“Right-Wing Unemployment Myths Debunked”: When You Look At The Data, It’s Just Not There
Surprising many supporters, a three-month unemployment extension bill survived an initial Senate test Tuesday, with six Republicans joining 37 Democrats in voting to let the bill proceed to debate. But GOP members in both chambers have suggested they’ll withhold or withdraw their support unless Democrats offer up conservative concessions – be they parallel budget cuts, deregulation measures, new requirements for the unemployed or an Obamacare mandate delay. Others have argued that unemployed people would be better off without unemployment benefits.
In a Sunday CNN interview, Wisconsin governor and potential presidential contender Scott Walker argued that “the federal government doesn’t require a lot” of the unemployed, and urged that rather than “just putting a check out,” Congress tie unemployment extension to tightened eligibility requirements.
“Making them jump through more hoops will definitely increase administrative costs, but it’s not going to generate more jobs,” Economic Policy Institute economist Heidi Shierholz countered in a Tuesday interview with Salon. “Unless he’s looking at it as a jobs program to hire more public sector workers.”
Shierholz, a former University of Toronto professor now at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, panned several of the right’s other diagnoses and prognoses for the unemployed. A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows.
Some of the same Republican senators whose votes were necessary for unemployment extension to move forward Tuesday are implying they could still vote against final cloture if it isn’t offset with cuts. Is insisting on budget cuts to “offset” the cost of unemployment extension good policy?
It isn’t in this context. And I say that sort of carefully. Because if we were at full employment, and the economy was humming along, and fully utilizing all its potential, then if you’re going to spend a big chunk of money, you might want to think about offsetting it, because the economy doesn’t need any more demand.
We are so far away from that situation that this is exactly the kind of time where you do not have to worry about trying to do offsets like that.
It’s not a bug of the UI system, it’s a feature that it actually costs money. Because at a time like this, when the labor market is so weak, the economy is so weak, and we know that the overwhelming factor behind that weakness is just weak demand, we’re operating way below our potential. People don’t have the income, so they’re not spending. Businesses aren’t investing as much as they would if we were in a strong labor market. Weak demand for goods and services means businesses don’t have to ramp up hiring, they don’t have to ramp up to meet the demand, because demand isn’t there.
So the fact that you’re spending this money on UI, you’re getting money into the economy, is actually exactly what we want to do at a time like this. So trying to sort of bend over backwards to offset it actually just undermines one of the key features of extending UI, which is that it increases economic activity at a time when the economy desperately needs it.
Scott Walker told CNN that “one of the biggest challenges people have who are either unemployed or underemployed is many of them don’t have the skills in advanced manufacturing, in healthcare and I.T. where many of those job openings are.” What’s your assessment of that claim?
You hear that claim made a lot: that the reason we have this weak unemployment, or high long-term unemployment, is that workers don’t have the right skills for the jobs that are available.
I think because you hear this anecdote a lot, there’s been a ton of research done on it — a ton. And economists have dug in, and looked at the data from all sides. The overwhelming consensus: People who aren’t just relying on anecdotes, but who are actually digging in and looking for any sign of a skills-mismatch in the data, don’t find it. The divide on who finds this is more those who are relying on anecdotes versus those who have looked at the data, not right-leaning or left-leaning. Because of those who have looked at the data, you just don’t find evidence that the problem right now is due to workers not having the right skills.
If it were due to workers not having the right skills you would have to see some evidence in some meaningfully sized group of workers of actually tight labor markets relative to 2007. [But] unemployment rates are higher now relative to before the recession started across every education group, across every gender, across every age group, across all racial and ethnic categories, in all major occupations, and all major industries.
If we were seeing tight labor markets, you’d see wages being bid up for the workers who can’t be found, people poaching from other companies. And that you also don’t find. You actually find basically no group that is even seeing wage growth keep pace with overall productivity growth. In any group meaningfully sized enough to be actually driving anything, you don’t see any sign of wages being driven up. Same story with hours.
You’re not seeing any sectors of meaningful size where there’s more job openings than people actually looking for those jobs.
