Three Republican-appointed white men are now deciding whether you have rights on the job
Yesterday marked the end of Democratic National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Member Lauren McFerran’s term. McFerran ended her term offering the lone dissenting voice in the Trump board’s efforts to slow down union elections to give employers more time to campaign against the union, give employers the ability to make unilateral changes without bargaining with their workers’ union, weaken remedies when employers break the law, and more.
McFerran is the former Chief Labor Counsel for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP Committee) and is widely respected by both labor and management. Her departure leaves a second open seat on the board that the Trump administration is tasked with filling. However, the Trump administration has not yet acted to nominate McFerran for a second term, nor has it nominated a Democrat to fill the other vacant Democratic seat that has been open since August 2018. The failure of the Trump administration to act is not for lack of a qualified nominee with widespread support. Former deputy general counsel and longtime NLRB career attorney Jennifer Abruzzo has reportedly been under consideration.
As a result, the NLRB has only Republican appointees for the first time in its 85-year history, and the three Republicans are all white men—two lawyers who represented corporations before coming to the NLRB, and one former Republican congressional staffer. There is no Democratic appointee to offer alternative views on workers’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), or to issue dissenting opinions when the Trump board goes off track. And there are no women or people of color participating in these decisions, even though women and people of color make up the majority of workers.
EPI previously reported on the unprecedented rollback of workers’ rights happening at the hands of these three NLRB appointees. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the nation’s largest business lobby—is 10 for 10 in winning action on its top 10 “wish list” for the Trump board. Unfortunately, things are likely to get worse, not better. With no Democratic appointee there to provide an alternative or dissenting viewpoint on the Trump board’s actions, we are likely to see a continued rollback of workers’ rights under this bedrock statute that, after all, is supposed to protect workers’ rights.
On its second anniversary, the TCJA has cut taxes for corporations, but nothing has trickled down
It’s been two years since Republicans passed their Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), enough time for its effects to have come into full view. As we lay out in a report released today with the Center for Popular Democracy, the economic data that has come in since its passage has not been kind to the argument of the TCJA’s proponents.
The centerpiece of the TCJA was a large cut in the corporate tax rate. Supporters of the TCJA made the supply-side argument that higher corporate profits would juice investment, which would eventually trickle down to faster productivity growth that would mechanically boost workers’ wages. The theory behind this relied on a long chain of economic events occurring, and it was clear from the very beginning that there was little reason to trust a single link in the chain.
Despite some disingenuous and cynical arguments surrounding wages and bonuses, if the TCJA is to work as its supporters claimed, then the first thing we would see is a substantial uptick in investment. After two years, there is no evidence of any investment boom. Instead, investment growth followed along its pre-TCJA trend for a couple of quarters and then cratered. Year-over-year investment growth has sunk from 5.4% at the time of the TCJA’s passage to just 1.3% in the most recent quarter.
More evidence the Trump tax cuts aren’t working as advertised: Change in real, nonresidential fixed investment shows no investment boom
| Years | Real, nonresidential fixed investment |
|---|---|
| 2003-Q1 | -2.3% |
| 2003-Q2 | 1.6% |
| 2003-Q3 | 4.0% |
| 2003-Q4 | 6.8% |
| 2004-Q1 | 5.2% |
| 2004-Q2 | 4.9% |
| 2004-Q3 | 5.7% |
| 2004-Q4 | 6.5% |
| 2005-Q1 | 9.2% |
| 2005-Q2 | 8.2% |
