Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein
The Atlantic, December 8, 2016

This is the second blog post in a three-part series on the Affordable Care Act’s potential effects on part-time employment. The first and third posts can be read here and here.

In 2013, critics of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) rolled out a new complaint about the law: it would lead to a dramatic increase in involuntary part-time employment. Maria Bartiromo, Robert Samuelson, and Fox News all argued that firms would move workers from full-time to part-time status due to the law’s “employer mandate”. And while most critics have since shifted to other arguments against the ACA, Fox News has continued pushing this particular line.

To be clear, there is anecdotal evidence that at least some firms really are cutting back on their workers’ hours. So there has undoubtedly been at least some increase in involuntary part-time employment as a result of the mandate.

However, the discussion surrounding the employer mandate paints a rather incomplete picture of the ACA’s effect on involuntary part-time work, for two reasons. First, the discussion often lacks empirical evidence about the potential size of the mandate’s impact. To the extent that economic analysts have looked into this particular issue, they have generally found that the mandate caused little to no increase in involuntary part-time work, with even the largest purported increases being completely invisible in the aggregate national data.^[1]

More than two weeks after Haitians went to the polls to elect a new president, 16 Senators and 25 Deputies, preliminary results from all races have finally been released. Presidential results have already been contested by the second, third and fourth place finishers while many legislative races will likely be contested as well. However, if the preliminary results are upheld, the November 20 elections will have consolidated nearly unprecedented political power in the hands of PHTK, the party of former president Michel Martelly. While PHTK and its allies appear to have scored electoral victories at both the presidential and legislative level, their political success has occurred in a context of extremely low turnout, raising questions about the significance of their mandate to govern moving forward.

Presidential Results

At the presidential level, Jovenel Moïse of PHTK came in first place with 55.67 percent of the vote. If these results hold,  Moïse will secure the presidency without having to compete in a second-round election. In second, third and fourth place were Jude Celestin of LAPEH with 19.52 percent, Jean-Charles Moïse of the Platfom Pitit Dessalines (PPD) with 11.04 percent and Maryse Narcisse of Fanmi Lavalas (FL) with 8.99 percent.

While the top four vote getters in the 2016 election were exactly the same as in last year’s election, the results of which were thrown out due to widespread irregularities, the composition of the vote changed dramatically. Jovenel Moïse, who was widely believed to have benefitted from fraud in the 2015 elections, was the only one of the four to increase their vote total over last year. This appears to largely stem from the far wider geographical support that Jovenel Moïse received in 2016, coupled with the other top candidates losing substantial ground.

 

As can be seen above, Jovenel Moïse received over 50 percent of the vote in each department except for the Artibonite and the Sud Est. Similar to in 2015, the strongest areas of support were in the north of the country, where he runs a banana export business. But perhaps the most surprising result this year was that he also received 50 percent of the vote in the Ouest department, home to some 40 percent of registered voters. In 2015, he received just over 20 percent of the vote in the Ouest. This accounts for nearly the entire increase in the number of total votes received by Jovenel Moïse this year.

Still, even with Jovenel Moïse increasing his votes from 2015, the main reason why he was able to win in the first round was that all three other candidates lost significant numbers of votes. Celestin received 185,000 fewer votes, Jean-Charles 104,000 and Narcisse 14,000. If these candidates had simply received the same number of votes as last year, Jovenel Moïse would not have been able to win in the first round.

The long campaign, and the consolidation of private sector funding behind PHTK certainly helped in this regard. With more resources, PHTK was able to more actively campaign and build support throughout the last year. It takes significant money to have party staff across the entire country, an especially important factor in getting one’s supporters to come out to vote on election day. As a result, PHTK had a wider national presence of political party representatives than other parties, according to local observer organizations.  

Another factor that contributed to the vastly different result was that many more voters were either unable or unwilling to participate in this year’s election. The Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), announced that participation was just 21 percent, compared to 26.6 percent last year. However the rate announced by the CEP includes many thousands of votes that were not counted due to irregularities. If one looks just at valid votes, the participation in this year’s election drops to 17.3 percent. The 26.6 percent figure from last year was based on valid votes.

This is the first blog post in a three-part series on the Affordable Care Act’s potential effects on part-time employment. The second and third posts can be found here and here.

