Democrats, Republicans, and Job Creation

About 12 years ago, there was a controversial claim (based in part on some of my analysis) that Obama was the most fiscally conservative president of the 1980-2012 period, which includes Reagan.

I crunched the numbers to show where that claim was true and where it was false (main takeaway: Obama was not as bad as some people thought, but Reagan easily was the most fiscally prudent president).

Today, I’m going to do something similar by looking at a controversial claim about job creation.

But let’s first familiarize ourselves with some data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

First, here is total civilian employment from 1969 to the present. As you can see, there’s an upward trend line, with occasional blips associated with recessions (if we wanted to be super-rigorous, we would adjust for factors such as size of the labor force and size of the working-age population, but let’s keep things simple).

Second, let’s zoom in on the Bush-Obama years. The most notable thing about this chart was the big loss of jobs because of the financial crisis, followed by a slow recovery.

Third, let’s zoom in on the Trump-Biden years. What stands out in this chart is the massive loss of jobs during the pandemic, followed by an initially rapid recovery and then stumbling progress.

Having absorbed this background information, now let’s look at the new controversial claim.  Simon Rosenberg tweeted earlier this month that almost all jobs in recent decades have been created when Democrats were in the White House.

This certainly seems like a damning indictment of Republicans, but is it true?

Lou Jacobsen of Politifact says yes, but with some qualifications.

Are Democratic presidents better at creating jobs and driving the economy? …We caught the latest iteration on X, in a post by Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic strategist in Washington, D.C. …The talking point…has merit. But it ignores caveats around divided governance and lucky timing. …What is the catch? Attributing job creation to policies or presidents isn’t as clear as it might seem. The Republican Congress of 1995 to 2001 might deserve a share of the credit for the job growth under Clinton… In crises especially, the parties have historically worked together. When faced with the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, George W. Bush and Trump “chose the policy responses that Democrats favored,” said Dan Mitchell, a libertarian economist. …Also, Rosenberg chose a favorable time frame for Democrats. …Job creation under each president also depends on luck. …In one recent example, the number of jobs created under Trump would have been higher had a once-in-a-century pandemic not hit during his fourth year in office.

I appreciate that Lou gave me the chance to add one of my comments to his analysis.

But I want to elaborate. Here’s everything I sent to him as part of our email exchange.

Very convenient to start after the Reagan years. Setting aside that laughable example of cherry-picking, Rosenberg’s number is largely driven by the financial crisis at the end of the George W. Bush years and the COVID crisis at the end of the Trump years. A partisan Democrat could argue “so what?” The net result, after all, was big job losses at the end of the Bush and Trump years. As a libertarian wonk, I don’t have to worry about blindly supporting one side or the other. Instead, I’ll simply point out that Bush and Trump chose the policy responses (bailouts/spending and shutdowns/spending, respectively) that Democrats favored. The real lesson to be learned is that good policies create jobs and bad policies reduce jobs, and it doesn’t matter whether there is an R or D after a politician’s name.

And I concluded by sharing a link to this column, which expands on my point about policy being the most important variable, not partisan affiliation.

The bottom line is that any analysis based on party affiliation will be senseless because we had one pro-market Republican (Reagan, who conveniently wasn’t even included in Rosenberg’s analysis) and lots of mediocre-to-bad Republicans (Bush I, Bush II, and Trump).

Likewise, there was one reasonably good Democrat (Clinton) while the others (Obama and Biden) were statist.

In other words, the recipe for growth and prosperity applies regardless of which political party holds power.

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Biden’s Income Challenge

In various ways (hourly wages, total compensation, household income, earnings growth), I’ve pointed out that falling living standards have been the biggest downside of Biden’s economic policies.

Simply stated, inflation has been rising faster than people’s income.

Some of Biden’s supporters have been sidestepping that issue. They want to focus on the unemployment rate (while deliberately avoiding any discussion of grim data on labor-force participation).

Today, let’s look at an example. Here are some excerpts from David Brooks’ most-recent New York Times column.

…in 2020…Joe Biden won the White House and immediately pursued an ambitious agenda to support the working class. The economic results have been fantastic. During Biden’s term the U.S. economy has created 10.8 million production and nonsupervisory jobs, including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs and 774,000 construction jobs. Wages are rising faster for people at the lower ends of the wage scale than for people at the higher ends. …But what have been the political effects? …Biden’s economic policies have done little to help the Democratic Party politically. In fact, the party continues to lose working-class support. …Some of the loss of support is happening among some the party’s historically most loyal constituencies. …the Democrats’ lead among Black Americans has shrunk by 19 points. Among Hispanics, the Democratic lead shrunk by 15 points. …Franklin Roosevelt built the New Deal majorities by using government to support workers. Biden tried to do the same. While his policies have worked economically, they have not worked politically. What’s going on?

Brooks is basically saying that Biden is doing a great job and that he is befuddled that workers somehow don’t appreciate the good news.

As he wrote, “What’s going on?”

I’ll answer that question for him. Here’s the latest data from the Labor Department on total compensation. As you can see, the Biden years have not been good for workers.

To be fair, workers in 2023 actually gained a bit of ground after the terrible numbers from 2021 and 2023.

But, to paraphrase one of Reagan’s campaign lines from 1980, “are they better off than they were four years ago?”

Doesn’t look that way to me.

The purpose of this column is not to argue that people should vote for Biden or against Biden. Rather, I want people to understand that Biden’s tax-and-spend policies have not been good for ordinary workers.

In other words, good policy is good politics. And, in Biden’s case, the reverse is true.

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Even More Evidence Against Minimum Wage Laws

As explained by public intellectuals such as Milton Friedman, Johan Norberg, John Stossel, and Orphe Divougny, the argument against minimum wage requirements is very simple.

If politicians dictate that people can’t be employed unless they receive, say, $15 per hour, then workers who are worth less than than amount (because of low skills, no experience, etc) won’t get hired.

And if a worker is worth $17 per hour and a government now says that worker must get $20 per hour, that’s a recipe for getting laid off.

Which is exactly what is happening in California. Here are some excerpts from a Wall Street Journal editorial.

California’s $20 an hour minimum wage for fast-food workers doesn’t take effect until April, but the casualties are already piling up. Pizza Hut franchises this week told more than 1,200 delivery drivers that they’ll lose their jobs before the higher wage kicks in. …it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers. Some may try to pass on their higher labor costs to customers. McDonald’s and Chipotle Mexican Grill have said that they plan to raise prices. But how many people will pay $8 for a Big Mac? Restaurants will probably deploy more automation to the extent they can, but fewer workers will mean longer waits in the drive-through. Pizza Huts are shaving their costs by out-sourcing delivery service to apps like DoorDash and GrubHub—ironic given how unions have fought against gig work. …Employment in California has fallen by 77,700 in the last year. Yet Democrats continue to impose higher costs and other burdens on business, oblivious to the lost jobs and services.

Why do politicians impose bad laws?

The simple answer is that they are kowtowing to unions.

So you may then ask why unions support bad laws?

I’ve previously noted that unions are willing to screw workers so long as the union benefits. And now we have more evidence for that view.

Why Do Labor Unions Advocate for Minimum Wage Increases?

By the way, here’s some new research showing that minimum wages are bad for workers and the economy.

"Do minimum wages deliver what they promise? Effects of minimum wage on employment, output, and income inequality from occupational choice theory" https://t.co/IltyZHpG1o "the effects are mainly negative… and quantitatively large for high minimum-to-average wage ratios" pic.twitter.com/pIZhHvs4ll

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) August 22, 2023

Just as economists have long understood.

High minimum wages even lead to more homelessness!

Important and provocative finding from @seth_j_hill: "when cities raise their minimum wage by 10%, relative homeless counts increase by three to four percent." Full paper at https://t.co/P5zwiiSp88 pic.twitter.com/lKFoIuhOj2

— Josh Kalla (@j_kalla) June 13, 2023

Let’s close with a bit of good news.

Professor Bryan Caplan explains that inflation (thanks, Federal Reserve!) is making the minimum wage less and less relevant.

One upside of Bidenflation is that the federal minimum wage has almost been abolished. And the sky has not fallen. pic.twitter.com/flVYuFXIkv

— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) January 11, 2023

But note that Bryan is only talking about the federal minimum wage. States and cities still have the power to throw people out of jobs.

P.S. If you want to see me ranting and raving about the minimum wage, click here, here, and here.

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Joe Biden and Jobs

It’s very hard to give Joe Biden a good grade for economic policy after examining issues such as subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, red tape, employment, and poverty.

So I was surprised last night when Governor Gavin Newsom of California said Biden deserved high marks. And his main piece of evidence was that Biden supposedly created millions and millions of new jobs.

Politicians don’t create jobs, of course, but let’s ignore that bit of rhetorical sloppiness. And let’s also ignore the absurdity of a politician trying to take credit for the economy’s bounce-back from the pandemic.

Instead, let’s dispassionately analyze the job market’s performance during Biden’s time in office

Looking at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s data, the good news (from the Biden-Newsom perspective) is that there has been a big increase in employment since January of 2021.

But there’s also bad news. If you extrapolate based on the job market’s performance before the pandemic – which I did with the dashed line – you can see that the economy is still lagging.

To be sure, this data is not evidence that Biden’s policies have prevented the economy and job market from fully recovering.

But the numbers also show that it is silly to assert that the president has overseen some sort of employment miracle. Or even that he’s done a good job.

Biden’s track record on employment looks even more suspect when you review the Labor Department’s data on job market participation. I’ve created a dashed trend line and once again we see that that economy is lagging its pre-pandemic performance. In this case, the lag is even greater.

These numbers are very revealing. After all, it is not exactly great news if the unemployment rate is low merely because workers have given up and dropped out.

Which seems to be one of Biden’s big legacies, especially when you compare the United States to other industrialized nations.

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The Economic Damage of Subsidized Unemployment

There was a lot of bad policy during the pandemic, with the health bureaucracies (the CDC and FDA) being especially incompetent.

But we also got lots of policy mistakes from elected officials, including trillions of dollars of fraud-riddled spending from both Trump and Biden.

Today, let’s focus on one part of that spending, the expanded unemployment benefits.

Economists traditionally have worried that such policies extend and increase joblessness. Even left-leaning economists such as Paul Kruman and Larry Summers have written about this problem.

So what happened during the pandemic? Did extra-generous unemployment benefits discourage people from finding jobs?

