Dear America,

A working mother recently wrote to the New York Times asking what really makes for a “family friendly” company. Her workplace experiences were the opposite of the company’s stated commitment to the notion and she wanted to know if her expectations were too high. The reply that followed was not so much a definition of a family friendly workplace, but advice: “Even if you are short on funds, it is worth it for you to go into (potentially further) debt at this time to pay for as much day-to-day help as you can get.” In other words, if you’re looking for a better work-life balance, you’re on your own in 2019 America.

A survey on work-family stress due to lack of childcare support conducted among working mothers from the US and other industrialized countries found “it was American moms uniquely who blamed themselves for their own stress and thought it was their own job to resolve it.”

In honor of Mother’s Day, CEPR is publishing a curated selection of original research reports from academic institutions and nonprofits on the current state of child care and early education in the US. The compilation is part of our ongoing effort to promote informed debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives as well as encouraging inclusive conversations on improving the lives of families across the country.

Brookings Institution

What is the market price of daycare and preschool?

This report uses nationally representative data from the 2016 Early Childhood Program Participation Survey in order to calculate hourly and annualized prices for parents who purchase at least eight hours a week of center-based care for a child under the age of five without a disability or without outside financial help in paying child care fees. Ultimately, the author is looking to find the market price of center-based daycare and preschool for young children by analyzing the age of the child, region of country, parental education, parental income, and hours of attendance.

(This post first appeared on my Patreon page.)

I had the opportunity to testify last week before the House Rules committee on Medicare for All. Incredibly, this was apparently the first time the topic had been explicitly addressed in a congressional hearing. In my testimony, I argued that a Medicare for All program would be affordable, but the key factor was reducing the cost of input prices, like prescription drugs, medical equipment, and doctors’ pay. I also briefly laid out what I considered the key features of a transition from the current system. I want to go into this issue in a bit more detail here.

I listed four main steps as being key in the transition:

1. Fix the current Medicare system;

2. Allow a Medicare buy-in;

3. Take measures to reduce input prices;

4. Lower age of Medicare eligibility to 64.

These four steps should allow for an orderly phase in of a universal Medicare system. They also should quickly provide substantial benefits to most of the population in the form of better quality/lower cost health care.

Dean Baker
Truthout, May 6, 2019

This year’s Social Security and Medicare trustees’ report saw very few changes from last year’s report and showed that the Social Security retirement program’s (OASI) financial situation had improved modestly by some measures. While the report predicts th

Maio de 2019, Mark Weisbrot e Jeffrey Sachs

May 3, 2019

May 3, 2019 (Jobs Byte)

(This piece was first posted on my Patreon page.) The Trumpers were celebrating over the 3.2 percent GDP reported for the first quarter last week. They claimed it proved the success of their tax cuts.

But fans of arithmetic saw things differently. First of all, the jump in GDP was largely a fluke, with a big jump in inventory accumulations and a fall in imports accounting for almost half of the growth. Pulling these out, GDP growth was under 2.0 percent.

This isn’t just cherry picking. It is virtually certain that inventories accumulation will slow next quarter, this usually happens after a month of rapid accumulation. The logic is straightforward, if companies added a lot to their inventory in the first quarter, then they probably want to add less in the second quarter.

It’s a similar story with imports. Our imports typically rise quarter to quarter, unless the economy is in a recession. The shrinkage in the first quarter is likely a fluke, which means unless imports are revised up in subsequent reports (the GDP data will be revised twice before the second quarter data are released), we are likely to see a larger than usual jump in imports in the second quarter.

In that story, both inventories and imports are likely to be a drag on growth. This means that if we have an underlying growth rate of 2.0 percent, a slower rate of inventory accumulation, coupled with more rapid growth in imports, could mean that second quarter GDP will be close to 1.0 percent.

Mayo 2019, Mark Weisbrot y Jeffrey Sachs