shows change in the 20th percentile real wage between 2009 and 2011.
Increasing New Jersey’s minimum wage is the right thing to do for several reasons. It is smart economics, boosting a weak economic recovery that has New Jersey firmly in its grips, and it improves the well-being of working families still reeling from the effects of the Great Recession.
Getting to a better Fed is about more than just Jamie Dimon
Does J.P. Morgan Chairman and Chief Executive Jamie Dimon belong on the board of the New York Federal Reserve? Of course not. And there’s actually a petition demanding his resignation or removal, being pushed by former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson.
But it’s also important to note that he didn’t belong on the board two months ago either—before the large trading loss J.P. Morgan suffered made news. And it’s not just Dimon, it’s the whole structure of Federal Reserve banks that needs reform.
The problem is that the boards of directors for regional Federal Reserve banks are composed of financial-sector executives—and these boards then get to choose five of the 12 voting members of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (FOMC), the body that makes monetary policy decisions. So, essentially 42 percent of the committee that controls the single most important lever of macroeconomic policy for the country is picked by banking executives. Oh, and the New York Fed, while technically a regional bank, occupies a permanent seat on the FOMC.
This is all made more ironic by the fact that any attempt by outsiders to criticize the Fed often leads to distressed hand-wringing by the Beltway elite about the sanctity of Fed “independence.” But of course, they are not talking about “independence” in any normal sense of the word, but rather independence from having to consider the views of those in the economy who might have different interests from finance.
So, sign the Dimon petition. But also, and much more importantly, support the efforts by legislators in Congress like Barney Frank and Bernie Sanders to undertake more comprehensive reform of the Fed. Because none of this is personal, it’s just business.
Does just arguing over the debt ceiling damage recovery? Maybe
Given that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) essentially promised last week to engineer a replay of last summer’s debt ceiling fight at the first opportunity, people have been wondering if that previous fight could be tied directly to subsequent economic damage in the form of lost output or jobs.
The short answer: maybe.
Before going into this question, however, it is worth noting that there is absolutely zero economic reason to believe that current levels (and expansions in recent years) of public debt are damaging to the economy. We can say this with confidence for a couple of reasons, based in pretty boring textbook macroeconomics. First, interest rates remain historically low, meaning that lenders are not just willing, but intensely eager, to keep financing budget deficits. Second, these low interest rates are not based on capricious market sentiment that could turn on a dime; instead they’re based on economic fundamentals.
To put it quickly, the same thing that is keeping interest rates low is what is keeping the economy weak – an excess of desired savings from households and businesses over demand for new borrowing and investments. So there will be upward pressure on interest rates if and only if this fundamental economic weakness is resolved, and not before.
But while economic fundamentals regarding public debt pose no threat to the U.S. economy, political brinksmanship might. As the nation approached the (arbitrary, unuseful, and dangerous) statutory debt ceiling last summer, what had been historically a pro forma vote to keep the federal government from defaulting on its obligations became this time a chance for GOP members of Congress to extort passage of some of their own pet policies in exchange for not causing an economic crisis. Eventually, the debt ceiling was raised in a deal to cut more than $1 trillion in spending over the next decade.
Given Boehner’s threat/promise of last week, this brings us back to the main question: Did last summer’s political wrangling over the debt ceiling inflict tangible harm on the economy?
Circumstantial piece of evidence exhibit A is that economic growth decelerated markedly in the middle of the year (see figure below on year-over-year GDP growth), roughly as the debt ceiling debate came to a head.
Source: Author’s analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income and Product Accounts public data series
Further, a paper by Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom, and Stephen Davis (2012) has attempted to construct an empirical measure of economic uncertainty and estimate the association of rising uncertainty with economic performance. While the paper has often been cited by critics of the Obama administration who think that it estimates the effect of regulatory uncertainty on growth, there is actually almost nothing in the paper to support this reading.
But the paper does show a very large increase in economic uncertainty associated with the debt ceiling fight (see the figure below, which is lifted directly from the paper, including the association of the last spike with the fight over the debt ceiling). In fact, the index of economic uncertainty rose more in the midst of last summer’s debt ceiling fight than it did during the financial meltdown of fall 2008 (when Lehman Brothers collapsed).
Lastly, Baker, Bloom and Davis (2012) estimate that the rise in economic uncertainty as large as the total rise that occurred between the index’s trough in 2006 and its peak in 2011 is associated with a contraction in GDP of more than two percentage points and a reduction in employment of more than 2 million jobs. Eyeballing their chart, the fight over the debt ceiling accounts for nearly half of this 2006 to 2011 rise. If one believes their estimates of the effect of a rise in uncertainty of roughly this size and one is willing to make very strong assumptions about causality (more on this below) this means that the fight over the debt ceiling could have cost the economy a percentage point of GDP and a million jobs (Baker, Bloom and Davis say that these effects manifest between nine and 24 months later).
How hard should we lean on an estimate like this? Not very—the causal relationship between measures of economic uncertainty and performance clearly runs both ways. As Baker, Bloom and Davis note, “So, for example, it could be that policy uncertainty causes recessions, or that policy uncertainty is a forward-looking variable that rises in advance of anticipated recessions.”
Does fighting about the statutory debt ceiling in and of itself damage the economy? Maybe—and it’s clear that the current economy needs no further drags on growth in the coming year.
What’s much clearer is that an actual financial crisis caused by debt ceiling brinksmanship would have real economic consequences, and would also be the first purely self-inflicted sovereign debt crisis in history. Even flirting with this is unspeakably stupid.
Management—bad management—crippled the auto industry’s Big Three, not the UAW
Many in the media have accepted the notion put forward by conservatives and business associations that unions make businesses uncompetitive by raising wages and benefits irresponsibly. The poster child for this view of the world is the auto industry, where the United Auto Workers supposedly drove the “Big Three” (Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors) into the ground while foreign competitors ate their lunch.
This is false history. As Case Western Reserve University manufacturing scholar Sue Helper has helped me understand, the auto industry’s problem stemmed from decades of mismanagement, and regardless of the UAW contracts, the Big Three made choices that doomed them to lose market share and the ability to compete.
The biggest element of mismanagement was designing and selling poor products. Anyone who lived in Michigan in the 1970s remembers when Detroit began building truly terrible cars, like the Chevy Vega, the AMC Gremlin, the Chrysler Imperial, and the Ford Pinto; it was the beginning of what became a slow-moving train wreck. As the Economist published in the May 2009 story, “A Giant Falls,” Detroit began making cars that were both dull and unreliable:
“Only in the 1970s, after the first oil shock, did faults start to become visible. The finned and chromed V8-powered monsters beloved of Americans were replaced by dumpy, front-wheel-drive boxes designed to meet new rules (known as CAFE standards) limiting the average fuel economy of carmakers’ fleets and to compete with Japanese imports. As well as being dull to look at, the new cars were less reliable than equivalent Japanese models.
By the early 1980s it had begun to dawn on GM that the Japanese could not only make better cars but also do so far more efficiently. A joint venture with Toyota to manufacture cars in California was an eye-opener. It convinced GM’s management that “lean” manufacturing was of the highest importance. Unfortunately, that meant still less attention being paid to the quality of the cars GM was turning out. Most were indistinguishable, badge-engineered nonentities.”1
Bad design and engineering were accompanied by disastrous pricing decisions, which further jeopardized quality:
“As the appeal of its products sank, so did the prices GM could ask. New ways had to be found to cut costs further, making the cars still less attractive to buyers.”
Autoworker wages didn’t make the Big Three uncompetitive by driving prices up; poor value drove prices down. As prices and quality fell together, consumers fled. The UAW’s contracts were almost irrelevant. One way to show this is to compare the pricing of the competitors’ vehicles with the size of the labor cost differential bargained by the UAW. Labor costs make up only 10 percent of the cost of a typical automobile. Before the auto rescue, the Big Three paid $55 an hour in compensation per auto worker while the Japanese paid only $46 an hour. (Company lobbyists and publicists inflated the total Big Three labor cost to $71 by attributing the unfunded pension and health benefit costs for decades of retired workers to the much smaller currently employed workforce2; the legacy costs for Japanese transplants were only $3 an hour.)3 But even if, for the sake of argument, we accept the unfairly inflated $71 figure, the difference in the cost of a vehicle attributable to the UAW (the UAW premium) would be 30 percent of the average 10 percent labor cost, or 3 percent of total cost.
In 2008, according to Edmunds, GM sold its average large car for $21,518. Assuming GM sold its cars at cost, the UAW premium would have been only $645 (3 percent of $21,518). Did the UAW premium raise the selling price so high as to make GM cars uncompetitive with Toyotas? Not exactly. Toyota sold its comparably equipped average large car for $31,753—$10,000 more than GM.4 It wasn’t price that made GM cars uncompetitive, it was the quality of the product and the customers’ perception of quality.5
For nearly 30 years, the Big Three’s market share fell steadily, from 77 percent in 1980 to 45 percent in 2009, almost entirely because the U.S. companies built cars that were noisier and less comfortable, had poorer fit and finish, poorer gas mileage, more defects, and a poorer repair record and resale value.6 Helper has documented the hostile relationships the Big Three developed with their suppliers,7 which led to the provision and assembly of parts that did not work well together, did not fit seamlessly, and whose inherent quality was sometimes substandard.8 In 2006, before the auto industry collapsed (and before gas prices skyrocketed), economists Kenneth Train and Clifford Winston did a careful econometric analysis of buyer preferences and concluded that:
“… the U.S. automakers’ loss in market share during the past decade can be explained almost entirely by the difference in the basic attributes that measure the quality and value of their vehicles. Recent efforts by U.S. firms to offset this disadvantage by offering much larger incentives than foreign automakers offer have not met with much success. In contrast to the numerous hypotheses that have been proffered to explain the industry’s problems, our findings lead to the conclusion that the only way for the U.S. industry to stop its decline is to improve the basic attributes of their vehicles as rapidly as foreign competitors have been able to improve the basic attributes of theirs.”