According to new research from Michael R. Strain, R. Glenn Hubbard, and, Harry Holzer, the answer is yes. Here are are the issues they sought to address in their study, which was published by Economic Inquiry.

This paper studies whether special pandemic-era unemployment benefits reduced the flow of unemployed workers into employment. The American Rescue Plan, enacted in March 2021, built upon previous pandemic-era measures that expanded Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits. It extended the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) program, which added a $300 weekly supplement to standard state UI benefits from the law’s passage in March 2021 until September 6, 2021. And it extended UI benefits to workers typically ineligible for state UI programs through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, such as the self-employed, “gig” and part-time workers. Concerns about the labor-market effects of PUA and FPUC led 26 states to opt out of at least one of these programs before it was set to expire in September 2021. Of those 26 states, 18 stopped participating in both programs in June 2021.

So we had a natural experiment. Some states, mostly “red states,” opted against extended and expanded benefits.

While other states, mostly “blue states,” did the opposite.

And here are some of the results.

It seems red states made the right choice, assuming the goal is getting people back to work.

Using CPS data, we present difference-in-difference estimates that the flow of unemployed workers into employment increased by around 12-14 percentage points following early termination. Among prime-age workers, the effect is about two-thirds the size of the unemployed-to-employed flow among control states during the February–June 2021 period. …We show that state-level unemployment rates fell following early exit from FPUC and PUA.

Wonky readers may appreciate Figure 1 and its accompanying explanation.

These results are hardly surprising.

The left’s dependency agenda reduces the relative benefits of working compared to not working.

We should have learned that lesson during the Obama years.

P.S. Here’s an amusing way of looking at the issue. And another.

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Red States vs. Blue States, Part III

In Part I or our series comparing red states and blue states, we found that the former enjoyed better overall economic performance.

In Part II, we discovered that red states did much better with regards to unemployment.

But the unemployment rate does not fully capture the strength of the labor market. It’s also important to look at how many people are actually working. Especially in the economy’s productive sector.

So, for Part III of our series, here’s a fascinating visual showing how quickly private sector employment rebounded after the pandemic.

It’s from John Phelan of Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, so he’s focusing on his state’s lagging performance, but if you look at the states with the best performance (fewest months before jobs recovered) and the states with the worst performance (states where private-sector jobs still haven’t recovered), red states are doing better.

It’s not a perfect relationship, of course, since some red-oriented, energy-producing red states are at, or near, the bottom. But those are exceptions to the general rule.

Vance Ginn and Erik Randolph discussed the gap between red states and blue states in a column last year for Real Clear Policy. Here are some of their findings.

Freer states that were more reluctant to shut down their economies due to COVID-19 are doing much better economically than states with severe shutdowns. Even a state like California is suffering — which was considered an American paradise for nearly a century, with its perfect weather and natural beauty. …Residents are fleeing California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania for places like Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. …the most important statistic is how Americans are voting with their feet. Forty-six million Americans changed zip codes in a 12-month period ending in February 2022. That’s the most moves since 2010. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2021, California, New York, and Illinois had the highest domestic migration losses, and Florida, Texas, and Arizona gained the most.

The moral of the story is that people are “voting with their feet” against high taxes and excessive government.

And it’s not simply a matter of moving to places with better climate. If that was the case, California would be the nation’s top destination (and it was, prior to getting captured by the left).

P.S. Speaking of California, click here for my series comparing California and Texas. You can also click here for the comparisons between New York and Florida.

P.P.S. Sadly, some blue states want to accelerate the loss of jobs and investment.

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America’s Most Depressing Chart

I periodically use a “most depressing” theme when writing about charts or tweets with grim data.

I’ve done that with regional data and also looked at depressing data from specific countries.

Today, we’re going to look at some “most depressing” information about the United States. Here’s a tweet from Yale Professor Alice Evans about labor force participation for working-age men in developed nations.

Let’s start by emphasizing that that the labor force participation rate (or the employment-population ratio, for those who prefer that data set) is a more important indication than the unemployment rate.

After all, our prosperity is tied to the quantity and quality of labor and capital in the economy. Which leads me to three observations.

1. It is definitely bad news when labor force participation declines over time.
2. It is even worse news when it declines for men in their prime working years.
3. And it is utterly depressing when the United States falls behind other nations.

David Bahnsen has a new article in National Review on the topic of declining labor force participation. Here are a few excerpts. starting with some straight-forward economic analysis.

The labor-force participation rate (those working combined with those actively looking for work as a percentage of the non-institutionalized, working-age population) was steady and reliably around 66 or 67 percent for years before the financial crisis. The number dropped to between 62 and 63 percent after that and only started to trend higher after the deregulation and tax reform of 2017–18. That, of course, was upended by Covid and the 2020 shutdowns. …That problem is the failure of the labor-force participation rate to return to normal. At approximately 62 percent, we sit 1.5 percentage points below pre-Covid levels… While 1.5 percentage points may seem like a small number, with a working-age population of about 260 million people, it means we are about 4 million people below the trend-line… And paradoxically, this comes with more job openings than we have people looking for jobs.

This is an economic problem, but it should raise alarm bells for other reasons as well.

Simply stated, the decline in labor force participation may be a sign of eroding societal capital.

The American ethos values the dignity of work and sees purpose, meaning, and hope in productive activity. Not only does our economy desperately need the full weight of American ingenuity, innovation, and productivity, but our souls do as well. In a time of increased alienation, isolation, and desperation, a larger labor force would mean a greater number of people engaged in meaningful activity with attendant duties and responsibilities. It would allow for less substance abuse, less emotional angst, and more pursuits of passions. …Our goal must be not only maximum employment of those looking for work, but also that more people who are able to participate in the labor force actually do so. …A labor-force participation rate equal to our pre-2008 levels is attainable, but not without a resurgence of values focused on productivity. The end result would be far more meaningful than what we find in a GDP calculation.

He’s right, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Which raises the question of why the U.S. numbers are bad and what can be done to reverse the decline?

At the risk of admitting uncertainty, I’m not sure we have easy answers. For instance, I’m tempted to say the numbers will improve if we address some of the ways (subsidized unemployment, lax disability rules, licensing laws, etc).

But presumably those problems exist in the other nations in the chart. Indeed, most of those countries presumably have policies that are worse (such as bigger welfare states) than what we have in the United States.

Which means societal capital may be the problem (even though conventional measures suggest the U.S. ranks highly by world standards).

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The Tradeoff Between Government Dependency and Self-Sufficiency

When writing about employment and jobs, I often try to remind people about a handful of important observations.

1. A nation’s economic output is determined in part by the number of people gainfully employed.
2. The share of working-age people with jobs may be more important than the unemployment rate.
3. Worker compensation is determined by productivity and productivity is driven by investment.
4. Government redistribution programs can make joblessness more attractive than employment.

Regarding the final point, a new report from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity contains some very depressing data. Authored by Prof. Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago and E.J. Antoni or the Heritage Foundation, it shows how Americans can be lured into unemployment.

…with existing unemployment benefits and the dramatic recent expansion of ObamaCare subsidies, a spouse would have to earn more than $80,000 a year from a 40 hour a week job to have the same after-tax income as certain families with two unemployed spouses receiving government benefits. In these states, working 40 hours a week and earning $20 an hour would mean a slight reduction in income compared to two parents receiving unemployment benefits and health care subsidies. …In 24 states, unemployment benefits and ACA subsidies for a family of four with both parents not working are the annualized equivalent of at least the national median household income. …In more than half the states, unemployment benefits and ACA subsidies exceed the value of the salary and benefits of the average firefighter, truck driver, machinist, or retail associate in those states.

For American readers, here’s a look at how some states make it very attractive to rely on government.

The good news (if we’re grading on a curve) is that some of the numbers are not as bad as they were during the pandemic, when politicians decided to provide super-charged unemployment benefits.

On the other hand, Obamacare subsidies are becoming an ever-bigger drag on the job market.

The big takeaway is that the numbers above reflect the impact of just two social insurance programs. The numbers would look worse if various means-tested programs were included.

For those interested in that data, here are state estimates from back in 2013, before Obamacare was fully in effect.

And for those who like international comparisons, here’s a look at the nations with the biggest handouts.

P.S. If Biden’s proposal for per-child handouts is approved, it would become far easier for people to leave the labor force and rely on handouts.

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Krugman’s Anemic Defense of Bidenomics

Over the past few months, I’ve written a 7-part series on Bidenomics, reviewing the president’s record on issues such as subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, red tape, and employment.

Regarding the last item, a big problem is that the share of the population with jobs (measured by either the labor-force participation rate or the employment-population ratio) has not recovered.

It hasn’t recovered to where it was before the pandemic and it hasn’t recovered to where it was before Obama took office.

That’s bad news. Our economy’s output (and our national income) depends on the quantity and quality of both labor and capital.

This does not reflect well on Biden.

But not everyone agrees. Paul Krugman has leapt to the President’s defense. He even claims that American workers are enjoying a “Biden boom.”

President Biden has presided over a huge employment boom… Bidenomics has been good for American workers, whether they know it or not. …Haven’t they seen the purchasing power of their wages fall, thanks to inflation? The answer is yes, but. …that decline was entirely caused by rising prices for food and energy, which have a lot to do with global forces and little, if anything, to do with U.S. policy… If you want to assess the impacts of Bidenomics on wages, you should probably compare wages with prices excluding food and energy. And on that basis, real wages have basically been flat since Biden took office. …So, yes, the Biden boom has been good for workers.

The most shocking part of the column is that Krugman never addresses the problem of missing workers.

I’m not joking. You can read his entire article and you won’t find anything about the labor-force participation rate or the employment-population ratio.

He does mention the number of people working and wants us to believe those numbers are a cause for celebration, but even he felt the need to acknowledge that, “the job gains under Biden probably reflected a natural recovery from lockdowns.”

And I think it’s worth noting that we have 4 million fewer jobs than Biden claimed we would have if his so-called stimulus scheme was approved.

In other words, the president’s policies almost certainly have hindered the natural recovery that should have occurred.

Now let’s tackle the issue of inflation-adjusted wages for the people who do have jobs.

Krugman claims that workers have enjoyed a “boom” because “real wages have basically been flat.”

But even that claim is only possible if you ignore what’s happened to prices for food and energy.

Call me crazy, but this is the economic equivalent of “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

The bottom line if that inflation-adjusted wages have been falling during Biden’s tenure.

I’ll conclude by noting that Krugman could have written a column blaming the Fed for the weak employment data. That would have been legitimate.

