A New Year’s Message for Interventionists: Workers Do Best in Unregulated Labor Markets

It’s time to channel the wisdom of Frederic Bastiat.

There are many well-meaning people who understandably want to help workers by protecting them from bad outcomes such as pay reductions, layoffs and discrimination.

My normal response is to remind them that the best thing for workers is a vibrant and growing economy. That’s the kind of environment that produces tight labor markets and more investment, both of which then lead to higher pay.

Even statists sort of understand that this is true, but it’s sometimes difficult to get them to grasp the implications. They oftentimes are drawn to specific forms of government intervention, even if you explain that there are adverse unintended consequences.

• Higher minimum wages push marginal workers into joblessness.
• Pro-feminist policies make women less attractive to employers.
• Labor protection laws discourage companies from hiring workers.

Let’s explore this issue further.

In a column for the New York Times, Megan McGrath writes about a big new mining project in a remote part of Australia that “has the potential to create 10,000 jobs.” While that’s obviously good news, she worries that the company “will repeat the mistakes made by companies during the last mining boom by using workplace practices that hurt workers and their families.”

And what are these mistaken “workplace practices”? Apparently she thinks it is terrible that workers don’t want to move to the outback and instead prefer to continue living in cities and suburbs. So she think it is bad that they fly in for multi-week shifts, stay in temporary housing, and then fly back (at company expense) to their homes.

Employees…fly to remote mines from major cities to work weeks at a time, and fly home for several days off before starting the cycle again. These so-called fly-in, fly-out jobs, which offer hefty pay, are widely known here as “fifo.” At the peak of the boom in 2012, …more than 100,000 of these held fifo positions.

Though it seems these workers are making very rational decisions on how to maximize the net benefits of these positions.

…fifo workers in the last boom were young, undereducated men lured by salaries that far surpassed what they could earn for similar work outside the industry — up to $100,000 a year to shift earth and drive trucks. The average full-time mining employee in 2016 earned $1,000 more per week than other Australians.

So what’s the downside? Why are workers supposedly being exploited by these lucrative jobs?

According to McGrath, the mining camps don’t have a lot of amenities.

…fifo life comes at a steep price. The management in many mines controls the transient workers’ schedules — setting times for meals, showers and sleep. The workers often can’t visit nearby towns and recreational facilities such as gyms and swimming pools because of a lack of transportation. Many employees have to share beds. They work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, up to three weeks at a time.

That doesn’t sound great, but this also explains why the mining companies have to pay a boatload of money to attract workers. This is a well-established pattern that is familiar to labor economists. If working conditions are unpalatable, then employers have to compensate with more remuneration.

But Ms. McGrath doesn’t think workers should get extra cash. She would rather the mining company compensate workers indirectly.

A lot can be done to improve life in the camps. Shorter swings would help workers maintain bonds with their families. More stable living situations, with less sharing of living spaces, would increase a sense of value and belonging. Workers should be encouraged to visit nearby towns to reduce their isolation. The Adani megamine could be in operation for 60 years, experts say. Roads for the mine and the region should be improved so employees can move with their families to existing townships and drive to work.

Of course, she doesn’t admit that she wants workers to get less cash compensation, but that would be the real-world impact of her proposed policies.

She says that the mining companies should “put people ahead of profits.” But that’s a vacuous statement. Projects like this new mine only exist because investors expect to earn a return. Otherwise, they wouldn’t take the enormous risk of sinking so much capital into such endeavors.

All this new investment is good news for unemployed or under-employed Australians since they’ll now have an opportunity to compete for jobs that pay very well, particularly for workers without a lot of education.

By the way, if workers really valued all the things that are on Ms. McGrath’s list, the company would offer those fringe benefits instead of higher wages. But that’s obviously not the case. The market has spoken.

By the way, I can’t resist pointing out that she also does not understand tax policy. In a sensible system, companies calculate their taxable profit by adding up their total revenue and then subtracting all their costs. What’s left is profit, a slice of which is then grabbed by government.

But that’s not enough for Ms. McGrath. She apparently believes that mining companies shouldn’t be allowed to subtract many of the costs associated with so-called fifo workers when calculating their annual profit. I’m not joking.

Mining companies are encouraged through tax incentives to use the transient workers. Some costs associated with a fifo worker — meals, transportation and airline tickets — can be claimed as production expenses, helping to lower a company’s tax bill.

I hope the Australian government isn’t dumb enough to buy this argument. Allowing a firm to subtract costs when calculating profit is simply common sense. And if doesn’t matter if those costs reflect fifo costs, investment expenditures, luxury travel, or band costumes.

For what it’s worth, if the government does get pressured into forcing companies to pay tax on these various business expenses, one very safe prediction is that the net effect will be to lower the wages offered to workers. Or, if the mandates, taxes, and regulations reach a certain level, the business will simply close down or new projects will be abandoned.

And those options obviously are not good news for workers.

Let’s now shift from the specific example of fifo workers to the broader issue of labor regulation. What happens if governments listen to people like Ms. McGrath and impose all sorts of rules that prevent flexible labor markets? According to recent scholarly research from three European economists, the consequence is more unemployment.

They start by pointing out that European nations with mandates and red tape have a lot more unemployment (particularly when the economy is weak) than countries with lightly regulated labor markets.

The Great Recession has brought a substantial increase in unemployment in Europe. Overall, unemployment rate in the euro area has grown from 8 percent in 2008 to 12 percent in 2014. The change in unemployment has been very heterogenous. In northern Europe, unemployment did not grow substantially or even fell: in Germany, for example, unemployment rate has actually declined from 7 to 5 percent. At the same time, in Greece unemployment has grown from 8 to 26 percent, in Spain — from 8 to 24 percent, and in Italy — from 6 to 13 percent. Why has unemployment dynamics been so different in European countries? The most common explanation is the difference in labor market institutions that prevents wages from adjusting downward. If wages cannot decline, negative aggregate demand shocks (such as the Great Recession) result in growth of unemployment.

The three economists wanted some way to test the impact of regulation, so they looked at the labor market for immigrants in Italy since some of them work in the formal (regulated) economy and some of them work in the shadow (unregulated) economy.

While this argument is straightforward, it is not easy to test empirically. Cross-country studies of labor markets are subject to comparability concerns. The same problems arise in comparing labor markets in different industries within the same country. In order to construct a convincing counterfactual for a regulated labor market, one needs to study a non-regulated labor market in the same sector within the same country. This is precisely what we do in this paper through comparing formal and informal markets in Italy over the course of 2004-12. We use a unique dataset, a large annual survey of immigrants working in Lombardy carried out by ISMU Foundation since 2004. …Our data cover 4000 full-time workers every year; one fifth of them works in the informal sector. The dataset is therefore sufficiently large to allow us comparing the evolution of wages in the formal and in the informal sector controlling for occupation, skills and other individual characteristics.

And what did they find?

In the absence of regulation, labor markets can adjust. The bad news for workers is that they get less pay. But the good news is that they’re more likely to still have jobs.

Our main result is presented in Figure 1. We do find that the wage differential between formal and informal sector has increased after 2008. Moreover, while the wages in the informal sector decreased by about 20 percent in 2008-12, the wages in the formal sector virtually did not fall at all. This is consistent with the view that there is substantial downward stickiness of wages in the regulated labor markets. …we find that both before and during the crisis, undocumented immigrants (those without a regular residence permit) are 9 percentage points more likely than documented immigrants to be in the labor force

Here’s the relevant chart from the study.

And here are some concluding thoughts from the study.

…despite the substantial growth of unemployment in 2008-12, the wages in the formal labor market have not adjusted. In the meanwhile, the wages in the unregulated informal labor market have declined substantially. The wage differential between formal and informal market that has been constant in 2004-08 has grown rapidly in 2008-12 from 18 to 35 percentage points. …These results are consistent with the view that regulation is responsible for lack of wage adjustment and increase in unemployment during the recessions.

For what it’s worth (and this is an important point), this helps explain why the Great Depression was so awful. Hoover and Roosevelt engaged in all sorts of interventions designed  to “help” workers. But the net effect of these policies was to prevent markets from adjusting. So what presumably would have been a typical recession turned into a decade-long depression.

So what’s the moral of the story? Good intentions aren’t good if they lead to bad results. Which brings me back to my original point about helping workers by minimizing government intervention.

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Another Lesson from Bastiat: So-Called Employment Protection Legislation Is Bad News for Workers

Frederic Bastiat, the great French economist (yes, such creatures used to exist) from the 1800s, famously observed that a good economist always considers both the “seen” and “unseen” consequences of any action.

A sloppy economist looks at the recipients of government programs and declares that the economy will be stimulated by this additional money that is easily seen, whereas a good economist recognizes that the government can’t redistribute money without doing unseen damage by first taxing or borrowing it from the private sector.

A sloppy economist looks at bailouts and declares that the economy will be stronger because the inefficient firms that stay in business are easily seen, whereas a good economist recognizes that such policies imposes considerable unseen damage by promoting moral hazard and undermining the efficient allocation of labor and capital.

We now have another example to add to our list. Many European nations have “social protection” laws that are designed to shield people from the supposed harshness of capitalism. And part of this approach is so-called Employment Protection Legislation, which ostensibly protects workers by, for instance, making layoffs very difficult.

The people who don’t get laid off are seen, but what about the unseen consequences of such laws?

Well, an academic study from three French economists has some sobering findings for those who think regulation and “social protection” are good for workers.

…this study proposes an econometric investigation of the effects of the OECD Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) indicator… The originality of our paper is to study the effects of labour market regulations on capital intensity, capital quality and the share of employment by skill level using a symmetric approach for each factor using a single original large database: a country-industry panel dataset of 14 OECD countries, 18 manufacturing and market service industries, over the 20 years from 1988 to 2007.

One of the findings from the study is that “EPL” is an area where the United States historically has always had an appropriately laissez-faire approach (which also is evident from the World Bank’s data in the Doing Business Index).

Here’s a chart showing the US compared to some other major developed economies.

It’s good to see, by the way, that Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands engaged in some meaningful reform between 1994-2006.

But let’s get back to our main topic. What actually happens when nations have high or low levels of Employment Protection Legislation?

According to the research of the French economists, high levels of rules and regulations cause employers to substitute capital for labor, with low-skilled workers suffering the most.

Our main estimation results show an EPL effect: i) positive for non-ICT physical capital intensity and the share of high-skilled employment; ii) non-significant for ICT capital intensity; and (iii) negative for R&D capital intensity and the share of low-skilled employment. These results suggest that an increase in EPL would be considered by firms to be a rise in the cost of labour, with a physical capital to labour substitution impact in favour of more non-sophisticated technologies and would be particularly detrimental to unskilled workers. Moreover, it confirms that R&D activities require labour flexibility. According to simulations based on these results, structural reforms that lowered EPL to the “lightest practice”, i.e. to the US EPL level, would have a favourable impact on R&D capital intensity and would be helpful for unskilled employment (30% and 10% increases on average, respectively). …The adoption of this US EPL level would require very largescale labour market structural reforms in some countries, such as France and Italy. So this simulation cannot be considered politically and socially realistic in a short time. But considering the favourable impact of labour market reforms on productivity and growth. …It appears that labour regulations are particularly detrimental to low-skilled employment, which is an interesting paradox as one of the main goals of labour regulations is to protect low-skilled workers. These regulations seem to frighten employers, who see them as a labour cost increase with consequently a negative impact on low-skilled employment.

There’s a lot of jargon in the above passage for those who haven’t studied economics, but the key takeaway is that employment for low-skilled workers would jump by 10 percent if other nations reduced labor-market regulations to American levels.

Though, as the authors point out, that won’t happen anytime soon in nations such as France and Italy.

Now let’s review an IMF study that looks at what happened when Germany substantially deregulated labor markets last decade.

After a decade of high unemployment and weak growth leading up to the turn of the 21th century, Germany embarked on a significant labor market overhaul. The reforms, collectively known as the Hartz reforms, were put in place in three steps between January 2003 and January 2005. They eased regulation on temporary work agencies, relaxed firing restrictions, restructured the federal employment agency, and reshaped unemployment insurance to significantly reduce benefits for the long-term unemployed and tighten job search obligations.

And when the authors say that long-term unemployment benefits were “significantly” reduced, they weren’t exaggerating.

Here’s a chart from the study showing the huge cut in subsidies for long-run joblessness.

So what were the results of the German reforms?

To put it mildly, they were a huge success.

…the unemployment rate declined steadily from a peak of almost 11 percent in 2005 to five percent at the end of 2014, the lowest level since reunification. In contrast, following the Great Recession other advanced economies — particularly in the euro area — experienced a marked and persistent increase in unemployment. The strong labor market helped Germany consolidate its public finances, as lower outlays on unemployment benefits resulted in lower spending while stronger taxes and social security contribution pushed up revenues.

Gee, what a shocker. When the government stopped being as generous to people for being unemployed, fewer people chose to be unemployed.

Which is exactly what happened in the United States when Congress finally stopped extending unemployment benefits.

And it’s also worth noting that this was also a  period of good fiscal policy in Germany, with the burden of spending rising by only 0.18 percent annually between 2003-2007.

But the main lesson of all this research is that some politicians probably have noble motives when they adopt “social protection” legislation. In the real world, however, there’s nothing “social” about laws and regulations that either discourage employers from hiring people and or discourage people from finding jobs.

P.S. Another example of “seen” vs “unseen” is how supposedly pro-feminist policies actually undermine economic opportunity for women.

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The Productive People in France Need a Frexit

The United Kingdom is getting a lot of attention because voters just chose to leave the European Union.

I think this was the smart choice. Yes, there will be some short-run economic volatility, but the long-run benefits should make it worthwhile. Sort of like chemotherapy being painful, but still being much better than the alternative of cancer.

My main argument for Brexit was that the European Union is a sinking ship. The continent is in trouble because the bureaucrats in Brussels reflexively support centralization, bureaucratization, and harmonization. And it’s in trouble because most member governments support dirigiste policies on the national level.

Consider France. The country is so statist that even some folks from the establishment media have warned that government has too much power. Heck, even some of the people at the European Commission have complained that taxes are too high.

Perhaps most miraculously, there was even a column in the New York Times last month explaining how bad government policy is killing France’s job market.

It’s obvious that the current system isn’t working. …business owners are reluctant to hire employees, because it’s so complicated and expensive to fire them when times are bad. …times are pretty bad: France has 10 percent unemployment, roughly twice the levels in Germany and Britain. For young people, it’s around 24 percent. …While many other European countries have revamped their workplace rules, France has barely budged.

The most important thing to understand is that employers are extremely reluctant to hire full-time workers because it’s nearly impossible to fire them if they don’t do a good job or if the company hits hard times. And that translates into temporary jobs combined with lots of unemployment.

