It’s presidential primary season!  That time every four years when the media focuses on all of the important policy issues facing our county with thorough, unbiased, factual analysis of all of the candidates’ proposals…

OK, we know that’s wishful thinking, especially this campaign season when the debate is about the size of the candidates’ “hands” rather than the size of workers’ paychecks. But on those occasions when the talk does turn to economic policy, CEPR is there - providing research and analysis that is truly fact-based and non-partisan.  

And we need your help to continue to inject some economic sanity into the news spin cycle this year.

March 2016, Annette Bernhardt, Rosemary Batt, Susan Houseman, and Eileen Appelbaum

Paul Krugman has agreed to use his blog this week as a jumping off point for great CEPR papers of the past (yes, I'm kidding), but he gives us a great segue into an old paper on unionization rates in Canada with his latest blogpost. In his post Krugman makes the simple point that if inevitable forces like globalization and technology were responsible for the decline in unionization rates in the United States then we should expect to see a comparable decline in Canada. After all, Canada's economy is even more exposed to trade than the United States and the country has all the same technologies that we enjoy south of the border.

Yet, Canada has seen only a modest decline in its unionization rate over the last three decades. It is still close to 28 percent, compared to just 11 percent in the United States.

The CEPR paper, by former research associate Kris Warner, explains that the difference is the result of differing institutional structures around the unionization process. In most Canadian provinces (labor law is set at provincial level in Canada, as opposed to the national level in the United States), workers can organize through a process of majority sign-up. This means that if a majority of workers in a bargaining unit sign cards indicating their desire to join a union, then the employer must recognize the union.

Dean Baker
Truthout, March 14, 2016

The graph above shows the impact on the deficit of sustaining a 4.0 percent unemployment rate over the next decade, alongside projected spending on TANF, and SNAP. A 4.0 percent unemployment rate is 0.9 percentage points below the 4.9 percent average rate of unemployment projected by the Congressional Budget Office over the next decade.

The economy sustained a 4.0 percent unemployment rate as a year-round average in 2000, with the rate falling as low as 3.8 percent over the course of the year. Contrary to the predictions of most economists, there was no notable uptick in the rate of inflation despite this low unemployment rate. While we cannot know for certain the lowest unemployment rate the economy could sustain without leading to inflation, most economists had badly overstated this rate in the 1990s. There is reason to believe, most notably due to the aging of the labor force (older workers have lower unemployment rates), that the economy might be able to sustain a lower unemployment rate today than it did two decades ago.

This is the first in a series of profiles of the members of the Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee [FOMC]. The profiles will focus on their writings, public statements, and voting records as members of the FOMC.

Esther George has been one of the more hawkish members of the FOMC since becoming President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in October of 2011. She first became a voting member of the FOMC in 2013. In her first seven meetings, she dissented from the majority each time and argued that the Fed should move to more restrictive monetary policy. (The statements on the dissents, from the Fed’s minutes, are at the end of this post.)  In six of the seven cases, she was the lone dissenter.

In 2014 and 2015 she continued to argue for tighter monetary policy in her public speeches. For example, in the summer of 2014 she argued that keeping the federal funds rate near zero could be signaling excessive pessimism and therefore have a negative effect on the economy:^[1]

“And by keeping rates unusually low, policymakers may signal pessimism that the economy is not strong enough to begin moving to a more normal rate environment.”

Mark WeisbrotThe Hill, March 14, 2016

E.J. Dionne used his column to argue that it is not just the establishment Republicans who are facing a crisis because of the rise of Donald Trump. He argues that the establishment Democrats also face a crisis:

“Its ideology was rooted in a belief that capitalism would deliver the economic goods and could be balanced by a ‘competent public sector, providing services of quality to the citizen and social protection for those who are vulnerable.’”

This is far too generous an account. The Clinton Democrats were actively steering the economy in a direction to redistribute income upward. This was clear in a number of areas.

