Living On The Edge: Americans In A Time Of “Prosperity”

These are supposed to be the good times—with our current economic expansion poised to set a record as the longest in US history. Yet, according to the Federal Reserve’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2017, forty percent of American adults don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense such as an unexpected medical bill, car problem or home repair.

The problem with our economy isn’t that it sometimes hits a rough patch.  It’s that people struggle even when it is setting records.

The expansion is running out of steam

Our current economic expansion has already gone 107 months.  Only one expansion has lasted longer: the expansion from March 1991 to March 2001 which lasted 120 months.

A CNBC Market Insider report by Patti Domm quotes Goldman Sachs economists as saying: “The likelihood that the expansion will break the prior record is consistent with our long-standing view that the combination of a deep recession and an initially slow recovery has set us up for an unusually long cycle.”

The Goldman Sachs model, according to Domm:

shows an increased 31 percent chance for a U.S. recession in the next nine quarters. That number is rising. But it’s a good news, bad news story, and the good news is there is now a two-thirds chance that the recovery will be the longest on record. . . . The Goldman economists also say the medium-term risk of a recession is rising, “mainly because the economy is at full employment and still growing above trend.”

The chart below highlights the growing recession risk based on a Goldman Sachs model that looks at “lagged GDP growth, the slope of the yield curve, equity price changes, house price changes, the output gap, the private debt/GDP ratio, and economic policy uncertainty.”

Sooner or later, the so-called good times are coming to an end.  Tragically, a large percent of Americans are still struggling at a time when our “economy is at full employment and still growing above trend.” That raises the question: what’s going to happen to them and millions of others when the economy actually turns down?

Living on the edge

The Federal Reserve’s report was based on interviews with a sample of over 12,000 people that was “designed to be representative of adults ages 18 and older living in the United States.”  One part of the survey dealt with unexpected expenses.  Here is what the report found:

Approximately four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money. The following figure shows that the share of Americans facing financial insecurity has been falling, but it is still alarming that the percentage remains so high this late in a record setting expansion.

Strikingly, the Federal Reserve survey also found, as shown in the table below, that “(e)ven without an unexpected expense, 22 percent of adults expected to forgo payment on some of their bills in the month of the survey. Most frequently, this involves not paying, or making a partial payment on, a credit card bill.”

And, as illustrated in the figure below, twenty-seven percent of adult Americans skipped necessary medical care in 2017 because they were unable to afford its cost.  The table that follows shows that “dental care was the most frequently skipped treatment, followed by visiting a doctor and taking prescription medicines.”

Clearly, we need more and better jobs and a stronger social safety net.  Achieving those will require movement building.  Needed first steps include helping those struggling see that their situation is not unique, a consequence of some individual failing, but rather is the result of the workings of a highly exploitative system that suffers from ever stronger stagnation tendencies.  And this requires creating opportunities for people to share experiences and develop their will and capacity to fight for change.  In this regard, there may be much to learn from the operation of the Councils of the Unemployed during the 1930s.

It also requires creating opportunities for struggle.  Toward that end we need to help activists build connections between ongoing labor and community struggles, such as the ones that education and health care workers are making as they fight for improved conditions of employment and progressive tax measures to fund a needed expansion of public services.  This is the time, before the next downturn, to lay the groundwork for a powerful movement for social transformation.

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This post was updated May 31, 2018.  The original post misstated the length of the current expansion.

Corporate Taxes And False Promises: US Workers And The 2017 Tax Cuts And Jobs Act

In December 2017 the Congress approved and the President signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  The Act reduced business and individual taxes, with corporations and the wealthy the greatest beneficiaries.  But, as usual, government and business leaders promoted this policy by also promising substantial gains for working people.  Any surprise that they lied?

Corporate Tax Giveaways And Wage Promises

Corporations, and their stockowners, were the biggest winners of this tax scam.  The Act lowered the US corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and eliminated the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax.