The Hollande government has proposed to tinker with this system.

The new labor bill — weakened after long negotiations — wouldn’t alter the bifurcated system, in which workers either get a permanent contract called a “contrat à durée indéterminée,” known as a C.D.I., or a short-term contract that can be renewed only once or twice. Almost all new jobs have the latter.

But even though the reforms are very timid, the French are protesting.

…it isn’t just unions that oppose the bill. So do more than 60 percent of the population, who fear the bill would strip workers of protections without fixing the problem. Young people took to the streets to oppose it, demanding C.D.I.s, too. Why are the French so wedded to a failing system? …they believe that a job is a basic right — guaranteed in the preamble to their Constitution — and that making it easier to fire people is an affront to that. Without a C.D.I., you’re considered naked before the indifferent forces of capitalism. …young protesters held a banner warning that they were the “génération précaire.”

Here’s the most amazing part of the story. The protesters think that a government-protected job is a rite of passage into adulthood. They want the “right to grow up,” even though their version of adulthood involves complete blindness to economic reality.

They were agitating for the right to grow up. …getting a permanent work contract is a rite of adulthood. Without one, it’s hard to get a mortgage or car loan, or rent an apartment. Mainstream economic arguments can’t compete. “Basic facts of economic science are completely dismissed,” said Étienne Wasmer, a labor economist at Sciences Po. “People don’t see that if you let employers take risks, they’ll hire more people.” Instead, many French people view the workplace as a zero-sum battle between workers and bosses.

The obvious answer is to dramatically reduce government intervention in labor markets. But since that’s a near impossibility in France, high levels of joblessness almost surely will continue and short-term employment contracts will be the norm for those who do manage to find work.

By the way, the system doesn’t even work that well for the workers with the government-protected positions.

Many workers here have permanent contracts that make it very hard to fire them. So some companies resort to an illegal strategy: They try to make someone so miserable, he’ll quit. “What happens next is, I’ll lose my team and my staff, and therefore I’ll have nothing to do,” the man predicted. “You still have to come to work every day, but you have no idea why.” …those lucky enough to have C.D.I.s can struggle at work. In one study, workers with C.D.I.s reported more stress than those with short-term contracts, in part because they felt trapped in their jobs. After all, where else would they get another permanent contract?

No wonder so many people in France want to work for the government. That way they can get lavish pay and benefits with very little pressure to perform.

In any case, the net result is that the French economy is stagnant. Potentially valuable labor (one of the two factors of production) is being sidelined or misallocated.

Writing for Market Watch, Diana Furchtgott-Roth shares her analysis of crazy French labor law.

…reforms are vital because the French economy is stagnant. GDP growth for the latest quarter was 0.6%. Over the past decade, growth has rarely risen above 1%. The unemployment rate is over 10% and the youth unemployment is 25%. Clearly tax and regulatory reform, including more labor flexibility, are needed to encourage employers to hire. …a French court this week ruled that Société Générale rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel, who lost $5.5 billion of the bank’s assets in 2008 and almost caused its bankruptcy, had been unfairly dismissed. Société Générale was ordered to pay Kerviel $511,000 because it decided he was dismissed “without cause.” …When employers cannot fire workers, they are less likely to hire them, leading to a sclerotic labor market and high unemployment. This is what the left-wing Hollande is trying to repair. …Some view France as a worker’s paradise where the government protects workers from abusive employers. The reality is that France is a worker’s nightmare where jobs are scarce and work ethic is prohibited by law.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is even more negative in his column for the U.K.-based Telegraph.

An intractable economic crisis has been eating away at the legitimacy of the French governing elites for much of this decade. This has now combined with a collapse in the credibility of the government, and mounting anger… The revolt comes as Paris battles a wave of protest against labour reform, a push that has come close to rupturing the Socialist Party. The measures were rammed through by decree to avoid a vote. Scenes of guerrilla warfare with police on French streets have been a public relations disaster… Rail workers are demanding a maximum 32-hour week. Eric Dor from the IESEG School of Management in Lille says powerful vested interests have made France almost unreformable. …Dor said the labour reforms have been watered down and are a far cry from the Hartz IV laws in Germany in 2004, which made it easier to fire workers and screw down wages.

He points out that the damage of labor-market intervention is exacerbated by a wretched tax system (I’ve written that the national sport of France is taxation rather than soccer).

France’s social model is funded by punitively high taxes on labour. The unintended effect is to create a destructive ‘tax wedge’ that makes it too costly to hire new workers. It protects incumbents but penalizes outsiders, leading to a blighted banlieu culture of mass youth unemployment. There are 360 separate taxes, with 470 tax loopholes. The labour code has tripled… Public spending is 57pc of GDP, a Nordic level without Danish or Swedish levels of labour flexibility. Unemployment is still 10.2pc even at this late stage of the global cycle.

Given the various ways that government discourages employment, is anyone surprised that the French work less than any other nation in Europe? Here’s a blurb from a report in the EU Observer.

French put in the least working hours in the EU, according to the bloc’s statistical office Eurostat. Full-time workers in France clocked up 1,646 hours of labour last year.

By the way, there’s a tiny possibility of change.

There’s an election next year and one of the candidates has a platform that sounds vaguely like he wants to be the Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher of France.

Here are some of the details from a report by Reuters.

French presidential hopeful Alain Juppe, the frontrunner in opinion polls 20 years after serving as a deeply unpopular prime minister, said on Tuesday he would roll back France’s iconic 35-hour working week and scrap a wealth tax if elected next year. In the mid-1990s Juppe triggered France’s worst unrest in decades because he would not budge on pension reforms. He eventually had to drop them after weeks of strikes and protests. …”The French are being kept from working by excessive labor costs. I want to cut those costs,” Juppe told hundreds of supporters as he outlined his economic platform. …Juppe said he would raise the retirement age to 65 from 62 while cutting both taxes and state spending. Juppe said he would aim to cut public spending by 80-100 billion euros over five years and to reduce payroll taxes by 10 billion euros and corporate taxes by 11 billion euros. …Juppe also said he would cap welfare subsidies.

Amazingly, Juppe is the favorite according to the polling data.

So maybe French voters finally realize (notwithstanding the bad advice of Paul Krugman) that becoming another Greece isn’t a good idea.

P.S. My “Frexit” title simply recognizes the reality – as shown in this video – that productive people already are fleeing France. Hollande’s punitive tax policy has driven many of them to other nations. French entrepreneurs in particular have flocked to London.

P.P.S. Watch Will Smith’s reaction after being told France has a top tax rate of 75 percent.

P.P.P.S. France’s effective tax rate actually climbed to more than 100 percent, though Hollande mercifully decided that taxpayers now should never have to pay more than 80 percent of their income to government.

P.P.P.P.S. The big puzzle is why the French put up with so much statism. Polling data from both 2010 and 2013 shows strong support for smaller government, and an astounding 52 percent of French citizens said they would consider moving to the United States if they got the opportunity. So why, then, have they elected statists such as Sarkozy and Hollande?!?

P.P.P.P.P.S. In my humble opinion, the most powerful comparison is between France and Switzerland.

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The Recipe for Job Creation: Less “Help” from Washington

The American economy is in the doldrums. And has been for most this century thanks to bad policy under both Obama and Bush.

So what’s needed to boost growth and create jobs? A new video from Learn Liberty, narrated by Professor Don Boudreaux (who also was the narrator for Learn Liberty’s superb video on free trade vs. protectionism), examines how to get more people employed.

A very good video. There are three things that grabbed my attention.

First, there’s a very fair compilation of various unemployment/labor force statistics. Viewers can see the good news (a relatively low official unemployment rate) and the bad news (a lowest-in-decades level of labor force participation)

Second, so-called stimulus packages don’t make sense. Yes, some people wind up with more money and jobs when politicians increase spending, but only at the expense of other people who have less money and fewer jobs. Moreover, Don correctly notes that this process of redistribution facilitates cronyism (the focus of another Learn Liberty video) and corruption in Washington (an issue I’ve addressed in one of my videos).

Third, free markets and entrepreneurship are the best routes for more job creation. And that requires less government. Don also correctly condemns occupational licensing rules that make it very difficult for people to get jobs or create jobs in certain fields.

The entire video was very concise, lasting less than four minutes, so it only scratched the surface. For those seeking more information on the topic, I would add the following points.

1. Businesses will never create jobs unless they expect that new employees will generate enough revenue to cover not only their wages, but also the cost of taxes, regulations, and mandates. This is why policies that sometimes sound nice (higher minimum wages, health insurance mandates, etc) actually are very harmful.
2. Redistribution programs make leisure more attractive than labor. This is not only bad for the overall economy because of lower labor force participation. This is why policies that sometime sound nice (unemployment benefits, food stamps, health subsidies, etc) actually are very harmful.

Let’s augment Don’s video by looking at some excerpts from a recent column in the Wall Street Journal by Marie-Joseé Kravis of the Hudson Institute.

In economics, as far back as Joseph Schumpeter, or even Karl Marx, we have known that the flow of business deaths and births affects the dynamism and growth of a country’s economy. Business deaths unlock resources that can be allocated to more productive use and business formation can boost innovation and economic and social mobility. For much of the nation’s history, this process of what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” has spread prosperity throughout the U.S. and the world. Over the past 30 years, however, with the exception of the mid-1980s and the 2002-05 period, this dynamism has been waning. There has been a steady decline in business formation while the rate of business deaths has been more or less constant. Business deaths outnumber births for the first time since measurement of these indicators began.

Why has entrepreneurial dynamism slowed? What’s happened to the creative destruction described in a different Learn Liberty video?

Unsurprisingly, government bears a lot of the blame.

Many studies have also attributed the slow rate of business formation to the regulatory fervor of the past decade. …in a 2010 report for the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration, researchers at Lafayette University found that the per employee cost of federal regulatory compliance was $10,585 for businesses with 19 or fewer employees.

Wow, that’s a powerful real-world example of how all the feel-good legislation and red tape from Washington creates a giant barrier to job creation.

And it’s worth noting that low-skilled people are the first ones to lose out.

P.S. My favorite Learn Liberty video explains how government subsidies for higher education have resulted in higher costs for students, a lesson that Hillary Clinton obviously hasn’t learned.

P.P.S. Perhaps the most underappreciated Learn Liberty video explains why the rule of law is critical for a productive society. Though the one on the importance of the price system also needs more attention.

P.P.P.S. And I’m a big fan of the Learn Liberty videos on the Great Depression, central banking, government spending, and the Drug War. And the videos on myths of capitalism, the miracle of modern prosperity, and the legality of Obamacare also should be shared widely.

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A Grim Final Year for Obamanomics

What’s the most important economic statistic to gauge a society’s prosperity?

I often use per-capita economic output when comparing nations.

But for ordinary people, what probably matters most is household income. And if you look at the median household income numbers for the United States, Obamanomics is a failure. According to the Census Bureau’s latest numbers, the average family today has less income (after adjusting for inflation) than when Obama took office.

In an amazing feat of chutzpah, however, the President is actually arguing that he’s done a good job with the economy. His main talking point is that the unemployment rate is down to 4.7 percent.

Yet as discussed in this Blaze TV interview, sometimes the unemployment rate falls for less-than-ideal reasons.

Since I’m a wonky economist, I think my most important point was about long-run prosperity being dependent on the amount of labor and capital being productively utilized in an economy.

And that’s why the unemployment rate, while important, is not as important as the labor force participation rate.

Here’s the data, directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As you can see, the trend over the past 10 years is not very heartening.

To be sure, Obama should not be blamed for the fact that a downward trend that began in 2008 (except to the extent that he supported the big-government policies of the Bush Administration).

But he can be blamed for the fact that the numbers haven’t recovered, as would normally happen as an economy pulls out of a recession. This is a rather damning indictment of Obamanomics.

By the way, I can’t resist commenting on what Obama said in the soundbite that preceded my interview. He asserted that “we cut unemployment in half years before a lot of economists thought we could.”

My jaw almost hit the floor. This is a White House that promised the unemployment rate would peak at only 8 percent and then quickly fall if the so-called stimulus was approved. Yet the joblessness rate jumped to 10 percent and only began to fall after there was a shift in policy that resulted in a spending freeze.

In effect, the President airbrushed history and then tried to take credit for something that happened, at least in part, because of policies he opposed.

Wow.

One final point. I was asked in the interview which policy deserves the lion’s share of the blame for the economy’s tepid performance and weak job numbers.

I wasn’t expecting that question, so I fumbled around a bit before choosing Obamacare.

But with the wisdom of hindsight, I think I stumbled onto the right answer. Yes, the stimulus was a flop, and yes, Dodd-Frank has been a regulatory nightmare, but Obamacare was (and continues to be) a perfect storm of taxes, spending, and regulatory intervention.

And even the Congressional Budget Office estimates it has cost the economy two million jobs.

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Obama, Redistribution, and Jobs: Always Wrong, Never in Doubt

Let’s dig into the issue of whether the United States should become more like France.

In a 2014 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Stanford University’s Robert Hall wrote about America’s sub-par economic performance. His opening line was basically a preemptive refutation of Obama’s claim – made during the State-of-the-Union Address – that the economy is strong.

The years since 2007 have been a macroeconomic disaster for the United States of a magnitude unprecedented since the Great Depression.

I don’t know that I would use “disaster” to describe the economy. That word would be much more appropriate for failed welfare states such as Italy and Greece.

But Professor Hall was definitely correct that the U.S. economy has been sputtering, as illustrated by comparative business-cycle data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve.

So what accounts for America’s anemic economy? Hall has about 50 pages of analysis, but since brevity is a virtue, let’s look at some of what he wrote in his final paragraph.

Labor-force participation fell substantially after the crisis, contributing 2.5 percentage points to the shortfall in output. The decline showed no sign of reverting as of 2013. …an important part may be related to the large growth in beneficiaries of disability and food-stamp programs. Bulges in their enrollments appear to be highly persistent. Both programs place high taxes on earnings and so discourage labor-force participation among beneficiaries. The bulge in program dependence…may impede output and employment growth for some years into the future.

In other words, he pointed out that a large number of people have left the labor force, which obviously isn’t good since our economy’s ability to generate output (and boost living standards) is a function of the degree to which labor and capital are being productively utilized.

And his work suggests that redistribution programs are a big reason for this drop in labor-force participation.

Now let’s look at another study from NBER, this one from 2015 that was authored by economists from the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oslo, and Stockholm University.

They examine the specific impact of unemployment insurance.

We measure the effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment. …Federal benefit extensions that ranged from 0 to 47 weeks across U.S. states at the beginning of December 2013 were abruptly cut to zero. …we use the fact that this policy change was exogenous to cross-sectional differences across U.S. states and we exploit a policy discontinuity at state borders. We find that a 1% drop in benefit duration leads to a statistically significant increase of employment by 0.0161 log points. In levels, 1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut. Almost 1 million of these jobs were filled by workers from out of the labor force who would not have participated in the labor market had benefit extensions been reauthorized.