The authors conducted a simulation to determine “how much U.S. manufacturers would have to reduce their prices in 2000 to attain the same market share in 2000 that they had in 1990 and found that prices would have to fall more than 50 percent.” In other words, reducing the cars’ price by the UAW premium would have had no discernible effect on market share. The Big Three were building cars that most people simply didn’t want to buy, and only by cutting the price in half could they have retained their market share.
What happens to a corporation that sells its products at a low price while losing market share for 30 years? It goes bankrupt.
Fundamental mismanagement and building cars that customers didn’t want doomed the Big Three, not the UAW. Read more
Alan Simpson isn’t ‘saving Social Security’
Alan Simpson is at it again. Launching another off-color attack on people who oppose the Bowles-Simpson plan to bomb Social Security in order to save it, Simpson claims he is saving it for young people who would otherwise be “gutted.” In fact, Simpson’s overarching desire to protect rich Americans from paying their fair share of Social Security taxes (if wealthy earners paid FICA taxes on all of their income, most of Social Security’s solvency problems would be solved) leads him to propose cuts in Social Security almost as large as the automatic benefit reductions that will occur in 2033 under current assumptions.
According to an analysis of the Bowles-Simpson plan by Social Security’s chief actuary, middle-class workers with average earnings over the course of their careers (around $43,084 in 2010) would see a 22 percent cut in benefits by 2080, not significantly different from the 23.5 percent cut in benefits these workers would face if nothing were done to shore up Social Security’s finances. Our children and grandchildren will lose critical benefits under Simpson’s plan, while seniors like him are mostly protected.
Notwithstanding Simpson’s crocodile tears for young people, under the Bowles-Simpson plan, if someone who is born in 2015 retires at age 65 with a middle-class income in 2080, Social Security will replace only 28 percent of their pre-retirement earnings. By contrast, a 65-year old who retired in 1980 replaced 49 percent of pre-retirement earnings. It is Simpson himself who wants to gut the Social Security of coming generations.
Latinos and the good jobs crisis
This post originally appeared in the Huffington Post
If Latinos are to fully recover from the ravages of the Great Recession, they will need not simply jobs, but jobs that lead to increased earnings over time and that also have good benefits. In short, they will need what we call “good jobs.” Recent evidence from EPI research on state and local public sectors portends that getting good jobs will continue to be a major challenge for Hispanic workers.
From 2007 (the year the recession started) to 2011, Latinos workers’ wages in state and local public sectors declined more than the wages of whites and African Americans. The median wage of Hispanic employees declined 5.2 percent, compared with a decline of 1.9 percent for African Americans, and 0.7 percent for whites.
Since the 1970s, the rich have been getting richer as the rest of America has been suffering from a good jobs crisis. Wages have declined or stagnated and benefits have been cut. Just about everyone on Main Street has been hurt by the decline in the share of good jobs, but Hispanic men have been hit the hardest. From 1979 to 2008, the share of Hispanic men in good jobs declined 15.5 percent. For white and black men respectively, the declines were 12.8 percent and 9.3 percent.
Without a good job, it is very hard to keep one’s family out of poverty. A third of Hispanic children are living in poverty, nearly three times the rate for white children. Since the start of the recession, Latino child poverty has increased the most of the major racial and ethnic groups. To lower this high rate of poverty, we need to increase the wages of Hispanic workers. Unfortunately, Hispanics lead in the share of workers earning wages that cannot lift a family out of poverty.
In terms of benefits, Latinos are also in a dire situation. Hispanics have the lowest share of workers with employer-sponsored health insurance. Given that Latinos are underrepresented in good jobs that provide a retirement plan and overrepresented in jobs that do not provide enough for savings, it is not surprising that Latinos are very weak on measures of retirement security. The fact that Latinos have lost a significant amount of wealth over the recession does not improve the situation.
What can be done to produce more good jobs in the American economy and more good jobs for Latinos specifically? I discuss several policies in Getting Good Jobs to America’s People of Color, but here I will only address one: unions.
Recently, Knowledge@Wharton, the online business journal of the Wharton School of Business, published State of the Unions: What It Means for Workers — and Everyone Else (May 9, 2012). This article provided information about how a strong union movement helps provide good jobs.
Good jobs require good wages. Knowledge@Wharton cited recent research that has shown that the decline in union membership since the 1970s has played a significant role in the growth in income inequality. The journal quoted the sociologist Jake Rosenfeld, who observed, “It is hard to think of a way to tackle income inequality without a vibrant labor movement.”
Unions also help create good jobs by fighting for worker’s rights and for worker benefits. Wharton Professor Janice Bellace noted, “If you think of major pieces of legislation that have been very important to working persons, you will often see that the legislation was pushed by unions. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) . . . was pushed by the unions and almost no one else. And the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1977 . . . was brought by the International Union of Electrical Radio and Machine Workers.” She added that unions are truly the “national voice for the average working person.”
Without a strong union movement, and without increasing Latino unionization, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse the decline in good jobs in America. While all racial and ethnic groups are hurting from this decline, Latinos have been hurt the most.
Don’t let Congress fast-track another tax cut
House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) high-profile speech at last week’s 2012 Fiscal Summit garnered much attention for its pledge to again hijack the debt ceiling; less noticed was his announcement that the House of Representatives will establish a fast-track process for expediting “tax reform.” Comprehensive tax reform could add much needed revenue and balance to a long-term deficit “grand bargain,” but that’s not what Boehner is talking about:
“If we do this right, we will never again have to deal with the uncertainty of expiring tax rates. We’ll have replaced the broken status quo with a tax code that maintains progressivity, taxes income once, and creates a fairer, simpler code. And if we do that right, we will see increased revenue from more economic growth.” (Full text here.)
Anything resembling the tax plan recommended by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and included in Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) fiscal 2013 budget resolution—Boehner’s chief fiscal policy deputies—is going to have a devilishly hard time meeting this laundry list of talking points. That’s because conservatives falsely equate a “simpler” tax code with cutting and consolidating tax brackets, which would confer big tax cuts to upper-income households in the top tax brackets. This is the bedrock of the Camp-Ryan tax plan: “Consolidate the current six individual income tax brackets into just two brackets of 10 and 25 percent.” Short of unspecified offsets, this would sap progressivity from the tax code and deprive the Treasury of $2.5 trillion over a decade—accounting for more than half of the $4.5 trillion of unfunded tax cuts proposed in the Ryan budget. Combined with the other major tenants—repealing the alternative minimum tax (AMT), cutting the corporate tax rate to 25 percent, exempting foreign profits from taxation, and repealing health care reform—the tax code would be markedly flattened at the top of the income distribution, as seen in the Tax Policy Center’s (TPC) analysis of the Ryan budget, again short of unspecified offsets:
The red bars show what regressive upper-income tax cuts and lower-income tax increases look like, not what tax reform looks like. The missing element is how the tax cuts would be financed—i.e., which unspecified tax expenditures would be eliminated in “broadening the tax base.” House Republicans object to eliminating or even scaling back the preferential tax rates on capital gains and dividends—the tax expenditures most disproportionately benefiting upper-income households—which would be the only feasible way to maintain progressivity at the top of the income distribution with a top rate of 25 percent and no AMT. Repealing exclusions—like that for employer-sponsored health insurance—would hit middle- and upper-middle class households a lot harder than upper-income households, and repealing refundable tax credits would wallop only lower- and middle-income households (see Table 2 of this TPC report). Itemized deductions are more regressive, but nowhere nearly as regressive as the preferential treatment of capital income. If substantial base broadening were added to the Camp-Ryan tax plan without raising rates on capital income, either substantial progressivity or revenue (likely both) would be lost relative to current policy. Many lower- and middle-income households would effectively foot the bill, subsidizing more upper-income tax cuts.
With respect to the budget, relying on “economic growth” for more revenue translates to, at best, revenue-neutral tax reform relative to the inadequate levels raised by current policy. Official scorekeepers—the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation—rightfully reject the kind of “dynamic scoring” (i.e., changing economic projections and budget scoring based on potential macroeconomic effects of tax cuts) Boehner and others would cite to show more revenue. Economic growth is the only source of “increased revenue” that would not violate Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge—signed by 236 members of Boehner’s caucus—because it’s a gimmick, not a revenue source, as my colleague Ethan Pollack recently explained.
Lastly, Boehner’s implied objectives of revenue and distributional neutrality—which guided the Tax Reform Act of 1986—are now wholly inappropriate benchmarks, as they would lock-in the past decade’s unaffordable and regressive Bush-era tax cuts and exacerbate Gilded-Age levels of income inequality. Much of our structural budget deficit and the ad hoc state of temporary tax cuts’ pending expiration stem from the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts, which were, in a sense, “fast-tracked” with reconciliation (around the filibuster). Financing an extension of the Bush tax cuts with spending cuts (essentially maintaining revenue around 18 percent of GDP), as the Ryan budget effectively proposes, would require draconian spending cuts. Reducing revenue below current policy levels—the more likely outcome of the Camp-Ryan plan—would require implausibly deeper cuts and exacerbate the unsustainable long-run fiscal trajectory, grossly contradicting purported concern about budget deficits.
If Congress really is heading toward comprehensive tax reform in the next few years, policymakers need to be kept honest about what amounts to reform versus a tax cut. The United States simply can’t afford to let Congress fast-track another tax cut disguised as “tax reform.” And House Republicans are currently $4.5 trillion shy of proposing even revenue-neutral tax reform.
What happens if you tighten your belt …
… but don’t lose any weight? You get unsightly bulges elsewhere and can’t breathe well enough to exercise.
That’s essentially the House Republican solution to the long-term budget challenge of escalating health care costs: Shift costs to individuals, and do it in a way that impedes measures that could actually help control costs in the long run.
Nevertheless, belt-tightening is the latest weight-loss fad to hit Washington, prompting Robert J. Shiller to ask in yesterday’s New York Times, “Why is there such strong political support for fiscal austerity, for government cuts and layoffs, at a time of widespread unemployment?”