And he could have written a column arguing that Trump had the same big-spending policies when he was in office. That also would have been legitimate.

Instead, he wrote a column that may be even more of a joke than his “exploding cigar” about Estonia.

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The Failure of Bidenomics, Part VII

Let’s revisit the issues of Bidenomics.

Previous editions of this series have focused on Biden’s dismal record with regards to subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, and red tape.

The assessment has not been positive, which shouldn’t be very surprising since Biden is basically a slow-motion version of Bernie Sanders.

Today, we’re going to look at Biden’s record on jobs…and that’s not going to improve the assessment.

The problem is employment rather than unemployment.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Eberstadt writes about the millions of Americans who have disappeared from the labor force.

Never has work been so readily available in modern America; never have so many been uninterested in taking it. …For every unemployed person in the U.S. today, there are nearly two open jobs, and the labor shortage affects every region of the country. …Why the bizarre imbalance between the demand for work and the supply of it? One critical piece of the puzzle was the policy response to the pandemic. …Washington pulled out all the monetary and fiscal stops….created disincentives for work as never before. …In 2020 and 2021, a windfall of more than $2.5 trillion in extra savings was bestowed by Washington on private households through borrowed public funds. …With pre-Covid rates of workforce participation, almost three million more men and women would be in our labor force today.

To be fair, bad pandemic policies began with Trump.

But Biden promised changes yet has delivered more of the same.

Why does this matter?

It’s not just a numbers issue. When people drop out of the labor force, that translates into a weakening of America’s societal capital.

Mr. Eberstadt explains.

The signs that growing numbers of citizens are ambivalent about working shouldn’t be ignored. Success through work, no matter one’s station, is a key to self-esteem, independence and belonging. A can-do, pro-work ethos has served our nation well. America’s future will depend in no small part on how—and whether—her people choose to work.

Thanks to a stronger work ethic and spirit of self reliance, the United States historically has had an advantage over other nations.

But it’s increasingly difficult to feel optimistic about the long-run outlook for America’s societal capital.

Ironically, Joe Biden seemed to understand this in the not-too-distant past.

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Defending International Trade

As a fan of globalization – but not globalism, I endorse this new video from Reason, which punctures myths from protectionists such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (and Joe Biden).

If you don’t have a spare seven minutes to watch the video, it addresses three specific points.

1. Does cross-border trade destroy manufacturing jobs?
2. Did liberalizing trade with China take American jobs?
3. Does trade make us vulnerable because of supply chains?

Plenty of good material, but I also would have challenged protectionists to provide a successful example of protectionism. Today or in the past.

Did protectionism work for Herbert Hoover – or anyone else – in the 1930s?

Did protectionism work for Juan Peron in Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s?

Is protectionism working for India’s economy in the 21st century?

Did protectionism work for Donald Trump between 2017 and 2020?

The answer is no in every single case. So it is no surprise that scholarly research (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) shows that free trade is a better approach if a nation wants more jobs and higher income.

But protectionists make one accurate point. While free trade increases overall employment, that does not mean every worker in every industry benefits.

In his New York Times column, Peter Coy explores this topic.

The skepticism about free markets…has gotten only stronger…only 44 percent of Republican voters…viewed free trade mainly as an opportunity for growth through increased exports. …the standard Econ 101 argument for free trade… First, assert that trade increases prosperity by allowing each country to specialize in what it’s best at. …Second, acknowledge that not everyone wins from free trade… Third, state that this problem can be easily solved: Everyone in society can be made better off if the winners share some of their gains with the losers. …In reality, the winners from trade rarely share much of their gains with the losers. The losers remain losers, and they often vote for candidates who put up tariff walls. …the free traders have failed to deliver on their promises to make free trade and open markets work for all.

A reasonably fair article, but I don’t think “free traders have failed” for reasons I explained in one of my videos from earlier this year.

If you don’t want to spend three minutes watching the video, I explain that all trade destroys jobs. And that includes trade within a nation.

It’s part of “creative destruction,” which I’ve labeled as the best and worst part of capitalism.

Millions of jobs get destroyed every year, in part because new technology, new competitors, and new innovations.

That’s bad news for many people, but it’s also the process that creates even more new jobs.

And it’s the process that has made all of us so much richer than our ancestors. And that includes the ancestors of people who lost jobs because of domestic or international trade.

P.S. Click here, here, and here for some very sound observations from America’s best post-WWII president.

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Biden’s Anemic Jobs Market

I’ve long argued that it’s generally better to focus on employment rather than unemployment when assessing the health of the job market, and I had a chance to pontificate on that topic for Labor Relations Radio.

Sadly, labor force participation numbers weren’t good under Obama and they improved only marginally under Trump.

And, as you might expect, the numbers are not good under Biden.

Courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, here is the data on the labor force participation rate.

As you can see, the numbers were declining for much of this century, but then began to improve before falling off a cliff because of the pandemic.

For purposes of today’s column, it’s rather troubling that the labor market has not bounced back to where it was before coronavirus wreaked so much havoc.

The Employment-Population Ratio, also from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, tells a similar story.

There was a big drop at the end of the Bush years and start of the Obama years, followed by a gradual recovery that was short-circuited by the pandemic.

Sadly, we have not come close to recouping those losses.

By the way, there are some folks on the left who recognize this problem.

Andrew Yang recently tweeted about the drop in labor force participation.

And he had a follow-up tweet pointing out that every one-percentage-point drop in labor force participation translates into 2.5 million fewer people being employed.

Is he right?

Well, let’s look at another chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As you can see, total employment today (158.4 million people) is not even back to where it was before the pandemic (158.9 million people).

And we would need a couple of million more jobs simply to get back on the pre-pandemic trendline.

To be fair, I don’t think Biden is fully responsible for the sub-par numbers. We probably would not be back to the pre-pandemic trendline even if we had good policy from Washington.

That being said, Biden is making a bad situation worse. His so-called stimulus was a net-job destroyer.

I’m sure additional red tape also is hindering job growth. Moreover, the threat of higher taxes surely isn’t helping.

The bottom line is that we need more people working, but that probably won’t happen unless we get government out of the way.

P.S. If you want technical definitions, here’s how the BLS defines the above terms.

• The labor force participation rate. This measure is the number of people in the labor force as a percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years old and over. In other words, it is the percentage of the population that is either working or actively seeking work.
• The employment-population ratio. This measure is the number of employed as a percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years old and over. In other words, it is the percentage of the population that is currently working.

P.S. If you want a humorous take on labor economics, I recommend this Wizard-of-Id parody, as well as this Chuck Asay cartoon and this Robert Gorrell cartoon.

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Trade, Jobs, and Wages

I’m a knee-jerk supporter of free trade, which simply means I don’t think politicians and bureaucrats should be able to interfere with my freedom to buy good and services from people who happen to live in other nations.

But my support for free trade is not just based on ideology. I also cite data on how trade taxes and other restrictions make nations poorer.

Simply stated, trade barriers (like other forms of government intervention) make an economy less efficient.

And the negative effects go beyond overall economic output. Researchers also find job losses, lower productivity, and increased inequality.

Today, let’s look at some new research on this topic. The IMF earlier this year released a new working paper authored by Kim Beaton, Valerie Cerra, and Metodij Hadzi-Vaskov.

Here are the main results.

…firms in countries and industries experiencing greater competition from imports reduce employment slightly. …Even so, the low elasticity of employment growth to imports indicates a limited adverse impact. …Contrary to popular belief and anti-globalization sentiment, import competition is associated with higher average wage growth across the global sample of firms…, driven by the EMDEs… Taking employment and wages together, import growth in an industry leads to a rise in the wage bill of domestic firms in the same industry. Thus, while import competition generates some job dislocations, the overall impact on earnings of workers in the same industry is positive.

Here’s a chart that was included with the study.

One unexpected finding from the study is that rich nations are more likely to enjoy job gains.

The job loss associated with import competition appears to be dominated by the behavior of firms in emerging and developing economies… In contrast, the import shock provides a statistically significant positive boost to firms’ employment in advanced economies.

And here’s a finding that should not surprise anyone.

…we find relatively positive outcomes of import competition on exposed firms, including higher sales, profits, wage growth, and investment. Moreover, the import shock to exposed firms, and the ensuing employment changes, do not take place in isolation. Import growth often goes hand in hand with export growth, which spurs job creation.

But I didn’t like everything I found in the paper. In some circumstances, trade reduces inequality, but by hurting those with high incomes rather than helping those with low incomes.

Our results also show that firms experiencing higher imports shocks are those with higher average wage levels. Thus, to the extent that employment growth is lower in these more exposed firms, it could lead to lower inequality.

For some of our friends on the left, this is a good outcome. Crazy.

Fortunately, trade generally helps everyone, so this quirky result is an exception rather than the rule.

The bottom line is that free trade is an overall winner for the economy. Does that mean that everyone benefits in short run? Of course not.

Jobs always get destroyed when there’s competition. And that’s true whether the competition comes from inside a country or outside a country.

The goal, of course, is to have a vibrant economy that regularly produces plenty of new jobs to offset any job losses.

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Understanding Jobs, Trade, and Creative Destruction

I’ve previously explained that “creative destruction” is the best and worst part of capitalism. This new video has more details.

I have three goals with this video.

First, I explain that trade destroys jobs. But protectionists won’t be happy with my message because I point out that all trade destroys jobs – whether we are looking at trade inside a country or trade that crosses national borders.

To be more specific, jobs are destroyed because of changes in trade that are caused by innovation. And I cite several examples.

• The invention and adoption of the light bulb destroying jobs in the candle-making industry.
• The invention and adoption of the automobile destroying jobs in the horse-and-buggy industry.
• The invention and adoption of the personal computer destroying jobs in the typewriter industry.

Second, I explain that this creative destruction boosts our living standards. Americans are far more prosperous today than we were 50 years ago or 100 years ago.

And I specifically point out in the video that this is true even for the descendants of candle makers, blacksmiths, and typewriter makers.

Third, I share data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about massive annual job losses in the private sector that occurred in 2017 and 2018, but I also pointed out that an ever larger amount of new jobs were created in those two years.

For today, I’m going to update those numbers by also showing what happened in 2019. As you can see from the chart, the United States lost more than 85 million jobs during those three years (the orange bars), but those losses were fortunately offset by a gain of nearly 91 million private-sector jobs (the blue bars).