Wow, that’s a huge impact.

To be sure, I’ll be the first to admit that empirical work is imprecise. Ask five economists for an estimate and you’ll get nine answers, as the old joke goes.

Professor Hall, for instance, found a smaller impact of unemployment insurance on joblessness in his study.

But even if the actual number of people cajoled back into employment is only 500,000 rather than 1 million, that would still be profound.

Though at some point we have to ask whether it really matters whether people are being lured out of the labor force by food stamps, disability payments, unemployment insurance, Obamacare, or any of the many other redistribution programs in Washington.

What does matter is that we have a malignant welfare state that is eroding the social capital of the country. The entire apparatus should be dismantled and turned over to the states.

But not everyone agrees. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the White House is impervious to data and evidence. Indeed, notwithstanding the evidence that the left was wildly wrong about the impact of ending extended unemployment benefits, the White House is proposing to expand the program.

Here’s some of what’s being reported by The Hill.

The president’s three-pronged plan includes wage insurance of up to $10,000 over two years, expanded unemployment insurance coverage… The plan comes on the heels of Obama’s final State of the Union address on Tuesday, in which he committed to fighting for expanded out-of-work benefits during his last year in office. …The plan would also extend benefits to part-time, low-income and intermittent workers who can’t already take advantage of the out-of-work programs. And it would mandate states provide at least 26 weeks of coverage for those looking for work.

The part about mandating that all states provide extended coverage is particularly galling.

It’s almost as if he wants to make sure that no states are allowed to adopt good policy since that would show why the President’s overall approach is wrong.

I joked in 2012 about a potential Obama campaign slogan, and I suggested an official motto for Washington back in 2014.

Perhaps we should augment those examples of satire with a version of the Gospel according to Obama: Always wrong, never in doubt.

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Obama’s Legacy? Dismal and Declining Labor Force Participation

I normally enjoy working for the Cato Institute since it’s a principled and effective organization.

But every so often, my job requires an unpleasant task, and watching the State-of-the-Union Address as part of Cato’s live-tweeting program counts as one my least enjoyable experiences since joining the team.

But let’s make lemonade out of lemons by looking at lessons that can be learned from Obama’s speech. The most jarring part of the evening was when Obama bragged about the American economy.

Since we’re suffering through the weakest recovery since the Great Depression, that was rather bizarre.

Moreover, being proud that we’re doing better than Europe is akin to getting a participation ribbon in a soccer league for kids.

And the chest thumping about the unemployment rate was very misplaced since that piece of data only looks good because so many Americans have given up on finding a job.

I’ve pontificated on that issue before and cited the Labor Department’s overall data, but let’s dig a little deeper to fully understand why Obama should have apologized rather than patted himself on the back.

Here’s the employment/population ratio for the prime, working-age population of those between 25 and 54 years of age.

As you can see, this ratio has improved a bit over the past five years, but it appears that there’s very little hope that the overall employment situation will ever recover to where it was before the recession.

At least not with current policies.

Here’s another way of looking at the same data. It’s labor force participation by age. The lines don’t seem that far apart, but a 3-4 percentage point decline across age groups adds up to millions of people no longer productively employed.

Last but not least, here’s another way of approaching this data.

We have a chart from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank showing the number of working-age people not in the labor force.

There are two takeaways from this chart.

First, it’s clear that the problem started well before Obama.

But it’s also clear that the problem has gotten much worse during his tenure.

The bottom line is that the expansion of redistribution programs has lured more and more people out of the labor force, particularly when matched by government policies that have hindered the private sector’s ability to create jobs.

So you’ll understand why I cited labor-force participation (along with stagnant household income) as Obama’s real legacy in this interview.

By the way, one of the perils of live TV is that you sometimes get curve balls. And since the Ted Cruz birther controversy is now big news, I was asked my opinion even though I don’t have the slightest competency to discuss the issue.

Sort of like the time I went on a program for the ostensible purpose of discussing trade and wound up trapped in a discussion on America’s relationship with North Korea.

My only regret from yesterday’s interview is that I wasn’t clever enough to say that I was more worried about Cruz supporting a Canadian-style tax system than I was about Cruz being born in Canada.

P.S. While I’m not happy about Cruz including a value-added tax in his reform proposal, don’t read too much into that grousing since there are warts in the other candidates’ plans as well.

With one exception.

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Bernie Sanders Is (Sort of) Right about Europe Being a Role Model for the United States

Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s pseudo-socialist senator, thinks that America can learn from Europe.

He’s right.

But he’s also wrong. That’s because he thinks that Europe is a role model to emulate rather than a warning signal of mistakes to avoid. Needless to say, that’s borderline crazy.

Heck, even President Obama has pointed out that the United States out-performs our European counterparts.

In his Washington Post column, Robert Samuelson warns that it would be a mistake to follow the European model of more taxes and additional regulation. He starts with (what should be) an obvious point about businesses responding to incentives.

We can learn from Europe about job creation, but many Americans may reject the underlying lesson. It is: If you price labor too high — pay workers more than they produce — businesses will slow or stop hiring.

He then points out that bad incentives in Europe are leading to bad results.

Europe’s economy is in the doldrums. Growth in the eurozone (the 19 countries using the euro) is weak… Eurozone unemployment is 11.1 percent, barely down from the peak of about 12 percent. This contrasts with the United States, where the jobless rate has dropped from 10 percent in October 2009 to 5.3 percent now.

And what exactly are the bad incentives in Europe?

Simply stated, governments are imposing too many burdens on the economy’s productive sector.

In a fascinating article in the latest “Journal of Economic Perspectives,” economist Christian Thimann — a former top adviser at the European Central Bank and now at the French investment bank AXA — argues that Europe’s debt crisis and the weak recovery both stem from high wage and compensation costs. “Jobs fail to be created in a number of [eurozone] countries not because of a ‘lack of demand’ as often claimed,” Thimann writes,” but mainly because wage costs are high relative to productivity, social insurance and tax burdens are heavy, and the business environment is excessively burdensome.”

Which brings us back to the point Samuelson made earlier.

If the costs of new workers exceed the likely benefits in higher sales and profits, companies will hire less or not at all.

And just in case the implications aren’t obvious, he spells it out.

…we should not ignore the implications for the United States. …it’s tempting to load the costs of social policies onto business. …The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) requires firms to provide health insurance for workers; a $15 minimum wage would raise labor costs sharply for many firms; and there are proposals mandating paid maternity and sick leave. All these seem worthy causes, but we need to be alert to unintended consequences. If we make hiring too expensive, there will be less hiring.

Amen. As I’ve already noted, businesses aren’t charities. They won’t hire new workers if that means lower profits!

But Europe has a lot of these policies, so unemployment is higher. And we have politicians in America who want to copy Europe’s mistakes.

The problem is not just that politicians are making it more expensive to hire workers. Bad government policy also is making it more expensive to do almost anything.

The U.K.-based Telegraph has a story looking at how some European governments are making other business activities needlessly costly and difficult.

…doing business in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain is more difficult, expensive and slower than in stronger, neighbouring countries. …Looking at the average time it takes to get construction permits, electricity connected, contracts enforced and goods exported shows the disparity.

This chart shows that the problem is especially acute in Southern Europe.

Let’s close by making a very important point about differences within Europe. While it’s sometimes useful and interesting to look at big-picture comparisons (such as average unemployment in the EU vs US or average income in the EU vs US), it’s also important to realize that European nations (notwithstanding pressures for harmonization, centralization, and bureaucratization from the European Commission) still have considerable leeway to determine their own economic policies.

And if you peruse Economic Freedom of the World, you’ll see that Northern European nations such as Finland (#10), Denmark (#19), Germany (#28), and the Netherlands (#34) are all considered market-friendly, while Southern European countries such as Spain (#51), France (#58), Italy (#79), and Greece (#84) are much lower in the rankings.

The Nordic nations are especially interesting. They have large welfare states, but they have very pro-market policies in other areas. So to elaborate on what Senator Sanders asserted, we actually could learn some good lessons from Scandinavian nations in areas other than fiscal policy.

P.S. Since we picked on Bernie Sanders already, let’s create some balance by also mocking Hillary Clinton.

Here’s a clever satirical video about her email scandal.

And if that doesn’t satisfy your craving, click here for more Hillary humor.

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Destroying Jobs with Innumerate Compassion

A few days ago, we used supply-and-demand curves to illustrate how taxes reduce economic output.

Supply-and-demand curves also can be used to examine the impact of minimum wage laws on the labor market.

Workers understandably will be willing to supply more labor at higher wages.

Employers are just the opposite. They demand more labor when wages are low.

In an unfettered market, the interplay of supply and demand will result in an “equilibrium wage.”

But as you can see from the chart, if politicians impose a minimum-wage mandate above the equilibrium level, there will be unemployment.

Some folks, though, may not be overly impressed by theory. So how about empirical research.

Other folks, though, may prefer real-world examples rather than academic studies.

We’ve already looked at the bad results when the minimum wage was increased in Michigan.

Now we have some more unfortunate evidence from the state of Washington. Seattle Magazine has a story about a bunch of restaurants closing because of an increase in the minimum wage.

The article starts by noting a bunch of eateries are being shut down.

Last month—and particularly last week— Seattle foodies were downcast as the blows kept coming: Queen Anne’s Grub closed February 15. Pioneer Square’s Little Uncle shut down February 25. Shanik’s Meeru Dhalwala announced that it will close March 21. Renée Erickson’s Boat Street Café will shutter May 30… What the #*%&$* is going on?

Hmmm…so what’s changed. It’s not higher food prices. It’s not a change in dining preferences of consumers.

Instead, government intervention is having a predictable effect.

…for Seattle restaurateurs recently, …the impending minimum wage hike to $15 per hour. Starting April 1, all businesses must begin to phase in the wage increase: Small employers have seven years to pay all employees at least $15 hourly; large employers (with 500 or more employees) have three. Since the legislation was announced last summer, The Seattle Times and Eater have reported extensively on restaurant owners’ many concerns about how to compensate for the extra funds that will now be required for labor: They may need to raise menu prices, source poorer ingredients, reduce operating hours, reduce their labor and/or more.

An industry expert tries to explain the new reality of coping with higher costs.

Washington Restaurant Association’s Anton puts it this way: “It’s not a political problem; it’s a math problem.” …he says that if restaurant owners made no changes, the labor cost in quick service restaurants would rise to 42 percent and in full service restaurants to 47 percent. “Everyone is looking at the model right now, asking how do we do math?” he says. “Every operator I’m talking to is in panic mode, trying to figure out what the new world will look like.”

Well, we know what “the new world will look like” for many workers. They’ll be unemployed.

So you can understand why this issue is so frustrating. Politicians posture about helping workers, but they wind up displaying their economic ignorance and real-world innumeracy.

And innocent people pay the price, as shown in the Branco cartoon.

P.S. Walter Williams explains the racist impact of minimum-wage laws.

P.P.S. On a lighter note, here are a couple of additional clever cartoons illustrating the negative impact of minimum-wage mandates.

P.P.P.S. And this video is a must-watch on the issue.

P.P.P.P.S. Shifting to a different topic, I’m not quite sure this guy deserves to be in the Moocher Hall of Fame, but I’m glad he’s going to jail.

Champion golfer Alan Bannister, who played off a handicap of seven, was convicted of benefits fraud after being caught on camera walking around the course on his daily game. He even had a taxpayer-funded mobility car by claiming he was in too much pain to walk. …Inspectors discovered he used his mobility car – intended for people “virtually unable to walk” – to drive to the golf club to play with the “Sunday Swingers” and “The Crazy Gang” players, despite claiming he could barely walk 50 metres at a time. …The court was told Bannister dishonestly claimed £26,090.55 from 2007 until 2012 in Disability Living Allowance.

And while he’s only a borderline case for the Moocher Hall of Fame, he’s a perfect example of eroding social capital.

He’s a dirtbag who decided that it is perfectly okay to scam off taxpayers. When enough of his fellow citizens make the same choice, a society is in deep trouble.

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Minimum-Wage Laws Are a Triumph of Emotion over Logic

It’s very frustrating to write about the minimum wage. How often can you make the elementary observation, after all, that you’ll get more unemployment if you try to make businesses pay some workers more than they’re worth?

But it’s my mission to promote economic liberty, so I’ve written on why government-mandated wages can create unemployment by making it unprofitable to hire people with low work skills and/or poor work histories. And I’ve attacked Republicans for going along with these job-killing policies, and also pointed out the racist impact of such intervention.

Heck, just about everything sensible that needs to be said about the topic is contained in this short video narrated by Orphe Divougny

But I guess I’m the Sisyphus of the free-market movement because once again I’m going to try to talk some sense into those who think emotion can trump real-world economics.

Let’s start by citing some new reasearch.

States are allowed to increase minimum wages above the federal level. This creates interesting opportunities to measure what happens to employment when the national minimum wage is increased, since the change presumably doesn’t impact states that already are at or above that level.

Two economists from the University of California at San Diego took advantage of this natural experiment and examined employment changes in states that were “bound” and “unbound” by the law.

…we find that minimum wage increases significantly reduced the employment of low-skilled workers.  By the second year following the $7.25 minimum’s implementation, we estimate that targeted workers’ employment rates had fallen by 6 percentage points (8%) more in ‘bound’ states than in ‘unbound’ states.  …Over the late 2000s the average effective minimum wage rate rose by nearly 30% across the United States.  Our best estimate is that these minimum wage increases reduced the employment of working-age adults by 0.7 percentage points.  This accounts for 14% of the employment rate’s total decline over this time period and amounts to 1.4 million workers.  A disproportionate 45% of the affected workers were young adults (aged 15 to 24).

Gee, what a surprise. Fewer jobs.

But the mandated hike in wages didn’t just reduce employment.

There were also negative effects on income.

We find that binding minimum wage increases reduced low-skilled individuals’ average monthly incomes.  Targeted workers’ average incomes fell by an average of $100 over the first year and by an additional $50 over the following two years. …We provide direct evidence that such losses translate into meaningful reductions in upward economic mobility.  Two years following the minimum wage increases we study, low-skilled workers had become significantly less likely to transition into higher-wage employment in bound states than in unbound states. 

This evidence on income is particularly important because some statists make a rather utilitarian argument that it’s okay for some people to lose jobs because others will benefit.

Jared Bernstein is Exhibit A, as you can see in this debate we had for CNBC.

But let’s not just focus on numbers. There are painful human costs when low-skilled workers are priced out of the labor market.

Here are some excerpts from a column in the Wall Street Journal about a real-world example of people losing their jobs.