Shiller thinks the reason austerity has caught on (at least inside the Beltway) is that the other side has better metaphors, like belt-tightening. His proposed alternative—”winter on the family farm“—may not resonate in a non-agrarian economy, but his point is a good one: When there’s no planting, fertilizing or harvesting being done, it’s time for infrastructure projects to make productive use of idle labor.
It’s not even necessary to increase the deficit, though this would be the quickest way back to full employment. Raising taxes to pay for infrastructure and education would still create jobs, because all the money would be spent, whereas some of the income that was taxed would have been saved. This is especially true if the taxes fall on higher-income households. These investments would also pay off in the form of a more productive economy in the long run.
Alas, Shiller notes that despite the fact that a balanced-budget stimulus was endorsed in the International Monetary Fund’s 2012 World Economic Outlook, politicians espousing such measures, such as France’s François Hollande, aren’t taken seriously. Meanwhile, extreme and counterproductive measures put forward by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have shifted the window of policies considered to be within the political mainstream in the United States, even though Ryan would actually reduce taxes on the wealthy and slash public investment. The House Republican budget may be a non-starter, but so too—for the time being—are balanced-budget measures to get the economy moving again.
Speaker Boehner pledges to hijack the debt ceiling and jeopardize recovery again
At this week’s Peter G. Peterson Foundation 2012 Fiscal Summit, an event dedicated to avoiding the merest possibility that the United States could ever find itself in a sovereign debt crisis, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) was invited to address the assembled crowd, wherein he pledged … to try to maximize the possibility of a sovereign debt crisis.
Specifically, he pledged a repeat of last summer’s showdown over the statutory debt ceiling, when congressional Republicans concocted an artificial crisis of epic proportions, by refusing the historically pro forma task of raising the debt ceiling—done 73 times between 1940 and 2010—unless deep spending cuts were made. This time around, Boehner literally suggested that it would be more responsible to default on the full faith and credit of the United States than to increase the statutory debt ceiling without first hijacking the U.S. credit rating to extract spending cuts:
“Yes, allowing America to default would be irresponsible. But it would be more irresponsible to raise the debt ceiling without taking dramatic steps to reduce spending and reform the budget process… When the time comes, I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase.” (Full transcript here.)
Rather than indulge the revisionist histories of last summer invoked by Boehner and others at the Fiscal Summit, here’s a refresher on what happened with the last episode of economic and fiscal “responsibility.” First, Republican leaders demanded policy concessions before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling; after the Obama administration conceded to this, Republican leadership walked away from negotiations over a deficit reduction “grand bargain,” first with Vice President Biden, then from negotiations with President Obama. Republican leadership demanded a dollar in spending cuts for every dollar increase in the debt ceiling, refused any revenue increases accompanying spending reductions, and refused any compromise. Obama and Boehner formally negotiated a variation of these demands on July 31, two-and-a-half months after the Treasury Department declared a “debt issuance suspension period” of unconventional cash-management tools to avoid a sovereign default. The resulting Budget Control Act (BCA) cleared the Senate and was signed into law August 2, the last day Treasury could avoid defaulting.
(From Flickr Creative Commons via SpeakerBoehner)
Shortly thereafter, rating agency Standard & Poor’s exercised “responsibility” in the Boehner sense of the word—i.e., trying to leverage the political debate over debt ceiling into concrete economic damage—by downgrading the U.S. “AAA” credit rating for the first time in history based on a judgment about dysfunctional politics (their economic justification was dropped after the Treasury Department found a $2 trillion error in their budget math). As for the “compromise” that ended the standoff, the BCA solidified Congress’ pivot from prioritizing job creation to prioritizing austerity measures like those that have pushed much of Europe back into recession, even though near-term cuts are largely to entirely self-defeating while the Federal Reserve keeps short-term rates at zero. My colleague Ethan Pollack and I estimated that the first phase of spending cuts would shave 0.3 percentage points from real GDP growth in 2012 and lower employment by 323,000 jobs; the second phase of front-loaded, automatic “sequestration” cuts scheduled for fiscal 2013 and beyond pose graver risks to growth and joblessness.
There are only two theoretical ways in which long-term deficit reduction can accelerate economic recovery. First (and actually plausible), a long-term deficit reduction “grand bargain” could include substantial near-term fiscal stimulus and gradually phase-in deficit reduction after some macroeconomic trigger is met (e.g., EPI proposed a “6-for-6” trigger: unemployment at or below 6 percent for six consecutive months). Second, deficit reduction could lower the premium on government borrowing, and thus private interest rates. This second channel actually has no hope of actually working today, as longer-term Treasury yields are already at historically low levels. Making all future increases in the debt ceiling completely uncertain and chaotic, however, will almost certainly impede both channels in the future.
And this strategy of promising to hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage in exchange for spending cuts seems entrenched as the GOP strategy. This should not be mistaken simply for excessive zeal for cutting deficits; this is playing chicken with a self-induced sovereign debt crisis. Informed deficit hawks (and they exist—they just put vastly insufficient weight on solving the actually existing jobs crisis, in our view) endorse long-term deficit reduction as a means to avoid a sovereign debt crisis, not cause one.
The statutory debt ceiling has devolved from a pro forma vote into a global economic liability that Congress should put to rest. It seems clear that anybody interested in a sane economic policy regime should be looking for ways to repeal the debt ceiling, either in law or in practice. Time to bring on the $1 trillion coin?
Social Security advocates go on the offensive
In March, the AFL-CIO issued a call-to-arms on Social Security, saying, “We have to stop playing defense, because we have nothing to be defensive about.”
Advocates have taken up the challenge, coalescing around a strategy centered on eliminating the cap on taxable earnings, raising the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to reflect the higher out-of-pocket medical expenses faced by seniors, and increasing benefits across the board in ways that provide larger percentage increases for low-income beneficiaries. Building on a bill introduced in 2010 by Congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) that included the first two of these measures, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) made them the centerpiece of the retirement provisions in his Rebuild America Act.
The three measures were also among the recommendations of a blueprint released last Friday by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare Foundation and the NOW Foundation that focused on women; and two of these measures (minus the COLA increase) were among the recommendations of the 2011 Commission to Modernize Social Security that focused on people of color. The Center for Community Change and the Task Force on Older Women’s Economic Security, who are expected to issue their own set of recommendations in the near future, will also include some of these measures.
It goes without saying that advocates are not just making a strong case for increasing benefits, but also pushing back against proposed cuts—hence the focus on the need for a higher COLA when many are arguing for a lower COLA based on a “chained” consumer price index.
The progressive blueprints also include provisions that target particularly vulnerable groups, such as caregivers, very low-income retirees receiving the special minimum benefit, and college and vocational school students whose dependent benefits were cut in 1981. There’s significant overlap among the recommendations, with relatively minor variations reflecting the groups’ constituencies and different strategic approaches to dealing with the revenue side of the equation (the Commission to Modernize Social Security presented a package that included sufficient revenue to close the projected 75-year shortfall and pay for all recommended benefit increases).
Advocates must balance the impulse to make the system more progressive and help under-served groups with the need to preserve its role as a universal, contributory, and work-based social insurance system. While it’s tempting to attach many items on the progressive wish list to such a popular program (and, admittedly, this is a good way to grow a coalition), progressives also need to resist deficit hawks’ attempt to re-brand Social Security as a safety net program for the poor, which would doom the program in the long run.
One way to do this is to focus on policies that help everyone, but especially matter to low-income groups, such as replacing 95-100 percent of the first $767 in average indexed monthly earnings rather than 90 percent (one of several variations on the across-the-board benefit increase mentioned earlier). Another is to focus on proposals that can be framed as tweaks or extensions of the existing system, such as equal benefits for same-sex couples as proposed by Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) (an issue also flagged in the progressive blueprints). Though this generally argues against major changes or additions to the system, some proposals to take Social Security in new directions—such as providing for paid family leave—could conceivably enhance Social Security’s popularity rather than weigh it down.
All of this is to say that there is a shared resolve among Social Security advocates—many of whom attended Tuesday’s protest at the “Fiscal Summit”—to fight cuts in the program while pushing for needed improvements. The one potential outlier is a certain 1000-pound elephant that sometimes thinks it wise to make nice with the poachers.
Misguided views of Social Security emerge at fiscal summit
Yesterday, I attended the third annual Peterson Fiscal Summit, a gathering sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The event brought together a number of inside-the-beltway folks to speak on the fiscal challenges facing this country, ranging from the fairly reasonable to the rather unreasonable. Speakers included Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, President Bill Clinton, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and many others.
The focus this year, somewhat strangely, seemed to be on the wholesale acclamation of the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission report from Dec. 2010, The Moment of Truth. This represented somewhat of a departure from the previous year’s summit, when a fair deal of attention was paid to six very different long-term budget plans from organizations spanning the political spectrum (including this plan from EPI). While Bowles-Simpson was certainly present in 2011, it dominated the 2012 summit.
One rather startling moment came when President Clinton said the Bowles-Simpson proposals “[make] the Social Security system more progressive.” This statement alone—rather misguided—makes it worth revisiting the exact impacts Bowles-Simpson would have had on Social Security benefits, had it been adopted (or should it be adopted). First of all, in fairness, The Moment of Truth doesn’t hide its Social Security reform impacts, publishing a full distributional table on page 55 of the report. But back to Clinton. In calling Bowles-Simpson “progressive,” he is most likely referring to the fact that the provisions within would provide a very marginal bump (as seen in their distributional tables) to the very poorest Social Security recipients while significantly reducing benefits for the vast majority of recipients, including cuts for most low-income beneficiaries.