There’s also data for 2020 and part of 2021, and those numbers tell an unhappy story because we still haven’t recovered from pandemic-related job losses (notwithstanding President Biden’s false claims in his State of the Union speech last night).

The moral of the story is that major job losses are an unavoidable feature of a modern economy. And that’s true regardless of the level of cross-border trade.

Which is why policymakers should focus on making sure we have sensible policies (low tax rates, efficient markets, spending restraint, open trade, etc) that allow high levels of new job creation in the United States.

P.S. Creative destruction also means that some companies disappear and are replaced by new ones.

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The Anti-Jobs Agenda of Spanish Politicians

Spain is more economically backwards than most nations in Western Europe. As a public finance economist, my gut instinct is to blame bad fiscal policy.

And there’s certainly plenty of evidence for that view. After all, taxes drive a huge wedge between pre-tax income and post-tax consumption. So there is not much incentive to be a productive member of society.

But it’s important to remember that fiscal policy is just one of the ways politicians can hurt an economy.

In an article for the Foundation for Economic Education, Michael Peterson explains how labor law is stifling job creation in the Spanish economy.

Spain doesn’t suffer from a labor shortage like in the United States, but something much worse—a sclerotic labor market marked by…Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) that constrains employers from hiring and firing workers. …These figures help explain the high unemployment rates observed in Spain over the past three decades—averaging 17.3 percent compared to 7.6 percent for EU-8 countries and 5.2 percent for the U.S. …one study showed that Spain’s unemployment rate wouldn’t have been as high following the Great Recession had there been less onerous costs to firing workers in permanent jobs… In another study, researchers from the Banco de España found that the duality function of the labor market increases unemployment volatility relative to a unified employment system (like in the U.S., for instance). A similar study finds that increasing the number of workers on temporary contracts reduces the number of days they worked by 4.5 percent and their total earnings by 9 percent. …Additionally, the labor force participation rate has steadily declined in Spain since 2012—from almost 60 percent to 56.7 percent. …Spain also has one of the highest historical long-term unemployment rates among OECD nations, further reflecting the rigidities within its labor market.

Here’s the chart that accompanied the article.

If you peruse the EU’s data on unemployment, you’ll find that Greece also has very high levels of joblessness. And for largely the same reasons.

By the way, Mr. Peterson also notes that excessive tax rates play a role.

Another factor that we can’t ignore is the high social security tax on employers in Spain, which stands at 29.9 percent.

So what’s the bottom line?

The most important thing to understand is that some of the politicians who support “employment protection legislation” may genuinely think they are helping workers.

But their efforts are backfiring for reasons that should be obvious.

• Making it more expensive to hire workers means fewer workers will be hired.
• Making it more expensive to fire workers means fewer workers will be hired.
• Making it more expensive to employ workers means fewer workers will be hired.

P.S. Labor law is one area where the United States is far ahead of most European nations.

P.P.S. I applaud Spaniards for coming up with clever ways of avoiding excessive taxation.

P.P.P.S. Spanish politicians balance their bad labor taxation with bad business taxation.

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Biden’s “Stimulus” Failure

At the risk of understatement, economists are not good forecasters.

And they are especially incompetent when they make forecasts based on bad policy, such as when the Obama White House projected that his so-called stimulus would quickly lead to falling unemployment.

In reality, the jobless rate immediately increased and then remained much higher than projected for the remainder of the five-year forecast.

The failure of Obama’s stimulus should have been a learning moment for Washington politicians.

But Joe Biden must have slept through that lesson because his first big move after taking office was to saddle the nation with a $1.9 trillion “stimulus” package.

The White House claimed this orgy of new spending would lead to four million additional jobs in 2021, on top of the six million new jobs that already were expected.

So what happened? Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute looked at the final numbers for 2021 and discovered that employment actually fell compared to pre-stimulus baseline projection.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected on February 1, 2021…a gain of 6.252 million jobs over…2021…we now know payroll employment in the fourth quarter of 2021 averaged 148.735 million — an increase of 6.116 million compared with the average of 142.619 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. That means the job growth the President praised this week has fallen 136,000 jobs short of what was expected under the policies he inherited. …President Biden and congressional Democrats promised their $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would create millions of additional new jobs this year — on top of what White House economists called the “dire” baseline of 6.252 million new jobs reflected in CBO’s projection without that enormous legislation. …House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) repeated that claim, stating that “if we do not enact this package, the results could be catastrophic,” including “4 million fewer jobs.” Yet…not one of those four million additional jobs supposedly resulting from that $1.9 trillion spending plan has appeared, as job creation in 2021 did not even match CBO’s projection without that legislation.

Below you’ll see the chart that accompanied the article.

As you can see, the White House projected more than 10 million new jobs (right bar).

Yet we would up with 6.1 million new jobs (left bar), about 140,000 less than we were projected to get (center bar) without wasting $1.9 trillion.

If pressed, I’m sure the Biden Administration would use the same excuse that we got from the Obama White House (and from the Congressional Budget Office), which is that the initial forecast was wrong and that the so-called stimulus did create jobs.

In other words, the Biden economists now would say they should have projected 2 million new jobs, which means that the $1.9 trillion spending spree added 4 million jobs, for a net increase of 6 million.

You may think I’m joking, but that is exactly how the Keynesian economists tried to justify Obama’s stimulus failure.

The moral of the story is that the best way to really create jobs is to get government out of the way rather than adding new burdens.

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So-Called Employment Protection Legislation Is Bad for Workers

Tax issues such as depreciation, net operating losses, worldwide taxation, and carry forwards probably set the record for inducing boredom, but I suspect most people also have little interest in a workforce issue known as “employment protection.”

But they should.

Job creation and wage levels can be adversely affected when politicians impose laws and regulations that sound nice, but have the unintended consequence of increasing the cost of employing people.

The good news is that this is an area where the United States gets a high score.

As shown in the chart, America is behind only Denmark in having a deregulated market for matters such as hiring, firing, and compensation.

Today, we’re going to examine some research about the impact of government intervention in labor markets.

Here are some excerpts from a new working paper for the European Central Bank, authored by Gerhard Rünstler, that looks at the impact of labor market deregulation in eurozone nations over the past 20-plus years.

This paper uses a narrative panel VAR to estimate the macro-economic effects of reforms in the euro area in between 1998 Q1 and 2018 Q4. …The narrative VAR finds that unemployment benefit reforms lead to a relatively quick increase in employment and a moderate decline in the real wage. In the medium term, the effect on employment remains, while real compensation reverts back to baseline. The responses to reforms of regular contract EPL are similar, but the response of employment builds up gradually and reaches its full scale only after about six years. …the effects of EPL reforms depend on the state of the business cycle: in states of low growth the response of real activity and employment is more delayed. Some of the reforms had sizeable medium-term effects. In particular, the German Hartz reforms and EPL reforms in Portugal after 2007 altogether raised GDP and employment by above 2% in these countries. Reforms in the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain had smaller but still significant effects.

Here are some of the statistical estimates from the study, starting with a look at relaxing employment protection legislation.

Output and employment increase, which is good news, but the most important finding is an increase in long-run compensation.

Here’s a look at what happens if the law is changed to reduce subsidies for joblessness.

Unsurprisingly, there’s more output and more employment (a lesson we’ve learned in the United States).

I’ll include one final graphic from the study.

Figure 5 shows that the benefits may be larger, or materialize more quickly, depending on the economy’s underlying health.

The bottom line is that it is always a good idea to reduce government intervention in labor markets. If you want more jobs and higher pay, deregulate when the economy is weak and deregulate when the economy is strong.

By the way, the European Central Bank is not the only international organization to reach this conclusion.

I also want to share some passages from last year’s Doing Business report from the World Bank.

…firms should…be free to conduct their business in the most efficient way possible. When labor regulation is too cumbersome for the private sector, economies experience higher unemployment—most pronounced among youth and female workers. …Flexible labor regulation provides workers with the opportunity to choose their jobs and working hours more freely, which in turn increases labor force participation. …For example, if France were to attain the same degree of labor market flexibility as the United States, its employment rate would rise by 1.6 percentage points, or 14% of the employment gap between the two countries. When Sweden increased labor market flexibility, by giving firms with fewer than 11 employees the freedom to exempt two workers from their priority list, labor productivity in small firms increased 2–3% more than it did at larger firms. …Many high- and upper-middle-income economies, including Denmark…and the United States, have flexible labor regulation. In other advanced economies, including Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Spain, strict labor rules make the process of hiring employees arduous. Research shows that strict employment protection legislation shapes firms’ incentives to enter and exit the economy, which in turn has implications for job creation and economic growth. …When faced with rigid employment protection laws, firms lose the freedom to conduct business efficiently. …A firm’s ability to adjust to shocks is adversely affected by rigid labor regulation. Moreover, firms invest less in new product creation in such an environment.

The moral of the story is that when politicians impose laws to “protect” workers, they’re actually making it less likely that businesses will hire workers.

P.S. This cartoon aptly captures what happens when well-intentioned people expand government (by the way, most politicians are not well-intentioned).

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The Negative Relationship between Welfare and Work

Ten days ago, I shared some data and evidence illustrating how redistribution programs result in high implicit tax rates and thus discourage low-income people from climbing the economic ladder.

Simply stated, why work harder or work more when an additional dollar of income only leads to a net benefit of 10 cents or 20 cents? Or why work harder or work more when you can actually wind up being worse off?

Or why work at all if the governments provides enough goodies?

But don’t ask such questions if you’re in the same room as Helaine Olen of the Washington Post. She is very upset that some people think welfare payments discourage work.

It’s a dangerous myth, this idea that government help causes some people to just loaf off. It’s also untrue. Reminder: Before the pandemic, most working-age people receiving benefits like food stamps worked. They just didn’t earn enough money. …the temporary child tax credit signed into law this year by President Biden demonstrates the opposite. It is an extraordinary success. Almost 90 percent of families with children under age 18 are eligible to receive a monthly check from the federal government through the end of the year. …Many other developed nations offer almost all residents a child allowance of some sort.

If you read the entire column, you’ll notice that she provides very little evidence, particularly considering her very bold assertion that a negative link between redistribution and labor supply is “a dangerous myth.”

Yet we know from the experience of welfare reform in the 1990s that work requirements did boost labor supply.

And don’t forget about the very recent evidence that turbo-charged unemployment benefits encouraged more joblessness.

We also have evidence from overseas showing that there’s a negative relationship between handouts and idleness.

Including research from the Netherlands and the Nordic nations such as Denmark. And the same is true in Canada. And the United Kingdom.