It also gave a special bonus to multinational corporations, changing the federal tax system from a global to a territorial one.  Under the previous global tax system, US multinational corporations were supposed to pay the 35 percent US tax rate for income earned in any country in which they had a subsidiary, less a credit for the income taxes they paid to that country.  Now, under the new territorial tax system, each corporate subsidiary is only required to pay the tax rate of the country in which it is legally established.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, this change:

risks creating a large, permanent incentive for U.S. multinationals to shift overseas not just profits on paper but actual investment as well.  This could lead to a reduction in capital investment in the United States and thereby wind up reducing U.S. workers’ wages, as Congressional Research Service economist Jane Gravelle has explained. The law includes several provisions to try to limit the damage this incentive could cause, but they don’t alter the basic incentive to shift profits and investment offshore.

The Act also offers multinational corporations a one-time special lower tax rate of 8 percent on repatriated profits that are currently held by overseas subsidiaries in tax-haven countries; estimates are that there are some $3 trillion dollars parked offshore.

And, what are working people supposed to get for this massive tax giveaway to corporations?  According to President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan, the Act would generate a substantial increase in investment and productivity, thereby boosting employment and wages.  Both political leaders cited, in support of their claims, the work of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers which argued that:

Reducing the statutory federal corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent would, the analysis below suggests, increase average household income in the United States by, very conservatively, $4,000 annually. The increases recur each year, and the estimated total value of corporate tax reform for the average U.S. household is therefore substantially higher than $4,000. Moreover, the broad range of results in the literature suggest that over a decade, this effect could be much larger. These conclusions are driven by empirical patterns that are highly visible in the data, in addition to an extensive peer-reviewed research.

In fact, the Council’s report went on to say: “When we use the more optimistic estimates from the literature, wage boosts are over $9,000 for the average U.S. household.”

Modeling the effects of a tax cut is far from simple.  And, given the political nature of tax policy, it should come as no surprise that the estimate of gains for workers by President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers was based on questionable assumptions and a real outlier.  This is highlighted by a Washington Center for Equitable Growth issue brief:

This issue brief examines estimates of the change in wages resulting from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act after 10 years implied by the macroeconomic analyses of the Tax Policy Center, the Congressional Budget Office, the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Tax Foundation, and the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The Tax Policy Center estimated that the law would increase wages by less than 0.1 percent after 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimated an increase of about 0.3 percent in the same year. The Penn Wharton Budget Model produced two estimates of the impact on wages, about 0.25 percent and 0.8 percent. The Tax Foundation estimated an increase of about 2 percent, and the White House Council of Economic Advisers estimated increases between 5 percent and 11 percent.  All of these estimates compare wages in 2027 to what they would have been in that year had the legislation not been enacted. . . .

These estimates imply widely varying labor incidence of the corporate tax cuts in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, ranging from near zero for the Tax Policy Center to multiples of the conventional revenue estimate for the Council of Economic Advisers. As a reference point, wage rates would need to increase by about 1 percent above what they would have been in the absence of the law to shift the benefits of the corporate tax cuts from shareholders to workers—and even more if revenue-raising provisions of the new law scheduled to take effect in the future are delayed or repealed.

Corporate Taxes Go Down and Wages Remain Low

Chris Macke, writing in the Hill, highlights just how little workers have benefited to this point from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act:

The latest Employment Situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows weekly employee earnings have grown $75 since tax reform passed, well short of the $4,000 to $9,000 annual increases projected by President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan.

During the three months following passage of the tax bill, the average American saw a $6.21 increase in average weekly earnings. Assuming 12 weeks of work during the three months following passage of the corporate tax cuts, this equates to a $75 increase.

Assuming a full 52 weeks of work, the $6.21 increase in weekly earnings would result in a $323 annual increase, nowhere near the minimum $4,000 promised and $9,000 potential annual increases projected by President Trump and Speaker Ryan if significant cuts were made to corporate tax rates.

Unless something drastically changes, it seems that Americans are going to have to settle for much less than the $4,000 to $9,000 projected wage increases. An extra $322 a year isn’t going to do much to pay down the $1 trillion in additional debt they are projected to take on as a result of the tax cuts.