It’s well-established in the economic literature, if not in the minds of proponents of these laws, that the result will be job losses. Yet this empirical reality fails to capture the emotional reality of the employees who are let go, or of the business owners who had no choice but to let them go. …Michigan’s minimum wage rose in September to $8.15 an hour from $7.40 (the minimum wage for tipped employees rose 17%, to $3.10 an hour). The wage will rise to $9.25 by January 2018.

Now let’s look at the impact on a non-profit restaurant that helped disadvantaged people.

The staff at Tastes of Life was made up of recovering addicts, recently incarcerated individuals and others who would have a hard time landing a job elsewhere. Mr. Mosley explained that on-the-job offenses for which an employee would have been “gone that day” in a traditional work setting were instead used as training opportunities at Tastes of Life. …Mr. Mosley’s financial goal was to break even and use any excess funds to subsidize Life Challenge participants. After more than two years of operation on Beck Road, 2½ miles from the center of town, Tastes of Life had a steady flow of loyal customers, but rising food costs presented a challenge. …Mr. Mosley and Ms. Tucker had planned to print new menus with higher prices to cover the food costs, but the September wage hike complicated those plans, in particular because the increase covered both tipped and non-tipped employees. …“If we had a $10 menu item, it would have to be $14,” Mr. Mosley said. The restaurant’s customer base of seniors on a fixed income and Hillsdale locals made this option a nonstarter. The restaurant also had to find roughly 250 new customers a month, unrealistic in a small town of about 8,300.

So the inevitable happened.

The increased minimum wage, he told me, was “the straw that broke that camel’s back,” forcing him to close his doors and lay off his 12-person staff. …with the higher wage costs, the arrangement was no longer feasible, and Tastes of Life closed on Sept. 28. …Four former employees have been able to leverage their restaurant experience to find new employment, but Mr. Mosley told me that eight are still out of work. …the loss of Tastes of Life cuts deep, because the benefit for Life Challenge participants was both valuable and is not easily attained elsewhere. These unintended consequences of a minimum wage hike aren’t unique to small towns in south-central Michigan. Tragically, they repeat themselves in locales small and large each time legislators heed the populist call to “raise the wage.”

Understanding “unintended consequences” is a key characteristic of a good economist.

Indeed, Bastiat’s wise words about the “seen” and “unseen” help to explain why Krugman makes so many mistakes.

But that’s a topic for another column (actually, a whole series of columns).

Today, the goal is simply to understand that it is pointlessly destructive to make low-skilled labor less affordable.

P.S. Given all the evidence that minimum-wage laws destroy jobs, why do some people persist in supporting such a destructive policy? In this post, I provide six possible reasons.

P.P.S. No wonder I get so frustrated on this topic.

P.P.P.S On the lighter side, here are some good cartoon on the minimum wage from Steve Breen, Lisa Benson and Henry Payne.

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If You Want to Gauge the Health of the Job Market, Focus on Employment rather than Unemployment

For the past several years, on the issue of jobs, I’ve focused more on the employment-population ratio rather than the official unemployment rate.

Both figures are important, of course, but I think the employment-population ratio has more economic meaning since our prosperity ultimately is based on how many people are productively employed.

To put this in wonkish terms, our national economic output is a function of the efficient allocation of labor and capital.

The reason I bring this up is that many people think the job market is now in great shape because the unemployment rate has dropped to 5.6 percent.

To be sure, that’s good news when compared to the much higher rates of joblessness that plagued the nation a few years ago. But one of the reasons the unemployment rate has dropped is that many people have left the labor force.

Here’s a chart based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing how many people have jobs compared to the working-age population. As you can see, there’s been scant improvement in this important indicator.

The problem isn’t that the ratio plummeted during the downturn. That always happens.

What’s worrisome is the fact that there wasn’t a bounce back in the right direction after the economy started to improve.

Indeed, it’s become such a problem that the establishment media has started to notice.

Here’s some of what Reuters reported on Fridays good news/bad news jobs report.

…wages posted their biggest decline in at least eight years in a sign the tightening labor market has yet to give much of a boost to workers. …The jobless rate fell 0.2 percentage point to a 6-1/2-year low of 5.6 percent, but that was mainly because people left the labor force. The drop in labor participation and a surprise five-cent, or 0.2 percent, decrease in average hourly earnings…the labor force participation rate, the percentage of the working age population who either have a job or are looking for one, dropped back to the 36-year low of 62.7 percent reached in September.

The labor force participation rate, which is mentioned in the Reuters article, is another set of data that is rather similar to the employment-population rate.

Here’s a chart that’s been circulating on Twitter, based on data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. You can see that the labor force participation rate jumped significantly between 1970 and 1990, in large part because more women were entering the job market. But in recent years, the trend has been in the wrong direction.

And if you parse the data, you can see that the big problem is among those without a college degree.

Now that we’ve cited lots of data, let’s speculate on why we have fewer and fewer people productively employed.

There are several possible answers, including the big increase in people scamming the disability system.

There’s also the jump in tax and regulatory burdens, though that presumably impacts all economic statistics.

Obamacare deserves its own special mention since it imposes a significant penalty on work.

And, until recently, the government had a policy of endless unemployment benefits that made work relatively less attractive.

So the bottom line, as you might expect, is that the problem is too much intervention and bloated government. Which means the answer is free markets and less government.

P.S. Some readers will have noticed that this piece cites both the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate. These two data series are sometimes used interchangeably, though I prefer the former for reasons explained in this article for the BLS’s Monthly Labor Review.

P.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.

P.P.P.S. To end on a glum note, Obama wants to increase the minimum wage. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know whether that’s going to help or hurt the job market.

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The Three Best and Three Worst Policy Developments of 2014

Exactly one year ago, we looked at the best and worst policy developments of 2013.

Now it’s time for a look back at 2014 to see what’s worth celebrating and what are reasons for despair.

Here’s the good news for 2014.

1. Gridlock – I’ve been arguing for nearly three years that divided government is producing better economic performance. To be sure, it would have been difficult for the economy to move in the wrong direction after the stagnation of Obama’s first two years, but heading in the wrong direction at a slower pace is better than speeding toward European-style statism.

Indeed, the fact that policy stopped getting worse even boosted America’s relative competitiveness, so there’s a lot to be thankful for when politicians disagree with each other and can’t enact new laws.

David Harsanyi explains the glory of gridlock for The Federalist.

Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we’ve seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks like it’s going to be strong in 2015, unemployment numbers have looked good, buying power is up and the stock market closed at 18,000 for the first time ever. All good things. So what happened? …the predominant agenda of Washington was doing nothing. It was only when the tinkering and superfluous stimulus spending wound down that fortunes began to turn around. …spending as a percent of GDP has gone down. In 2009, 125 bills were enacted into law. In 2010, 258. After that, Congress, year by year, became one of the least productive in history. And the more unproductive Washington became, the more the economy began to improve. …Gridlock has caused an odd, but pervasive, stability in Washington. Spending has been static. No jarring reforms have passed — no cap-and-trade, which would have artificially spiked energy prices and undercut the growth we’re now experiencing. The inadvertent, but reigning, policy over the past four years has been, do no harm.

Amen. Though I should hasten to add that while gridlock has been helpful in the short run (stopping Obama from achieving his dream of becoming a second FDR), at some point we will need unified government in order to adopt much-needed tax reform and entitlement reform.

The key question is whether we will ever get good politicians controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

2. Restrained Spending – This is the most under-reported and under-celebrated news of the past few years, not just 2014.

Allow me to cite one of my favorite people.

In fiscal year 2009, the federal government spent about $3.52 trillion. In fiscal year 2014 (which ended on September 30), the federal government spent about $3.50 trillion. In other words, there’s been no growth in nominal government spending over the past five years. It hasn’t received nearly as much attention as it deserves, but there’s been a spending freeze in Washington. …the fiscal restraint over the past five years has resulted in a bigger drop in the relative size of government in America than what Switzerland achieved over the past ten years thanks to the “debt brake.” …The bottom line is that the past five years have been a victory for advocates of limited government.

And this spending restraint is producing economic dividends, though Paul Krugman somehow wants people to believe that Keynesian economics deserves the credit.

3. Limits on Unemployment Benefits – Although the labor force participation rate is still disturbingly low, the unemployment rate has declined and job creation numbers have improved.

The aforementioned policies surely deserve some of the credit, but it’s also worth noting that Congress wisely put a stop to the initiative-sapping policy of endlessly extending unemployment benefits. Such policies sound compassionate, but they basically pay people not to work and cause more joblessness.

Phil Kerpen of American Commitment elaborates, citing recent research from the New York Fed.

According to empirical research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: “most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of unemployment benefit eligibility.” Those benefits finally ended at the end of 2013, triggering a sharp rise in hiring… Specifically, they found that the average extended unemployment benefits duration of 82.5 weeks for four years had the impact of raising the unemployment rate from 5 percent to 8.6 percent. …Good intentions are not enough in public policy.  It might seem kind and compassionate to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on “emergency” unemployment benefits forever, but the effect is to keep millions of people unemployed.  Results matter.

Phil’s right. If you pay people not to work, you’re going to get foolish results.

But the three above stories are not the only rays of sunshine in 2014. Honorable mention goes to North Carolina and Kansas for implementing pro-growth tax reforms.

I’m also pleased that GOPers passed the first half of my test and told the Democrat appointee at the Congressional Budget Office that he would be replaced. Now the question is whether they appoint someone who will make the long-overdue changes that are needed to get better and more accurate assessments of fiscal policy. That didn’t happen when the GOP had control between 1995 and 2007, so victory is far from assured.

And another honorable mention is that Congress has not expanded the IMF’s bailout authority.

Now let’s look at the three worst policy developments of 2014.

1. Obamacare Subsidies – Yes, Obamacare has been a giant albatross for the President and his party. Yes, the law has helped more and more people realize that big government isn’t a good idea. Those are positive developments.

Nonetheless, 2014 was the year when the subsidies began to flow. And once handouts begin, politicians get very squeamish about taking them away.

This is why I wrote back in 2012 that Obamacare may have been a victory (in the long run) for the left, even though it caused dozens of Democrats to lose their seats in the House and Senate.

I think the left made a clever calculation that losses in the last cycle would be an acceptable price to get more people dependent on the federal government. And once people have to rely on government for something like healthcare, they are more likely to vote for the party that promises to make government bigger. …This is why Obamacare – and the rest of the entitlement state – is so worrisome. If more and more Americans decide to ride in the wagon of government dependency, it will be less and less likely that those people will vote for candidates who want to restrain government.

Simply stated, when more and more people get hooked on the heroin of government dependency, I fear you get the result portrayed in this set of cartoons.

2. Continuing Erosion of Tax Competition – Regular readers know that I view jurisdictional competition as a very valuable constraint on the greed of the political class.

Simply stated, politicians will be less likely to impose punitive tax policies if the geese with the golden eggs can fly away. That’s why I cheer when taxpayers escape high-tax jurisdictions, whether we’re looking at New Jersey and California, or France and the United States.

But this also helps to explain why governments, either unilaterally or multilaterally, are trying to prevent taxpayers from shifting economic activity to low-tax jurisdictions.

And 2014 was not a good year for taxpayers. We saw further implementation of FATCA, ongoing efforts by the OECD to raise the tax burden on the business community, and even efforts by the United Nations to further erode tax competition.

Here’s an example, from the Wall Street Journal, of politicians treating taxpayers like captive serfs.

Japan could become the latest country to consider taxing wealthy individuals who move abroad to take advantage of lower rates. The government and ruling party lawmakers are considering an “exit tax”… Such a rule would prevent wealthy individuals moving to a location where taxes are low–such as Singapore or Hong Kong… some expats in Tokyo are concerned the rule could make companies think twice about sending senior professionals to Japan or make Japanese entrepreneurs more reluctant to go abroad.

My reaction, for what it’s worth, is that Japan should reduce tax rates if it wants to keep people (and their money) from emigrating.

3. Repeating the Mistakes that Caused the Housing Crisis – A corrupt system of subsidies for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with other misguided policies from Washington, backfired with a housing bubble and financial crisis in 2008.

Inexplicably, the crowd in Washington has learned nothing from that disaster. New regulations are being proposed to once again provide big subsidies that will destabilize the housing market.

Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute warns that politicians are planting the seeds for another mess.

New standards were supposed to raise the quality of the “prime” mortgages that get packaged and sold to investors; instead, they will have the opposite effect. …the standards have been watered down. …The regulators believe that lower underwriting standards promote homeownership and make mortgages and homes more affordable. The facts, however, show that the opposite is true. …low underwriting standards — especially low down payments — drive housing prices up, making them less affordable for low- and moderate-income buyers, while also inducing would-be homeowners to take more risk. That’s why homes were more affordable before the 1990s than they are today. … The losers, as we saw in the financial crisis, are borrowers of modest means who are lured into financing arrangements they can’t afford. When the result is foreclosure and eviction, one of the central goals of homeownership — building equity — is undone.

Gee, it’s almost as if Chuck Asay had perfect foresight when drawing this cartoon.

Let’s end today’s post with a few dishonorable mentions.

In addition to the three developments we just discussed, I’m also very worried about the ever-growing red tape burden. This is a hidden tax that undermines economic efficiency and enables cronyism.

I continue to be irked that my tax dollars are being used to subsidize a very left-wing international bureaucracy in Paris.

And it’s very sad that one of the big success stories of economic liberalization is now being undermined.

P.S. This is the feel-good story of the year.

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Mocking the IRS with Reason TV

In some sense, there’s nothing remotely funny about the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party organizations.

It is disgusting that a powerful arm of the government became a corrupt vehicle for illegal partisan politics.

But it’s better to laugh rather than cry, so let’s enjoy this new video from Remy at Reason TV.

And let’s not forget that the IRS rewarded itself with big bonuses after the scandal!

President Obama infamously claimed there wasn’t a “smidgen” of corruption at the IRS. This Glenn Foden cartoon is the only appropriate response.

P.S. Switching to another topic, I explained recently that the left was wrong about unemployment insurance. The statists told us that paying people to be unemployed wouldn’t increase joblessness, but virtually all the evidence is on the other side.

Now we have even more research emphasizing that point. Here’s a blurb from some new research published by the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

…we find that the extension of unemployment benefits affected the labor market status of long-term unemployed workers in late 2013. Without extended UI benefits, these unemployed workers would have been more likely to be employed, more likely to exit the labor force, and on average 1.9 percent less likely to remain unemployed in the following period. In short, our simulated early termination of the EUC program lowered the unemployment rate by 3 to 5 basis points, suggesting that the December 2013 expiration of the EUC program might have slightly lowered the unemployment rate in early 2014.