You hear anecdotes a lot about people saying, “I just can’t find the workers that I need.” This may be some interesting sort of psychological stuff about the echo chamber of how those things get so much play at a time like this. When you look at the data, it’s just not there.
One of the senators who voted against proceeding with the unemployment bill, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said, “First and foremost, unemployment insurance is treating the symptoms of the problem. It’s an aspirin for a fever, but the fever has been raging for weeks now.” Is that a revealing analogy in any way?
It’s treating the symptoms and it helps actually be part of the cure.
They actually are a lifeline to the people that were most hurt by the downturn — people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and have not been able to find another one in the period of weakest labor market we’ve seen in 70 years. The fact of the matter is that the labor market is still extraordinarily weak. It’s way weaker by far than at any time we’ve ever allowed extensions to expire.
So it definitely is part of dealing with the symptoms. And then it is absolutely part of the cure: You get money in the hands of the long-term unemployed.
Those are people who are almost by definition cash-strapped. They are going to spend that money. It goes straight into the economy and generates demand for goods and services, which generates demand for workers. So it helps strengthen the recovery.
You put out an estimate that not extending unemployment benefits would cost 310,000 jobs this year. How?
Around $25 billion would be spent if the extensions were continued [for a year]. Some spending is actually more stimulative to the economy, and it has everything to do with how fast and how completely that money goes into raising and creating demand. So unemployment benefits are consistently the second most efficient way that a government can spend money — either through direct spending or through tax cuts to support an economy, to generate economic activity. The only thing that consistently comes in ahead is food stamps.
You have that [unemployment] money spent on rent and groceries and clothes. So you increase demand for goods and services. Then there’s the fiscal multiplier. Then from there, that’s where you get the total amount of economic activity generated — the boost to GDP. And then from there, there’s a direct walk to jobs created.
It’s a rough measure. But that’s an idea of the scope.
Scott Walker also argued that instead of “just putting a check out,” the government should require more from people on unemployment, in terms of entering job training and looking more often for work. What do you make of that argument?
We do know that it’s already keeping people in the labor market, looking for work. There’s good evidence that receiving benefits actually keeps people looking for work.
A helpful bit of information, to know if the reason people are long-term unemployed is because they’re not looking hard enough, is the following: You’d want to know if our long-term unemployment situation is somehow weird, if it’s unexpected, if there’s something going on with our long-term unemployed, like they’re not looking as hard as they should, or they’re not being as flexible as they should. Like, is there something about these benefits that’s keeping them from doing those things? And that you don’t find.
So there’s a paper by Jesse Rothstein that looks very carefully at today’s long-term unemployment situation in the historical context. And he found that what we’re experiencing now is exactly what you would expect given three things: given how deep the period of economic weakness has been; how long it’s been as bad as it’s been; and then a little bit of this longer-term trend in long-term unemployment share. Which has to do with declining incidences of temporary layoff and stuff like that — but that’s not a big component.
We’re not seeing something abnormal right now in the long-term unemployment situation, except for an incredibly abnormally weak labor market that’s been incredibly abnormally weak for a very long time. Once you have that, then what’s going on with long-term unemployment is exactly what you would expect.
So it’s not like, “if we just get them to look harder, they’re going to find jobs.” The real problem, why we have this long-term unemployment crisis, is that the labor market has been so weak for so long.
So making them jump through more hoops will definitely increase administrative costs, but it’s not going to generate more jobs. Unless he’s looking at it as a jobs program to hire more public sector workers to deal with more administration. But I don’t think that was probably his angle. The real problem right now is weak demand for workers, and this won’t touch that.
The reason we have elevated unemployment is not that workers don’t have the right skills for the jobs that are available. It’s just that we don’t have jobs available. It’s not like training can never help an individual, but that’s not why we have high unemployment right now.
By: Josh Eidelson, Salon, January 8, 2014
“Facing A Groundswell”: The Plotting And Scheming Of An Assorted Cast Of Cringe Worthy Conservative Clowns
If you’ve ever found it curious that far-right media activists all seem to say the same thing at the same time about the same issues, it’s not your imagination. David Corn offers an explanation.
Believing they are losing the messaging war with progressives, a group of prominent conservatives in Washington — including the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner — has been meeting privately since early this year to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.
Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell — including aides to congressional Republicans — cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and “clueless” GOP congressional leaders.
There’s quite a bit to Corn’s scoop, including the fact that Groundswell really has no use for Karl Rove’s effort to protect more electable Republicans in GOP primaries.
There’s also quite a cast of characters at play, led in part by Ginni Thomas, and including an ignominious assortment of cringe-worthy clowns, including former ambassador John Bolton, former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), Ken Blackwell, Frank Gaffney, Jerry Boykin, and Capitol Hill staffers, including a top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Groundswell has collaborated with conservative GOPers on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Cruz and Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a leading tea partier. At its weekly meetings, the group aims to strengthen the right’s messaging by crafting Twitter hashtags; plotting strategy on in-the-headlines issues such as voter ID, immigration reform, and the sequester; promoting politically useful scandals; and developing “action items.”
That may make Groundswell sound kind of scary, but there’s reason to believe these right-wing activists — surprise, surprise — aren’t especially sharp.
Notes from a February 28 Groundswell gathering reflected both their collective sense of pessimism and desire for aggressive tactics: “We are failing the propaganda battle with minorities. Terms like, ‘GOP,’ ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Conservative’ communicate ‘racism.'” The Groundswellers proposed an alternative: “Fredrick Douglas Republican,” a phrase, the memo noted, that “changes minds.” (His name is actually spelled “Frederick Douglass.”) The meeting notes also stated that an “active radical left is dedicated to destroy [sic] those who oppose them” with “vicious and unprecedented tactics. We are in a real war; most conservatives are not prepared to fight.”
The right’s preoccupation with manufactured fake scandals, however, is coming into sharper focus.
The notes from the March 20 meeting summed up Groundswell griping: “Conservatives are so busy dealing with issues like immigration, gay marriage and boy scouts there is little time left to focus on other issues. These are the very issues the Left wants to avoid but we need to magnify. R’s cannot beat Obama at his own game but need to go on the offense and define the issues.” The group’s proposed offensive would include hyping the Fast and Furious gun-trafficking controversy, slamming Obama’s record, and touting Benghazi as a full-fledged scandal.
To be sure, there’s nothing illegal or necessarily untoward about this kind of coordination, but the fact that these folks feel the need to get together to plot and scheme, as part of their perceived “war” with the left, explains quite a bit about the problems with much of the political discourse.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 25, 2013
“So Much For The Fabric Of Freedom”: When Republicans Thought It Was Okay For Judicial Nominees To Have Opinions
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee spent yesterday’s confirmation hearing on D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Nina Pillard harping on two points: first, that they think the D.C. Circuit doesn’t need its three vacancies filled, and second, that they think Pillard’s arguments as an academic mean she would disregard the law as a judge.
As it happens, when George W. Bush was the one nominating federal judges, the very same senators held the exact opposite view on both of these issues.
As People For the American Way has extensively shown, the argument that the D.C. Circuit doesn’t need judges holds no water – in fact, Bush nominees Thomas Griffith and John Roberts (now Chief Justice) were confirmed to the D.C. Circuit when each active judge’s caseload was significantly lower than it is today.
And Republican attacks on Pillard’s academic writings also directly contradict their previous statements on Bush nominees with academic records. As Pillard noted in her hearing, “Academics are paid to test the boundaries and look at the implications of things. As a judge, I would apply established law of the U.S. Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit.”
Just a few years ago, Republican senators agreed. On the nomination of Tenth Circuit judge Michael McConnell, who took a number of far-right stands as an academic, including disagreeing with a Supreme Court decision declaring that a university ban on interracial dating constituted racial discrimination, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch said, “The diversity of backgrounds and points of view are often the stitches holding together the fabric of our freedoms.”
“Surely, we can’t vote for or against a nominee on whether they agree with us on any number of a host of moral and religious issues, ” Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions said of Eleventh Circuit nominee William Pryor, a far-right culture warrior who was outspoken in opposition to gay rights, women’s rights and the separation of church and state.