Mark Whitehouse, writing in Bloomberg Businessweek, provides additional evidence that the business tax cuts are doing little for the average worker.  As he put it: “Companies getting bigger breaks aren’t giving bigger raises.”

The following chart from his article shows that industries “getting bigger tax breaks aren’t giving bigger raises.”  Actually, quite the opposite appears to be true.  To this point, we actually see a negative correlation between the size of the tax cuts and wage increases.

The next chart provides a more useful look at the relationship between expected tax breaks and wage increases, showing how much companies in the different industries have boosted wages relative to the previous year.  Not only does the negative correlation remain, wage growth has actually fallen in the industries expected to enjoy the largest tax cuts.

 

What we see is corporate power at work.  And, in the face of growing stagnation tendencies, those who wield this power appear willing to pursue ever more extreme policies in defense of their interests, apparently confident that they will be able to manage any instabilities or crises that might arise.  It is up to us to stop them, by building a movement able to help working people see through corporate and government misrepresentations and take-up their side of the ongoing class war.

US Policy and Possibilities For Peace On The Korean Peninsula

 

KOREAN CONFEDERATION OF TRADE UNIONS UNIFICATION COMMITTEE AND US LABOR AGAINST THE WAR SOLIDARITY DELEGATION TO KOREA, May 3, 2018, in front of the U.S. Embassy, Seoul, South Korea

The recent inter-Korean summit and the upcoming US-NK summit have suddenly made real the possibility for an end to the Korean War, normalization of relations between the US and North Korea, and meaningful progress toward Korean reunification.  Although the peace process is being driven by Korean efforts, clearly, the outcome depends heavily on US actions.

Unfortunately, the US press is not doing a very good job informing people about the history of US policy towards Korea, North and South, which means that it is not as easy as it should be to build a popular movement for peace. In response, the Korea Policy Institute has just published a reader on US Policy on Korea.  It is 130 pages long, with 19 articles by authors from the United States and Asia, and organized into the following five sections:

1. The Unending Korea War
2. US Foreign Policy Towards North Korea
3. South Korea: The Democratic Struggle
4. Voices For Peace
5. A Hopeful Start To An Era Of Peace

You can download it or order hard copies here:

http://kpolicy.org/the-kpi-reader-2018-important-new-resource-on-korea/

And keep checking the Korea Policy Institute website for the latest news and analysis of events.

What Next For The Teacher’s Movement?

Public school teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona have won meaningful salary gains for themselves, and in several cases other school workers, and real although limited increases in education spending.  Unfortunately, their demands for significant tax reform, including new taxes on corporations and the wealthy to fund a more general increase in public services, remain largely unfulfilled.  Hopefully, the lessons learned and the connections made will lead to more democratic and powerful unions and worker-community movements for change that can carry the fight forward.

Teachers deserved a raise

Teachers definitely deserve a raise.  A recent Economic Policy Institute study by Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel finds a substantial and growing wage and compensation gap between what teachers and other similarly educated workers earn.  For example:

• Average weekly wages (inflation adjusted) of public-sector teachers decreased $30 per week from 1996 to 2015, from $1,122 to $1,092 (in 2015 dollars). In contrast, weekly wages of all college graduates rose from $1,292 to $1,416 over this period.
• For all public-sector teachers, the relative wage gap (regression adjusted for education, experience, and other factors) has grown substantially since the mid-1990s: It was ‑1.8 percent in 1994 and grew to a record ‑17.0 percent in 2015.
• While relative teacher wage gaps have widened, some of the difference may be attributed to a tradeoff between pay and benefits. Non-wage benefits as a share of total compensation in 2015 were more important for teachers (26.6 percent) than for other professionals (21.6 percent). The total teacher compensation penalty was a record-high 11.1 percent in 2015 (composed of a 17.0 percent wage penalty plus a 5.9 percent benefit advantage). The bottom line is that the teacher compensation penalty grew by 11 percentage points from 1994 to 2015.
• Collective bargaining helps to abate the teacher wage gap. In 2015, teachers not represented by a union had a ‑25.5 percent wage gap—and the gap was 6 percentage points smaller for unionized teachers.