Clinton is relying on a technical definition of “progressive,” where even deep cuts to a critical government program can be called “progressive” as long as the cuts are larger for higher-income beneficiaries. But progressives should be wary to support this Social Security plan, even with the token bump for some of the lowest earners. Not only does it include draconian cuts for middle-class recipients through a change in the benefit formula and an increase in the full retirement age (this is equivalent to an across-the-board cut because benefits are reduced at any given retirement age), but it would also reduce the cost-of-living adjustment by about 0.3 percentage points per year, lowering lifetime benefits for recipients by about 3 percent on average. This last cut would disproportionately affect the oldest beneficiaries, who are also among the poorest beneficiaries. These cuts would be on top of the 13 percent cut that is gradually being implemented as the full retirement age increases from 65 to 67, a change dating to the early 1980s that takes full effect with the generations born in 1960 and later. Lastly, it’s worth noting that the “progressive” description of this plan only works if one looks at the dollar-value of the Social Security cuts. If one instead scales the cuts as a share of a household’s total income, it is far from clear that even this forced definition of “progressivity” would hold. The chart below, from StrengthenSocialSecurity.org, illustrates estimated impacts to benefits under Bowles-Simpson.
What was also disappointing was hearing some in the room speak to the fact that raising the retirement age for Social Security was an easy and appropriate way to improve Social Security’s finances just because people are living longer these days. In reality, not all people have the luxury of working in positions where it is realistic to maintain employment as one ages. Aside from those who must quit work due to health issues or to care for an ill spouse or family member, many older workers have jobs where they stand a good portion of the day, or engage in even more physically-demanding activities. Nor is everyone living that much longer; recent gains in life expectancy have been concentrated among those with high incomes and more education. The figure below (reproduced from the EPI paper, Beyond ‘normal’: Raising the retirement age is the wrong approach for Social Security) illustrates that between 1982 and 2006, life expectancy increased by one year for men in the bottom half of the earnings distribution, and five years for those in the top half of the earnings distribution. Lower-income workers would also be the most hurt by an increase in the retirement age, or any other across-the-board benefit cut, because they rely most heavily on Social Security benefits in old age.
Bernard ‘B’ Rapoport remembered
Last night’s memorial service for Bernard Rapoport at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington brought together hundreds of his family members, friends, and colleagues. Everyone in attendance treasured his enthusiasm, generosity, and thirst for economic justice and fairness. “B,” as he was affectionately known, founded American Income Life Insurance and was one of EPI’s longest-serving board members. I was privileged to attend a service that mixed politics, religion, and humor in a celebration of a life well lived.
MORE: EPI statement on Rapoport’s passing
President Bill Clinton topped a list of past and current Democratic politicians who spoke of B’s loyalty, persistence, and progressive values. As Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa) remarked, B was the rare political donor who pushed politicians and the government to demand more from the rich, rather than to cater to them. B was born poor (unlike most rich people), yet he never deluded himself into thinking that he was a self-made man. He knew that the government and our system of laws, the education he received, and his employees were all critical to his success.
Despite being a millionaire and a CEO, B never bought into the notion that as a “job creator” he was entitled to a lower tax rate than the folks who worked for him. He never thought that the government owed him anything. He also vehemently rejected the belief that the nation would be better off if the rich got continually richer at the expense of the many. As President Clinton said, B never tuned in to the message of greed and egotism that has characterized the last 35 years of politics in Washington.
Instead, B learned and subsequently taught a very different lesson: “As I grew up I realized when too few have too much and too many have too little, we do not have a sustainable society.”
Addressing unfair expectations for the next wave of educators
I regularly encounter, as I travel around the country, teachers who are dispirited by what they feel is an unrestrained contempt for their calling and career. These teachers feel that this contempt, initially expressed by politicians and “experts” with no classroom experience, has been repeated so frequently that it has spread to the public at large. They feel they are being blamed for all the inequities in American society, and are expected to rescue children from impoverished families and communities with no support from others in society. They feel abused by demands that they discard curriculum it has taken them years to develop, curriculum they are convinced has inspired children who had little prior interest in school, to love learning and inquiry. They do not believe that requirements that they focus on preparing students for standardized tests is respectful of the educational process or their own expertise, because such tests reflect only a tiny part of the knowledge and skills children need. These teachers are embittered and feeling put upon by those who claim to represent the interests of poor children but express this interest by trying to destroy the public education system that is the only institution attempting to serve these children. The teachers I meet all consider some colleagues to be inadequate and would like to see them leave. But the teachers I meet insist that poor performers are a small minority in their schools, and resent the now-popular and, they feel, indiscriminate witch hunt to cleanse schools of incompetents.
Last week, I addressed the 2012 graduates of the School of Education of Loyola University–Chicago. Anticipating (correctly, as it turned out) that these young people shared many of the feelings of the experienced teachers I have described, I urged these students to have the confidence to resist the now-conventional attack on public education and their teachers. Here is what I said to them:
Thank you, Dr. Fine, President Garanzini, Dean Prasse, faculty, parents, and guests.
Congratulations to the graduates.
Good luck as you embark on new responsibilities in one of the most important enterprises with which our society can entrust you – the preparation of the next generation.
Yet you leave here in a national climate of mistrust for all government, including public education. You are entering a highly politicized field where facts are too easily ignored.
In medicine, and in all fields, we know you can’t design proper treatment if your diagnosis is factually flawed.
Yet in education, conventional and widely shared diagnoses are based on fantasy, with little relation to facts.
Understanding these fantasies requires you not only to be good educators, but sophisticated citizens, capable of questioning data and penetrating the relationships between schools and the society that they reflect.
Politicians of both parties, leading educators, and philanthropists like Bill Gates who increasingly influence education policy, repeat incessantly that our schools are failing, especially for disadvantaged children. Past efforts at improvement, and vast increases in spending, have accomplished little or nothing, they say. Achievement gaps between disadvantaged and middle class students have narrowed little, so as the proportion of white children declines, this failure of our schools weakens our nation, rendering it unable to compete internationally.
In truth, this conventional view relies upon imaginary facts.
You may be surprised to learn that African-American elementary school student achievement, in Illinois and nationwide, has been improving so spectacularly that in math, the average black student now performs better than about 90% of all black students performed less than a generation ago.
What’s more, black elementary school math performance is now better than white performance was in the previous generation.
Let me repeat: black elementary school students today have better math skills than white students did only twenty years ago.
These data come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal sample that is the only reliable source on student achievement over time in this country.
The gains have been almost as great for middle-schoolers in math, and for elementary school students in reading,
Most gains were posted in the 1990s, before the test-obsessed accountability system called “No Child Left Behind,” a law whose flawed premise was that it was necessary to force educators to pay attention to minority students. Read more
Video: Cambridge Forum discussion on the U.S. and globalization
The Cambridge Forum hosted a videotaped mini-conference on the impact of global engagement on the U.S. and world economies on April 16. Speakers and topics included University of Massachusetts Amherst economic professor Robert Pollin on the “Globalization of Labor: Is a Race To the Bottom Inevitable?”; Economic Policy Institute Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Research, Robert Scott, on the “Globalization of Capital: The Rise of the Multinationals”; editor-at-large of The American Prospect and Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson on the “Globalization of Markets: Do Corporations Need American Consumers?”; and Harvard Kennedy School of Government Professor of International Political Economy Dani Rodrik, who delivered the keynote address on his book, The Globalization Paradox (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.).
Each participant delivered brief remarks and engaged in wide-ranging question-and-answer sessions with the audience that were moderated by Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect (Note: Kuttner is an EPI co-founder and board member). You can watch videos of all four speakers below:
Paging the congressional ophthalmologist
Sometimes it all seems to come together in a perfect storm of bewildering congressional myopia. This seems like one of those times.
This weekend, as many as 236,300 Americans without work will lose their unemployment insurance as a consequence of the “compromise” that Congress passed in February to save the payroll tax cut and UI extension. This is on top of the estimated 173,000 of the jobless who already lost their benefits this year. Some will inevitably argue that this is a good thing because extending benefits keeps people from taking available jobs. This is a wildly deceptive claim. The research shows that in some cases, the availability of unemployment insurance allows people greater flexibility to find jobs that better match their skills, but it’s not causing anyone to give up work entirely. In fact, unemployment insurance keeps discouraged job seekers from giving up their search for work, and adds a meager source of income to those individuals who are the most likely to spend their income and bolster overall aggregate demand.
The real problem is that there simply are not enough available jobs. Yet, instead of strengthening programs that help these and other people still struggling in the wake of the Great Recession, the Republican-controlled House voted yesterday to slash $310 billion in funding for such programs to avoid the previously agreed-upon cuts to the defense budget. What’s perhaps most shocking about this vote is that it comes despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans—both Democrats and Republicans—favors reductions in defense spending over cuts to other domestic programs.
Cutting important social protections and reducing assistance to people in need is only going to push more Americans into poverty. But in the cruelest of ironies, some members of Congress were not content with shooting America in the foot; they voted to blind her as well. On Wednesday night, House Republicans voted to defund the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, an incredibly powerful source of data for examining state and local economic trends, and one of the primary tools that the government uses to track poverty!
Some might argue that all of this constitutes the House’s attempt to commit the crime and then hide the evidence. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that it is just plain short-sightedness.
Larry Summers shrewdly reframes tax simplification
Last week, economists Martin Feldstein and Larry Summers sparred over tax reform on a panel discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project. It is widely agreed that Washington is overdue for and likely headed toward comprehensive tax reform in the next few years. Any compromise on a long-term deficit reduction package will necessitate more revenue and a quarter-century has passed since the last major scrubbing of the tax code (though the Tax Reform Act of 1986’s revenue- and distributional-neutrality makes it an inappropriate benchmark for reform). Most of the reform proposals have focused on broadening the tax base—i.e., eliminating or curbing tax expenditures—rather than raising marginal tax rates to increase revenue. Tax reform is also typically couched in the objectives of simplifying the tax code, reducing economic distortions, and creating a “pro-growth” tax code.
