In Paul Krugman’s blog, a bit of good news from the August 2010 Social Security Trustees’ Report on the finances of the Social Security entitlement programs (retirement, survivors, and disability):

Given the apocalyptic rhetoric we’re hearing, once again, about Social Security finances, it comes as something of a shock—even to me—to look at the actual projections in the latest Trustees’ Report. OASDI [ed.: in plain English, Social Security spending] is projected to rise from 4.8 percent of GDP now to about 6 percent of GDP in 2030, and level off. That’s not trivial—but it’s not huge either.

Hence, the intermediate forecast reported by Krugman seems to indicate that we can maintain current benefit levels, retirement ages, and other rules for the foreseeable future using existing payroll and benefit taxes plus only a modest increase in federal revenues dedicated to Social Security programs. Perhaps more Americans will be able to retire fairly comfortably and at a reasonable age than some have predicted.

Coincidentally, not long after the report was released, a new exhibit marking the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act opened here in the Hudson Valley, not far from the Levy Institute, at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. (The famous Roosevelt home is on the same site.) I hope to see the Social Security exhibit soon and may report back to you on what I find there.

Scholars at the Levy Institute have supported the creation of an employer-of-last-resort (ELR) program in the United States for many years. Such a program would provide a government job to any American who needed one and met a few basic requirements. (This readable policy note, along with many other Levy publications, explains the case for ELR programs.) So far, the government has created many jobs since the passage of the stimulus package, but the unemployment rate remains at 9.5 percent. Many forecasters are now predicting that the overall unemployment rates for 2010 and 2011 will both exceed 9 percent

Children are among the groups deeply affected by recessions. For example, a government report issued last November found that over one million children sometimes went hungry in 2008, which represented a large increase over the previous year.  Also, in a recent article, Katherine Newman and David Pedulla discuss how this recession has had an uneven impact, hitting groups like young people just entering the labor force especially hard.

Programs that helped the poor in times like these were weakened greatly in 1996, when President Bill Clinton somewhat reluctantly signed a welfare reform bill that was not what he had hoped for, saying that it was the country’s “last best chance” for reform. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act set time limits for receiving welfare benefits, and converted the program from one that provided grants to all qualified families to one that came in the form of a grant of a fixed amount to each state. In passing the bill, leaders intended to expand work requirements for welfare benefits, but in practice many were not able to get work, appropriate training, and/or child care. The bill followed many years of reforms at the state and federal levels, some of which had enabled welfare recipients to obtain job training or to raise their incomes substantially by putting in more hours of work.

When the 1996 welfare reform effort took effect, many observers expected an eventual rise in homelessness and poverty, particularly among single-parent families. These effects seemed to have been avoided at first, and indeed poverty rates seemed to be falling as states implemented the new law. Many observers noted, however, that the job market was relatively tight during the late 1990s. The graph below (click on it for a larger view) shows two data series: unemployment for women over 19 years old and poverty rates for families with a female adult, children under age 18, and “no husband.”

The idea is to show how poverty for this group is related to the strength of the job market. Note that as welfare reform went into effect in the late 1990s, the unemployment rate for women was falling, mostly because of a booming economy. This trend helps to explain the fall in the poverty rate shown on the left side of the figure. Then, after the stock-market crash of 2000 and the recession that followed, the unemployment rate shown in the figure rose. It dropped a bit during the subsequent recovery, but then climbed again, reaching 4.9 percent in 2008. This reduction in demand for workers partially explains the steady rise in poverty that occurred during the same period, to more than 37 percent in 2008. Fortunately, improvements in the earned income tax credit (EITC) program probably helped to contain increases in poverty rates during this period. Of course many other factors affect poverty rates, some related to the business cycle and some not.

Unfortunately, as the graph shows, the unemployment rate for women more than 19 years of age rose again in 2009, by 2.6 percentage points—a big increase. The Census Bureau has not released poverty rates for that year, but this analysis shows that there is very good reason to believe that the new data will show that the rise in most poverty rates continued in 2009. Moreover, monthly data for this year show that the unemployment rate for women over 19 continued to rise in 2010 and stood at 7.9 percent as of June. Last month’s employment data will be released later this week. This information suggests that job creation efforts and other initiatives to help the unemployed and underemployed should be on the increase and not on the wane.

