March 22, 2011, John Schmitt and David Rosnick

The NYT treated us to this column from a recent college grad complaining about the prospect that he will be faced with higher taxes to pay for his parents' and grandparents' Social Security and Medicare. The idea that our children and grandchildren are going to be poorer on average than we are is a regular theme of much of the budget reporting and advocacy work (think Peter Peterson funded enterprises) that we see regularly.

It is of course absurd on its face, as all economists and budget analysts know. Real per capita disposable income has risen at average rate of just under 2.0 percent year as shown in the chart below.

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis.

 

All projections show that real per capita disposable income will continue to rise, meaning that future generations will on average be richer than we are today and much richer than our parents and grandparents' generations. Of course there is an issue of inequality, if most of the gains from growth go to the Goldman Sachs-Mark Zuckerberg types, then most today's children may not be much better off than their parents and grandparents, but that is an issue of inequality within generations, not between generations.

Supporters of presidential candidate Michel Martelly (including military contractors) have been complaining of allegedly “fraudulent” polls showing Mirlande Manigat with a lead over Martelly. Instead, Martelly backers claim that “real numbers show Martell

The Republican proposals to slash the budget seem to work from the premise that if we fire government employees that we will induce private employers to hire more workers. This runs directly opposite to the idea behind the stimulus, that if the government stimulated demand by spending money and/or cutting taxes it would create more jobs. Interestingly, there is new research that indicates that the stimulus did raise employment. In fact, it seems that its effect was even larger than the Obama administration had predicted.

But the Republicans seem uninterested in these research findings. They instead claim that the best way to create private sector jobs is by having the government fire workers and spend less.

It is difficult to follow the logic of this view. If we think of a cross section of employers – hospitals, construction companies, car factories, retail stores and restaurants – which ones on this list do we think will hire more workers after a big round of federal budget cuts and layoffs?

Do we think that hospitals will suddenly rush out and hire more nurses and doctors because because of the National Institutes of Health is cutting funding for cancer research? Will Wal-Mart expand its sales staff because the government is laying off people from Head Start? These stories don’t seem very plausible.

Undoubtedly some of the government employees losing their jobs will be experienced and highly educated workers who private employers will be anxious to hire, but this will generally be for positions that would have existed in any case. These former government employees will simply be displacing other workers who would have held these jobs; there will not be new jobs in the private sector created for them.

The elections have now passed, in what has generally been described as a more peaceful election day than the first round. There were still many problems however, and most reports from on the ground indicate that turnout was very low. It is important to ke

This week, we post links to reports from Center for American Progress, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Demos, Economic Policy Institute, and National Employment Law Project.