However, since most leftists are not very literate about economics, let’s simplify the issue. Maybe they can understand some cartoons. Here are some options from Michael Ramirez, Robert Gorrell, and Chuck Asay, as well as a great Wizard-of-Id parody.

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The Left Was Wrong about Unemployment Insurance…Plus a Message from 1948 about Markets vs. Statism

Over the past several years, I’ve repeatedly argued that you get more unemployment when the government pays people to be unemployed. But I’m not just relying on theory. I’ve cited both anecdotes and empirical research to bolster my case.

You won’t be surprised to learn that many politicians have a different perspective. They say it is compassionate to provide unemployment insurance benefits. And they say it is cruel and heartless to put a time limit on those payments.

And if you believe Nancy Pelosi, unemployment handouts actually are good for the economy!

You might think this is one of these never-to-be-resolved Washington debates, but we actually have two natural experiments over the past year that show one side was right and the other side was wrong.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, John Hood of the North Carolina-based John Locke Foundation describes what happened when his state decided to limit unemployment benefits.

Here are the changes that were made.

A year ago, North Carolina became the first state in the nation to exit the federal government’s extended-benefits program for the unemployed. …Gov. Pat McCrory and the state legislature…reduced the amount and duration of unemployment-insurance benefits, which had been higher in North Carolina than in most states. As a result the state lost its eligibility to participate in the extended-benefits program on July 1, 2013. …liberal activists pounced. …media outlets excoriated North Carolina for ending extended benefits. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called it a “war on the unemployed.”

And here are the results.

North Carolina didn’t descend into the Dickensian nightmare critics predicted. For the last six months of 2013, it was the only state where jobless recipients weren’t eligible for extended benefits. Yet during that period North Carolina had one of the nation’s largest improvements in labor-market performance and overall economic growth. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of payroll jobs in North Carolina rose by 1.5% in the second half of 2013, compared with a 0.8% rise for the nation as a whole. Total unemployment in the state dropped by 17%, compared with the national average drop of 12%. The state’s official unemployment rate fell to 6.9% in December 2013 from 8.3% in June, while the nationwide rate fell by eight-tenths of a point to 6.7%.

But we didn’t just have a state-based experiment. Hood explains that the same thing happened on the national level six months later. Congress rejected Obama’s call for another extension of benefits.

So what happened?

Still not convinced that leaving the extended-benefits program encouraged both job creation and job acceptance? As of Jan. 1, 2014, the extended-benefits program expired nationwide. Yet there has been no sudden exodus of discouraged workers to the fringes of the national economy. Both job creation and household employment are up. The nation’s employment-population ratio was 58.9% in May, up from 58.6% in December.

This is a powerful point.

We may not have a strong job market, but the numbers definitely have improved since the start of the year.

There’s actually an important lesson here. You don’t need perfect policy to get better performance. The private economy will generate growth so long as it has some breathing room.

Heck, sometimes the absence of bad policy is enough to boost economic performance. The post-2010 gridlock didn’t lead to a lot of good policies, but it did end the threat of major new statist initiatives from the Obama White House. And that was enough, in my humble opinion, to give us better numbers.

But better numbers are not the same as impressive numbers. This is still the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. So while it’s good to have a bit of improvement, we should be dissatisfied until we at least get back on the long-run trendline for 3 percent average real growth.

And what needs to happen to give us that kind of growth? The answer is simple: Free markets and small government.

P.S.  Since the main point of today’s column is unemployment insurance, let’s close with some great cartoons on that topic from Michael Ramirez, Robert Gorrell, and Chuck Asay, as well as a superb Wizard-of-Id parody.

P.P.S. On a separate topic, here’s a superb video of a 1948 cartoon comparing free markets to the poisonous ideology of “isms” such as communism, fascism, and socialism.

Very well done, particularly considering that it’s almost 70 years old. And if you want to see how economic growth can make a huge difference over that amount of time, check out this comparison of Argentina and Hong Kong.

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More Evidence that Big Government Doesn’t Work: Unambiguously Awful Employment Numbers

On many occasions, I’ve explained that economic output is a function of how much labor and capital are productively utilized.

This is why I relentlessly criticize policies that undermine GDP growth by hindering the use of these “factors of production.”

That’s a bit of economic jargon, but it helps to explain why we shouldn’t be discriminating against capital by double taxing income that is saved and invested.

And it helps to explain why we shouldn’t be discouraging labor by subsidizing unemployment and idleness.

But it’s time to issue a very important caveat. The goal of policy should be economic freedom, not maximizing GDP.

There’s nothing wrong with people choosing to be out of the labor force – so long as they’re not expecting taxpayers to pay their expenses.

Many women, for instance, may want to be at home with children, particularly during their younger years.

Moreover, some older workers may want to retire early.

So while I think it’s bad news that labor force participation has dropped under Obama, there’s more than one possible way to look at that data when you factor in the voluntary choices of some segments of the potential workforce.

But it’s very difficult to give any sort of optimistic or positive spin to these numbers from the Senate Budget Committee. They show a very worrisome trend among prime-working-age men.

These are people who should be in the labor force.

Here’s what John Hinderaker at Powerline wrote about these sobering figures.

An unprecedented number of men–one in six–between the ages of 25 and 54, what should be their prime earning years, are either unemployed or out of the work force entirely.

Here’s the breakdown.

One in eight, the highest proportion since record-keeping began in 1955, are out of the labor force… Another 2.9 million men in the 25-54 age group haven’t given up–they are still in the labor force–but are currently unemployed.

And here are the consequences.

…the damage done to a generation of American men (and women too, of course) will not easily be undone. Those who missed a chunk of what should have been their most productive years, or departed the labor force entirely, will suffer from Obamanomics for the rest of their lives. The damage being done by our current, inept economic policies is literally incalculable.

Here’s another chart, this one comparing idleness among men in 2007 and 2014.

So how do we fix this problem, keeping in mind that this is not a partisan issue since the bad trend started under Bush?

The big-picture answer is free markets and small government.

In other words, you create jobs by having Washington get out of the way.

P.S. Over the years, the President has made some remarkable statements.

• In my video on class warfare, I noted that Obama said in 2008 that – for reasons of “fairness” – he wanted to raise the capital gains tax even if the government lost revenue.
• A couple of years ago, he arrogantly remarked that “at some point you have made enough money.”
• In 2011, the President was complaining about bank fees and asserted that, “you don’t have some inherent right just to, you know, get a certain amount of profit…”
• And in 2012, Obama made his infamous “you didn’t build that” statement, which generated some very amusing political cartoons.

With these statements in mind, here’s some Obama humor.

No substantive policy message, I’ll admit, but still funny. Sort of like this t-shirt, this Pennsylvania joke, this Reagan-Obama comparison, this Wyoming joke, this Bush-Obama comparison, this video satire, and this bumper sticker.

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Let Markets Work, even for Folks Who Want to Buy and Sell Human Organs

Back in 2011, I shared a video making the moral argument that adults should be allowed to buy and sell kidneys.

After all, if one person is made better off by selling a kidney and another person is made better off by buying a kidney, why should the rest of us be allowed to ban that voluntary exchange?

In a new video looking at anti-market bias, Professor Bryan Caplan of George Mason University uses kidney sales as an example of how capitalism yields great results.

So why is it against the law to buy and sell kidneys, particularly when the actual buyers and sellers – by definition – both benefit?

In 2010, I speculated that a knee-jerk fixation on the wrong kind of equality might be part of the answer. The current system, with long waiting lines and thousands of needless deaths, may be bad, but at least rich people suffer just as much as poor people.

…it is perplexing that statists are so viscerally opposed. The only interpretation I can come up with – which I admit is very uncharitable – is that they are willing to let people die because they are myopically fixated on equity. No system is acceptable, in their minds, unless it results in equal death rates by income class and equal kidney donations by income class.

In reality, a free market would benefit both rich and poor. Not only would some poor people get a lot of money by selling their spare kidneys, but poor people on dialysis would be far more likely to get transplants since private charities would be able to raise money to save their lives.

P.S. Professor Caplan is the creator of the “libertarian purity quiz.” I only got 94 out of 160 possible points, which doesn’t sound that impressive, but it was enough to get me classified as “hard core.”

P.P.S. In my posts about unemployment benefits, I’ve argued that there’s a big downside to giving people money on the condition that they don’t have a job. Simply stated, you trap people in unemployment.

And I’ve cited lots of academic evidence to support that hypothesis. And for those who prefer anecdotes, check out this story from Michigan and this example from Ohio.

I’ve even cited left-wing economists who admit that unemployment benefits translate into more joblessness. And this Michael Ramirez cartoon on the issue is both amusing and persuasive.

But one thing I haven’t done is share data from actual people without jobs. So here’s some data from a national scientific poll of unemployed Americans.

…80 percent agree that it “is giving me time to find the right position.” …82 percent of those receiving benefits said if their unemployment compensation were to run out prior to their finding a job, they would “search harder and wider for a job.” …48 percent agree that they “haven’t had to look for work as hard” thanks to unemployment compensation.

Gee, what a shocker. Endless unemployment benefits enable people to be less diligent about finding work. That may not be a big problem if people are out of the labor force for two months. But when politicians keep extending jobless benefits, you create permanent unemployment.

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Sensible Swiss Voters Crush Proposed Minimum Wage Mandate

I’m beginning to think that people from some nations are smarter and more rational than others.

That may explain, for instance, why voters in Estonia support fiscal restraint while voters in France foolishly think the gravy train can continue forever.

But I’m not making an argument about genetic ability. Instead, what I’m actually starting to wonder is whether some political cultures yield smarter and more rational decisions.

Switzerland is a good example. In a referendum this past weekend, an overwhelming majority of voters rejected a proposal to impose a minimum wage. Here are some excerpts from a BBC report.

Swiss voters have overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to introduce what would have been the highest minimum wage in the world in a referendum. Under the plan, employers would have had to pay workers a minimum 22 Swiss francs (about $25; £15; 18 euros) an hour. …critics argued that it would raise production costs and increase unemployment. The minimum wage proposal was rejected by 76% of voters. Supporters had argued it would “protect equitable pay” but the Swiss Business Federation said it would harm low-paid workers in particular. …unions are angry that Switzerland – one of the richest countries in the world – does not have a minimum pay level while neighbouring France and Germany do.

Every single Swiss Canton voted against the minimum wage.

That means the French-speaking cantons voted no, even though the French-speaking people in France routinely support politicians who favor bad policy.

That means the German-speaking cantons voted no, even though the German-speaking people in Germany routinely support politicians who favor bad policy.

And it means that the Italian-speaking canton voted no, even though the Italian-speaking people in Italy routinely support politicians who favor bad policy.

So why is it that the same people, genetically speaking, make smart decisions in Switzerland and dumb decisions elsewhere?

I don’t have an answer, but here’s some more evidence. As you can see from these passages in a New York Times story, the Swiss have a lot more common sense than their neighbors.

“A fixed salary has never been a good way to fight the problem,” said Johann Schneider-Ammann, the economic minister. “If the initiative had been accepted, it would have led to workplace losses, especially in rural areas where less-qualified people have a harder time finding jobs. The best remedy against poverty is work.” …“Switzerland, especially in popular votes, has never had a tradition of approving state intervention in the labor markets,” said Daniel Kubler, a professor of political science at the University of Zurich. “A majority of Swiss has always thought, and still seems to think, that liberal economic principles are the basis of their model of success.”

Even the non-Swiss in Switzerland are rational. Check out this blurb from a story which appeared before the vote in USA Today.

…some who would be eligible for the higher wage worry that it may do more harm than good. Luisa Almeida is an immigrant from Portugal who works in Switzerland as a housekeeper and nanny. Almeida’s earnings of $3,250 a month are below the proposed minimum wage but still much more than she’d make in Portugal. Since she is not a Swiss citizen, she cannot vote but if she could, “I would vote ‘no’,” she says. “If my employer had to pay me more money, he wouldn’t be able to keep me on and I’d lose the job.”

Heck, I’m wondering if Ms. Almeida would be willing to come to Washington and educate Barack Obama. She obviously has enough smarts to figure out the indirect negative impact of government intervention, so her counsel would be very valuable in DC.

But if Ms. Almeida isn’t available, we have another foreigner who already has provided advice on the issue of minimum wages. Here’s Orphe Divougny, originally from Gabon, with a common-sense explanation of why it doesn’t make sense to hurt low-skilled workers.

By the way, this isn’t the first time the Swiss have demonstrated common sense when asked to vote of key economic policy issues.

In 2001, 85 percent of voters approved a plan to cap the growth of government spending.

In 2010, 59 percent of voters rejected an Obama-style class-warfare tax plan.

No wonder there are many reasons why Switzerland ranks above the United States.

P.S. I wrote earlier this month about Pfizer’s potential merger that would allow the company to reduce its onerous tax burden to the IRS by redomiciling in the United Kingdom.

Well, Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe has weighed in on the issue and I can’t resist sharing this excerpt.

…the outrage isn’t the wish of an American corporation to lower its tax bill. It is a US tax code so punitive and counterproductive that it can drive a company like Pfizer, which was launched in Brooklyn in 1849, to turn itself into a foreign corporation. The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. That puts American companies at a serious competitive disadvantage, since their rivals elsewhere are able to channel more of their profits into new investment, hiring, and productivity. What’s worse, ours is the only country that enforces a system of “worldwide” taxation, which means that American firms have to pay tax to the IRS not only on income earned in the United States but on their foreign earnings as well. Other nations content themselves with “territorial” taxation — they only tax income earned within their national borders. US corporations like Pfizer that have significant earnings overseas are thus taxed on those earnings twice: first by the government of the country where the money was earned, and then by the IRS.

Amen, amen, and amen.

Our tax system imposes a very punitive corporate tax rate.

It then augments the damage with worldwide taxation.

And the system is riddled with onerous rules that cause America to rank a lowly 94th out of 100 nations for business “tax attractiveness.”

In other words, when greedy politicians complain about Pfizer’s possible inversion, it’s a classic case of blaming the victim.

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Obamacare Could Cause Two Million additional Adults to Leave Labor Force and Become Trapped in Government Dependency

What’s the worst economic development during Obama’s reign?

Some would say it’s the higher tax burden.

Some would say it’s the wasteful faux stimulus.

Others would say it’s the fiscal nightmare of Obamacare.

And others would say it’s the loss of millions of workers from the labor force.

I suppose there’s no objective way to pick the most ill-conceived policy, but if you think the biggest problem is either Obamacare or falling labor force participation, then I have some very grim news that will confirm your fears.

According to new research, it appears Obamacare will drive many more people from the labor force. More specifically, the Medicaid expansion will alter – in a very destructive way – the tradeoff between labor and leisure.

