On Thursday, the Brookings Institution issued a memo to President Obama titled “Venezuela Breaks Down in Violence.” As might be expected from the title, the memo (and an accompanying video) depicts an alarming situation where

Venezuela is experiencing declining export revenues, accelerating inflation and widespread shortages of basic consumer goods. At the same time, the Maduro administration has foreclosed peaceful options for Venezuelans to bring about a change in its current policies.

But, contrary to the alarmist title, the violence is only a possibility in the future: “Economic mismanagement in Venezuela has reached such a level that it risks inciting a violent popular reaction,” and further on the reader learns that actually “[t]he risk of a violent outcome may still be low…”

The possibility of such chaos is troubling to the author, Harold Trinkunas since “it is in the U.S. interest that Venezuela remain a reliable source of oil,” while “[p]opular unrest in a country with multiple armed actors, including the military, the militia, organized crime and pro-government gangs, is a recipe for unwelcome chaos and risks an interruption of oil production.”

Trinkunas, who “previously served as an associate professor and chair of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California” urges the Obama administration to take action. At the top of his recommendations is for the U.S. to enlist Brazil – “whose interests are also at risk” - in an attempt “to convince the Maduro administration to shift course.”

Trinkunas makes clear what course he wants the U.S. government to take should a crisis result in Maduro being removed from power. While one might think that such a hypothetical scenario would indeed be one when the Inter-American Democratic Charter should be invoked (Trinkunas suggests that it be used against Maduro now), that would be naïve. Instead:

…we should also begin quiet conversations with others in the hemisphere on what steps to take should Venezuela experience a violent breakdown of political order. Such an event could potentially fracture the regional consensus on democracy on a scale much greater than that of the Honduran coup in 2009. Maduro’s allies in the region would most likely push for his immediate restoration, but in the absence of functioning democratic institutions, this would only compound Venezuela’s internal crisis. The United States would need to work with key states in the region—Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia—on a regional consensus in favor of rebuilding democracy in Venezuela.

Mark WeisbrotNACLA Report on the Americas, Winter 2013

January 24, 2014 (Union Membership Byte)

In July, economists Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West made a splash with a new paper arguing that even though the minimum wage doesn’t appear to have much effect on the level of employment (a position that should make more traditional critics of the minimum w

The number of union members rose 162,000 in 2013, reflecting a drop of 118,000 in the public sector that was offset by a rise of 281,000 in the private sector. Expressed as a share of the workforce, the union membership rate was unchanged in 2013, at 11.3

Sylvester Scheiber and Andrew Biggs have good news for us in a Wall Street Journal column, apparently the elderly are much better off than we realized.  Scheiber, a pension consultant and former chairman of the Social Security Advisory Board, and Biggs, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and former Deputy Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, tell readers that the standard numbers on income for the elderly are way off.

The most commonly used measures of income are from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey CPS). Scheiber and Biggs say that this survey misses a large portion of the income of retirees. For example, they tell readers:

"For 2008, the CPS reported $5.6 billion in individual IRA income. Retirees themselves reported $111 billion in IRA income to the Internal Revenue Service. The CPS suggests that in 2008 households receiving Social Security benefits collected $222 billion in pensions or annuity income. But federal tax filings for 2008 show that these same households received $457 billion of pension or annuity income.

"In combined terms, the Current Population Survey that ostensibly documents how poorly pensions and individual retirement plans provide retirement income ignores at least 60% of the income being delivered to retirees. Even that is not the whole story—because tax filings do not include distributions from Roth plans, since those distributions are not taxable."

Scheiber and Biggs go on to complain about the use of the CPS to assess retiree income and suggest alternative sources which they say would be more accurate.

This is an interesting argument. It is certainly newsworthy when someone finds major flaws in the most widely used survey for measuring income. However before we join Scheiber and Biggs in demanding that the Social Security Administration and other official bodies discard the data from the CPS, we may want to think this one over a bit.

There is one major problem with the Scheiber-Biggs story: the CPS is not the only data set that gives us these sorts of numbers about the income of the elderly. The Census Bureau has a totally separate survey, the Survey on Income and Program Participation (SIPP) that yields largely similar numbers to the CPS.

Mark WeisbrotChicago Tribune, January 28, 2014Huffington Post, January 28, 2014Arizona Daily Star/ Tuscon, January 27, 2014Harrisburg Sunday PATRIOT News, January 26, 2014TULSA Sunday WORLD, January 26, 2014South Bend Sunday Tribune (IN), January 26, 2014

Mark WeisbrotFresno Bee, January 23, 2014

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian (UK), January 22, 2014Público, February 9, 2014 En español