Saturday, March 16, 2024

[NJFAC] the CARES act and its loss: the appeal of Trump

By Bryce Covert NY Times March 12, 2024

It's a riddle that economists have struggled to decipher. The U.S. economy seems robust on paper, yet Americans are dissatisfied with it. But hardly anyone seems to have paid much attention to the whirlwind experience we just lived through: We built a real social safety net in the United States and then abruptly ripped it apart.

Take unemployment insurance. The CARES Act, passed in March 2020, included the largest increase in benefits and eligibility in American history. It offered people "a sense of relief," said Francisco Díez, senior policy strategist for economic justice with the Center for Popular Democracy, which organized unemployed people in the pandemic. "A feeling like they could breathe and figure out what they could do."

....
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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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Friday, March 15, 2024

[NJFAC] perhaps why many are gloomy about their economic prospects

Soaring costs of food and housing forcing many to still rely on parents to cover expenses, as they risk retirement security Erum Salam 12 Mar 2024

Nearly half of US parents provide some kind of financial support to their adult children, who are grappling with higher food and living costs than they did, a new study has found.

The study – conducted by Savings.com – found that young, working-class Americans were not substantially benefiting from the recovery of the country's economy, as "evidenced by high employment, falling inflation, and economic growth". That has forced many of them to continue to rely on their parents to help cover costs of living.

The average age of adults receiving financial help from their parents – sometimes at the risk of the parents' retirement security – was 22, according to the study. And while parents surveyed in the study on average said their adult children should become financially independent by 25, many were supporting those children beyond that milestone.

Of parents providing support, 21% were helping millennials (age 28-43) or members of gen X (age 44-59). Millennials and gen X adult children were on average given between $907 and $960 each month by their parents.

Gen Z adults (between 18 and 27) were getting more help from their mothers and fathers, averaging about $1,515 monthly.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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Friday, March 8, 2024

[NJFAC] The Most Technologically Progressive Decade of the Century [for the US] : 1929-1941

Because of the Depression's place in both the
popular and academic imagination, and the re-
peated and justifiable emphasis on output that
was not produced, income that was not earned,
and expenditure that did not take place, it will
seem startling to propose the following hypoth-
esis: the years 1929 –1941 were, in the aggre-
gate, the most technologically progressive of
any comparable period in U.S. economic history.1
The hypothesis entails two primary claims: that
during this period businesses and government
contractors implemented or adopted on a more
widespread basis a wide range of new technol-
ogies and practices, resulting in the highest rate
of measured peacetime peak-to-peak multifac-
tor productivity growth in the century, and sec-
ondly, that the Depression years produced
advances that replenished and expanded the lar-
der of unexploited or only partially exploited
techniques, thus providing the basis for much of
the labor and multifactor productivity improve-
ment of the 1950's and 1960's.
The hypothesis does not imply that all of the
effects of the advances registered in the decade
were immediately felt in the productivity data,
nor, on the other hand, does it dismiss the sig-
nificance of larder-stocking during the 1920's
and earlier, upon which measured advance
built. Rather, it draws our attention to the prob-
ability that progress in invention and innovation
in the 1930's was significant, in ways not well
appreciated, both in facilitating the remarkable
U.S. economic performance before and during
World War II, and in establishing foundations
for the prosperity of the 1950's and 1960's.
....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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Thursday, February 15, 2024

[NJFAC] Tell Congress: No “fiscal commission” that threatens Social Security and Medicare


Stop Fast Track Cuts to Social Security

Dear Friends,

The National Jobs for All Network is dedicated to the enactment of Franklin Roosevelt's Economic or Second Bill of Rights in which the guarantee of living-wage work is the "first and most fundamental" economic right and "security in old age" is one of the essential components.