Summers raised an excellent point about the tax reform discourse, particularly the way tax simplification is spun by many advocates. Simplifying the tax code is often falsely equated with reducing the number and scale of marginal tax rates. The House Republican budget, for instance, proposed consolidating the income tax to two brackets—of just 10 and 25 percent—as the cornerstone of “simplifying the tax code and promoting job creation and economic growth.” But in the age of tax return software, Summers argued that tax rates don’t add to complexity; the complicating factor is calculating taxable income. Even before TurboTax, citizens managed to navigate a much longer schedule of marginal tax rates; the tax code had at any time between 24 and 26 marginal tax rates between World War II and 1978. The tax code was also much more progressive, particularly at the top of the income distribution, and income growth was evenly shared over this period. At present, compressing the number of marginal tax rates (currently at six) would only further decouple the contours of the tax code from the increasingly uneven distribution of income gains.
Reform is often framed in terms of broadening the tax base and simplifying the code in tandem, but Summers noted the two are often contradictory objectives. Base broadening inherently increases the amount of taxable economic activity, which in some circumstances can actually make the tax code more complex. Summers gave the example of repealing the exclusion on owner-occupied home sales from capital gains taxation, which would broaden the tax base and raise revenue but unquestionably increase complexity for many filers. Summers downplayed the need for simplification—at least as it’s often thought of—in this tradeoff, and instead endorsed base broadening in ways that increase revenue and the perception of tax fairness.
The complex nature of the tax code favors—both in effect and appearance—those with numerous financial planners and accountants, including dozens of Fortune 500 companies paying nothing in taxes. The tax code needs to be cleaned in ways that inhibit tax gaming and avoidance—best accomplished by reducing tax loopholes that allow for income shifting, such as the preferential rates on capital gains and dividends or the tax deferral for U.S.-multinationals’ foreign source income. That largely amounts to base broadening. Flattening the schedule of marginal income tax rates, on the other hand, would not improve tax compliance or simplify the tax code but would markedly reduce both tax fairness and revenue. When push comes to shove, much of what is peddled as “tax simplification” is nothing but an attempt to further undermine tax progressivity and reduce effective tax rates for upper-income households; doing so would amount to a tax cut, not tax reform.
Senate health committee hearing stresses importance of paid sick time
As my colleague, Ross Eisenbrey, pointed out earlier, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a very important hearing today (in honor of the upcoming Mother’s Day holiday this weekend) looking at the balance between work and family. This work/family balance has become one of the most ubiquitous sources of economic stress for millions of American families.
One of the important policy proposals covered at the hearing was providing a minimum number of paid sick days to all workers. As Judith Lichtman of the National Partnership for Women and Families noted during the hearing, 40 million workers have no paid sick time to care for themselves or family members when they get sick. Most of the evidence presented at the hearing in favor of providing this important policy was compelling, and it should be clear by now that paid sick time is essential for working families’ economic security. The personal testimony of Kimberley Ortiz about her lack of job security and the penalties she faced at work when she needed to take care of her sick son was particularly compelling and powerful.
In the Senate hearing, Juanita Phillips, Director of Human Resources of Intuitive Research and Technology, spoke about the flexibility her company provides to her workers. She attributes these characteristics—e.g. flexible work hours, paid time off, parental benefits (including short term disability)—to why her company is rated the country’s No. 2 best small business to work for by the Great Place to Work Institute.
Given this, it’s surprising that she argues against the Health Families Act. She claims her company will be punished for already doing the right thing. As an economist, that argument simply makes no sense. To her company, the law is what we economists call a “nonbinding constraint.” They currently provide 15 days of paid time off to new employees for use immediately, and 20 days of paid time off at three years of service. The bill proposes only 7 days.
It doesn’t add up. The one thing Phillips said that could explain her company’s position, is their concern about losing their competitive edge to recruit and retain the best talent. So, she admits the policy is a good one, but doesn’t want to encourage others to engage in it as well. Let’s just say that keeping millions of American families stressed so that a couple of high-road companies get a better pool of resumes when they offer job openings seems like a bad trade-off to me.
This issue is too important to our working families—particularly those at the middle and low end of the wage scale. Furthermore, in the context of similar legislation that was passed in Connecticut, the bill would be of very little cost to businesses, even including those businesses that are not already in compliance with the law.
Organized business’s knee-jerk opposition to paid sick days legislation
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is holding its Mother’s Day hearing today, and the main subject is paid sick leave, something every working mother needs. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) have introduced a bill, the Healthy Families Act (S. 984/H.R. 1876), to mandate that every employee receive at least seven days of paid time off for illness each year. Everywhere in the civilized world, employees have the right to at least some minimum amount of paid leave when they or their children are sick or when they have to see a doctor—everywhere except in the United States.
The organized U.S. business community—represented by the Washington lobbyists and dozens of giant trade associations—fiercely opposes giving American workers this right.
Why? Because business owners don’t want to be told what to do by anybody, least of all by the government. They consider themselves entitled to force employees to choose between working while sick, taking leave without pay (if the employees are lucky enough to have the right to take unpaid leave), or being fired.
At this morning’s hearing, the business community was represented by the Society for Human Resources Management, which reflexively takes the position that workers should not have legal rights; they should not, for example, have the legal right not to be fired without just cause, they should not have the right to a minimum wage, they should not have the right to unpaid leave to care for family members, they should not have the legal right to advance notice that their office, store or factory will be shut down, etc. The SHRM position is that wages, benefits, and protections should be left to the whim of the employer, or in fancier terms, to market forces.
As usual, the SHRM witness is testifying this morning that her business treats its employees well, giving its employees with three years or more of service 20 days of paid leave. The implication is that left alone, businesses will treat employees as well as they can afford to, and everything will be for the best.
But this benign view is not true. Absent legislation, businesses will treat employees only as well as they want to, even if they can afford to do much more. Even businesses whose CEOs are paid millions of dollars a year can deny all or most of their workers any paid sick leave at all. This problem is so widespread that about 40 percent of the private-sector workforce has no right to even a single day of paid sick leave. That’s 40 million people—mostly low-wage workers who are barely scraping by—who go unpaid if they get sick or if they have to take time off to care for a sick family member.
The SHRM witness argues that a mandate is “inflexible,” and that’s true. It should be inflexible; the whole point is to guarantee a basic, minimum right to workers—most of whom are women—that they need very badly. Nothing would prevent a business from doing more, as the SHRM witness’ business already does.
SHRM’s alternative arguments against the paid sick leave legislation are altogether astonishing. SHRM’s witness argues that providing generous benefits is a competitive advantage to her company that would be lost if every business were compelled by law to provide them, ignoring that the bill’s mandate is for only seven days of paid leave, rather than the 20 days her business provides, leaving plenty of competitive advantage.
“We provide generous paid leave so that we can continue to be an employer of choice for employees and applicants in our area. What we do not want is a government-imposed paid leave mandate to take away our competitive edge over other employers.”
And finally, she argues that it is somehow degrading to be told what to do by the government:
“Organizations such as ours that are already extremely successful with flexible workplace outcomes should not be brought down to the mediocre level that regulatory approaches would be trying to get not-so-well-run companies up to achieving.”
The silliness of these arguments is pretty good evidence that the business community has no good reason (no economic reason) to oppose the Healthy Families Act. Their opposition is ideological: They own the businesses, and no one has the right to tell them (the 1 percent) how to treat their workers—not even a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Grasping at Chinese straws
The Commerce Department released another depressing report on the U.S. trade deficit this morning, our monthly reminder of the huge gap between globalization’s economic reality and American economic policymaking.
In March, we bought about $52 billion (28 percent) more from the rest of the world than we sold. From first quarter 2011 to first quarter 2012, the deficit on goods and services rose almost 8 percent, with China representing almost two-thirds of our non-oil deficit with the rest of the world.
Yet, over the past year or so, a drumbeat of analysis in the establishment business press has been telling us to stop worrying; our chronic trade imbalance with China will soon disappear. New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter last week summed up the happy scenario: Chinese wages and transpacific transportation costs are rising and the Chinese are allowing their currency to appreciate. The implication is that rather than exerting unpleasant political pressure on China, we should trust in the natural workings of the market and the good common sense of the Chinese leaders who “appear to understand the need for change.”
Don’t hold your breath.
Porter is correct that wages are rising in China faster than they are in the United States. But to get a perspective, check out the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ numbers on international labor costs in manufacturing, where the latest data—for 2008—is that Chinese manufacturing costs are a little over 4 percent of U.S. levels. Yes, they probably have risen since then, but the gap is still immense and will clearly not be closed anytime soon.
Moreover, the narrowing of the gap may have as much to do with U.S. workers getting less as Chinese workers getting more. The corporate poster boy for looking at the bright side is General Electric, which has moved some production of a few heavy appliances back to the U.S. from China. What the poster leaves out is that GE workers who used to make $22 an hour are now making $13.
It is also true that rising fuel costs are making it more expensive to import large, heavy products from across the Pacific. But that hardly means that production will move back to the U.S. Thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement, multinational producers of big appliances and autos and parts who find importing from China too expensive, are moving to Mexico where labor costs are 18 percent of what they’d pay in the U.S.
Finally, Porter writes that the Chinese strategy of manipulating their currency to keep their exports cheap and imports expensive “may be turning the corner.” He notes that the Chinese, while they don’t want to appear caving to American pressure, have quietly allowed the renminbi to appreciate 40 percent against the dollar since 2005.
Just so. And over that time our trade deficit with China has grown by over 45 percent, suggesting how large China’s comparative advantage in trade has become. Moreover, despite the endless parade of American officials to Beijing pleading for more currency appreciation, the Chinese apparently think they’ve already done enough. Porter himself quotes China’s premier Wen Jiabao to the effect that the dollar-renminbi now may “have reached equilibrium level.”
Thus, there is little evidence that either the market or the Chinese leadership intend to rescue the U.S. from its trade quagmire.
Unfortunately, neither is there evidence that American leaders—from either party—intend to take responsibility for doing it themselves. Not only do they have no strategy to deal with the trade deficit, but President Obama and congressional Republicans are busily preparing for yet another of the so-called free trade agreements—this one to a group of countries around the Pacific rim—that have allowed our multinationals to off-shore production for the American consumer for over three-and-a-half decades.
But the market will not be denied; eventually we will balance our trading account. So, in the absence of a proactive policy, GE will be the model—the relentless lowering of American wages and living standards until the gap with workers in China and Mexico is closed.