| 2005-Q3 | 7.4% |
| 2005-Q4 | 6.1% |
| 2006-Q1 | 8.0% |
| 2006-Q2 | 8.2% |
| 2006-Q3 | 7.8% |
| 2006-Q4 | 8.1% |
| 2007-Q1 | 6.5% |
| 2007-Q2 | 7.0% |
| 2007-Q3 | 6.8% |
| 2007-Q4 | 7.3% |
| 2008-Q1 | 5.8% |
| 2008-Q2 | 3.8% |
| 2008-Q3 | 0.2% |
| 2008-Q4 | -7.0% |
| 2009-Q1 | -14.4% |
| 2009-Q2 | -17.1% |
| 2009-Q3 | -16.1% |
| 2009-Q4 | -10.3% |
| 2010-Q1 | -2.3% |
| 2010-Q2 | 4.1% |
| 2010-Q3 | 7.5% |
| 2010-Q4 | 8.9% |
| 2011-Q1 | 8.0% |
| 2011-Q2 | 7.3% |
| 2011-Q3 | 9.3% |
| 2011-Q4 | 10.0% |
| 2012-Q1 | 12.9% |
| 2012-Q2 | 12.6% |
| 2012-Q3 | 7.2% |
| 2012-Q4 | 5.6% |
| 2013-Q1 | 4.3% |
| 2013-Q2 | 2.3% |
| 2013-Q3 | 4.4% |
| 2013-Q4 | 5.4% |
| 2014-Q1 | 5.5% |
| 2014-Q2 | 8.1% |
| 2014-Q3 | 8.4% |
| 2014-Q4 | 6.9% |
| 2015-Q1 | 5.3% |
| 2015-Q2 | 3.0% |
| 2015-Q3 | 1.3% |
| 2015-Q4 | -0.1% |
| 2016-Q1 | -0.3% |
| 2016-Q2 | -0.1% |
| 2016-Q3 | 0.7% |
| 2016-Q4 | 1.8% |
| 2017-Q1 | 3.6% |
| 2017-Q2 | 3.6% |
| 2017-Q3 | 2.9% |
| 2017-Q4 | 4.8% |
| 2018-Q1 | 6.4% |
| 2018-Q2 | 7.4% |
| 2018-Q3 | 7.5% |
| 2018-Q4 | 6.5% |
| 2019-Q1 | 4.5% |
| 2019-Q2 | 2.9% |
| 2019-Q3 | 2.7% |
| 2019-Q4 | 1.4% |
| 2020-Q1 | -1.3% |
| 2020-Q2 | -8.9% |
Note: Chart shows year-over-year change in real, nonresidential fixed investment from 2003Q1 to 2020Q2.
Source: Adapted from Figure A in Hunter Blair, "The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Isn’t Working and There’s No Reason to Think That Will Change," Working Economics (Economic Policy Institute blog), October 31, 2019.
Source: Adapted from Figure A in Hunter Blair, The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Isn’t Working and There’s No Reason to Think That Will Change, Economic Policy Institute, October 2019. Data are from EPI analysis of data in Table 1.1.6 from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).
To be blunt, this means that the $4,000 annual boost to average incomes that the White House Council of Economic Advisers promised to working families because of the TCJA did not—and will not—happen. While it’s been worse-than-advertised for working families, the TCJA has been an even bigger boon to large corporations and rich households. In fact, corporate tax revenues have come in even lower than the Congressional Budget Office originally projected, allowing corporations and their shareholders to make out like bandits.
The Farm Workforce Modernization Act allows employers to hire migrant farmworkers with H-2A temporary visas for year-round jobs: Impacts are unknown and other wage-setting formulas should be considered
My last blog post described in detail how the Farm Workforce Modernization Act (FWMA)—a bipartisan piece of legislation in the House of Representatives that would legalize unauthorized immigrant farmworkers, make major reforms and expansions to the H-2A temporary work visa program, and require farm employers to use E-Verify—included an updated H-2A wage rule that could lower wages for migrant farmworkers. I also called on the House of Representatives to further assess the impacts of that the FWMA could have on the farm labor market by holding public hearings in the relevant committees of jurisdiction with expert testimony before voting on the bill. One of the other major provisions in the bill that also desperately needs a closer look is the FWMA’s proposal to allow H-2A jobs—which currently must only offer temporary or seasonal work—to become eligible for year-round agricultural occupations.
A look at annual average employment in in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data set shows there were just over 419,000 year-round jobs in agriculture, mostly in greenhouse and nursery production (155,000) and animal production and aquaculture (264,000), which represent the major year-round occupational categories in agriculture. Farm employers have been clamoring for years for Congress to allow them to hire temporary H-2A workers for many of these 419,000 permanent, year-round jobs, especially on dairies. Since they haven’t had the requisite support to pass legislation that would accomplish this, members of Congress have attempted multiple times to circumvent the regular legislative process by pushing to make the change through legislative riders on annual omnibus appropriations bills.