Ms. Olen seems primarily motivated by her support for permanent per-child handouts, as President Biden has proposed.

And she wants us to believe that everyone will continue to work, even if they can get $3000-plus for each kid, along with all the other goodies that are provided by Uncle Sam (often topped up by state governments).

For what it’s worth, I think she admits her real agenda toward the end of her column.

…an argument can be made that the children of the irresponsible deserve more support from us, not less. Children can’t push their parents to get with the work-and-education program. As a result, you’re not “helping” children if you insist on financially punishing their parents for not making an “effort.” …human infrastructure matters too.

In other words, Ms. Olen seems to share Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s view that money should be given to people “unwilling to work.”

Which is how some of our friends actually view the world. They think there is a right to other people’s money. Which is why they support big handouts, including so-called basic income.

The bottom line is that Biden’s per-child handouts and other expansions of the welfare state clearly would make work less attractive for some people.

Not all people, of course, because it takes time to erode societal capital.

But why would we want a society where a growing number of people think it’s okay to live off of others?

P.S. There is scholarly research that redistribution programs lure older people out of the workforce.

P.P.S. There is also scholarly research showing redistribution programs discourage households from building wealth.

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America’s Labor Laws Are (Relatively Speaking) Great for Workers

In my fantasy country of Libertaria, there is no Department of Labor, no regulation of employment contracts between consenting adults, and no favoritism for either labor or management.

In the real world, the relevant question is the degree of regulation and intervention. Especially compared to other nations, which is why the the Employment Flexibility Index is a useful measuring stick.

The Employment Flexibility Index is a quantitative comparison of regulatory policies on employment regulation in EU and OECD countries. …Higher values of the Employment Flexibility Index reflect more flexible labor regulations.

The good news, for American workers and American companies, is that the United States has the second-best system among developed nations, trailing only Denmark (another reason why pro-market people should appreciate that Scandinavian nation).

It’s hardly a surprise that France is in last place, notwithstanding President Macron’s attempt to push policy in the right direction.

It’s worth noting that the United States has much less regulation of labor markets than the average European nation. Which may help to explain why American living standards are so much higher.

Let’s review some academic research on the issue of employment regulation.

In an article for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Professor Gail Heriot of the University of San Diego Law School explains how regulations discourage job creation and also may encourage discrimination.

… there’s a demographic out there that we ought to be worrying about, it is young people, the perennial newcomers to the economy. Well-meaning employment laws primarily benefit those who already have jobs, often at the expense of those who do not. …For low-skilled young people trying to get their first jobs, the most immediate threat may be the steep minimum wage hikes adopted recently in various cities.…young people even with great educational credentials are unknown quantities to employers and, hence, risky to hire, especially in a legal environment in which employee terminations can lead to costly legal disputes. …he best way for employers to avoid being wrongly accused of a Title VII violation is to avoid hiring someone who could turn out to be litigious if things do not work out. That creates a perverse incentive to avoid hiring the first African American or the first woman in a particular business or department. …A law that was intended to end discrimination in hiring, thus, ends up encouraging it instead.

In a Cambridge University working paper, Maarten de Ridder and Damjan Pfajfar found that wage rigidities, which are driven in part by red tape, are correlated with greater levels of economic damage when there is an adverse policy shock.

We find considerable variation in downward nominal wage rigidities across states and over time. Our estimates of nominal rigidities are positively related to state minimum wages, unionization,union bargaining power, and the size of services and government in employment and negatively to labor mobility. …We therefore focus on nominal wage rigidities when assessing the transmission of policy shocks. We find that states with greater downward nominal wage rigidities experience larger and more persistent increases in unemployment and declines in output after monetary policy shocks. …Similar results also hold for exogenous changes in taxes… States with higher nominal rigidities experience larger increases in unemployment and declines in output after a tax increase compared to states that are more flexible. We further show that institutional factors that could drive wage rigidities—like minimum wages and right-to-work-legislation—have a similar effect. States with a higher minimum to median wage ratio and those without right-to-work legislation experience larger and more persistent effects of monetary and tax policy shocks. Combined, these results firmly corroborate the hypothesis that resistance to wage cuts deepens policy shocks.

And in an article for Regulation, Warren Meyer explains that red tape and intervention is particularly bad news for unskilled workers.

The government makes it too difficult, in far too many ways, to try to make a living employing unskilled workers. …In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there was a wave of successful large businesses built on unskilled labor (e.g., ServiceMaster, Walmart, McDonalds). Today, investment capital and innovation attention is all going to companies that create large revenues per employee with workers who have college educations and advanced skills. …the mass of government labor regulation is making it harder and harder to create profitable business models that employ unskilled labor. For those without the interest or ability to get a college degree, the avoidance of the unskilled by employers is undermining those workers’ bridge to future success

Let’s close by looking at a chart from a 2018 presentation by Martin Agerup.

He shows that red tape doesn’t even provide meaningful job security for those who are already employed.

The bottom line is that so-called employment protection legislation is very bad news for those who are looking for jobs while offering no measurable benefit for those who have jobs (especially if we compare living standards across nations).

If we want more jobs, the best prescription is less government.

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The Adverse Economic Consequences of “Basic Income”

When I first looked at the issue of “basic income,” back in 2013, my gut reaction was deep skepticism.

That’s because I feared many people would drop out of the labor force if they could live off government handouts (as illustrated by this Wizard-of-Id parody).

It’s true that the current amalgamation of welfare programs also discourages work and creates dependency, but a government-provided basic income could make a bad situation worse.

Especially if politicians didn’t get rid of other redistribution programs (a very realistic concern).

That being said, what’s the evidence, either pro or con?

There was an experiment in Finland, which poured cold water on the concept.

And now we have some U.S.-focused research. Four economists from the University of Chicago (Mikhail Golosov, Michael Graber, Magne Mogstad, and David Novgorodsky) investigated this topic in a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Here’s a description of their methodology, which used lottery winnings as a proxy for the effect of government handouts.

How do Americans respond to idiosyncratic and exogenous changes in household wealth and unearned income? Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in this question. …the earnings responses to such shocks are important…to assess the effects of public policy such as…universal basic income. However, giving a credible answer to this question has proven difficult. …We analyze a wide range of individual and household responses to lottery winnings and explore the economic implications of these responses for a number of key questions. …our analyses are based on a population-level panel data set which is constructed by combining the universe of worker tax records with third-party-reported lottery winnings. 

And here are some of their results.

We find that Americans respond to an exogenous increase in household wealth by significantly reducing their employment and labor earnings. For an extra 100 dollars in wealth, households reduce their annual earnings by approximately 2.3 dollars on average. …the introduction of a UBI will have a large effect on earnings and tax rates. For example, even if one abstracts from any disincentive effects from higher taxes that are needed to finance this transfer program, each dollar of UBI will reduce total earnings by at least 52 cents.

At the risk of understatement, this data should be the death knell for this bad idea.

Especially when you consider the impact of the higher tax rates that would be necessary to fund the basic income.

As illustrated by Figure 5.1 from the study, tax-financed handouts would be bad news for America’s economy.

P.S. Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected a referendum for basic income back in 2016 (perhaps my speech in Switzerland convinced a few people?).

P.P.S. Interestingly, Joe Biden expressed skepticism about the idea back in 2017, but he obviously has had a change of heart, given his current support for big, per-child handouts.

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Minimum Wage Laws: Even Bad for the Workers Who Don’t Lose their Jobs

Politicians impose higher tax costs on tobacco because they want less smoking. And environmentalists want higher gas prices so there will be less driving.

And, as explained in this video, higher minimum wages for low-skilled labor will reduce employment.

For economists, none of this is surprising and none of this is newsworthy.

Minimum wage laws are a form of price controls, and we have centuries of evidence that bad things happen when politicians try to rig the market.

When I discuss this issue, people often respond by asserting that businesses will treat people like dirt in the absence of government intervention.

I answer them by agreeing with their premise (businesses would like to pay everyone as little as possible), but I then share this data, which shows that they’re wrong on facts. To be more specific, nearly 99 percent of workers make more than the minimum wage.

In other words, the free market leads to higher wages (which is why today’s workers earn so much more than previous generations).

And we’ll continue to enjoy economic progress, so long as politicians give the private sector enough breathing room to create more prosperity.

Which is why a mandate for higher minimum wages would be a bad idea.

Indeed, research published by the Harvard Business Review shows that the minimum wage even can be bad news for the workers who don’t lose their jobs.

Here is a description of the methodology used by the authors (Qiuping Yu, Shawn Mankad, and Masha Shunko).

…minimum wage policies…can influence firms’ behavior in a variety of complex, interrelated ways. In addition to changing employment rates, studies suggest that firms may strategically respond to minimum wage increases by changing their approaches in other areas, such as worker schedules. This can have significant implications for employee welfare… To address these challenges, we conducted a study in which we…looked at worker schedule and wage data from 2015 to 2018 for more than 5,000 employees at 45 stores in California — where the minimum wage was $9 in 2015, and has increased every year since then — and at 17 stores in Texas, where the minimum wage was $7.25 for the duration of our study. We then controlled for statewide economic and employment differences between California and Texas in order to isolate just the impact of increasing the minimum wage.

Here are some of their results.

For every $1 increase in the minimum wage, we found that the total number of workers scheduled to work each week increased by 27.7%, while the average number of hours each worker worked per week decrease by 20.8%. …which meant that the total wage compensation of an average minimum wage worker in a California store actually fell by 13.6%. This decrease in the average number of hours worked not only reduced total wages, but also impacted eligibility for benefits. We found that for every $1 increase in minimum wage, the percentage of workers working more than 20 hours per week (making them eligible for retirement benefits) decreased by 23.0%, while the percentage of workers with more than 30 hours per week (making them eligible for health care benefits) decreased by 14.9%. …our data suggests that the combination of reduced hours, eligibility for benefits, and schedule consistency that resulted from a $1 increase in the minimum wage added up to average net losses of at least $1,590 per year per employee — equivalent to 11.6% of workers’ total wage compensation.

Gee, is anybody surprised to see bad results from California?

But let’s focus on the minimum wage, not on the (formerly) Golden State.

Here’s the bottom line: I’ve explained that a higher minimum wage is theoretically bad.

And I’ve shown that it leads to higher unemployment.

But this new research is important because it shows that a higher minimum wage also backfires on the workers who don’t lose their jobs.

That’s an argument I’ve made before, but it needs to become a bigger part of the discussion.