Andrew Biggs is at it again
Comic Demetri Martin has this advice: “Only people in glass houses should throw stones, provided they are trapped in the house with a stone.”
Feeling trapped might explain the American Enterprise Institute’s Andrew Biggs’ penchant for stone throwing, such as accusing public pensions of projecting rosy rates of return (in Biggs’ view, anything higher than Treasury bond yields) despite the fact that he once hyped Social Security private accounts with promises of riches galore.
His latest: charging the National Institute of Retirement Security with advocating stone throwing—or at least window breaking—in order to stimulate the economy (apologies for the colliding metaphors).
Specifically, Biggs says NIRS ignores the cost to taxpayers in its research on the economic impact of public pensions, likening this to advocating window breaking as a way to create jobs for glaziers. Aside from the fact that the report in question repeatedly cites taxpayer costs, author Ilana Boivie is straightforward about the fact that her study measures the gross (not net) economic impact, as even Biggs eventually acknowledges. Thus, the economic stimulus from pensions can be compared to other forms of saving or spending without being limited to a specific counter-factual.
Biggs seems to think the relevant comparison should be with cutting public pension benefits and refunding the cost to taxpayers, as if they could be cut without damaging employee recruitment or retention—and, by extension, public services. He also cites another potential counter-factual: What would happen to the economy if state and local governments switched from traditional defined benefit pensions to 401(k)-style defined contribution plans? In theory, contributions to retirement plans should increase to make up for these plans’ inefficiency due to high fees and a lack of risk pooling. In practice, 401(k) contributions tend to be grossly inadequate, since anxiety, it appears, is not a good motivator. So such a switch would more likely lead to a decline in saving, an increase in consumption spending, and a short-run boost to our economy, albeit for all the wrong reasons (in other words, it would be rather like breaking windows to boost the economy). In the long run, you’d have to factor in an upward redistribution of wealth to high-income households who benefit the most from these accounts and whose higher saving rate would be a drag on our demand-constrained economy.
Perhaps Edward Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom" is the kind of earthly paradise Andrew Biggs envisions.
You can see how it gets complicated. Not for Biggs, though. For him, increasing savings in private accounts would lead to an earthly paradise, making Americans “not only richer, but also happier, healthier, more familial, smarter, and more active citizens.”
He said this back in the day when he was promoting President George W. Bush’s plan to partially privatize Social Security. Of course, Biggs took into account the cost in the form of reduced guaranteed benefits…
Actually, he didn’t. Which gets back to Biggs’ habit of accusing others of sins he’s committed. Maybe he feels trapped by Dean Baker in a crystal palace of Social Security privatization, and this is the only way he can think of getting out?
Price of a diploma: Class of 2012 faces tough job market, rising costs, and increasing debt
There was a great article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal that discussed the tough job market the Class of 2012 is facing. Many of these new graduates will be competing with the graduating classes of 2011 and 2010 just to get on the bottom rungs of the career ladder. While it’s well-documented that graduating into a depressed labor market lowers lifetime earnings potential on average, today’s young graduates have additional hurdles to worry about: rising higher education costs and crippling student debt.
At EPI, we, with economist Heidi Shierholz, recently released an analysis of the labor market for recent high school and college graduates. The results are predictably grim, with unemployment rates for both sets of graduates spiking at the beginning of the Great Recession and falling very slowly in the recovery.
The report also highlighted the rising cost of obtaining a college degree. The figure below shows that the cost of higher education has been rising faster than family incomes for decades, making it harder for families to pay for college. From the 1981–82 enrollment year to the 2010–11 enrollment year, the cost of a four-year education increased 145 percent for private school and 137 percent for public school. Median family income only increased 17.3 percent from 1981–2010, far below the increases in the cost of education, leaving families and students unable to pay for most colleges and universities in full.
Unsurprisingly, a large majority of students and recent graduates take on debt to pay for college. Two-thirds of recent college graduates have student loans, and trends indicate that the number of student loans is increasing. Between 1993 and 2008, average student debt for graduating seniors increased 68 percent, from $14,410 to $24,238. Average debt for graduating seniors at public universities was $21,105 in 2008, and average debt for graduating seniors at private non-profit universities was $28,888 (authors’ analysis of Project on Student Debt 2010). In taking on these loans, students are taking a risk and hoping that they will be able to quickly secure work to begin paying them off after graduation. In recent years, and through no fault of their own, a growing number of graduates have been on the wrong side of this risk, with harsh consequences. Although most student loans have a grace period of six months before repayment begins, recent graduates who do not find a stable source of income may be forced to postpone payment though deferment or forbearance, miss a payment, or worst of all, default altogether on their loans. Deferment and forbearance are short-term fixes, however, and ultimately increase the amount borrowers owe once each period ends. Missed payments and default can ruin young workers’ credit scores and set them back years when it comes to saving for a house or a car.
Even worse, these young workers do not have a strong safety net on which to rely during the volatile job-seeking process.
Young workers are often ineligible for unemployment insurance, for example, because they must first meet state wage and work minimums during an established reference period—a reference period during which they are often in school and not working. Many new graduates are likely turn to their families for assistance. In 2011, 54.6 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were living with their parents, an increase of 3.4 percentage points since 2007. This option is not, obviously, available to all young graduates. In short, young workers are being squeezed from multiple angles and their plight constitutes yet another instance of how damaging our tolerance of an underperforming economy truly is.
Additional findings and more analysis on the labor market facing young high school and college graduates can be found in our report, The Class of 2012: Labor market for young graduates remains grim.
Depressing graph of the day: The long-term unemployed
The Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative has released an addendum to its 2010 report A Year or More: The High Cost of Long-Term Unemployment, and the update isn’t pretty. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, Pew’s addendum finds that 29.5 percent of unemployed Americans in the first quarter of 2012 have been jobless for a year or more. That means 3.9 million working-age Americans haven’t been able to find a job in 12-plus months.
In 2008, during the first quarter of the Great Recession, 9.5 percent of the unemployed had been jobless for at least a year. While this percentage of the long-term unemployed peaked at 31.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011, it’s still very high and remains more than three times greater than at this point four years ago. Note also that BLS defines long-term unemployment as someone who has been unemployed for more than half a year (27 weeks or more). By this measure, 41.3 percent of the jobless still qualify as long-term unemployed.
Some other findings from the Pew analysis:
- Age: Older workers are less likely to lose their jobs, but much more likely to be jobless for a year or more once they do (see Figure 3 in the addendum).
- Education: Workers with higher levels of education are less likely to lose their jobs, but they’re no better off once they do as long-term joblessness is fairly even across all education levels (see Figure 5).
- Industry: No industry or occupation has gone unscathed due to long-term unemployment (see Table 3).
Continued high levels of long-term unemployment have a damaging impact on the economic situations of both individuals and families, and more broadly, on the economy as a whole. As EPI has documented before, the outcome of such long-term joblessness is “scarring,” which carries severe and long-lasting consequences for our economy and society.
What we should talk about when we talk about Social Security
Love?
That’s the original word in the Raymond Carver short story collection paraphrased in this blog title, and in a perfect world, that’s all we’d need to say: Americans love Social Security because it takes care of the people they love.
But this is Washington, so that won’t cut it. Fortunately, our friends at Social Security Works have hired some smart people to think about why we’re losing the messaging war on Social Security, despite the program’s popularity and the fact that transparently partisan attacks (“Ponzi scheme”) haven’t found much traction.
What has gotten traction: a decades-long and lavishly-funded campaign to convince younger workers that Social Security won’t be there when they retire, which opens the door to all sorts of shenanigans. Many Washington insiders, from across the political spectrum, have bought into the idea that Social Security is on an unsustainable course, and a willingness to slash benefits has become a “badge of fiscal seriousness” inside the Beltway, as Paul Krugman has noted.
Once the myth that Social Security is in trouble has taken root, attempts to dispel it with facts can inadvertently reinforce it, because the issue becomes technical and confusing, and people tend to assume that if you’re arguing about a problem, then it must exist. (If-there’s-smoke-there-must-be-fire logic isn’t always wrong, by the way: The Federal Reserve’s repeated attempts to pooh-pooh the existence of housing and stock bubbles should have put people on alert long before the bubbles burst in 2007.)
The good news, as John Neffinger of KNP Communications explained at a recent meeting of Social Security advocates, is that positive messages about Social Security can stick if presented the right way and in the right order.
Here are some DOs and DON’Ts, according to Neffinger:
- DON’T fight on their terrain (“Social Security isn’t going broke”).
- DO focus on the fact that Social Security is the only secure pillar of our retirement system (“If the middle class can’t count on Social Security in their retirement years, what can it count on? Not home equity, or 401(k)s or IRAs…”). In this vein, push for strengthening the program, as Michael Hiltzik does in this recent Los Angeles Times article.
- DO explain attacks on Social Security as attempts to dismantle the system for private gain (“Wall Street stands to make billions from managing more private accounts”) or political ideology (“They take their marching orders from someone who wants to shrink government to the size that they can drown it in a bathtub”).
- DO address the solvency issue by showing that simple adjustments can maintain the system (“Scrap the cap, so everyone pays the same percentage of their income in payroll tax”).
- But DON’T lead with the last two points, or you risk sounding partisan and reinforcing the myth that Social Security is in crisis.
The beauty of this framework, at least in theory, is that it avoids talking points that can backfire, like accusing Congress of raiding Social Security. It also sidesteps confusing topics like the trust fund that are hard to explain in a sound bite. Read more
Addressing price parity concerns
The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson had a nice write-up on the Future of Work paper that EPI released April 27. In his article, Thompson included a bar chart illustrating “where poverty lives,” showing the 10 states with the highest share of workers making less than poverty-level wages, as defined in the paper. Thompson’s chart also included the share of workers in these states making between 100-200 percent of poverty wages. His bar chart clearly demonstrated that in these states, between 70-80 percent of workers earned less than twice the official poverty threshold for a family of four in 2010, or around $46,000 annually. (As a side note on poverty measures, my colleague David Cooper did a nice blog post explaining how a more dynamic method of assessing poverty—the Census Bureau’s Research Supplemental Poverty Measure—both defines millions more Americans as being impoverished and shows a far greater proportion of people living at very modest means, when compared with the official measure.)