The figure below highlights the growing wage gap between public school teachers and similar workers (controlling for age, education, race/ethnicity, geographic region, marital status, and gender).

The next figure shows that in no state are teachers paid more than other college graduates.  In fact, as the EPI study points out:

The ratio for the overall United States is 0.77, meaning that, on average, teachers earn just 77 percent of what other college graduates earn in wages. . . . In 18 states, public school teacher weekly wages lag by more than 25 percent. In contrast, there are only five states where teacher weekly wages are less than 10 percent behind.

And, as the table below makes clear, teachers suffer an overall compensation gap, with their benefit advantage not nearly big enough to compensate for their large and growing wage penalty.

The rightwing playbook

Teacher victories in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona were made possible by strong community support for their strike actions.  However, teachers and other activists need to prepare for the likely rightwing counter attack, which will aim to break the newly created bonds of solidarity and support for collective, militant action.

A Guardian newspaper article, which includes a secret three-page manual on how to talk about teacher strikes produced by the State Policy Network, sheds light on rightwing fears and planning.  The State Policy Network is “an alliance of 66 rightwing ‘ideas factories’ that span every state in the nation,” that is well funded by, among others, the Koch brothers, the Walton Family Foundation, and the DeVos family.

The manual talks about the need to discredit the strikes by portraying them as harmful to low income parents and their children.  But it also recognizes that this is a challenging task.  For example, it says:

A message that focuses on teacher hours or summer vacations will sound tone-deaf when there are dozens of videos and social media posts going vital from teachers about their second jobs, teachers having to rely on food pantries, classroom books that are falling apart, paper rationing, etc.  This is an opportunity to sympathize with teachers, while still emphasizing that teacher strikes hurt kids.  It is also not the right time to talk about social choice—that’s off topic, and teachers at choice-schools are often paid less than district school teachers.

As to what should be said, the manual encourages rightwing activists to respond to concerns about insufficient school funding by calling for more efficient use of existing monies, in particular by reducing “administrative bloat” and “red tape.”  And, it has special advice for those that live in states where taxes have been recently slashed:

That is obviously a challenging message to counter.  But you can consider something like “One of the most important things we can do to make sure our schools are properly funded is to have a strong economy where everyone who can work can find a job and contribute to the tax coffers that fund the government. Lower tax rates help contribute to stronger job growth.  Also lower taxes on individuals let teachers keep more of the money they earn.”

More dangerous are some of the ways in which the rightwing actually seeks to punish or intimidate teachers.  Jeff Bryant, writing at OurFuture.org provides a sobering list:

Leading into the two-day teacher walkout in Colorado, Republican legislators introduced a bill that would lead to fines and potentially up to six month’s jail time for the striking teachers. The bill was pulled, when it became clear even some Republicans weren’t too keen on the measure.

In Arizona, a libertarian think tank sent letters to school district superintendents threatening them with lawsuits if they didn’t reopen closed schools and order striking teachers to return to work. It’s unclear how or whether the threat will actually be carried out now that teachers are back on the job.

In West Virginia, where teachers used a nine-day strike to secure a five percent raise, Republicans have vowed to get their revenge by cutting $20 million to Medicaid and other parts of the state budget to pay for the increase. No doubt, when the axe falls on these programs, Republican lawmakers will be quick to blame the “greedy” teachers.

In Kentucky, Republican Governor Matt Bevin accused striking teachers of leaving children exposed to sexual assaults or being in danger of ingesting toxic substances because teachers weren’t at school. Now that the uprising has ended, Bevin has turned his revenge against teachers into an effort to take over the largest school system in the state and take away local control of the schools.

No doubt, this is just the beginning, which means that activists need to move quickly to build on victories and expand their challenge to existing relations of power.

The challenges ahead

One hopes that teacher activists in states where strikes have taken place are finding ways to build upon recent mobilizations to build organizations and revitalize their unions.  And, that they are also reaching out to other public sector unions, with the aim of building a broad alliance that can spearhead a grass-roots movement for new progressive taxes and a more class conscious vision of state policy. Despite the dangers, this is a hopeful political moment for all of us.