Researchers Laura Dague, Thomas DeLeire, and Lindsay Leininger argue in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that Medicaid enrollment will lead to significant and lasting reductions in employment among childless adults. …Dague and her colleagues conclude that if the Medicaid expansion enrolls about 21 million additional adults, anywhere from 511,000 to 2.2 million fewer people will be employed. Furthermore, they argue that the Medicaid expansion will knock almost a full point off of today’s labor force participation rate — or share of the civilian population that is working — a measure of economic health that is already at its lowest point since 1977. …This research provides strong evidence for the contention that enrolling in Medicaid traps people in poverty and makes it harder for them to make their way into the middle class. Furthermore, it links the Medicaid expansion to the weakening of our nation’s economy.

By way of background, Medicaid is the federal government’s healthcare entitlement for (supposedly) poor people, while Medicare is the entitlement for old people. And, as part of Obamacare, the eligibility rules for Medicaid were dramatically weakened.

But the new research cited above shows that if you give people “free” health care, that makes them less likely to work.

Particularly when you combine that freebie with food stamps, housing subsidies, welfare, and other handouts.

That’s obviously bad news for taxpayers, who bear the direct cost of a bloated welfare state.

But it’s also bad for the less fortunate. They get trapped in a web of dependency, both because handouts reduce the incentive to work (humorously depicted here and here), band also because they face very high implicit marginal tax rates if they actually try to escape government dependency.

But Obama and other leftists probably see this as a feature, not a bug.

After all, those who are lured into being dependent on government presumably have an incentive to vote for those who give them the most goodies.

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A Decent but Underwhelming Jobs Report

The headlines from today’s employment report certainly seem positive.

The unemployment rate has dropped to 6.3 percent and there are about 280,000 new jobs.*

But if you dig into the details of the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you find some less-than-exciting data.

First, here is the chart showing total employment over the past 10 years.

This shows a positive trend, and it is good that the number of jobs is climbing rather than falling.

But it’s disappointing that we still haven’t passed where we were in 2008.

Indeed, the current recovery is miserable and lags way behind the average of previous recoveries.

But the really disappointing news can be found by examining the data on how many working-age people are productively employed.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has two different data sets that measure the number of people working as a share of the population.

Here are the numbers on the labor force participation rate.

As you can see, we fell down a hill back in 2008 and there’s been no recovery.

The same is true for the employment-population ratio, which is the data I prefer for boring, technical reasons.

Though I should acknowledge that the employment-population ratio does show a modest uptick, so perhaps there is a glimmer of good news over the past few years.

But it’s still very disappointing that this number hasn’t bounced back since our economic output is a function of how much labor and capital are productively utilized.

In other words, the official unemployment rate could drop to 4 percent and the economy would be dismal if that number improved for the wrong reason.

* Perhaps the semi-decent numbers from last month are tied to the fact that Congress finally stopped extending subsidies paid to people for staying unemployed?

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Debating How Best to Create Jobs: Markets or Government?

Early last month, I wrote an article for The Federalist on job creation.

I used that opportunity to document that there is a serious problem with jobs under Obama, and I explained that the problem existed in part because the President was intervening with so-called stimulus schemes.

The far better approach is for government to “get out of the way.”

Though that’s not really correct. I want changes in government policy. Indeed, major changes. But those policy changes would involve less government, whereas Obama pushed major changes in the other direction.

I took this discussion to the next level in this debate on C-Span.

My opponent, Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, was my mirror image.

He wanted more spending and I urged less spending.

He called for more intervention and I advocated less intervention.

We would probably even disagree about the answer to 2 + 2 = ?.

Viewers can make their own decisions on who did a better job in the debate. I’ll simply state that my strongest point (at least in my humble opinion) is that businesses only create jobs when they expect new workers will increase net revenue.

But don’t believe me. You can read what actual real-world employers have to say about the topic.

In other words, I agree with the message of this poster. If you think more government is the answer, you’ve asked a very silly question.

P.S. I’m in Monaco for the Convention of Independent Financial Advisors and the Princess of the Levant is with me at the Hotel Hermitage. It’s nice to get a glimpse at the lifestyle of the infamous Top 1 Percent.

Fortunately, Monaco seems to have plenty of guys with women out of their league, so I don’t feel too out of place.

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The Best Way for Politicians to “Create” Jobs Is to…Get Out of the Way

The United States is supposed to be enjoying a recovery. Indeed, we’re now supposedly in the fifth year of an expanding economy.

Many Americans must wonder why it doesn’t feel that way.

In part, that’s because growth has been very anemic. Indeed, this is the weakest recovery since the Great Depression.

But it’s also because the labor market has been very weak.

Most observers correctly note that there are far fewer jobs than Obama promised if the so-called stimulus was enacted.

I think that’s a very fair complaint, but I’m even more concerned about the very troubling drop in the employment-population ratio and the grim data on long-run joblessness.

Simply stated, our economy’s ability to generate prosperity is a function of the quantity and quality of labor and capital that are being utilized.

So it’s very bad news when millions of workers drop out of the labor force.

So how can we rejuvenate job creation?

I addressed this issue in a column for The Federalist. Here’s some of what I wrote, starting with a generic complaint that the crowd in Washington seems to think that “more government” is the answer to every question.

The discussion in Washington over how best to “create” jobs is a bit surreal. In part, this is a semantic gripe. …jobs are created in the private sector, not by politicians. …Politicians would probably admit that they simply want to “create” the conditions that lead to job creation. But even by that more realistic standard, the Washington debate often is surreal for the simple reason that too many politicians think that a larger burden of government will boost job creation.

President Obama clearly is guilty of this form of hubris.

I touch on several points in the article, but this excerpt highlights his ongoing fixation on Keynesian economics, which I’ve previously referred to as the perpetual motion machine of the left.

President Obama, for instance, routinely urges more government spending to “stimulate” job creation. …The new outlays, we are told, inject money into the economy and jump-start growth, leading to more jobs as businesses increase production in response to higher demand.The problem with this argument, as explained in an earlier Federalist article, is that government can’t inject money into the economy without first taking money out of the economy, either by borrowing or taxation. This is why Keynesian spending didn’t work for Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, Japan in the 1990s, Bush in 2008, or Obama in 2009.

But the me-too crowd on the right commits the same sins.

While the left has bad ideas and has delivered poor results, some proposals from the “right” aren’t much better. Consider a recent article in National Affairs by Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute. Entitled “A Jobs Agenda for the Right,” the piece is filled with proposals that are distressingly reminiscent of the big-government-lite platform of pre-Reagan Republicans.

Do you think I’m exaggerating?

You can click on his article and see for yourself. You’ll find some good information on how the job market is very weak.

But when Strain proposes solutions, he goes awry. As I say in the article, many of his policy ideas “could have been uttered by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi.”

He writes that “conservatives should see that there is a role for macroeconomic stimulus.” …He claims, for instance, that “government spending can support economic growth during a recession” That Keynesian statement sounds more like Brookings than AEI. He also has Obama’s faith in “shovel-ready jobs,” extolling “the desirability of a multi-year program of high-social-value infrastructure spending.” …He wants to finance additional spending, at least in part, with higher taxes, suggesting “a reining in of tax expenditures.” There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on tax preferences (properly defined), but the money should be used to lower tax rates rather than expand the burden of government spending. …he endorsed extended unemployment benefits – notwithstanding the wealth of evidence that such policies encourage joblessness.

To be fair, he does list some ideas that are good, as well as some that are mixed, but the unambiguous message of his article is that government needs to play an activist role to boost the job market.

Needless to say, I offer my prescription for job creation and suggest that we go in the opposite direction.

I make (what should be) an elementary observation about the conditions that are necessary for businesses to hire new workers.

[Jobs] are created when businesses think that the amount of revenue generated by new employees will exceed the total costs (including those imposed by government) of putting those people on the payroll.

And I elaborate on this point, quoting myself in the article (and now I’m quoting myself quoting myself, which is definitely a sign I’ve been in DC too long).

It may not be an agenda tailored to appeal to politicians, who generally want to be seen as “doing something,” but the best way to create jobs is to get government to stop trying to help. Free markets and small government are far more likely to produce the conditions that lead to more employment. In other words, let the private sector flourish. The pursuit of profit is a powerful force for growth. To quote one of my favorite people, “businesses are not charities. They only create jobs when they think that the total revenue generated by new workers will exceed the total cost of employing those workers. In other words, if it’s not profitable to hire workers, it’s not going to happen.” …If we really care about workers, particularly those without jobs, the most compassionate approach is prosperity rather than dependency.

And that means free markets and small government.

Which is the direction we headed during the Reagan years and Clinton years, when we enjoyed very good performance in labor markets (as illustrated by this Michael Ramirez cartoon).

But the 21st century has been very bad news for economic freedom.

P.S. In a postscript last week, I shared a very amusing image of Obama and Putin on a horse.

In that same spirit, here’s a phone call between a statist who doesn’t respect the rule of law…and another statist who doesn’t respect the rule of law.

I’m not sure whether this is better than Obama’s NSA phone-tapping conversation, but still amusing.

By the way, it goes without saying that this doesn’t imply the United States should be intervening. You can read my thoughts here.

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Crying about Obamacare, but also Laughing at Obamacare

I asked back in September whether all the bad news about Obamacare meant it was time to feel sorry for President Obama and other statists.

Some people apparently didn’t realize I was being sarcastic, so I got some negative feedback.

I’ve since learned to be more careful with my language, and subsequent columns about Obamacare developments have used more direct rhetoric such as Obamacare disaster, Obamacare Schadenfreude, and the continuing Obamacare disaster.

Well, I don’t even know if there are words that can describe the latest bit of bad news about Obamacare. The Congressional Budget Office, which usually carries water for those who favor bigger government, has been forced to acknowledge that Obamacare is going to wreak havoc with America’s job market.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a column on the topic, giving considerable and deserved credit to Casey Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who has produced first-rate research on implicit marginal tax rates and labor supply incentives.

Rarely are political tempers so raw over an 11-page appendix to a dense budget projection for the next decade. But then the CBO—Congress’s official fiscal scorekeeper, widely revered by Democrats and Republicans alike as the gold standard of economic analysis—reported that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise willing and able to work before ObamaCare will work less or not at all as a result of ObamaCare. As the CBO admits, that’s a “substantially larger” and “considerably higher” subtraction to the labor force than the mere 800,000 the budget office estimated in 2010. The overall level of labor will fall by 1.5% to 2% over the decade, the CBO figures. Mr. Mulligan’s empirical research puts the best estimate of the contraction at 3%. The CBO still has some of the economics wrong, he said in a phone interview Thursday, “but, boy, it’s a lot better to be off by a factor of two than a factor of six.”

That’s a lot of lost jobs, which is going to translate into lower levels of economic output and reduced living standards.

By the way, I can’t resist quibbling with the assertion that CBO is “widely revered” and that it’s the “gold standard of economic analysis.”

Utter nonsense. CBO helped grease the skids for Obamacare by producing biased numbers when the law was being debated.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. CBO also produces “analysis” which implies that you maximize growth with 100 percent tax rates. And the bureaucrats at CBO also are reflexive advocates of Keynesian economics, which is why they claimed that Obama’s so-called stimulus was creating jobs even though unemployment was rising.

So you can understand why I don’t like citing CBO numbers, even when they happen to support my position.

As far as I’m concerned, the bureaucracy should be shut down. And if Republicans win the Senate in the 2014 elections, it will be interesting to see whether they have the brains to at least reform CBO to limit future damage.

But I’ve digressed long enough. Let’s get back to the WSJ column about the latest Obamacare disaster.

Our friends on the left are in a very tough position.

…liberals have turned to claiming that ObamaCare’s missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren’t cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we’re told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists. Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this “eliminated from the drudgery of labor market” argument, which he views as a form of trahison des clercs. …A job, Mr. Mulligan explains, “is a transaction between buyers and sellers. When a transaction doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. We know that it doesn’t matter on which side of the market you put the disincentives, the results are the same. . . . In this case you’re putting an implicit tax on work for households, and employers aren’t willing to compensate the households enough so they’ll still work.” Jobs can be destroyed by sellers (workers) as much as buyers (businesses).

By the way, just in case you’re an unsophisticated rube like me, Wiktionary says that trahison des clercs means “a compromise of intellectual integrity by members of an intelligentsia.”

Which is a pretty good description of leftists who are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to rationalize that joblessness and government dependency are good things.

And Prof. Mulligan makes the right analogy.

He adds: “I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there’s too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that’s a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We’ve been complaining for six years now that there’s not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we’re glad that people are working less? We’re pursuing our dreams?” The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market. He points to a 2011 letter organized by Harvard’s David Cutler and the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack, signed by dozens of left-leaning economists including Nobel laureates, stating “our strong conclusion” that ObamaCare will strengthen the economy and create 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually.

Gee, that “strong conclusion” about an increase in jobs somehow turned into a cold reality that the economy might lose the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs.

This is very grim news. We can be happy that there’s now even more evidence that big government doesn’t work, but we should never forget that there are real victims when statist policies lead to less growth and more joblessness.

So let’s try to bring some cheer to a dismal situation with some new Obamacare cartoons.

Our first entry is from Chip Bok, who is mocking the New York Times for writing that fewer jobs was “a liberating result of the law.”

Gary Varvel’s analysis of the job impact has a seasonal theme.

And the great Michael Ramirez points out that the death panel has been very busy.

Lisa Benson picks up on the same theme, pointing out that at least Granny is still safe.

And Henry Payne makes a subtle, but superb point about labor supply incentives.

Just like this Chuck Asay cartoon, this Wizard-of-Id parody., and this Robert Gorrell cartoon.

Let’s now look at another Lisa Benson cartoon. It’s not about the job losses, but the underlying foolishness of how Obamacare is designed.

And if you like cartoons with sharks, here’s a classic one about Keynesian economics.

Let’s close with a couple of cartoons that look at the big picture.

Glenn McCoy shares a warning label.

And Steve Breen also has a warning label about Obamacare, but it’s much quicker to read.

Last but not least, Scott Stantis looks at one of the side effects of Obamacare.

Stantis, by the way, produced the best-ever cartoon about Keynesian economics.

P.S. If you want to learn more about how redistribution programs such as Obamacare trap people in dependency and discourage them from the job market, click here.

There are even some honest leftists who recognize this is a serious problem.

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Obama’s Dismal Legacy of European-Style Long-Run Unemployment

Looking at labor markets, my biggest concern is the drop in labor force participation.

The data from the Labor Department on the employment-population ratio, for instance, suggest a permanent reduction in the share of the population that is working.

And since economic output and living standards ultimately depend on the quality and quantity of labor and capital that is being productively utilized, it obviously is not good news that millions of people are no longer employed.

But if I had to identify a second-biggest concern, it would be the “Europeanization” of long-run unemployment in the United States. Specifically, we have a growing problem of too many people being unemployed for long periods.