The FWMA contains provisions to make H-2A year round: For the first three years after enactment, 20,000 three-year H-2A visas per year would be made available for year-round agricultural jobs—meaning 60,000 after three years—with half allocated for the dairy industry. Although the maximum allowed number of year-round H-2A jobs seems relatively small at first, the number could rise rapidly—in years four through 10, the cap could increase by 12.5% per year—and after the tenth year, the cap could be eliminated.
Looking for evidence of wage-led productivity growth: EPI Macroeconomics Newsletter
While unemployment rates are sitting at their lowest levels in decades, wage growth (adjusted for inflation) remains slower than in previous periods of comparably low unemployment. Part of the reason why wage growth remains subdued is that productivity growth has been generally weak since the Great Recession ended. This week’s newsletter provides some guidance on a key question for macroeconomic policymakers like the Federal Reserve: do we need to take this slow rate of productivity growth as a given, or can we nudge productivity upward by allowing unemployment to sink even lower for longer?
Specifically, I address the widespread speculation about the possibility of “wage-led productivity growth”—the hypothesis that tight labor markets that push up labor costs lead firms to invest more in labor-saving equipment and practices. Some suggestive evidence of this wage-led productivity growth has been shown in patterns of macroeconomic data. This newsletter provides some more suggestive evidence from patterns of productivity growth broadly but also across a set of very detailed industries when the labor share of industry income rises and falls. Here are the key findings:
- At the aggregate level, a rise in the labor share of corporate-sector income is associated with a small but significant rise in the pace of average productivity growth over the subsequent two years.
- At detailed industrial levels (looking at 124 industries mostly in manufacturing), this relationship is even stronger: a 1 percentage-point rise in the labor share of industry income is associated with a 0.1 percentage-point increase in the average pace of productivity growth over the subsequent two years.
- These relationships between labor share of income and productivity growth are consistent with a scenario in which firms try harder to make labor-saving investments and organizational changes when labor becomes scarcer and the need to pay higher wages threatens to pinch profits. If the labor share of corporate-sector income rose from today’s 78% to the 82% that characterized the tight labor markets of 2000, this would imply a boost to productivity of roughly 0.4 percentage points—an amount that would cut almost in half the gap between the productivity growth in recent years and the productivity growth of the late 1990s.
These results are obviously suggestive, not dispositive. The key challenge to testing the causal link that runs from higher pressure labor markets to increased effort by firms to find and adopt labor-saving practices and investments is finding truly exogenous changes in labor market tightness. This search for exogenous changes in the cost pressures firms face should be a prime preoccupation for macroeconomic policymakers in the near future. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll describe our findings in a bit more detail and discuss their potential implications.Read more
House vote imminent on the bipartisan Farm Workforce Modernization Act—which would lower wages for migrant farmworkers: Hearings and assessments of impacts still needed
On October 30, Representatives Zoe Lofgren (D-Cal.) and Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), along with dozens of other bipartisan cosponsors, introduced the Farm Workforce Modernization Act (FWMA), a compromise bill negotiated between representatives of agribusiness, farmworker advocates, and unions that would legalize unauthorized immigrant farmworkers, make major reforms and expansions to the H-2A temporary work visa program, and require farm employers to use E-Verify, an electronic employment verification system, to verify whether newly hired workers are authorized to be employed in the United States. The FWMA could legalize hundreds of thousands of unauthorized farmworkers while restructuring the landscape for farm employment. The House of Representatives looks set to vote on the FWMA as early as this week.
The FWMA would solve an important farm labor issue—perhaps the most important issue—legalizing unauthorized farm workers and their families. But it would also change the rules of a problematic temporary work visa program, H-2A, where migrant workers are indentured to their employers, often abused and exploited in the fields, paid low wages and robbed of their wages, sometimes live in substandard housing, and have at times been victims of human trafficking.
The H-2A rule changes in the FWMA would expand the H-2A program to year-round occupations, prohibit wage growth that might otherwise occur in the free market, and codify into law most of a new H-2A wage regulation that was recently put into place by the Trump administration—which is geared towards lowering the wages of most migrant workers in the H-2A program—and which many worker advocates opposed publicly. These provisions should raise concerns about the impact of the FWMA on the H-2A program and the future farm labor force but have not yet been explored in any congressional hearing focusing on the FWMA or through the publication of any government reports, or even credible research by non-governmental organizations.