In 2013, shortly before the main provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect, critics warned that the law might have dire effects on working hours. They said that the ACA would lead employers to shift workers from full-time to part-time positions, prompting a dramatic increase in involuntary part-time employment. CNBC host Maria Bartiromo argued that the law would make the U.S. “a part-time employment country”; Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson and others stated that the U.S. would become “a nation of part-timers.” In contrast, there is an extensive literature on health insurance related “job lock.” (Gruber and Madrian review this literature.) According to this literature, there is reason to believe that many workers are employed full-time only because they need health care insurance. If they have the option to get insurance outside of employment, they may decide to take time off from a job to care for children or other family members, they may start their own business, or they may decide to work part-time. There is considerable evidence that many workers have chosen the option of voluntary part-time employment since the exchanges were put in place at the start of 2014.

Mark WeisbrotÚltimas Noticias, 4 de diciembre, 2016

Dean Baker
Truthout, December 5, 2016

Dean Baker
The Hankyoreh, December 4, 2016

Harvard professor, textbook author, and occasional New York Times columnist Greg Mankiw told readers today that Donald Trump's economic team is wrong to worry about the trade deficit.

"The most important lesson about trade deficits is that they have a flip side. When the United States buys goods and services from other nations, the money Americans send abroad generally comes back in one way or another. One possibility is that foreigners use it to buy things we produce, and we have balanced trade. The other possibility, which is relevant when we have trade deficits, is that foreigners spend on capital assets in the United States, such as stocks, bonds and direct investments in plants, equipment and real estate." ...

"...in reality, trade deficits are not a threat to robust growth and full employment. The United States had a large trade deficit in 2009, when the unemployment rate reached 10 percent, but it had an even larger trade deficit in 2006, when the unemployment rate fell to 4.4 percent.

"Rather than reflecting the failure of American economic policy, the trade deficit may be better viewed as a sign of success. The relative vibrancy and safety of the American economy is why so many investors around the world want to move their assets here."

There are three points worth making here. First, purchases of financial assets, like stock and bonds, do not necessarily translate into greater output and employment. Mankiw may have missed it, but we had a long stretch of very high unemployment following the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008. The Fed purchased plenty of financial assets in this period, it had some effect on boosting output and employment, but did not come close to getting the economy back to full employment. (The assets don't care whether the Fed or foreigners purchase them, it has the same effect on output and employment.)

Second, much of the foreign purchases of U.S. assets were not because of the "vibrancy and safety" of the U.S. economy. Following the East Asian financial crisis in 1997 many developing countries felt that their central banks had to accumulate massive amounts of reserves to avoid ever facing the same situation as the countries of the region faced in 1997. (In other words, they didn't want to have a U.S.-directed I.M.F. bailout.)

This meant buying up massive amounts of dollars. That held down the value of their currencies, which in turn allowed these countries to run large trade surpluses. That reversed the textbook pattern where capital is supposed to flow from rich countries where it is plentiful to poor countries where it is scare. In the years since 1997, poor countries have been massive exporters of capital to rich countries.

The third point is that this trade deficit has created a large gap in demand, pretty much as Trump's economics team claims. In the late 1990s we filled this gap in demand with the demand generated by the stock bubble. When that bubble burst in 2000–2001, the ensuing recession gave us the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression.

The answer may not be as simple as readers were led to believe in a NYT article on the topic. The article explains several ways in which tariffs can be counter-productive. As evidence that tariffs tend to be net job losers, the article cites a study by the Peterson Institute on tariffs that President Obama imposed on tires imported from China, ostensibly to counter dumping. The study concluded:

"Some 1,200 American tire-making jobs were preserved, but American consumers paid $1.1 billion extra for tires. That prompted households to cut spending at retailers, resulting in more than 2,500 net jobs lost."

There are several important assumptions that drive this calculation of net jobs lost.

Mark WeisbrotThe Hill, December 2, 2016

Alexander MainNACLA Report on the Americas, Volume 48, Issue 4, December 2, 2016

December 2, 2016

Alexander Main and Gustavo CodasNACLA Report on the Americas, Volume 48, Issue 4, December 2, 2016

December 2, 2016

Dan Beeton and Rebecca WattsNACLA Report on the Americas, Volume 48, Issue 4, December 2, 2016