Then-Sen. Jim Demint defended D.C. Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown, one of the most outspoken conservative ideologues on the federal bench today, by saying, “A person with strong beliefs and personal convictions should not be barred from being a judge. In fact, I would rather have an honest liberal serve as a judge than one who has been neutered by fear of public opinion.”
And before the Senate confirmed Arkansas District Court Judge J. Leon Holmes, who used Todd Akin’s line about pregnancy from rape before Todd Akin did, Hatch told concerned colleagues, “This man is a very religious man who has made it more than clear that he will abide by the law even when he differs with it.”
These Bush nominees held positions that were clearly far out of the mainstream, yet Senate Republicans demanded and got yes-or-no confirmation votes on them, helping Bush to shift the federal judiciary far to the right.
What some Judiciary Committee Republicans objected to at yesterday’s hearings is what they apparently see as Pillard’s excessive support for women’s equality, both as an attorney and an academic. Pillard won the Supreme Court case opening the Virginia Military Institute to women and worked with Bush administration officials to successfully defend the Family and Medical Leave Act. She has strongly defended reproductive rights and criticized abstinence-only education that sends different messages to boys and girls. It’s this record that her Republican opponents have distorted beyond recognition.
By any measure, Pillard is well within the mainstream, and has made it very clear that she understands that the role of a judge is to apply existing law regardless of one’s personal views. But while Senate Republicans made plenty of excuses for Bush nominees who were far outside the mainstream, they are accusing Pillard of being just too much of a women’s rights supporter to fairly apply the law.
By: Miranda Blue, Right Wing Watch, July 25, 2013
“Extortion For The Sake Of Extortion: Republicans Taking The Politics Of Extortion Past The Breaking Point
With the House and Senate both having passed budget resolutions, the next step in the process should be a conference committee, which Republican leaders said they wanted. Recently, however, they changed their mind and now refuse to allow the process to proceed.
Why? I’ve worked under the assumption this is the result of GOP lawmakers feeling apprehension about their unpopular ideas and fearing a public backlash. But the Washington Post reports there may be a little more to it.
[The shrinking deficit] might seem like good news, but it is unraveling Republican plans to force a budget deal before Congress takes its August break. Instead, the fiscal fight appears certain to bleed into the fall, when policymakers will face another multi-pronged crisis that pairs the need for a higher debt limit and the fresh risk of default with the threat of a full-scale government shutdown, which is also looming Oct. 1.
In the meantime, Republicans face a listless summer, with little appetite for compromise but no leverage to shape an agreement. Without that leverage, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday, there is no point in opening formal budget negotiations between the House and the Senate, because Democrats have no reason to consider the kind of far-reaching changes to Medicare and the U.S. tax code that Republicans see as fundamental building blocks of a deal.
“The debt limit is the backstop,” Ryan said before taking the stage at a debt summit organized by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in Washington.
I realize talking about budgets, conference committees, and debt ceilings is dry. This no doubt strikes some readers as inside baseball, of little interest to anyone other than political junkies and wonks.
But I hope folks will take a moment to consider what Ryan and his colleagues are saying here. They’re admitting, publicly and without shame, that they can’t engage in budget negotiations unless they can also threaten to deliberately crash the economy. GOP lawmakers want a “backstop” that will give them “leverage” in talks — whereas the conference committee is ostensibly about finding a bipartisan, bicameral compromise, Republicans need the possibility of a brutal self-inflicted crisis to hang over the process.
And if they can’t have it, they won’t engage in the budget process at all.
Wait, it gets worse.
Congressional Republicans made a series of assumptions, all of which have turned out to be wrong. They assumed Senate Democrats couldn’t pass a budget. They assumed Democrats wouldn’t want a budget process considered under regular order. And they assumed the budget talks, if they occurred, would happen around the same time as the need for a debt-ceiling increase.
GOP lawmakers were terribly disappointed, then, to see Senate Democrats do exactly what they were asked to do, and the economy improved quickly enough to push off the debt-limit deadline until fall.
But with their plans foiled, Republicans are stuck with no Plan B, no leverage, and no credible threat. Consider how remarkable this is:
[S]enior Senate Republicans, including several who recently dined with Obama and huddled with administration officials, conceded that it may be tough to bring their colleagues to the table too far ahead of the debt-ceiling deadline.