The goal should be to help people climb the ladder of economic opportunity, which is why the minimum wage should be abolished rather than increased.

P.S. It’s disgusting that labor bosses push for a higher minimum wage to hurt low-skilled workers who compete with union members and it’s disgusting that big companies like Amazon push for a higher minimum wage to hurt small businesses that compete with them for customers

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The Economics of “Labor Shortages”

During the Obama years, I shared a cartoon strip that cleverly makes the point that some people will choose not to work if they can get enough goodies from the government.

That Wizard-of-Id parody has been viewed more than 56,000 times, which suggests many readers also thought it was worth sharing.

But it obviously hasn’t been shared often enough with the crowd in Washington. Politicians have created a welfare state that penalizes work and rewards dependency.

Especially now that there are bonus payments for staying unemployed. Which makes it hard to businesses to find workers.

Our friends on the left, however, think there’s a solution to this problem.

In his column for the New York Times, David Leonhardt says there is not a labor shortage because employers can simply raise wages.

The idea that the United States suffers from a labor shortage is fast becoming conventional wisdom. But before you accept the idea, it’s worth taking a few minutes to think it through. Once you do, you may realize that the labor shortage is more myth than reality. …one of the beauties of capitalism is its mechanism for dealing with shortages. In a communist system, people must wait in long lines when there is more demand than supply for an item. That’s an actual shortage. In a capitalist economy, however, there is a ready solution. …When a company is struggling to find enough labor, it can solve the problem by offering to pay a higher price for that labor — also known as higher wages. More workers will then enter the labor market. Suddenly, the labor shortage will be no more. …Sure enough, some companies have responded to the alleged labor shortage by doing exactly this. …companies that have recently announced pay increases include Amazon, Chipotle, Costco, McDonald’s, Walmart, J.P. Morgan Chase and Sheetz convenience stores.

Leonhardt is correct that businesses can lure workers back into the job market by boosting wages. I’m glad he recognizes how the price system works.

But he completely ignores the issue of whether some jobs will simply disappear because they’re not worth the amount of money that would be required to out-compete government handouts.

That’s the key argument from the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the topic.

…the U.S. labor market turned in its second disappointing result in a row in May, according to Friday’s Labor Department report. That’s what happens when government pays Americans not to work. Employers created 559,000 net new jobs in the month, which sounds great until you notice that 1.5 million fewer workers in May said they were unable to work because their employer closed or lost business due to the pandemic. …The civilian labor force shrank in May by 53,000, and the number of men over age 20 who were employed fell by 8,000. …What gives? The Occam’s razor explanation is that in March the Biden Administration and Congress ladled out another mountain of cash to Americans—work not required. The extra $300 a week in enhanced jobless benefits is one problem, since millions of Americans can make more staying on the couch. …This is on top of regular jobless benefits, plus new or extended cash payments such as the $3,000 per child tax credit, additional ObamaCare subsidies, and the $1,400 checks to individuals. Again, no work required.

For all intents and purposes, politicians in DC have been undoing the great achievement of welfare reform. That 1996 law was designed to push people from idleness into employment, and it was largely successful.

But over the past couple of decades, laws like Obamacare have given people goodies without any conditionality, which has resulted in many people deciding once again that they don’t need to work.

And if Biden’s per-child handouts are made permanent, expect the problem to get even worse.

Since we started with a cartoon, let’s close with another cartoon.

This gem from Henry Payne captures the problem facing many small businesses.

Big companies have enough financial depth that they can adapt. They have considerable ability to get rid of low-skilled jobs, invest in labor-saving technologies, and even give some raises to employees they retain.

Many small businesses, however, are simply out of luck. That’s one group of victims.

The other victims are the people who get goodies from politicians. Yes, the various handouts make their lives easier in the short run, but once they get trapped in the quicksand of government dependency, it’s very difficult to escape.

P.S. Because he said some sensible things about “basic income” back in 2017, I had hoped Biden would be better on this issue. I should have known better based on his track record.

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Red States vs Blue States, Part II

Last year, I compared the economic performance of red states and blue states.

My big takeaway from that column is that we should pay attention to the data on internal migration. More specifically, there’s a reason why Americans have been moving from high-tax states to low-tax states.

Today’s let’s follow up on that discussion.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an editorial on the gap between blue states and red states. This accompanying illustration shows that there is a clear relationship between joblessness and the degree to which states pursue big-government policies.

And here’s how the WSJ explained the big differences.

The unemployment rate in April nationwide was 6.1%, but this obscures giant variations in the states. With some exceptions, those run by Democrats such as California (8.3%) and New York (8.2%) continued to suffer significantly higher unemployment than those led by Republicans such as South Dakota (2.8%) and Montana (3.7%). It’s rare to see differences that are so stark based on party control in states. But the current partisan differences reflect different policy choices over the length and severity of pandemic lockdowns and now government benefits such as jobless insurance. Nine of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates are led by Republicans. The exception is Wisconsin whose Supreme Court last May invalidated Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s lockdown. …Most states in the Midwest, South and Mountain West aren’t far off their pre-pandemic employment peaks. One obstacle to a faster recovery may be the $300 federal unemployment bonus, which many GOP governors are rejecting. Meantime, states with Democratic governments continue to reward workers for sitting on the couch. The longer that workers stay unemployed, the harder it will be to get them to return to work.

For what it’s worth, I’m more upset about the subsidized unemployment than the differences in lockdown policies, particularly because the former is more indicative of economic illiteracy.

P.S. One of the worst parts of Biden’s waste-filled stimulus plan is that it gave a big bailout for states, based on a formula that actually rewarded them for having bad numbers.

P.P.S. Click here and here if you want to peruse comprehensive measures of state economic policy.

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Subsidized Unemployment and the Work Ethic

I wrote two days ago about subsidized unemployment, followed later in the day by this interview.

This controversy raises a fundamental economic issue.

I explained in the interview that employers only hire people when they expect a new worker will generate at least enough revenue to cover the cost of employment.

There’s a similar calculation on the part of individuals, as shown by this satirical cartoon strip.

People decide to take jobs when they expect the additional after-tax income they earn will compensate them for the loss of leisure and/or the unpleasantness of working.

Which is why many people are now choosing not to work since the government has increased the subsidies for idleness (a bad policy that began under Trump).

The Wall Street Journal editorialized about this issue a couple of days ago.

White House economists say there’s no “measurable” evidence that the $300 federal unemployment bonus is discouraging unemployed people from seeking work. They were rebutted by Tuesday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Jolts survey, which showed a record 8.1 million job openings in March. …But these jobs often pay less than what most workers could make on unemployment. That explains why the number of job openings in many industries increased more than the number of new hires in March. …The number of workers who quit their jobs also grew by 125,000. …some quitters may be leaving their jobs because they figure they can make more unemployed for the next six months after Democrats extended the bonus into September.

Dan Henninger also opined on the issue for the WSJ. Here’s some of what he wrote.

President Biden said, “People will come back to work if they’re paid a decent wage.” But what if he’s wrong? What if his $300 unemployment insurance bonus on top of the checks sent directly to millions of people (which began during the Trump presidency) turns out to be a big, long-term mistake? …Mr. Biden and the left expect these outlays effectively to raise the minimum wage by forcing employers to compete with Uncle Sam’s money. …Ideas have consequences. By making unemployment insurance competitive with market wage rates in a pandemic, the Biden Democrats may have done long-term damage to the American work ethic. …The welfare reforms of the 1990s were based on the realization that transfer payments undermined the work ethic. The Biden-Sanders Democrats are dropping that work requirement for recipients of cash payments.

Amen.

I made similar arguments about the erosion of the work ethic last year when discussing this issue.

And this concern applies to other forms of redistribution. Including, most notably, the foolish idea of big per-child handouts.

P.S. The WSJ editorial cited above mentioned the Labor Department’s JOLT data. Those numbers are also useful if you want proof that federal bureaucrats are overpaid, and you’ll also see that the same thing is true for state and local government employees.

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The Upside-Down Economics of Subsidized Unemployment

Back in 2010, I applauded Paul Krugman for acknowledging that government unemployment benefits can encourage joblessness.

And I even cited Krugman in this 2012 debate on the topic.

We’re debating this issue again today, but it’s an even bigger problem because politicians in Washington have added a special bonus payment for people who stay unemployed.

So we’re naturally finding that people are more reluctant to work, which is a rational choice for many of them since they’re getting more money for sitting on their butts.

So if Krugman recognized back in 2009 that regular-sized unemployment benefits lead to more joblessness, he must be even more worried about today’s super-sized unemployment benefits.

But there’s a catch. Krugman made his sensible observations on this issue in a textbook when he was still an academic economist, back when he felt some professional obligation to be rational and pay attention to the academic evidence and empirical research.

Today, he’s an ideologue and polemicist. So we get nonsense like this column in the New York Times.

…the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy added only 266,000 jobs in April, far short of consensus expectations that we’d gain around a million new jobs. Was this evidence that the economy really is being held back because we’re “paying people not to work”? No. For one thing, you should never make much of one month’s numbers, especially in an economy still distorted by the pandemic. …Also, if unemployment benefits were holding job growth back, you’d expect the worst performance in low-wage industries, where benefits are large relative to wages. …on the face of it the data don’t support an unemployment-benefits story. So what actually happened? We don’t know. Maybe it was a statistical aberration.

For what it’s worth, I prefer the sober-minded analysis available in editorials from the Wall Street Journal.

Such as this one.

Employers nationwide have complained for months that Washington’s $300-a-week bonus has made it harder to find willing workers. Yet Mr. Biden brushed aside the complaints, saying he and his staff “don’t see much evidence” that the payments are a “major factor.” …The perverse incentive of the bonus is clear, and the evidence goes beyond the anecdotes from tens of thousands of employers. …Bank of America economist Joseph Song notes that any worker earning less than $32,000 annually would get a raise by going on unemployment… The President intended his remarks to depict his Administration as the driver of job growth instead of its main hindrance. It was a tall order. But the bright side is that his urgent appearance showed that more Americans are figuring out that when the government pays people not to work, millions choose not to.

The good news is that some governors are opting out.

Here are some excerpts from a report in the Washington Post.

An unexpected slowdown in hiring nationwide has prompted some Republican governors to start slashing jobless benefits in their states, hoping that the loss of generous federal aid might force more people to try to return to work. …Arkansas on Friday became the latest to announce plans to cancel the extra benefits, joining Montana and South Carolina earlier in the week… Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signaled to local reporters that the state could soon follow suit, while Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is considering the same.