Considering the large and emerging role of H-2A in farm labor, perhaps the single biggest question about the FWMA from a labor standards perspective is: what will happen to H-2A wage rates under the bill? The FWMA updates and codifies a new H-2A wage rule—known as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate or AEWR. In the absence of any existing credible analysis of the FWMA, I offer some comments below outlining my concerns with some of the H-2A wage provisions in the bill. In order to understand its possible impact however, a brief discussion of the current AEWR and the recently proposed Trump H-2A wage rule is needed because the FWMA mostly incorporates the proposed Trump H-2A wage rule.Read more
What to watch on jobs day: Concerning slowdown in job growth and weakening wage growth
As we approach the end of 2019, it’s important to keep the long-run perspective on economic health in mind, but also investigate new trends that have emerged in the last several months that need to be closely monitored. Two concerning trends are the slowdown in nominal wage growth as well as the slowdown in payroll employment growth.
Let’s start with payroll employment growth. On its face, the pace of job growth in 2019 hasn’t been particularly troubling. The economy continues to move in the right direction—though at a slightly slower pace than the last couple of years—soaking up sidelined workers as the unemployment rate remains at historically low levels. But, when you factor in the preliminary benchmark revisions—which showed a half million fewer jobs created between April 2018 and March 2019—the data indicate weaker employment growth this year than originally reported. The final benchmark revisions won’t be released until the January 2020 employment numbers are released in February, but the preliminary release is troubling. And large downward revisions are sometimes associated with early signs of a recession because it means the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)’s model for predicting the births and deaths of firms is off, often accompanied by a turning point in the economy. These revisions don’t tell us a recession is necessary on the immediate horizon, but they are certainly something to keep in mind as the year winds down.
While the topline numbers are important to track, it’s also important to look under the hood. Manufacturing employment, for instance, has exhibited a notable slowdown in employment growth this year. The figure below shows the month-to-month change in manufacturing employment over the last two years with two important modifications. First, I’m using a three-month moving average to smooth the volatility in the series. Second, I’m removing the effect of the 46,000 striking GM workers that depressed the October numbers.
Manufacturing employment growth tapers off: Manufacturing monthly employment growth, in thousands, three month moving average, October 2017–October 2019
| Date | Three month moving average |
|---|---|
| 2017-10-01 | 23.3 |
| 2017-11-01 | 19.3 |
| 2017-12-01 | 26.0 |
| 2018-01-01 | 24.7 |
| 2018-02-01 | 25.0 |
| 2018-03-01 | 22.3 |
| 2018-04-01 | 24.3 |
| 2018-05-01 | 21.0 |
| 2018-06-01 | 25.0 |
| 2018-07-01 | 24.3 |
| 2018-08-01 | 20.0 |
| 2018-09-01 | 15.3 |
| 2018-10-01 | 18.3 |
| 2018-11-01 | 24.7 |
| 2018-12-01 | 25.3 |
| 2019-01-01 | 21.3 |
| 2019-02-01 | 15.0 |
| 2019-03-01 | 7.3 |
| 2019-04-01 | 2.7 |
| 2019-05-01 | 0.7 |
| 2019-06-01 | 5.0 |
| 2019-07-01 | 5.3 |
| 2019-08-01 | 5.3 |
| 2019-09-01 | 0.3 |
| 2019-10-01 | 2.3 |
Note: Adjusted for striking workers: https://www.bls.gov/ces/publications/strike-report.htm.
Source: EPI analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Employment Statistics public data series
This obvious slowdown in manufacturing employment is troubling in itself, but the reason to look more closely at manufacturing isn’t simply because it’s a significant share of the economy (10% of private-sector employment) and historically has been a place for decent non-college jobs—largely due to the relatively high levels of unionization in that sector in the past. Manufacturing is one of the most cyclical sectors, bested only by construction (among major industries) in its prediction of upcoming economic slowdowns. And, construction isn’t looking too hot either. Average monthly construction job growth so far in 2019 is about half as fast as it was in 2018. This does not mean we are necessarily headed toward a recession, but this is certainly an indicator to keep an eye on in coming months.