“I think there’s a better atmosphere for a solution than there’s been in the past, but I’m a little worried about people here in the Senate having fiscal fatigue. There isn’t any sense of urgency right now,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), one of three senators who joined Obama on Monday for a round of golf.
“We need to realize this debt ceiling is out there. It’s inevitable. It’s coming. And [the later deadline] should not relieve pressure,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. But “sometimes we don’t want to act until a gun is at our heads.”
Think about that for a second. The ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee is willing to admit — out loud and on the record — that there can’t be a budget process unless he and his Republican colleagues can threaten to trash the full faith and credit of the United States on purpose.
And here’s the kicker: Republicans aren’t even asking for anything specific yet. They know they want to hold the nation hostage, but they’re not sure why, and haven’t figured out what their demands are. Jonathan Bernstein argued persuasively yesterday that we’re looking at “extortion for the sake of extortion.”
The House crazy caucus is demanding not debt reduction, not spending cuts, not budget balancing, but blackmail itself. That’s really the demand: The speaker and House Republican leaders absolutely must use the debt limit as extortion. What should they use it to get? Apparently, that’s pretty much up for grabs, as long as it seems really, really, big — which probably comes down to meaning that the Democrats really, really don’t like it.
It’s the extortion that’s the point. Not the policy.
I’ve run out of adjectives to describe how crazy this is, but I’ll just conclude with this: those pundits who assume Republicans are a mainstream political party, and it’s a mystery as to why President Obama hasn’t had more success negotiating with these folks, just aren’t paying close enough attention.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 9, 2013
“The Slow Down Caucus”: On Immigration Reform, Marco Rubio Is Building Himself An Escape Hatch
Even as the Sunday shows were alive with predictions that a deal is close on immigration reform, Marco Rubio took the occasion to cast doubt on the prospects for success by joining other Senators who are calling for the process to slow down:
“We will need a healthy public debate that includes committee hearings and the opportunity for other senators to improve our legislation with their own amendments,” he said on Sunday. “Excessive haste in the pursuit of a lasting solution is perhaps even more dangerous to the goals many of us share,” he said on Saturday.
As my Post colleague Evan Soltas points out, Rubio has effectively built himself a “very clear escape hatch” on immigration. If he needs to bail, he’s got his excuse: The process was rushed, or Democrats were unfair procedurally to Republicans.
By my count this is the third such escape hatch Rubio has created for himself. The first came when word leaked that the White House had drawn up its own plan that was marginally different from what pro-reform Republicans want. Rubio said this had threatened the prospects for success, even though his plan was very similar to the President’s. But then John McCain and Lindsey Graham publicly proclaimed their belief in Obama’s sincere desire to make the process work. The second came back when Rubio claimed that unions were putting reform in peril because of their dispute with business groups over the guest worker program. But now that dispute has mostly been resolved.
Now, escape hatch number three is to join the “slow down” caucus. Only in so doing, Rubio is joining with other Senators who are urging a go-slow approach, such as Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, who may be urging a slowdown so the armies of the right have time to mobilize and strike fear into any reform-minded Republican officials, killing reform.
Indeed, one group opposed to reform has explicitly called on Senators to slow the process down, apparently for the purposes of derailing it. And we’ve seen this before: back in 2007, opponents of reform similarly tried to slow the process, with Senator John Cornyn urging colleagues to “slow down and read this bill” because Americans had not yet digested the plan. Now, six years later, we’re again hearing the calls to “slow down.” But the American people have made their verdict clear: They want a path to citizenship.
No doubt Rubio has a very tough balancing act to strike. He needs to reassure conservatives that he’s prepared to walk away from any deal, and that he’s getting them everything he can in the process. If he does this successfully, it could potentially bring some of them along. But as Benjy Sarlin points out, Senate Democrats have already vowed not to procedurally rush the process and have promised to run things through the typical committee and amendment process. Lending aid and comfort to the “slow down” caucus could make things worse, given that their apparent aim is to allow opponents more time to kill reform.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, The Plum Line, April 1, 2013
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