First, their trade policy was quite explicitly designed to put U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low paid workers in the developing world, but maintaining or increasing protections for highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers. The predicted and actual outcome of this policy is a redistribution from ordinary workers to those at the top. This effect of this policy was aggravated by the massive trade deficit that was the predictable result of the high dollar policy promoted by Robert Rubin.

They also pushed for longer and stronger patent and copyright protection both domestically and internationally in trade pacts. This meant more money for the pharmaceutical, software, and entertainment industry at the expense of the rest of society.

They pushed deregulation in the financial industry, which allowed for an explosion in the share of national income that went to the financial sector. Again, this upward redistribution came at the expense of the rest of society.

And, they effectively supported the explosion of CEO pay. Clinton pushed a transparently absurd measure to cap CEO pay. (He pushed a measure that removed the tax deductibility for non-performance related pay in excess of $1 million a year. This green-lighted huge option based packages.)

Clinton also promoted the outsourcing of government services (a.k.a. re-inventing government). This typically meant replacing relatively well-paid union workers with much lower paid contract workers. At the same time it often meant big profits for well-connected contractors, which meant that taxpayers received no benefit from the deal. The fact a Democratic president pushed this process at the national level encouraged many state and local governments to follow the same path.

Mark WeisbrotEl Economista, 11 de marzo, 2016Boston Review, 1 de marzo, 2016

The following reports on labor market policy were recently released:

Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

The Effects of a $15 Minimum Wage in NewYork State
Michael Reich, Sylvia Allegretto, Ken Jacobs, Claire Montialoux

Current Challenges to Workers and Unions in Brazil
Roberto Véras de Oliveira

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Policy Basics: How Many Weeks of Unemployment Compensation Are Available?
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Chart Book: The Legacy of the Great Recession
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

In recent weeks the Washington Post has virtually transformed itself into a Bernie Sanders attack platform, filling both its news and opinion pages with critical pieces. For this reason it was not surprising to see its lead editorial today criticizing Senator Sanders for not supporting an auto bailout because it was attached to funding for the Wall Street bailout. 

First, it worth once again correcting its misstatements about the Wall Street bailout. The piece tells readers:

"In September 2008, Ms. Clinton and Mr. Sanders were both U.S. senators deciding whether to vote for a $700 billion fund to prop up the rapidly collapsing U.S. financial system. Ms. Clinton voted yes, on the sound view that the likely alternative to this admittedly undeserved rescue of Wall Street would have been global calamity. Mr. Sanders voted no, demanding that Wall Street pay for its own bailout. As it happens, the bailout fund, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), ended up costing far less than the initial headline figure suggested, and even made taxpayers some money; but, as was foreseeable at the time, that hasn’t stopped the country’s political purists, left and right, from second-guessing and making political hay."

As I and others have pointed out, the "second Great Depression" story pushed by bailout supporters assumes that Washington does nothing even as the unemployment rate soars into the double digits. There is no historical support for anything like this. Even President George W. Bush supported a stimulus package when the unemployment rate was just 4.9 percent. Furthermore, the fact the bailout "made taxpayers some money" really has nothing to do with the time of day. The government lent billions of dollars (trillions of dollars counting the loans from the Fed) to some of the richest people in the country at rates that were far below what they would have been forced to pay in the market. This was an enormous transfer of wealth from the rest of us to Wall Street.

That is what Binyamin Appelbaum argued in a Upshot column with the headline, “on trade, Donald Trump breaks with 200 years of economic orthodoxy.” The piece points to Trump’s rhetoric in which he claims that other countries are taking advantage of the United States because they are running large trade surpluses with us.

It then turns to an old speech from Milton Friedman saying the opposite is true:

“'Economists have spoken with almost one voice for some 200 years,’ the economist Milton Friedman said in a 1978 speech. ‘The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.’”

This is in fact the classic economics argument for the merits of trade, but there is an important assumption in the argument which is not mentioned. The assumption is that the trade deficit has no effect on the level of aggregate demand and output in the United States. In the standard economic view, if our annual trade deficit increases by $200 billion we will simply make up this demand elsewhere in the economy.