On The Daily Beast, Levy senior scholar James K. Galbraith urges action to get people working again, and smites deficit hawks who might oppose it. In the debate over stimulus versus austerity, he warns of two traps:

The first is the idea that we need another “stimulus package.” How I hate that phrase! The message it conveys—of something fast, temporary, quickly withdrawn—is wrong. We’re not in an ordinary postwar recession. We’ve suffered a major collapse of the financial system. Repairing this, and working off household debt loads and the housing glut, will take years. Yes, the economy can recover without strong private credit, but the recovery will be slow and unemployment will not be cured.

The second trap is the idea that we should undo it all later on. Even worse, many argue that we must make cuts today, effective at a later time, to offset the “stimulus.” Since the major programs which are authorized today for later effect are Social Security and Medicare, this translates to “cutting entitlements” in order to bring “long-term budget deficits under control.”

In a New York Times column, Yale’s Robert Shiller calls for a federal effort to battle unemployment by creating precisely the kind of socially beneficial jobs that some Levy Institute scholars have been recommending:

Why not use government policy to directly create jobs — labor-intensive service jobs in fields like education, public health and safety, urban infrastructure maintenance, youth programs, elder care, conservation, arts and letters, and scientific research?

For deficit hawks, Shiller notes that the cost would be modest:

Big new programs to create jobs need not be expensive. Suppose the cost of hiring a single employee were as high as $30,000 a year, several times typical AmeriCorps living allowances. Hiring a million people would cost $30 billion a year. That’s only 4 percent of the entire federal stimulus program, and 0.2 percent of the national debt.

You can read more on this blog about the ideas of Levy scholars along these lines, or you can cut to the chase and read a Levy Policy Brief on this very subject for yourself. Another related Levy publication, this one a Policy Note on job creation and the lessons of the New Deal, is available here.

In the Wall Street Journal, Stanford’s Robert Hall tells Jon Hilsenrath that last year’s stimulus just about made up for the cuts in state and local government spending forced by the recession (most states have balanced budget requirements, so when tax revenues dip, as they do in a recession, spending must follow).

So, there was no net stimulus from government spending last year! Still, it could have been worse. What David Leonhardt doesn’t say (in his take on the subject for the New York Times) is that the initial stimulus was too small. Certainly state fiscal support was too small. States have still had to cut their budgets, laying off teachers and police officers. These layoffs have not been helpful to recovery, to say the least.

continue reading…

With apologies to Isaiah Berlin, here is the link.

Writing for the New York Times Economix blog, Nancy Folbre of the University of Massachusetts cites the work of Levy Institute economists in suggesting that Uncle Sam fund more home-care jobs:

Four economists at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College – Rania Antonopoulos, Kijong Kim, Thomas Masterson and Ajit Zacharias – have published a policy brief, “Why President Obama Should Care About ‘Care’: An Effective and Equitable Investment Strategy for Job Creation.”

There are many reasons this is a great way to battle unemployment. Check out the policy brief for the full story.

Two news items that arrived back-to-back in my feed-reader make for an unfortunate combination. The first, detailing the Senate’s abdication of responsibility on global warming, is depressing enough. The political reality is that our elected representatives will not vote for a bill that puts a price on carbon because a) they fear that voting to increase the cost of energy will lose them their jobs, b) they fear that voting to increase the cost of energy will lose them campaign contributions from the energy sector, or c) all of the above. I am leaving out of the equation legislators from coal states, who wouldn’t vote for any bill, not even the compromise that heavily favors coal over oil and natural gas.

The rhetoric has been all about scaring people into thinking they’ll be impoverished by the bill. A Cap and Dividend bill such as the CarbonLimits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act , which would work something like Alaska’s Permanent Fund, would negate any distribution problems by refunding equal shares of 75% of the revenue directly to each person, more than offsetting the cost to low-income families. The point is, to reduce carbon emissions you either have to raise the cost of emitting carbon or regulate those emissions. The former is more easily done and more socially efficient.

The second story, which appropriately enough is from Alaska, is about increased polar bear sightings at the mouth of the Yukon River. This is far south of their normal range (normal meaning the “old” normal, of course), though the bears have been spotted there occasionally in the past. Why would polar bears be heading south? Because their usual hunting grounds (on the Arctic ice cap) are shrinking. Of course, a focus on polar bears sidesteps the broader implications of global warming. It is, nevertheless, a potent symbol of what we are doing, and apparently are determined to continue doing, to our planet’s environment.

But, really, don’t worry. It snowed in Washington D.C. this winter. Maybe the polar bears heard about it.