The Federal Reserve is doing the right thing by cutting the federal funds rate this year, helping to keep the economy from stalling and for workers to hopefully see stronger wage growth. The figure below shows year-over-year nominal wage growth over the last several years. After rising to 3.4% in February 2019, the rate of growth has been tapering off. Wage growth is now back down to 3.0% over the year, significantly lower than levels consistent with inflation targets and productivity potential. This is slower than expected given that the unemployment rate has been at or below 4.0% for 20 months in a row. All else equal, the relative scarcity of workers should be driving up wages as employers have to compete to attract and retain the workers they want.Read more
OECD highlights temporary labor migration: Almost as many guestworkers as permanent immigrants
The 2019 edition of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) annual International Migration Outlook report included a new chapter, “Capturing the ephemeral: How much labour do temporary migrants contribute in OECD countries?” It’s a good question, and one that had not yet been answered.
There is a dearth of data on temporary labor migration programs (TLMP) or schemes—aka guestworker programs, where migrants are employed temporarily in a country outside their own—and it hinders the ability of policymakers to make informed decisions. The OECD declared TLMPs are “a core concern in the public debate across OECD countries” but warns that their impacts are “understudied.” This information deficit exists despite the fact that TLMPs are controversial and make up an increasing share of labor migration, and in the United States in particular have been at the center of debates about how to reform the U.S. immigration system.
Why are TLMPs controversial and at the center of public debates? First, their size. One of OECD’s key findings is that the 4.9 million temporary labor migrants that entered OECD countries in 2017 is “almost as many… as permanent migrants in all categories combined.” Ignoring temporary labor migration in the OECD means ignoring nearly half of all migration.
Many employers want larger TLMPs and fewer regulations governing their use. But there are high economic, social, and psychological costs for the migrant workers who participate in temporary programs, including frequent human rights violations suffered in both countries of origin and destination. Further, some abuses that are technically legal are facilitated by the legal frameworks of TLMPs. In most TLMPs, employers control the visa status of their temporary migrant employees or “guestworkers”—which means getting fired makes them deportable. In part, that’s why TLMPs have been called things like “The New American Slavery.”
TLMPs raise technical issues that are not easily resolved. For example: Which industries are permitted to hire migrant workers? How will appropriate numerical limits in TLMPs be determined? What rights will migrants have once they’ve been admitted into receiving country labor markets? Can they bring their families? Will migrants be tied to one employer or be allowed to change jobs and employers? How will receiving country governments ensure that migrants return after their employment contracts end, or will migrants be allowed to become permanent residents? Do citizens in receiving countries have first preference for jobs that employers want to fill with migrants? Will migrants be paid the same wages as similarly situated local workers?Read more
Workers will lose more than $700 million annually under proposed DOL rule
In October, the Trump administration published a proposed rule regarding tips which, if finalized, will cost workers more than $700 million annually. It is yet another example of the Trump administration using the fine print of a proposal to attempt to push through a change that will transfer large amounts of money from workers to their employers. We also find that as employers ask tipped workers to do more nontipped work as a result of this rule, employment in nontipped food service occupations will decline by 5.3% and employment in tipped occupations will increase by 12.2%, resulting in 243,000 jobs shifting from being nontipped to being tipped. Given that back-of-the-house, nontipped jobs in restaurants are more likely to be held by people of color while tipped occupations are more likely to be held by white workers, this could reduce job opportunities for people of color.
The background: Employers are not allowed to pocket workers’ tips—tips must remain with workers. But employers can legally “capture” some of workers’ tips by paying tipped workers less in base wages than their other workers. For example, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but employers can pay tipped workers a “tipped minimum wage” of $2.13 an hour as long as employees’ base wage and the tips they receive over the course of a week are the equivalent of at least $7.25 per hour. All but eight states have a subminimum wage for tipped workers.