I’m tempted to comment about the Post‘s usual bias (saying GOP governors want to “slash” when they’re simply proposing to return to regular-sized benefits).

But let’s stick to the topic.

Here’s another interview on the issue, but it’s about the current fight rather than the Obama-era fight.

I’m especially concerned, as I noted in the interview, that bad government policy may erode the work ethic.

I’ll close with a comment about the fight we had during the Obama years. Back then, the battle revolved around extended unemployment benefits rather than turbo-charged benefits.

Republicans eventually prevailed in blocking the extended benefits. So what happened? As you might expect, there was an increase in employment.

P.S. I imagine this story from Michigan and this example from Ohio will ring a bell with many people because they have some relative or buddy who also has used government benefits as an excuse to stay unemployed.

P.P.S. Senator Rand Paul and I wrote about this issue back in 2014.

P.P.P.S. For some unintentional humor, Nancy Pelosi actually argued that the economy is stronger when people are paid not to work.

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Biden, the Minimum Wage, and Political Fantasy

While I understandably don’t like politicians, I rarely think they are stupid. They do lots of idiotic things, of course, but they are making calculated decisions that it’s okay to hurt the economy if they achieve some political benefit. That’s immoral, but not dumb.

However, sometimes politicians say things so absurdly inaccurate that it makes me wonder if they actually are…what’s the politically correct term?…cognitively challenged.

Consider, for instance, some of Donald Trump’s trade tweets, which were jaw-dropping examples of economic illiteracy.

And now Joe Biden is showing he can be similarly detached from the real world, claiming this past weekend that a $15-per-hour minimum wage is a good idea because, “all the economics show that if you do that the whole economy rises.”

Though maybe that’s true if one can somehow claim that “1 out of 40” is the same as “all.”

Moreover, it appears that “all” doesn’t include the Congressional Budget Office.

The bean counters at CBO don’t have a reputation for being fire-breathing libertarians, so it’s especially noteworthy that its new estimates show that a higher minimum wage will reduce economic output, destroy 1.4 million jobs, raise prices, and increase the burden of government spending.

As the old joke goes, “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?”

And “all” doesn’t include America’s premier source for financial news. The Wall Street Journal opined on Biden’s plan this morning.

…his proposal for a $15 federal minimum wage…by 2025, according to the CBO’s new average estimate, would result in a loss of 1.4 million jobs.The idled workers would be disproportionately younger and less educated, and CBO projects that half of them would drop out of the labor force. …The federal budget deficit through 2031 would increase $54 billion, CBO says, as the government spent more on unemployment benefits and health-care programs. …setting the minimum wage at a high of $15 would essentially put the country through an economic experiment. This would mean imposing the urban labor costs of San Francisco and Manhattan on every out-of-the-way gas station in rural America.

Of course, we’ve already experienced some real-world experiments.

Higher minimum wages already have wreaked havoc and destroyed jobs in places such as Seattle, New York City, Oakland, and Washington, DC, so we already have plenty of evidence (and don’t forget the European data as well).

I’ll close with this clever cartoon strip, which mocks people who support higher mandated wages for reasons of naivete rather than stupidity.

P.S. Here’s my most recent interview about the minimum wage, here’s the interview that got me most frustrated, and here’s my interview debate with Biden’s economic advisor.

P.P.S. I strongly recommend this video on the topic from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

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Biden’s Policy to Increase the Tax Burden on Investment, Wages, and Job Creation

Every single economic school of thought agrees with the proposition that investment is a key factor in driving wages and growth.

Even foolish concepts such as socialism and Marxism acknowledge this relationship, though they want the government to be in charge of deciding where to invest and how much to invest (an approach that has a miserable track record).

Another widely shared proposition is that higher tax rates will discourage whatever is being taxed. Even politicians understand this notion, for instance, when arguing for higher taxes on tobacco.

To be sure, economists will argue about the magnitude of the response (will a higher tax rate cause a big effect, medium effect, or a small effect?).

But they’ll all agree that a higher tax on something will lead to less of that thing.

Which is why I always argue that we need the lowest-possible tax rates on the activities – work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship – that create wealth and prosperity.

That’s why it’s so disappointing that Joe Biden, as part of his platform in the presidential race, has embraced class-warfare taxation.

And it’s even more disappointing that he specifically supports policies that will impose a much higher tax burden on capital formation.

How much higher? Kyle Pomerleau of the American Enterprise Institute churned through Biden’s proposals to see what it would mean for tax rates on investment and business activity.

Former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has proposed several tax increases that focus on raising taxes on business and capital income. Taxing business and capital income can affect saving and investment decisions by reducing the return to these activities and distorting the allocation across different assets, forms of financing, and business forms. Under current law, the weighted average marginal effective tax rate (METR) on business assets is 19.6 percent… Biden’s tax proposals would raise the METR on business investment in the United States by 7.8 percentage points to 27.5 percent in 2021. The effective tax rate would rise on most assets and new investment in all industries. In addition to increasing the overall tax burden on business investment, Biden’s proposals would increase the bias in favor of debt-financed and noncorporate investment over equity-financed and corporate investment.

Here’s the most illuminating visual from Kyle’s report.

The first row of data shows that the effective tax rate just by almost 8 percentage points.

I also think it’s important to focus on the last two rows. Notice that the tax burden on equity increases by a lot while the tax burden on debt actually drops slightly.

This is very foolish since almost all economists will acknowledge that it’s a bad idea to create more risk for an economy by imposing a preference for debt (indeed, mitigating this bias was one of the best features of the 2017 tax reform).

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Subsidized Unemployment and Societal Capital

In early June, I pontificated about the upside-down incentives that are created when government pays people more to be idle than they could get by working.

This is a real-world concern because the crowd in Washington earlier this year approved a $600-per-week bonus for people getting unemployment benefits.

And that resulted in many people getting far more from benefits than they could get from employment. In some cases, even twice as much.

Anyhow, that bonus expired at the end of July, which has triggered a debate on whether to renew the policy.

In her Washington Post column, Catherine Rampell argues that super-charged benefits don’t discourage employment.

State benefits, on average, cover about 40 percent of the typical worker’s lost wages…  Given the extraordinary economic crisis, federal lawmakers wanted to “top up” state benefits so that workers would get close to 100 percent of their lost wages. …So Congress passed a $600 weekly supplement because it seemed about the right amount to make the average worker whole. …a majority of unemployed workers received more in benefits than they earned in their most recent paychecks. …this prompted concerns that the benefits themselves might slow down the recovery, discouraging people from returning to work because being on the dole was too darn comfortable. …five…recent studies…concluded the…$600 federal supplement does not appear to have depressed job growth. …Yes, at some point, …fears about work disincentives may materialize, as the economy recovers and job opportunities become more plentiful. We’re nowhere near that point now.

The Wall Street Journal also opined on this topic, specifically debunking one of the studies cited by Ms. Rampell.

Most Americans understand intuitively that if people make more money by not working, fewer people will work. Then there are politicians and economists who want to pass out more money while claiming that disincentives to work are irrelevant. …a study by Yale economists…purportedly finds the $600 federal enhancement to jobless benefits hasn’t affected the incentive to work. …Yet the study excluded part-time workers and those who hadn’t been working at a business in their sample last year. In other words, the study focused on workers with more loyalty to their employers. …Notably, states with more generous unemployment benefits for low-wage workers generally have had larger declines in labor-force participation. In Kentucky the lowest-paid 25% of unemployed workers on average have made 216% of what they did working. The state’s labor-force participation has declined 4.8 percentage points since February. …If you subsidize not working, you get less work.

In this Rampell vs. WSJ debate, I’m more sympathetic to the latter.

When the big fight over extended unemployment benefits during the Obama years was finally resolved, it showed that people are significantly more likely to find jobs when they’re no longer getting paid for not working.

This doesn’t mean that it will be easy (especially in an environment where there is still uncertainty about the coronavirus), or that we shouldn’t have sympathy for people facing pressure to find jobs after losing their previous positions.

But if we want prosperity and rising living standards, there’s really no alternative.

I’ll close with another excerpt from Ms. Rampell’s column She cites an economist who found that some people went back to work even though they received less money than they were getting from the government.

Evercore ISI economist, Ernie Tedeschi, …observed that in June, around 70 percent of unemployment recipients who resumed working had been receiving more from benefits than their prior wage — yet nonetheless returned to work.

This is largely good news since it shows that America still enjoys a high degree of societal capital (work ethic, desire to earn rather than get handouts, etc).

But this underscores why we shouldn’t erode that valuable form of capital by making people feel like chumps for doing the right thing (a point I emphasized earlier this year when criticizing Elizabeth Warren’s dependency agenda).

Otherwise we wind up with the real-world version of this satirical Wizard-of-Id cartoon.

P.S. Speaking of satire, Nancy Pelosi actually argued that paying people not to work was a form of stimulus.

P.P.S. Here are a couple of anecdotes, one from Ohio and one from Michigan, about the perverse impact of excessive unemployment benefits during the last downturn.

P.P.P.S. If you want more academic literature on the relationship between government benefits and joblessness, click here and here.

P.P.P.P.S. Last but not least, prominent economists on the left (including Paul Krugman) actually agree the unemployment benefits encourage joblessness.

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Should Government Subsidize Unemployment?

Yesterday, I shared some research showing how misguided redistribution policies lead to high implicit marginal tax rates that discourage work.

Then I was interviewed about a very tangible example of this phenomenon – jobless benefits that give people more money than they could earn by working.

I wrote about this specific issue in late April and shared the nearby chart to show how many people can get a lot more money if they simply choose not to work. Which is the economic equivalent of a marginal tax rate of more than 100 percent.

As I noted in yesterday’s interview, creating this kind of upside-down incentive system is crazy even by the bizarre standards of Washington policy.

The federal government is – for all intents and purposes – bribing people not to work. This will be especially harmful for low-income workers since steady employment is their best route for upward mobility.

Part of the interview focused on the Keynesian argument that unemployment benefits are “stimulus” because recipients will have more money to spend. This is not satire. I mentioned that Nancy Pelosi actually asserted the economy becomes stronger when people are paid not to work.

Needless to say, this simplistic argument overlooks the fact that government can’t give people goodies without taking the money out of the private economy in the first place.

Sadly, the perpetual motion machine of Keynesian economics is still part of the Congressional Budget Office’s methodology. Here are some excerpts from the CBO’s report on the issue of super-charged benefits.

