Eileen AppelbaumEconomic Intelligence (U.S. News & World Report), February 4, 2013

Mark WeisbrotAl Jazeera English, February 2, 2013

Dean Baker
Truthout, February 4, 2013

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera English, February 4, 2013

This paper estimates the impact on climate change of reducing work hours over the rest of the century by an annual average of 0.5 percent.

The impact of the aging of the U.S. population on the finances of Social Security has been widely touted by the media and Washington pundits. While these demographics do raise costs for the program, this is hardly an unbearable burden and it certainly is not a surprise. We have known about the baby boom for more than 50 years.

What is newer and was less widely anticipated is the upward redistribution of income that we have seen over the last three decades.  This affects the program in two ways. First it has a direct effect in that a larger share of wage income has gone over the taxable maximum (currently just over $113,000). In 1983, the Greenspan commission set the cap at a level where 90 percent of wage income would be subject to the tax, meaning that 10 percent would escape taxations.

Since that date, the upward redistribution of wages has increased the portion of wage income over the cap to 16.8 percent, with just 83.2 percent of wage income subject to the cap. The share going over the wage cap is projected to rise further, reaching 17.5 percent of wage income in a decade. In this way, the upward redistribution of income directly worsens the finances of the program.

However there is also an indirect effect. If wages had kept pace with productivity growth over the last three decades, the typical workers would be paid around 25 percent more than they are now getting. In an environment of growing wages the prospect of increased Social Security taxes may not seem as bleak as in the environment of stagnating wages that we now see. While it is difficult to know how the political situation would differ if wages had kept pace with inflation, it is worth noting that even now workers would prefer higher payroll taxes to cuts in benefits according to a recent poll by the National Academy for Social Insurance.

Ezra Klein usually can be counted on for good insights on politics and the economy, however today's piece on immigration is the sort of thing that could have been on a press release from Fix the Debt. The basic point is to tout the virtues of immigration. While there are benefits of immigration that Klein rightly highlights, much of the piece veers off into the sort of pablum readers expect from the non-Klein portions of the Post.

This is especially the case where Klein dives off into demographics.

"The economic case for immigration is best made by way of analogy. Everyone agrees that aging economies with low birth rates are in trouble; this, for example, is a thoroughly conventional view of Japan. It’s even conventional wisdom about the U.S. The retirement of the baby boomers is correctly understood as an economic challenge. The ratio of working Americans to retirees will fall from 5 to 1 today to  3 to 1 in 2050. Fewer workers and more retirees is tough on any economy."

Klein then adds, "there’s nothing controversial about that analysis."

Actually everything about that analysis is controversial, including the basic facts. (Actually, these are just wrong.) The current ratio of workers to retirees is 2.8 to 1, it hasn't been 5 to 1 since the early 1960s. It is projected to fall to 2.0 to 1 by the mid 2030s.

There is little dispute among economists about the sharp rise in inequality over the last three decades. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top one percent's share of before-tax income roughly doubled between the late 1970s and the present -- from 10 percent to 20 percent. This gain came at the expense of the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution, who have seen little benefit from economic growth over this same period.

Economists generally agree about the facts on rising inequality. There are, however, enormous disagreements on the causes. The prevailing view within the profession attributes the rise in inequality primarily to technological change.

Is Rising Demanding for High-Skilled Workers Creating More Inequality?

The basic story is that computerization and other technological breakthroughs of the last three decades have displaced large numbers of relatively good paying jobs in manufacturing and elsewhere.

This loss of middle class jobs has forced formerly well-paid workers to crowd into occupations further down the wage scale, like retail trade and restaurant work. This has driven down wages for these workers in particular, and the occupations more generally. The result: the middle and bottom of the income distribution have seen relative declines in their wages because the demand for labor has simply not kept pace with the supply.

The most prominent proponent of this view is David Autor, an economics professor at M.I.T. His work purports to show a hollowing out of the middle, with demand increasing for workers in both high paid and low-paid occupations.

But while Autor's work has been widely accepted within the profession and in policy debates, not all of us buy it. In fact, my friends and colleagues Larry Mishel, John Schmitt, and Heidi Shierholz recently wrote a paper that challenges many of Autor's claims. They presented it at the annual economics meetings this month.

February 1, 2013

February 1, 2013 (Jobs Byte)

On January 30th, incoming Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder received a letter from fifty-eight members of Congress asking for a U.S. investigation into a DEA-led counter-narcotics operation in Ahuas, Honduras that went badly w