In a system like this, the more nontipped work that is done by tipped workers earning the subminimum wage, the more employers benefit. This is best illustrated with a simple example. Say a restaurant has two workers, one doing tipped work and one doing nontipped work, who both work 40 hours a week. The tipped worker is paid $2.50 an hour in base wages, but gets $10 an hour in tips on average, for a total of $12.50 an hour in total earnings. The nontipped worker is paid $7.50 an hour. In this scenario, the restaurant pays their workers a total of ($2.50 + $7.50) * 40 = $400 per week, and the workers take home a total of ($12.50 + $7.50) * 40 = $800 (with $400 of that coming from tips).
Analyses claiming that taxes on millionaires and billionaires will slow economic growth are fundamentally flawed
In recent weeks, a number of policy analyses of progressive economic policies—a surtax on high-incomes, a wealth tax, and Social Security expansion—have claimed these policies would damage economic growth. Policymakers should give these analyses very little weight in debates about these issues, for a number of reasons.
First, and most important, is the fact that all of these analyses are grounded in an economic view of the world that sees growth as constrained by the economy’s productive capacity (or the supply side of the economy) and not by the spending of households, businesses and government (the economy’s demand side). These estimates have other problems too—they are not even particularly convincing supply-side estimates and even if the economy’s growth really was constrained by supply, these estimates would still be misleading about the effects of these policies on welfare. But the biggest reason why policymakers should give these analyses zero weight is because they assume that growth is almost never demand-constrained.
Before the Great Recession, the assumption that growth was nearly always supply constrained was almost universally held by economists and macroeconomic policymakers. It was recognized that demand (or aggregate spending) could occasionally be too weak to fully employ the economy’s productive capacity and hence cause rising unemployment, but it was generally thought that such periods were rare and would end quickly after the Federal Reserve sensibly cut interest rates. Because shortfalls of demand relative to supply were rare and short and easy to fix, the reasoning went, any real constraint on the economy’s growth over the long-run must be the pace of growth of supply. Growth in supply is generally driven by growth in the quality of the workforce, the productive stock of plants, equipment and research, and growth in technological progress, which together lead to growing productivity—or the amount of income or output generated in an average hour of work.
The assumption that supply constraints are much more likely to bind overall growth than demand constraints drove almost all macroeconomic policymaking in the decades before the Great Recession. For example, the Federal Reserve for decades feared lower unemployment far more than lower inflation. Lower unemployment was a signal that demand was rising relative to supply, and if one thinks growth was generally supply-constrained, this meant that demand growth would quickly outstrip supply growth and lead to rising inflation. Lower inflation, conversely, meant that supply growth was outpacing demand growth—but that was always a temporary and easy-to-fix condition. The decades-long bipartisan overreaction to rising federal budget deficits is also a byproduct of assuming the economy’s growth is supply constrained. Deficits boost demand growth. If one assumes that demand is generally marching in lock-step with supply, then larger deficits that boost demand imply that supply constraints will soon bind and cause inflation (or interest rate increases). Smaller deficits, conversely, reduce demand growth. But if the danger of demand growth slowing too much is low and easy-to-fix, then that’s not a problem.Read more
Bipartisan Senate budget bill could damage the economy during recessions
Last week, the Senate Budget Committee passed a bipartisan set of budget reforms out of committee. While they include some important steps forward, such as effectively eliminating the archaic debt limit, their centerpiece is a deeply damaging provision that, if passed into law, would make recessions far more damaging by forcing Congress to consider steep cuts just when the economy would be most hurt by them.
Under the reforms, instead of passing a budget every year, Congress would be on a two-year budget cycle. This is not totally objectionable. The damaging provisions are the “special reconciliation instructions“ provided in the second year of this budget cycle. In the first year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would project the debt-to-GDP ratio from the budget. In the second year, CBO would report on whether the federal government is meeting those debt-to-GDP targets, and if not, trigger the special reconciliation instructions. These instructions would require the Senate Budget Committee to recommend an amount of deficit reduction in response to missing the debt-to-GDP targets and create a fast track for passing those deficit reductions.
Others have rightly focused on the extent to which this could line up budget cuts to programs that U.S. families rely on, like Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. For example, revenues have come in even lower than CBO expected following the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). If this reform bill were in place, Congress would be expected to respond to these larger-than-expected tax cuts for the rich with deficit reduction. This has been in the Republican leadership playbook all along, as they have made it abundantly clear that cuts to vital programs for low- and moderate-income families are the intended next step after passing regressive tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Read more