A combination of higher consumption, investment, and government spending will fully offset the $200 billion reduction in demand resulting from the rise in the trade deficit. This means that total demand in the economy will not change, nor will total employment. There could be some shift in employment, from the import competing industries to the industries that meet the new demand, but in the standard economics story of trade, overall unemployment is not a problem.

This view of trade is less tenable in an economy that faces a chronic shortfall of demand, as is the case in the United States. Most economists now recognize that advanced economies like those in the United States, Japan, and the European Union can have prolonged periods of inadequate demand (a.k.a. “secular stagnation”) leading to unemployment and underemployment.

Since the TARP has come up repeatedly in the debates between Secretary Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders, it is worth briefly correcting a couple of major misconceptions. The first one is that we would have had a second Great Depression without the bailout. This assertion requires rejecting everything we know about the first Great Depression.

The first Great Depression was caused by a series of bank collapses as runs spread from bank to bank. The country was much better positioned to prevent the same sort of destruction of wealth and liquidity most importantly because of the existence of deposit insurance backed up by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

More importantly, the downturn from the collapse persisted for over a decade because of the lack of an adequate fiscal response. In other words, if we had spent lots of money, we could have quickly ended the depression as we eventually did with the spending associated with World War II in 1941. There is no reason in principle that we could not have had this spending for peaceful purposes in 1931, which would have quickly brought the depression to an end.

The claim that we risked a second Great Depression in 2008 (defined as a decade of double-digit unemployment) is not only a claim that we faced a Great Depression sized financial collapse but also that we would be too stupid to spend the money needed to get us out of the downturn for a decade. None of the second Great Depression myth promulgators has yet made that case.

I see that Peter Petri and Michael Plummer (PP) have responded to my blog post on their models projections for the TPP. In essence, they minimize the concern that the TPP or even trade deficits more generally can lead to a prolonged period of high unemployment or secular stagnation to use the currently fashionable term.

Dealing with the second issue first, they argue:

“While trade agreements include many provisions on exports and imports, they typically contain no provisions to affect savings behavior. Thus, net national savings, and hence trade balances, will remain at levels determined by other variables, and real exchange rates will adjust instead.

“A similar argument applies to overall employment. The TPP could affect employment in the short run — a possibility that we examine below — but those effects will fade because of market and policy adjustments. Since there is nothing in TPP provisions to affect long-term employment trends, employment too will converge to these levels, as long as adjustments are completed in the model’s 10 to 15 year time horizon.”

In short, PP explicitly argues that trade agreements neither affect the trade balance nor employment as a definitional matter. They argue that the trade balance is determined by net national savings. They explicitly disavow the contention in my prior note that we cannot assume an adjustment process that will restore the economy to full employment:

“In fact, critics of microeconomic analysis often challenge the credibility of market adjustment even in the long term. Dean Baker (2016) argues, for example, that mechanisms that may have once enabled the US economy to return to equilibrium are no longer working in the aftermath of the financial crisis. But the data tell a different, less pessimistic story (figure 1). Since 2010, the US economy has added 13 million jobs, a substantial gain compared to job growth episodes in recent decades, and the US civilian unemployment rate has declined from nearly 10 percent to under 5 percent. The broadest measure of unemployment (U6), which also includes part-time and discouraged workers, has declined almost as sharply, from 17 to 10 percent, and is now nearly back to average levels in precrisis, nonrecession years.”

As I noted in my original blog post, the PP analysis is entirely consistent with standard trade and macroeconomic approaches, however these approaches do not seem credible in the wake of the Great Recession. The standard view was that the economy would quickly bounce back to its pre-recession trend levels of output and employment. This view provides the basis for the projections made by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in its 2010 Budget and Economic Outlook (CBO, 2010). These projections are useful both because they were made with a full knowledge of the depth of the downturn (the recovery had begun in June of 2009) and also because CBO explicitly tries to make projections that are in line with the mainstream of the economics profession.