I seem to remember that there used to be a column in a magazine featuring contradictory newspaper headlines. One headline might say, “Fed Chair Says Interest Rates Likely to Rise,” while another in a different newspaper from the very same day would insist, “Fed Chair Says Interest Rates Likely to Fall.”

Something like this appears to have occurred in blogs and articles that have published lists of prognosticators who predicted the financial crisis, the Great Recession, and/or the housing crisis. In fact, some pairs of these lists have very few names in common. For example, David Warsh’s often-fascinating online column, “Economic Principals” published the following “Pantheon of Prescients” two days ago:

Raghuram Rajan
Kenneth Rogoff
Nouriel Roubini
Robert Shiller
William White

On the other hand, here are the winners of the heterodox Revere Award, “for the economist who first and most cogently warned the world of the coming Global Financial Crisis”:

Dean Baker
Steve Keen
Nouriel Roubini

All of the economists on both lists have had some very interesting things to say about the financial crisis, recession, and/or various other developments since 2007 or so. A major concern of mine with the first list is that, in my view, some on the list have greatly underestimated the role of weak financial regulation as a factor in the crisis. (Another intriguing list was recently removed from the web, hopefully by its author. Appropriately, it included the late Levy Distinguished Scholar Wynne Godley.)

All such lists are of somewhat limited usefulness and importance. But somehow many people (including this blogger) find them interesting, and they continue to appear.

It is remarkable that the two lists above would have only one name in common, though I think no economist would seriously claim that even both of them combined would be all-inclusive. Is this just an indication that there are borders between groups of economists (left versus right, Keynesian versus New Classical, European versus North American, heterodox versus neoclassical, etc.) that are rarely crossed? I have been wondering if anyone will step up to the plate with the most comprehensive list possible, one that might cross more of these and other boundaries. One bit of good news that might emerge from this exercise is that we have quite an impressive “competition” indeed, yielding far more insights than one might have at first anticipated.

A number of prominent economists have signed a letter calling for more economic stimulus from the United States government in order to put people back to work. Levy senior scholar James K. Galbraith and two other well-known Keynesians chose not to participate, and issued this comment explaining why.

A statement from Paul Davidson, James Galbraith and Lord Skidelsky

We three were each asked to sign the letter organized by Sir Harold Evans and now co-signed by many of our friends, including Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Laura Tyson, Derek Shearer, Alan Blinder and Richard Parker. We support the central objective of the letter — a full employment policy now, based on sharply expanded public effort. Yet we each, separately, declined to sign it.

Our reservations centered on one sentence, namely, “We recognize the necessity of a program to cut the mid-and long-term federal deficit… ” Since we do not agree with this statement, we could not sign the letter.

Why do we disagree with this statement?  The answer is that apart from the effects of unemployment itself the United States does not in fact face a serious deficit problem over the next generation, and for this reason there is no “necessity [for] a program to cut the mid-and long-term deficit.”

On the contrary: If  unemployment can be cured, the deficits we presently face will necessarily shrink.  This is the universal experience of rapid economic growth: tax revenues rise, public welfare spending falls, and the budget moves toward balance. There is indeed no other experience in modern peacetime American history, most recently in the late 1990s when the budget went into surplus as full employment was reached.

We agree that health care costs are an important issue. But health care is a burden faced by both the public and private sectors, and cost control is a job for health policy, not budget policy.  Cutting the public element in health care – Medicare, especially – in response to the health care cost problem is just a way of invidiously targeting the elderly who are covered by that program.  We oppose this.

The long-term deficit scare story plays into the hands of those who will argue, very soon, for cuts in Social Security as though these were necessary for economic reasons.  In fact, Social Security is a highly successful program which (along with Medicare)  maintains our entire elderly population out of poverty and helps to stabilize the macroeconomy. It is a transfer program and indefinitely sustainable as it is.

We call on fellow economists to reconsider their casual willingness to concede to an unfounded hysteria over supposed long-term deficits, and to concentrate instead on solving the vast problems we presently face.  It would be tragic if the Evans letter and similar efforts – whose basic purpose we strongly support – led to acquiescence in Social Security and Medicare cuts that impoverish America’s elderly just a few years from now.

Paul Davidson is editor of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics and author of The Keynes Solution.

James K. Galbraith is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Predator State.

Lord Robert Skidelsky is the author, most recently, of Keynes: The Return of the Master.