CBO has examined the economic effects of extending the temporary increase of $600 per week in the benefit amount provided by unemployment programs. …CBO estimates that extending that increase for six months through January 31, 2021, would have the following effects: …Roughly five of every six recipients would receive benefits that exceeded the weekly amounts they could expect to earn from work during those six months. …The estimated effects on output and employment are the net results of two opposing factors. An extension of the additional benefits would boost the overall demand for goods and services, which would tend to increase output and employment. That extension would also weaken incentives to work as people compared the benefits available during unemployment to their potential earnings, and those weakened incentives would in turn tend to decrease output and employment.

Since I’ve already written many times about the flaws of Keynesian theory, let’s focus on the deleterious effect of government-subsidized unemployment.

In a column two days ago for the Wall Street Journal, Congressman James Comer of Kentucky explained how super-charged benefits have hurt his state’s economy.

Employers in Kentucky are finding it difficult to persuade employees to return to work, as nearly 40% of the state’s labor force has filed for unemployment benefits… It is clear that a system of excessive unemployment benefits has run its course. More than 60 of my colleagues in Congress plan to join me in sending a letter to House and Senate leadership to express our concerns and demand that these payments expire July 31, as the Cares Act intended. …It defies logic to extend disincentives to work when businesses are beginning to reopen. …efforts to spend the nation into oblivion and discourage Americans from working…are fundamentally opposed to the American spirit of the dignity of work. …to get back on the right track, we cannot extend the $600-a-week incentive not to return to work.

I applaud Rep. Comer.

It’s not popular to remove goodies from voters. Indeed, that’s the message of my Second Theorem of Government.

But it’s necessary if we want to restore incentives to work.

I’ll close by elaborating on the point I made in the interview about this battle being a repeat of the Obama-era fight about extended unemployment benefits.

Obama and other folks on the left said extended benefits were necessary because the unemployment rate was still high, while people like me argued that the jobless rate was still high precisely because the government was paying people not to work.

Extended benefits were finally halted in 2014, meaning we had a real-world test to see who was right. So what happened? Lo and behold, the jobless rate fell as more people went back to work.

The moral of the story, as illustrated by this satirical cartoon strip, is that people are more likely to work when the benefits of having a job and greater than the benefits of not having a job.

P.S. Here are a couple of anecdotes, one from Ohio and one from Michigan, about the perverse impact of excessive unemployment benefits during the last recession.

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Coronavirus and Subsidized Unemployment

Remember the “jobless recovery” of the Obama years?

Part of the problem was that President Obama kept extending unemployment benefits, which subsidized joblessness, as even Paul Krugman and Larry Summers had warned.

The good news was that Congress eventually said no in 2014 (actually one of the three best things to happen that year).

After that happened, the labor market improved.

But politicians apparently didn’t learn anything. As part of emergency coronavirus legislation, they turbo-charged unemployment benefits.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial from yesterday has a good summary.

Much of the harm from the coronavirus is unavoidable, but it would be nice if politicians didn’t compound the damage by ignoring the laws of economics. The worst blunder so far on that score is the $600 increase in federal jobless benefits… Why would anyone take a pay cut to go back to work? …Employees say they’ll take the unemployment check for as long as they can make more money by not working. …This does not mean these workers are lazy. Workers are making rational decisions based on the economic incentives the political class has created. …The question now is whether the Trump Administration will learn from its negotiating mistake. Democrats will try to extend the $600 for another few months, and then a few more after that, as they describe anyone who disagrees as heartless.

Tim Kane, in a piece for the Hill, explains why this doesn’t make sense.

The UI system is a case study in perverse incentives in the best of times, but the four-month “fix” in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) makes it far worse. …Existing UI provides a government payment to each worker who is involuntarily laid off, in essence paying people not to work. The amount varies slightly according to state-based formulas. But UI checks are generally set to replace 50 percent of the individual’s wages until they find a new job. …Pandemic UI jacks up the replacement rate with a supplemental $600 per unemployed worker for the next four months. That’s roughly an extra $2,400 each month that will go to you only if you are unemployed. …Now that the CARES Act is the law of the land, any American with an annual salary of $62,000 has no financial incentive to work, certainly not until August. …the federal government is going to pay non-working Americans way more than working Americans.

In a column for Bloomberg, Conor Sen explores the implications.

It’s also important to be mindful of how, once the economy is growing again, a $600 weekly benefit can distort the labor market. That works out to the equivalent of $15 an hour for a 40-hour work week, a level that substantially exceeds the minimum wage in most states. When restaurants are open for business again, they are likely to complain if they can’t hire dishwashers who understand that it’s not worth giving up unemployment benefits. One step to winding down the program might be reducing the benefit over time in response to labor-market conditions and monitoring the impact that’s having on workers accepting jobs.

Sam Hammond, writing for National Review, opines on the potential human cost.

…the new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program…will…add an extra $600 per week to the base benefit (equal to half the state’s regular unemployment benefit) for up to four months. …This $600 per week add-on — equivalent to a $15-per-hour full-time income — means that many workers will soon be eligible to receive more in unemployment compensation than they would make on the job. …It should go without saying that no government in history has ever designed an unemployment-insurance program quite like this — one that virtually anyone can qualify for, and with benefits on par with the median weekly earnings of full-time workers. …a worst-case scenario is easy to imagine…once quarantines begin to lift, a fraction of Pandemic UI recipients will choose to stay on “extended benefits”… Temporary unemployment will become structural, and a jobless recovery will drag out for decades.

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center cites some of the academic literature.

The unintended consequences and moral hazard of UI during normal times and normal recessions are well known. Put briefly, generous UI benefits create an incentive for workers to delay looking for jobs until the expiration of the benefit. In 2010, Harvard University economist Robert Barro estimated that the Great Recession expansions in UI benefits raised the US unemployment rate by about 2.7 percentage points. …In addition, economists Lawrence F. Katz and Bruce D. Meyer observe that workers receiving unemployment benefits were likely to postpone their job searches until their benefits expired. This finding was confirmed by many other studies, including one by economist Alan Krueger,  who wrote in 2008 that “job search increases sharply in the weeks prior to benefit exhaustion.”

And she points out that there is a better approach.

…an old policy proposal that should receive new attention—a proposal that by design encourages people to go back to work as quickly as they can… Personal unemployment insurance savings accounts (PISAs) are designed to maintain a financial incentive to return to work as soon as possible. These accounts are individually owned by workers who, during spells of unemployment, can make orderly withdrawals to partially compensate for the loss to their income but can keep and build the balance during their regular times of employment. …This form of UI is not a mere theoretical proposition. The experience of Chile is worth noting, but other countries such as Austria and Colombia have adopted similar plans.

Making a related point, Congressman Justin Amash points out that it would be less harmful to simply give people money rather than giving them money on the condition that they don’t work.

The law also provides robust unemployment benefits, but this money would have been better spent on monthly payments to all Americans regardless of employment status. As structured, it perversely makes employment a financial liability for many. We shouldn’t discourage employment.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) April 2, 2020

By the way, a study from the Bank for International Settlements, published well before coronavirus became an issue, notes other negative effects of unemployment benefits.

Many countries provide unemployment insurance (UI) to reduce individuals’ income risk and to moderate fluctuations in the economy. However, to the extent that these policies are successful, they would be expected to reduce precautionary savings and hence bank deposits–households’ main saving instrument. In this paper, we study this reduced incentive to save and uncover a novel distortionary mechanism through which UI policies affect the economy. In particular, we show that, when UI benefits become more generous, bank deposits fall. Since deposits are the main stable funding source for banks, this fall in deposits squeezes bank commercial lending, which in turn reduces corporate investment.

Just another chapter in the government’s book on how to discourage savings.

Let’s close with some real world illustrations of how Washington’s approach is backfiring.

A story from National Public Radio shows how workers respond logically to perverse incentives.

…the extra money can create some awkward situations. Some businesses that want to keep their doors open say it’s hard to do so when employees can make more money by staying home. “We basically have this situation where it would be a logical choice for a lot of people to be unemployed,” said Sky Marietta, who opened a coffee shop along with her husband, Geoff, last year in Harlan, Ky. …The shop had been up and running for only a few months when the coronavirus hit. …Marietta was determined to stay open. …But even though she had customers, Marietta reluctantly decided to close the coffee shop just over a week ago. “The very people we hired have now asked us to be laid off,” Marietta wrote… “Not because they did not like their jobs or because they did not want to work, but because it would cost them literally hundreds of dollars per week to be employed.” …the $10 to $15 an hour they’d make serving coffee is no match for the new jobless benefits.

Maxim Lott also wrote about another tragic example.

An additional $600 per week in unemployment benefits…causing concern that some workers could be in a position to actually make more money by leaving their jobs. . …That angers some essential workers on the front lines on the crisis. “I can tell you as a worker who barely makes over minimum wage, at $12 an hour, the whole thing is complete BS,” Otis Mitchell Jr., who works in West Virginia transporting hospital patients to get medical tests, told Fox News. Mitchell Jr. added that he has unemployed friends who already are getting the extra $600, and that “I prefer to work, but sadly I’d make more staying home.” …generous payments are…scheduled to last for four months, ending July 31.

A report from CNBC also found perverse consequences.

Jamie Black-Lewis felt like she won the lottery after getting two forgivable loans through the Paycheck Protection Program. …When Black-Lewis convened a virtual employee meeting to explain her good fortune, she expected jubilation and relief that paychecks would resume in full even though the staff — primarily hourly employees — couldn’t work. She got a different reaction. “It was a firestorm of hatred about the situation,” Black-Lewis said. …The anger came from employees who’d determined they’d make more money by collecting unemployment benefits than their normal paychecks. …“I couldn’t believe it,” she added. “On what planet am I competing with unemployment?”

If you want to see why people are choosing unemployment, here’s a chart from the CNBC story. Using examples from three states, it shows the normal generosity of unemployment benefits on the left and the new approach on the right.

Needless to say, it’s economic malpractice to make unemployment more attractive than jobs paying $20-$30 per hour.

It’s the real-world version of this satirical Wizard-of-Id cartoon.

P.S. Speaking of satire, Nancy Pelosi actually argued that paying people not to work was a form of stimulus.

P.P.S. Here are a couple of anecdotes, one from Ohio and one from Michigan, about the perverse impact of excessive unemployment benefits during the last downturn.

P.P.P.S. If you want more academic literature on the relationship between government benefits and joblessness, click here and here.

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