A few commenters on Thompson’s piece brought up a good point in regards to comparing wages by geographic location (in this case by state). Some were quick to point out that the 10 states with the highest shares of workers earning at or below poverty level wages were “red states,” while others pointed out that the analysis did not take into account purchasing power parity—that is, the fact that the purchasing power of a dollar may be different in Manhattan than it is in rural Kansas. Their point was simply that a worker earning $10 per hour in Kansas may actually fare better than someone earning far more who has to pay rent and buy goods and services in a traditionally pricey market such as New York City, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C.
The table below adjusts for this by inflating the poverty wage used in the paper—$10.73 per hour in 2010—by a regional price parity index calculated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (I actually averaged their measures for 2005 and 2006 that come from a BEA Research Spotlight titled Regional Price Parities: Comparing Price Level Differences Across Geographic Areas). The table shows the adjusted poverty wage level by state and the share of people in each state earning at or below that level. While Hawaii is somewhat of an anomaly due to its geographical separation from the lower 48 states by 2,500 miles of ocean, the next three states with the highest shares of workers earning less than the adjusted poverty wage are New York, California, and New Jersey; all states that contain very large metropolitan areas (as well as more rural areas). An even more accurate breakdown of regional purchase parity would show differences between rural and urban areas, as well as safety net services available for low-wage workers by region, but that is beyond the scope of this blog post.
Adjusted share of workers earning poverty wages by state, 2010
| State | 0-100% poverty wages | Adjusted poverty wage |
|---|---|---|
| Hawaii | 40.6% | $14.04 |
| New York | 38.4% | $14.10 |
| California | 37.8% | $13.75 |
| New Jersey | 31.8% | $13.42 |
| Rhode Island | 31.6% | $12.24 |
| Nevada | 27.7% | $10.74 |
| Connecticut | 27.5% | $13.20 |
| Illinois | 26.3% | $10.81 |
| Michigan | 26.3% | $10.04 |
| Massachusetts | 26.2% | $12.99 |
| New Hampshire | 26.2% | $12.21 |
| Florida | 25.2% | $10.59 |
| Oregon | 25.0% | $10.29 |
| Arizona | 24.5% | $10.22 |
| Texas | 24.5% | $9.81 |
| Virginia | 23.8% | $10.96 |
| Delaware | 22.5% | $11.44 |
| Vermont | 22.2% | $10.80 |
| Maryland | 21.7% | $11.38 |
| Pennsylvania | 21.4% | $10.06 |
| Washington | 21.2% | $11.08 |
| Tennessee | 20.6% | $9.00 |
| Colorado | 20.6% | $10.46 |
| Alaska | 19.8% | $11.24 |
| Ohio | 19.5% | $9.42 |
| Indiana | 19.0% | $9.16 |
| Minnesota | 18.8% | $10.20 |
| Georgia | 18.3% | $9.48 |
| North Carolina | 18.2% | $9.41 |
| Louisiana | 18.2% | $8.76 |
| Maine | 18.0% | $9.92 |
| Utah | 17.6% | $9.37 |
| Mississippi | 17.5% | $8.42 |
| Wisconsin | 17.4% | $9.82 |
| Kentucky | 17.4% | $8.69 |
| Alabama | 17.0% | $8.50 |
| Oklahoma | 16.5% | $8.67 |
| Idaho | 16.5% | $8.87 |
| New Mexico | 16.4% | $8.91 |
| Nebraska | 15.6% | $9.39 |
| Missouri | 15.5% | $8.79 |
| South Carolina | 15.3% | $8.92 |
| Kansas | 14.8% | $8.97 |
| Wyoming | 14.6% | $9.31 |
| Montana | 14.4% | $8.87 |
| Arkansas | 14.2% | $8.34 |
| Iowa | 14.0% | $8.95 |
| District of Columbia | 13.1% | $10.61 |
| South Dakota | 12.4% | $8.67 |
| North Dakota | 10.7% | $8.28 |
| West Virginia | 6.9% | $7.33 |
Source: Author's analysis of Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata, Bureau of Economic Analysis data
Note: Data were calculated using poverty data for a four-person household
The bottom line in this state-by-state comparison is not whether the states that show a high share of low-wage workers are red or blue; it’s rather to illustrate the often-enormous shares of people earning very low wages. As this National Low Income Housing Coalition report points out, for full-time individuals earning what they call the “renter wage,” a two-bedroom unit is unaffordable in nearly every state. The report also has some really interesting data, broken down by state, metropolitan area, and county, that shows how many full-time minimum wage jobs a household would need to hold to afford at two-bedroom fair market rent (FMR) unit. The data shows that whether or not low-wage workers are living and working in New York County (3.8 full-time minimum wage jobs to afford a FMR two-bedroom) or Wichita, Kan. (1.7 full-time minimum wage jobs to afford a FMR two-bedroom), their wages are likely not sufficiently covering their expenses.
How Romney can show support for working women
From 2007 to 2011, 70 percent of the jobs lost in the state and local public sector were jobs held by women. This amounts to roughly 765,000 jobs. Since 2011, we have continued to see public-sector job losses, and, unfortunately, it is a good bet that the declines will continue.
The Obama administration has provided aid to state and local government in a variety of ways. For example, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) injected more than $180 billion into state and local government. This aid has helped preserve significant numbers of jobs held by women. Women can be found in all types of public-sector jobs, but they are overrepresented in the public sector, in part, because they are more likely to be teachers. So far, $90 billion from ARRA has gone to education.
Out of a desire to appeal to women voters, Mitt Romney’s campaign has been making misleading statements about President Obama’s record. One way for Romney to show legitimate support for working women is to promise that, if elected, he will provide ample federal aid to state and local government. Unfortunately, Romney’s current commitment to shrink government means that he will put even more women out of work.
Underemployment isn’t a ‘myth’ for recent college grads
As readers of this blog are well aware, the labor market remains in terrible shape in the aftermath of the worst downturn since the Great Depression; this is evident in a wide array of economic data and is not disputed in the economics profession. Graduating into said labor market (in which the level of voluntary quits remains weak) with little to no work experience or wage history isn’t an enviable position, as my colleagues Heidi Shierholz, Natalie Sabadish, and Hilary Wething detail in their new paper The Class of 2012: Labor market for young graduates remains grim. Which is why I was flabbergasted by Abigail Johnson’s and Tammy NiCastro’s recent Forbes.com blog post Get Over It: The Truth About College Grad ‘Underemployment.’ Their title is plenty revealing, but here’s the gist of their argument:
“In recent weeks, there have been a slew of articles that reported how difficult things will be for this year’s college graduates because they can expect to be unemployed or “underemployed” … It’s not clear where the concept of being “underemployed” came from. But it’s damaging and counterproductive.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) U-6 Alternative Measure of Labor Underutilization—often referred to as the underemployment rate—is not a myth. It’s defined as such: “Unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.” EPI’s State of Working America website even tracks it on a monthly basis across educational attainment, gender, and race and ethnicity. Here’s what it looks like by educational attainment:
Not a pretty picture. Since the onset of the recession more than four years ago, underemployment has roughly doubled across all educational attainment levels (a clear indicator that the economy suffers from a sheer lack of aggregate demand—the economy is running $853 billion below potential output—rather than “structural” employment problems). With so much excess slack in the labor market, employers have all the bargaining power, hence anemic wage growth and the “employed part time for economic reasons” (i.e., involuntarily) part of the underemployment rate. Horatio Alger can’t set his hours worked—there simply aren’t enough hours of work being demanded in the depressed economy.
And as Shierholz, Sabadish, and Wething detail, it looks much, much worse for recent high school and college graduates entering the labor market. Over the last year, the unemployment rate averaged 31.1 percent for recent high school graduates and 9.4 percent for recent college graduates. The underemployment rates averaged 54 percent and 19.1 percent, respectively. High unemployment and underemployment, and accompanying depressed earnings early in career, will result in long-term economic scarring, particularly diminishing lifetime earnings. Beyond underemployment as measured by the BLS, skills/education-based underemployment (so called “cyclical-downgrading”) will contribute to lifetime earnings scarring; as my colleagues note, “entering the labor market in a severe downturn can lead to reduced earnings, greater earnings instability, and more spells of unemployment over the next 10 to 15 years.”
In suggesting that college grads should be grateful to take a job at Starbucks because they aren’t “entitled” to anything more, the authors blithely overlook that recent college graduates working at Starbucks part-time for economic reasons are likely displacing hours from someone with lower educational attainment. This is in no way an indictment of any such recent graduates. This is to say what’s truly damaging and counterproductive is economically illiterate “thought pieces” breeding complacency about the state of the labor market and the policy response to the Great Recession. Neither a college degree nor government can guarantee recent grads “good jobs” or full-time employment, but between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, government prioritized stabilizing the economy and targeting full employment—to the benefit of workers of all educational attainment levels. Underemployment of recent graduates is not a myth being cooked up to breed entitlement as the authors imply; it’s a reality and tragic failure of policymakers to address the jobs crisis.
Video: Paul Krugman discusses his new book
Yesterday, Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman spoke at EPI about his new book, End this Depression Now! A key point of the book and his speech is that there’s a common and very wrong belief that the economy is like a morality play: Lots of people made irresponsible decisions in the run-up to the economic collapse, and, like a hangover, they must now suffer the consequences of their actions.
As Krugman points out, the majority of the people who have been hurt by this crisis do not deserve the blame. Over eight million people lost their jobs and, with an unemployment rate of more than 8 percent for more than three years now, many of those same workers, along with new entrants to the labor market, have been unable to find jobs. Their jobs disappeared through no fault of their own, and the pace of their return is nowhere near sufficient to get everyone back to work anytime soon.