I pontificate about this issue in a column for CNN.

…there are almost 4 million Americans who have been out of work for more than six months. That’s a big number. What’s disconcerting is that the current long-term unemployment is more serious than in previous economic downturns. Data from previous business cycles show people suffering from long-run joblessness at worst accounted for about 20% to 25% of the unemployed. In recent months, that percentage has jumped to nearly 40% — an all-time record! Indeed, America is beginning to look like Europe. It used to be that long-term unemployment in the U.S. was only a fraction of Europe’s, but the latest data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that the United States has caught up to many of Europe’s welfare states. That’s not a race we want to be part of, much less win.

Here are some charts that illustrate the severity of the problem.

Let’s start with a look at what’s happened over time in the United States.

As you can see, the problem of long-run unemployment rises and falls with the business cycle. But during previous recessions, the share of the unemployed who were out of work for more than six months rarely climbed above 20 percent. And then the problem quickly got better once the economy began to recover.

That’s no longer the case. Long-term unemployment peaked at more than 40 percent of overall joblessness between 2010 and 2012. And even though we’ve supposedly been in a recovery since the summer of 2009, that number has fallen to only about 37 percent.

Now let’s compare the data from the United States to the numbers from other developed nations. As you can see, the United States used to have a huge advantage over other industrialized countries, but that gap has almost completely disappeared.

We don’t know, to be sure, whether this represents a permanent change. But my concern is that we’re more and more likely to see bad European-type numbers now that we’re enduring European-type economic policies of bigger government and more intervention.

There is an alternative, which I explained in my CNN column, that could improve American labor markets.

…what’s the solution? There’s no silver bullet, but economic growth is the single most important key. …Unfortunately, …we’re still suffering through a sluggish economic cycle. Recent improvements in the overall employment rate are in large part the result of people dropping out of the labor force, and the problem of long-run unemployment has barely budged. To boost employment, we need the kind of strong growth America enjoyed during the Reagan and Clinton years, when millions of new jobs were created and the unemployment rate fell dramatically. To get there, we need a return to the types of free-market policies we got under Reagan and Clinton: a lower burden of government spending and less intervention from Washington.

Seems simple, right? We got good growth and job numbers during the Reagan and Clinton years, so we should replicate those policies.

But that hasn’t been the case. And the problem didn’t start with Obama, though he’s certainly made it worse.

…we’ve been moving in the exact opposite direction. Under both Presidents Bush and Obama, the size and scope of government has expanded, and the United States — which had the world’s third-most free-market economy when Bill Clinton left office — has now dropped to 17th in the Economic Freedom of the World rankings. We also need to make sure the unemployed don’t get lured into long-term dependency. One glaring example of misguided big-government policy is the argument to endlessly extend unemployment benefits. …Moreover, Obama’s proposed hike in the minimum wage…is the equivalent of sawing off the bottom rungs on the economic ladder. Simply stated, businesses create jobs when they think a new employee will help the bottom line. Artificially raising the cost of workers — particularly those with marginal skills — is a recipe for creating more unemployment.

I hate repeating myself, but it bears saying over and over again that the key to prosperity is small government and free markets.

But to the extent we become more like France and less like Hong Kong, we are doomed to get anemic economic performance and fall in the competitiveness rankings.

P.S. On another topic, it pains me to report that one of the worst examples of DC sleaze is about the become law.

The so-called farm bill has cleared Congress after corrupt Democrats seeking more food stamp spending joined forces with corrupt Republicans seeking more agri-business welfare.

The invaluable Tim Carney describes the lobbyist feeding frenzy that produced this monstrosity.

A trillion-dollar, pork-filled farm bill stuffed with corporate welfare passed the House last week and cleared the Senate on Tuesday… The bill perpetuates the federal sugar program. Arguably Washington’s least defensible corporate welfare boondoggle, the sugar program keeps out foreign sugar, hiking prices for consumers, killing jobs for candy makers and enriching a few politically connected sugar producers. The farm bill replaces a flawed program of direct payments to farmers with a potentially more wasteful program of subsidized crop insurance, which takes money from taxpayers and gives it to banks and farming businesses. …The bill had its supporters, of course: the agribusiness lobby, the farm-finance lobby, the White House and the Congressional leadership of both parties. …The Ag lobby got what they wanted. The GOP leadership passed its bill. Democrats got their trillion-dollar price tag.

But here’s the part that really gets me pissed.

Lawmakers also stripped out of the final farm bill a provision that would have required congressmen to disclose the farm subsidies they receive from taxpayers.

This Chip Bok cartoon is a good summary of what happened.

Just in case you need a reminder about why the Department of Agriculture should be abolished.

P.P.S. Since we’re sharing bad news, I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that the new head of the IRS has decided to reward employees by giving them more of our money. Here are some excerpts from a report in the Washington Times.

Citing the need to boost employee morale, the Internal Revenue Service’s new commissioner said Monday that he will pay out millions of dollars in bonuses to agency employees, reversing a decision his predecessor made to save money… The move didn’t sit well with congressional critics who have been stupefied by the agency’s targeting of tea party groups… “It’s hard to think of a group of people less deserving of bonuses than IRS employees. Frankly, this is outrageous,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

Hey, but nothing to worry about.

After all, the President has appointed one of his big donors to investigate whether anybody at the IRS did anything wrong.

And we already know the results of that investigation. As this Jerry Holbert cartoon notes, the President has told us there isn’t a smidgen of corruption.

Gee, I know I’m satisfied with that assurance. After all, the President would never lie to us, would he?

I guess this is what they mean by trickle-down government.

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Deconstructing Obama’s Dismal Record on Jobs

According to the most recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate has dropped to 6.7 percent. Is this good news?

Well, it’s depends on your benchmark. Compared to France’s anemic economy and double-digit levels of unemployment, America is in decent shape.

But if you use data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve to compare the current business cycle to previous downturns and upturns in the U.S. economy, then the outlook is very grim. Simply stated, the American economy is enduring the worst performance for labor markets since the Great Depression.

Moreover, the Washington Post put together a chart in 2012 showing that Obama was far behind other presidents on job creation (a point humorously reinforced by Michael Ramirez).

Let’s look at some additional data to assess the President’s track record on jobs.

We’ll start with a chart, versions of which I’ve been sharing for nearly four years. It shows the unemployment rate that the White House claimed we would have back in 2009 if the so-called stimulus was enacted, compared to what actually happened.

As you can see, this is hardly a ringing endorsement for the Keynesian notion that more government spending is good for job creation (or for Nancy Pelosi’s laughable claim that you create jobs by paying people not to work).

But even though I’ve used variations of that chart several times, I don’t think it’s the best measure of either employment markets or the President’s performance. The White House can argue, with some validity, that the chart merely shows that the recession was more severe than they first forecast.

And critics of the Obama Administration can argue, also with validity, that the unemployment rate is an inadequate measure because it doesn’t capture the extent to which people drop out of the job market.

That’s why I’ve always liked the Labor Department’s figures showing the employment-population ratio. It’s a very straightforward number, showing the share of the working-age population that is employed.

And this data series is perhaps even more unfavorable if we’re giving Obama a grade for jobs.

The big drop took place before the President took office, so that’s definitely not his fault. But he can be blamed for the fact that the labor market didn’t bounce back, which usually happens after a recession.

Having millions of people leave the labor force translates into less economic output.

…economic output is a function of labor and capital. And if you want an economy to produce more, your only choices are to somehow achieve one or more of the following:

• More capital.
• More labor.
• More efficient use of capital.
• More productive use of labor.

In other words, labor and capital are the two ingredients that determine economic performance.

Needless to say, if you have less of one of the ingredients, you’re not going to produce as much.

Let’s look at another chart that reveals the Administration’s poor performance on jobs. James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute combines concepts by replicating the White House’s chart (including their prediction of joblessness in the absence of a so-called stimulus), but also including red dots showing what the unemployment rate would be today based on the various labor force participation rates that we might expect in a healthier economy.

The startling takeaway from this chart is that the unemployment rate today would be more than 10 percent if people hadn’t dropped out of the labor market!

Very sobering data, indeed.

And the main response from the White House is to argue for more unemployment benefits. That’s not very compassionate, as Senator Rand Paul and I explained in a piece for USA Today.

By the way, there is no reason to think that labor force was supposed to shrink. Here’s what the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted in 2007 compared to what’s actually happened.

So we have to ask ourselves why did so many workers leave the labor market? Was it the overall increase in the burden of government? The increase in the minimum wage? The disability scam? Subsidized unemployment? The welfare trap?

The honest answer is either “I don’t know” or “all of the above.” Or maybe something in between.

But I do know that it’s a very bad sign.

And it’s especially discouraging that we’re seeing a significant drop if labor force participation among males of prime working age.

That may reflect an erosion of social capital, and once a society loses the spirit of self reliance and the work ethic, it’s very difficult to restore those valuable norms. And once a nation has too many people riding in the wagon and not enough people pulling the wagon, that doesn’t bode well.

Since this post has been filled withe depressing data, let’s close by sharing some amusing cartoons.

Nate Beeler has produced some gems, so let’s start with this cartoon showing that some people have been stuck in a deep freeze.

And here’s Beeler’s take on the “drop” in labor force participation.

Lisa Benson, meanwhile, mocks the President’s empty talking points.

And Glenn McCoy shows the President’s version of compassion.

These cartoons remind me of the ones I shared last August.

P.S. Careful readers will have noticed that this piece cites both the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate. These two data series are sometimes used interchangeably, though I prefer the former for reasons explained in this article for the BLS’s Monthly Labor Review.

P.P.S. On a totally separate topic, I want to share some good news about the International Monetary Fund. The IMF is a statist international bureaucracy that pushed for bad policy, both in America and other nations. Last year, I reported that the Obama Administration proposed to give the IMF more money and authority, but that lawmakers on Capitol Hill wisely rejected the request. Well, the same positive outcome  happened again as part of the spending bill just approved by Congress.

Here’s some of what the New York Times reported.

Administration officials concede that Congress’s decision not to make the changes will be an embarrassment to President Obama internationally…congressional Republicans would not budge… The structural changes to the fund have languished since Mr. Obama agreed to the “rebalancing” with great fanfare at the G-20 meeting in Seoul, South Korea, in 2010.  …Since the 2010 accord, every nation involved but the United States has ratified it. But the United States remains the monetary fund’s largest contributor, and without Congress’s approval, the restructuring cannot happen.

P.P.P.S. And since I’m sharing random news, here’s something else that may interest readers. Time has a non-political personality quiz that supposedly reveals whether you are liberal or conservative. For what it’s worth, I’m 83 percent conservative and 17 percent liberal. I’m not sure what to think of the test, but it’s definitely better than the “social attitude test” I took last year, which concluded that I’m a “moderate” and “a centrist with few strong opinions.” I much prefer Professor Bryan Caplan’s libertarian purity quiz, where I scored a 94 out of 160, which may not sound impressive, but it was enough to put me in “the heady realm of hard-core libertarianism.”

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To Be Genuinely Compassionate, Politicians Should Focus on Job Creation, not Unemployment Benefits

Washington is in the middle of another debate about redistributing money.

But that’s hardly newsworthy. Politics, after all, is basically a never-ending racket in which insiders buy votes and accumulate power with other people’s money.

The current debate about extending unemployment benefits is remarkable, though (at least from an economic perspective), because certain politicians want to give people money on the condition that they don’t get a job. Needless to say, that leads to a very perverse incentive structure.

There is a problem with joblessness, to be sure, but it’s misguided to think that extending unemployment benefits is the compassionate response.

Senator Paul and I wrote a column for USA Today about a better way of helping the unemployed. Looking at the empirical evidence, we argue that it’s time to unleash the private sector by reducing the burden of government.

We started with an assessment of the labor market, which has been dismal under Obama’s reign.

The nation is enduring the weakest recovery since the Great Depression, 11 million people remain unemployed, and millions more have dropped out of the labor force. For minorities, it’s even worse. The black unemployment rate is more than twice that of whites. And the weak job market means that even those who are employed are having a hard time climbing the economic ladder.

We explain that more unemployment benefits is a misguided approach.

There’s a lot of talk about helping those down on their luck, but there’s a big divide on the best approach. Our view is that America needs a growth agenda based on reducing the burden of government. The unemployed need a strong job market, not endless handouts that create dependency. …There’s an understandable desire in Washington to “do something,” and extending benefits once again certainly is the easy route for policy makers. But if we are serious about keeping workers out of the long-term unemployment trap, we must have a debate about which policies cause unemployment and which policies create jobs.

The column cites many of the academic studies showing that unemployment benefits lead to more joblessness.

I’ve made this point during television interviews, and this Michael Ramirez cartoon echoes our thinking in a more entertaining fashion.

And we definitely can’t overlook this superb Wizard-of-Id parody. It doesn’t focus specifically on unemployment benefits, but it makes a great point about labor supply incentives.

But let’s get back to the column. Our main goal is to identify the types of policies that would generate jobs and growth.

Simply stated, genuine compassion should be defined by helping people get back to work so they don’t need to be wards of the state.

And easing the burden of government is the best way to make that happen. Our column looks at some evidence – from both overseas and here at home – about the policies that are associated with better economic performance.

Big government is responsible for today’s unemployment situation. …Since President Obama was elected, we have spent $560 billion on unemployment benefits. It’s likely many more jobs would have been created had the government not diverted that money from the economy’s productive sector. …Instead of copying stagnant European nations with bigger public sectors, we should learn from countries that have achieved better performance by lowering the burden of government. Singapore and Hong Kong are examples of jurisdictions with small governments and free markets that enjoy strong and sustained growth with very low levels of joblessness. …look at Canada, which has significantly boosted its jobs market with pro-growth reforms, or Switzerland, which has cemented its traditionally strong labor markets with reforms to control the growth of government. This is not a partisan argument. Or at least it shouldn’t be. The United States enjoyed strong levels of job creation during both the Reagan and Clinton years. But in both cases, public policy was largely the same, featuring an increase in economic freedom.

Some people may wonder whether Reagan and Clinton belong in the same category.

Well, as illustrated by this chart, they both presided over periods with impressive job creation.

And they both presided over periods with generally good economic policy.

Reagan moved the country in the right direction on purpose. Clinton, by contrast, may have wanted to move the nation in the other direction, but he was unsuccessful. Indeed, the evidence is very strong that the overall burden of government fell during his tenure.

Whether by accident or design, America needs another period of free markets and shrinking government.

For further details on the recipe for good policy, here’s the video I narrated for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, which explains the conditions that lead to strong and sustained growth.

P.S. I’m obviously a fan of Senator Rand Paul. Not only does he choose good people as op-ed partners, he also gave me public credit for a good Obamacare joke.