More importantly, Krugman points out that, unlike a hangover that needs to be waited out, we could easily fix the economy now and put these millions of people back to work. First, we should halt the fiscal austerity efforts that recently doomed the British economy. Second, we should embark on aggressive fiscal expansion to boost consumer and business spending, stimulating demand for goods and services and creating jobs. As Krugman notes, this is basic Econ 101. All we need is the political will.
What world of fiscal policy is Michael Gerson inhabiting?
Michael Gerson’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post hailed Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis) as the champion of “Reform Conservatism,” largely out of admiration for Ryan’s budget. In doing so, Gerson displayed a remarkable misunderstanding of both Ryan’s budget and fiscal policy at large. This adulation of Ryan—totally divorced from the policy specifics supposedly legitimizing Ryan—is exactly the inside-the-Beltway nonsense driving Jonathan Chait apoplectic (see his New York Magazine piece on Ryan).
Gerson’s major offenses are twofold, but he manages to hit both in the same sentence: “[The Ryan budget] deals seriously with the fiscal crisis — which, driven by demographics and cost increases, is a health entitlement crisis.” Let’s take these one at a time.
First off, Ryan’s budget is not serious—it’s gimmicky above and beyond the point of credibility. The Ryan budget proposes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts financed with a giant asterisk that wouldn’t come close to raising that much revenue and then simply “assumes” its desired revenue level (and forces the Congressional Budget Office to do the same in their long-term analysis). Under more reasonable assumptions about feasible “base-broadening,” the Ryan budget would push public debt north of 74 percent of GDP by the end of the decade, and roughly 84 percent of GDP if the tax cuts were entirely deficit-financed. (Ryan claims to hit 62 percent—we’re not talking rounding errors.)
Secondly, our long-run fiscal challenges overwhelmingly stem from the dual problems of escalating national health care expenditure and an addiction to tax cuts. Demographic change and health care inflation will certainly drive up federal health expenditure, but these trends are a broader national economic challenge with ramifications for the federal budget, not vice versa. And demographic change can’t be reformed away—it compels more revenue, not less.
So how seriously does Ryan deal with these underlying economic challenges? Not at all: He offers an accounting solution for the federal government—turning Medicare into a voucher system and slashing Medicaid—that would exacerbate national health expenditure. Economists Dean Baker and David Rosnick estimated that Ryan’s FY2012 budget would increase national health expenditure by $30 trillion over 75 years if seniors purchased Medicare-equivalent plans on the private market; that’s because Medicare is 11 percent cheaper than an equivalent private plan and is projected to be 28 percent cheaper by 2022. (The more likely result is more health expenditure as well as worse coverage and care.) Forsaking the economies of scale and purchasing power of Medicare would shift costs from the federal balance sheet to businesses, households, and state governments, while worsening the economic challenges at hand. Incidentally, the Affordable Care Act took the opposite approach—using government’s market share to lower costs—and it’s showing early signs of working; as the New York Times reported last week, national health spending has slowed markedly over the last few years. While much more can be done on this front, the latter is a serious approach to an economic problem, unlike slashing health care for the impoverished and disabled as the Ryan budget proposes.
Furthermore, long anticipated demographic change is a reality that compels looking at both sides of the budget ledger and viewing historical benchmarks as poor guides for setting policy. Gerson even acknowledges that revenue must realistically rise above a post-war historical average of around 18 percent of GDP (versus 17.8 percent under current policy and 18.3 percent magically assumed in the Ryan budget, over the next decade); but he then turns a blind eye to the reality that, short of unspecified offsets, the Ryan budget would drop revenue to 15.5 percent of GDP over the next decade according to the Tax Policy Center. Deficit-financed tax cuts also increase spending on debt service, which—like Gerson argues of health care—threatens to crowd out other government functions (under current policies, net interest spending—swollen by deficit-financed tax cuts—will exceed nondefense discretionary spending by the end of the decade). Gutting health care spending to partially finance massive, regressive tax cuts in no way equates to “addressing the fiscal crisis,” as Gerson adamantly claims Ryan is doing.
Gerson wants to believe the Republican Party cares about deficits, but their diametrically opposed focus is reducing taxes—overwhelmingly for those at the top of the income distribution. Ryan’s budget would indeed deeply cut health care spending, but it is neither focused on deficits nor serious; it’s about doubling-down on the Bush-era tax cuts. And the only serious things about the Bush-era tax cuts were the hole they blew in the federal budget and their dismal economic legacy.
Racial inequality and the black homicide rate
I had the privilege of attending the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s America Healing Conference last week. The America Healing initiative promotes racial healing to address racial inequity, and, in doing so, works “to ensure that all children in America have an equitable and promising future.”
At the conference, the honorable Mitchell J. Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, gave a moving, passionate, and brave speech about homicide in black communities. He challenged us to consider whether we devalued black lives by not paying sufficient attention to the more common forms of homicide in black communities, and instead reserved our activism for homicides that could be conceived of as involving racism.
Landrieu made an important point, but I think he also missed a number of other significant points. The black homicide victimization rate is six times the white rate, so this is clearly a worthy issue to address. But, it is important to note that the black homicide victimization rate was cut in half from 1991 to 1999. It declined 49 percent while the white rate declined 39 percent. Too often we assume that things are always getting worse. It is beneficial to acknowledge this dramatic positive change, while also acknowledging that there is much more to be done. Since the 1990s, however, the black and white homicide rates have basically been flat.
Landrieu failed to acknowledge that much of the work done by the participants of the conference, if successful, is likely to reduce homicide rates. Homicide rates are driven by a very complex mix of psychological and sociological factors that are not yet completely understood by criminologists. Probably the majority of the conference attendees work in areas that have the potential to reduce homicide rates.
Some of the participants work to improve educational outcomes for blacks. Research suggests that increases in the educational attainment, particularly of males, will reduce homicide rates. (Males are more likely to commit homicide, and it is likely that their social and economic circumstances may play a big role in homicide rates.)
Healthy children do better in school and also have lower rates of criminal offending. All aspects of health, especially in the early years, probably matter, but we should be especially concerned about the very high rates of black children’s exposure to lead. There are strong links of lead exposure to violent crime. Thus, the participants who are concerned with reducing racial disparities in children’s health can also be seen as working to reduce homicide rates.
Concentrated economic disadvantage, poverty, and unemployment have all been found to be predictors of homicide rates. Participants working to improve the economic conditions of black communities can also be said to be working to reduce homicide rates.
A number of other aspects of racial inequity that the attendees to the conference work on are also likely to be drivers of higher black homicide rates. Thus, it is not accurate to say that the participants of the conference were not regularly working to address homicide.
Finally, while the mechanisms to reduce homicide rates are not yet completely understood, the response to bad policing, bad laws, and racial-biased individuals is clearer. In part, it may be for this reason that there can be highly visible mobilizations around these issues. A relatively quick mobilization might change bad police practices, undo a bad law, or change the behavior of a specific racially-biased person. Undoing racial inequity in all of the factors found to drive homicide rates—health, education, economics, and more—will require a longer and deeper struggle. Read more
It’s executives and the finance sector causing surging 1% income growth!
That the incomes of the top 1 percent have fared fabulously is well known, and deservedly so. But it was not until the analysis of tax returns by Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley Heim that it could be documented that the doubling of the income share of the top 1 percent could be directly traced to executive compensation and finance-sector compensation trends. The new EPI paper, CEO pay and the top 1%: How executive compensation and financial-sector pay have fueled income inequality, which previews some of the findings from the forthcoming State of Working America, does exactly that.
Between 1979 and 2005 (the latest data available with these breakdowns), the share of total income held by the top 1.0 percent more than doubled, from 9.7 percent to 21.0 percent, with most of the increase occurring since 1993. The top 0.1 percent led the way by more than tripling its income share, from 3.3 percent to 10.3 percent. This 7.0 percentage-point gain in income share for the top 0.1 percent accounted for more than 60 percent of the overall 11.2 percentage-point rise in the income share of the entire top 1.0 percent.
The increases in income at the top were largely driven by households headed by someone who was either an executive or in the financial sector as an executive or other worker. Households headed by a non-finance executive were associated with 44 percent of the growth of the top 0.1 percent’s income share and 36 percent in the growth among the top 1.0 percent. Those in the financial sector were associated with nearly a fourth (23 percent) of the expansion of the income shares of both the top 1.0 and top 0.1 percent. Together, finance and executives accounted for 58 percent of the expansion of income for the top 1.0 percent of households and an even greater two-thirds share (67 percent) of the income growth of the top 0.1 percent of households.
The paper also presents new analysis of CEO compensation based on our tabulations of Compustat data. From 1978–2011, CEO compensation grew more than 725 percent, substantially more than the stock market and remarkably more than the annual compensation of a typical private-sector worker, which grew a meager 5.7 percent over this time period.
One way to illustrate the increased divergence between CEO pay and a typical worker’s pay over time is to examine the ratio of CEO compensation to that of a typical worker, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio, as shown in the figure. This ratio measures the distance between the compensation of CEOs in the 350 largest firms and the workers in the key industry of the firms of the particular CEOs.
CEO-to-worker compensation ratio, with options granted and options realized,1965–2011
Note: "Options granted" compensation series includes salary, bonus, restricted stock grants, options granted, and long-term incentive payouts for CEOs at the top 350 firms ranked by sales. "Options exercised" compensation series includes salary, bonus, restricted stock grants, options exercised, and long-term incentive payouts for CEOs at the top 350 firms ranked by sales.
Sources: Authors' analysis of data from Compustat ExecuComp database, Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics program, and Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income and Product Accounts Tables
Though lower than in other years in the last decade, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in 2011 of 231.0 or 209.4 is far above the ratio in 1995 (122.6 or 136.8), 1989 (58.5 or 53.3), 1978 (29.0 or 26.5), and 1965 (20.1 or 18.3). This illustrates that CEOs have fared far better than the typical worker over the last several decades. It is also true that CEO compensation has grown far faster than the stock market or the productivity of the economy.Read more