P.P.S. On a separate topic, I wrote in December 2012 that the strongest evidence for media bias is which stories get covered. A perfect example is that journalists already have given 17 times as much coverage of the Chris Christie “bridgegate” scandal as they gave to the IRS scandal over the past six months.

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Obama Administration Urges More Unemployment

President Obama has presided over a terrible jobs market.

Unemployment is more than two-percentage points higher today than the White House claimed it would be if the so-called stimulus was enacted.

Even more worrisome, the employment-population ratio seems to have permanently fallen, which is bad news for economic performance since our output is a function of how much capital and labor is being productively utilized.

So what’s the response from the Obama Administration? Well, they want to further subsidize people for not working.

I’m not joking. Here’s some of what has been reported by the Huffington Post.

The Obama administration on Friday came out strongly in support of extending long-term unemployment insurance past its current expiration date. …”We have always done so when unemployment is this high and would make little sense to fail to do so now when we are still facing the burdens of the worst downturn since the Great Recession,” [Obama economic adviser Gene] Sperling said. “It is high bang for the buck for the economy, reduces poverty and helps workers who lost jobs due to no fault of their own get back on their feet.”

But is it true that providing more unemployment benefits is an approach that “helps workers”?  In their academic writings, both Paul Krugman and Larry Summers have pointed out that you get more unemployment when you subsidize joblessness.

And research by Professor Casey Mulligan also has found a very clear link between government benefits and unemployment. If you’re still not convinced, here’s some more empirical evidence showing that you get more joblessness when you subsidize leisure.

And now we have even more evidence showing that it doesn’t make sense to make leisure more attractive than employment. Four economists conducted some new empirical research to look at how unemployment benefits impact economic performance in the labor market. First they explain the theoretical concerns.

Unemployment in the U.S. rose dramatically during the Great Recession… The policy response involved an unprecedented extension of unemployment benefits with benefit duration rising from the usual 26 weeks to as long as 99 weeks. …The effectiveness of this policy response was questioned by Barro (2010) and Mulligan (2012), among others. Because unemployment benefit extensions represent an implicit tax on market work, they subsidize unemployment and discourage labor supply. …Everything else equal, extending unemployment benefits exerts an upward pressure on the equilibrium wage. This lowers the profits employers receive from filled jobs, leading to a decline in vacancy creation. Lower vacancies imply a lower job finding rate for workers, which leads to an increase in unemployment.

Then they report their findings, including the remarkable result that the bulk of poor employment numbers in recent years are the result of extended unemployment benefits.

Our empirical strategy exploits a policy discontinuity at state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. …We explicitly control for the effects of other policy changes at the state level (that could be correlated with the expansion of unemployment benefit durations) to ensure that our estimates isolate the effects of unemployment benefit extensions. …We find that unemployment rises dramatically in the border counties belonging to the states that expanded unemployment benefit duration as compared to the counties just across the state border. The quantitative magnitude of this effect is so large that our estimates imply that benefit extensions can quantitatively account for much of the unemployment dynamics following the Great Recession.

Some Keynesians argue that unemployment benefits are nonetheless good for the economy because of the impact on aggregate demand. But even if you believe Keynesian theory, the authors find that unemployment benefits don’t help because of the offsetting foregone income resulting from fewer jobs.

…an increase in unemployment due to benefit extensions is similar in magnitude to the decline of employment. Thus, the total effect on spending is ambiguous as extending benefits increase spending by the unemployed but at the same time decrease spending as fewer people are employed.

So what’s the bottom line? Simply stated, we need some tough love. There needs to be a limit on unemployment benefits so that companies will have more incentive to create jobs and so that unemployed people will have more incentive to get off the couch and find a job.

I’ve made this point during television interviews, but I suspect that many people will find this Michael Ramirez cartoon more compelling and convincing. In any event, it’s more entertaining.

And we definitely can’t overlook this superb Wizard-of-Id parody. It doesn’t focus on unemployment benefits, but it makes a great point about labor supply incentives in a very amusing fashion.

But let’s close on a serious note. Comparing data from the United States and Europe also shows that government policy has a big impact on the labor market. And if you prefer anecdotes, check out this story from Michigan and this example from Ohio.

P.S. At least the President is consistent. He also is pushing another policy that would increase unemployment.

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Obamanomics and the Vanishing American Worker

The Department of Labor has issued its monthly employment report and the item that will attract the most attention is that the unemployment rate marginally increased to 7.3 percent.

That number is worthy of some attention, but I think it distracts attention from a far more important set of data. What we should be more worried about is the overall supply of employed workers.

I don’t want to sound like a boring economist (is there any other kind?), but our economic well being is a function of what we produce, and and what we produce is a function of the amount of labor and capital that is being productively utilized. We economists use jargon about “factors of production,” but what we’re really trying to say is that our living standards depend on good jobs and wise investment.

Which is why the most depressing bit of data from the Labor Department isn’t the unemployment rate. We should be far more worried about the employment-population ratio.

Here’s a chart based on DOL data showing the percent of the working-age population that is employed (click here to see the Labor Department’s explanation of this variable). As you can see, that key number used to be close to 63 percent. Now it’s down close to 58 percent.

To be fair, this isn’t all Obama’s fault. Not even close.

The big drop occurred at the end of the Bush years. Some of that drop was cyclical, caused by the recession. And some of it was presumably the cumulative impact of Bush’s big-government policies.

But what’s noteworthy is that the recession has been over since mid-2009 and the employment-population ratio hasn’t improved. And that’s something that we can blame in part on Obama.

It’s not just cranky libertarians who worry about this trend in the employment data.

William Galston of the Brookings Institution shares some very disturbing numbers in a Wall Street Journal column about the decline in labor force participation in the United States.

The great American jobs machine is faltering, and it is time for Washington to pay attention. Participation in the workforce is falling, the pace of job creation is anemic, and long-term unemployment remains stubbornly high. …the United States was once viewed as the home of the “employment miracle.” As recently as 1989, it was a leader in labor-force participation and employment rates among the world’s most developed economies. That is no longer the case. …When we consider prime-age workers age 35 to 54—past the period of extended education that success in the 21st century economy so often requires—the comparison looks even worse: Average participation rates in the 16 comparison countries are four to six points higher than they are in the U.S. Last year, the U.S. ranked in the bottom third for women, and dead last for men. …prospects for robust growth and shared prosperity are dim unless we can devise more effective labor-market policies.

I suspect Galston and I would only partly agree on “effective labor-market policies,” but I think a big part of the answer is smaller government and less intervention.

If we want more jobs, we need to make it more profitable for employers to create jobs. And, as this very clever cartoon parody indicates (and also as shown in this great Chuck Asay cartoon), we need to make it more attractive for people to get back in the job market.

Let’s conclude by returning to the data on the unemployment rate. I don’t think it’s particularly newsworthy that the joblessness rate crept up by a small amount. Any single month of data, after all, might be a statistical blip.

However, I can’t resist pointing out that today’s unemployment rate is still more than two percentage points higher than the White House claimed it would be if we enacted the failed stimulus.

Here’s an updated version of the chart showing the gap between what the Obama Administration promised and what’s been delivered.

Yup, good old Keynesian economics. Over-promising and under-delivering ever since the failed policies of Hoover and Roosevelt.

P.S. At least one liberal recognizes the dangers of government-subsidized dependency.

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Obama Advocates Higher Unemployment for Lower-Skilled Workers (and Some Great Election News from Colorado)

Perhaps because he wants to divert attention from the slow-motion train wreck of Obamacare, the President is signalling that he will renew his efforts to throw more people into the unemployment line.

Needless to say, that’s not how the White House would describe the President’s proposal to increase the minimum wage, but that’s one of the main results when the government criminalizes certain employment contracts between consenting adults.

To be blunt, if a worker happens to have poor work skills, a less-than-impressive employment record, or some other indicator of low productivity that makes them worth, say, $7.50 per hour, then a $9-per-hour minimum wage is a ticket to the unemployment line.

Which is the point I made in a rather unfriendly interview with Yahoo Finance.

But a higher minimum wage is popular with voters who don’t understand economics, and unions strongly support a higher minimum wage since it means potential competitors are then priced out of the market.

So it’s not exactly a surprise that the White House is siding with unions over lower-skill workers. Here’s some of what is being reported by The Hill.

President Obama might soon renew his push for a $9 minimum wage, a top economic adviser said on Monday. “You’ll certainly be hearing more about it,” Jason Furman, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters Monday at a Wall Street Journal event. …Obama urged lawmakers during January’s State of the Union address to boost the wage from $7.25 to $9 per hour and index it so that it rises with inflation.

The “indexing” provision would be especially pernicious. In the past, rising overall wage levels have diminished the harmful impact of the minimum wage. But if the minimum wage automatically increases, then the ladder of opportunity may be permanently out of reach for some low-skilled workers.

Walter Williams also has weighed in on this issue, noting specifically the negative impact of higher minimum wages on minorities. Indeed, he cited research showing that, “each 10 percent increase reduces hours worked by 3 percent among white males, 1.7 percent for Hispanic males, and 6.6 percent for black males.”

The bottom line is that businesses aren’t charities. They hire workers when they think more employees will improve the bottom line. So if you artificially increase the price of labor, it’s easy to understand why marginal workers won’t get hired.

For more information on this issue, here’s a video produced by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

P.S. I wrote yesterday that the tax-hike referendum in Colorado was the most important battle in the 2013 elections.

Well, I’m delighted to report that Colorado voters are even wiser than Swiss voters. A take-hike referendum in 2010 was defeated in Switzerland by a 58.5-41.5 margin. Colorado voters easily exceeded that margin, rejecting the tax hike in a staggering 66-34 landslide.

Here’s what the Denver newspaper – which liked the tax increase – wrote about the referendum.

The pro-66 side raised more than $10 million that it lavished on advertising, messaging and get-out-the-vote efforts, thanks in part to huge donations from teachers unions, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Opponents meanwhile had barely the equivalent of a street-corner megaphone at their disposal. And yet Colorado voters, in another display of independence, ignored the prodding in one direction and chose to go their own way. They didn’t merely defeat Amendment 66. They demolished the idea.

In other words, taxpayers were heavily outspent by union bosses and out-of-state billionaires, yet they easily prevailed and Colorado’s flat tax is safe.  At least for now.

P.P.S. I conducted a test this morning on media bias. I’m still in Iceland, so I went to sleep last night long before American election results were announced. When I woke up this morning, I looked first at both the CNN and Washington Post websites. When I didn’t see any results for the Colorado tax referendum, I was 99 percent confident that the statists had lost. Needless to say, it would have been front page news if the referendum was approved.

P.P.P.S. Since I’m adding some comments on Colorado elections, we also should be happy that the pro-school choice members of the Douglas County School Board were all reelected, notwithstanding a big effort by the unions.

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Very Bad News for Europe’s Young People

If young people in Europe were a company, I would be telling you to sell the stock.

Why? Well, because politicians want to help them. And, as perfectly illustrated by this Eric Allie cartoon (as well as the cartoon he has at the bottom of this post), government at best unintentionally harms those it tries to help.

To see what I’m talking about, here’s some of what the EU Observer is reporting today.

EU leaders gathering in Brussels on Thursday (27 June) for a two-day summit will again turn to measures aimed at helping young people to get jobs, as unemployment figures soar in southern countries. The summit kicks off at 4.30pm local time with a meeting between leaders, trade unions and employers’ associations, to hear what actions they are taking to boost youth employment. …The European Commission has already drafted a paper on how the EIB could boost its lending powers. Its loans are used mostly by small and medium enterprises, which could hire more young people if they get the money to fund expansion. Under the most ambitious scenario, EIB lending could exceed €100 billion.

How stereotypical. Big business, big labor, and big government are getting together and considering a €100 billion slush fund that will line their pockets.

They want us to believe this will lead to more jobs for young people, but they overlook (and hope we’re unaware of) Bastiat’s warning about the seen and the unseen.

Expanding the EIB will simply divert resources from more productive uses.

So what’s the answer? Here’s what I recommended as part of some speeches earlier this month in Europe.

I began with what should be a common-sense observation that businesses won’t create jobs unless they think new workers will add to the bottom line.

I then outlined some of the ways big government undermines incentives to create jobs by making workers more expensive.

I also explained that Keynesian spending schemes won’t create jobs.

Last but not least, I warned that workers will be less likely to seek jobs if government handouts alter the tradeoff between work and leisure.

Regarding this final slide, I shared in my speeches this amazing chart about the anti-work incentives created by the safety net in the United States, as well as some similar startling data from the United Kingdom.

Sadly, none of my audiences included senior European officials. And even if they were in the audience, I doubt they would have learned anything.

After all, why support an agenda of free markets and small government when that would reduce their power and influence?

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Helping Workers…to the Unemployment Line

Several European nations are suffering from a fiscal crisis.

But that’s just part of the story.

They also have significantly lower incomes than the United States, with living standards about 30 percent-40 percent below American levels.

And while many people are upset about the 7.5 percent joblessness rate in the United States, we’re doing much better than our cousins across the ocean. The unemployment rate averages about 11 percent in the European Union.

Given all this news, you would think that most people would understand that European policy makers would be trying to copy the United States, and not the other way around.

But that would be a rash assumption. There are interventionists in America who want to impose European-style mandates for paid-vacation time.

Here’s some of what USA Today wrote about a new report on the issue.

Nearly one in four Americans (23%) has no paid vacation days, according to a report released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C. “Relying on businesses to voluntarily provide paid leave just hasn’t worked,” says report co-author John Schmitt… The USA is the only advanced economy that does not require employers to provide paid vacation days, the report says. Many U.S. employers offer paid vacation days and holidays, but no law sets a minimum. The 27-member European Union requires employers to grant at least 20 paid vacation days a year.

The authors want people to conclude that America should be more like Europe.

You won’t be surprised to see that I offered a different opinion.

The center first analyzed vacation and holiday data six years ago. “It is striking that six years after we first looked at this topic, absolutely nothing has changed,” Schmitt says. “U.S law and U.S. employer behavior still lags far behind the rest of the rich countries in the world.” …Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank, [said]. “When you make it more expensive to hire workers, fewer workers get hired.”

This is a classic example of good intentions leading to bad results.

Would it be nice if we could wave a magic wand and give all workers paid-vacation time? Of course.

Just like it would be nice if we could pass a law that raised everyone’s pay.

Or required employers to provide health insurance.

In the real world, however, these policies all have a cost. Some workers will lose jobs. Others will receive lower pay to offset the cost of paid vacation.

Sometimes the cost will be passed along to consumer. Simply stated, there’s no free lunch.

The moral of the story is that it’s not very advisable to copy Europe, particularly when we see Europe melting down before our eyes.

But as this Michael Ramirez cartoon illustrates, there are some people who want to follow the lemmings over the cliff.

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