 

As Roosevelt stated in his 1945 State of the Union address:

Of these rights the most fundamental, and one on which the fulfillment of the others in large degree depends, is the "right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation." In turn, others of the economic rights of American citizenship, such as the right to a decent home, to a good education, to good medical care, to social security, to reasonable farm income, will, if fulfilled, make major contribution contributions to achieving adequate levels of employment.

Please consider signing the following Action Alert.

Best regards,
Trudy Goldberg, Chair
National Jobs for All Network
We cannot balance the federal budget on the backs of older Americans, people with disabilities, and low-income communities.

The House Budget Committee passed a harmful, so-called "fiscal commission" and now Speaker Johnson is looking to add it to must-pass legislation in the coming weeks. This commission is nothing but a way to fast track cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and other key programs behind closed doors so the American people won't know who to blame.

If Congress truly wanted to balance the federal budget, they would go after the wealthy and corporate tax cheats who cost our country $1 trillion dollars per year in lost revenue, and not the millions of people who rely on Social Security and Medicare as a lifeline.

TELL CONGRESS: No "fiscal commission"

Some in Congress are pushing back―and we can add our voices to stop this bad proposal. In January, Reps. John Larson (D-CT) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), along with 116 of their colleagues, sent a letter to House leadership to reject attaching a "fiscal commission" to any must-pass funding bills. We need to remind policymakers that putting our country on the right fiscal path should not come at the cost of meeting urgent public needs or cutting critical programs and services.

We cannot balance the federal budget on the backs of older Americans, people with disabilities, and low-income communities. It's time for Congress to listen to 81% of the American public and reject any cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and other vital programs.

ADD YOUR NAME to tell Congress to reject the "fiscal commission."
Thanks for all you do,
The whole Common Dreams team
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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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Friday, February 2, 2024

[NJFAC] "greedflation" as source of inflation surge

'Greedflation' caused more than half of last year's inflation surge, study finds, as corporate profits remain at all-time highs Irina Ivan, Fortune

"We may be looking at the end of capitalism." Those words, from the pen of the loquacious Albert Edwards of Societe Generale, shocked the Wall Street analyst set last April and set Alberts on his way to becoming a financial press favorite for his witty turns of apocalyptic phrase. He was commenting on the phenomenon of "greedflation," an economic bugbear previously beloved of progressive economists, not quite venerable 160-year-old French investment banks. 

But after falling from its blistering pace in 2022, consumer inflation has gotten stubbornly stuck in the 3% range—rising unexpectedly for the last two months even as wholesalers' prices stay flat or fall. That is greedflation's music, offering a clear bit of evidence that excessive profit-taking is happening above the raw cost of goods. And yet another progressive economic study, this time from the Groundwork Collaborative, sheds light on the problem, arguing that more than half of the consumer price price increases in the middle of last year were due to excessive profits, according to the findings. Corporate profits, by the way, remain at all-time highs.

Corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic, the report found, analyzing Commerce Department data. That's a massive jump from the four decades prior to the pandemic, when profits drove just 11% of price growth. 

"Businesses were really, really quick, when input costs went up, to pass that on to consumers. [But] had they only passed on those increases, inflation would have been maybe one to three points lower," Liz Pancotti, a strategic advisor at Groundwork and one of the report's authors, told Fortune. ....


A Goodjobs member reports a more than doubling of retail sector profits over 4 years.  jz
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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Clinton’s Presidency Was a Disaster for Labor --the late Judith Stein is co-author of book reviewed

....

Today Clinton's presidency wins little respect. Few liberals want to return to the Democratic Party of the 1990s because so many see his presidency as a betrayal of the progressivism that was once the hallmark of the New Deal and the Great Society. According to Lichtenstein and Stein, his presidency was merely an "accommodation to an ideology that privileged trade liberalization, financial deregulation, and privatization of government services, while tolerating the growth of class inequalities."

In addition to servicing longtime Democratic donors, at the heart of the presidency was a growing belief that America's high-tech "new economy" was unlike any other that the nation had witnessed. The Silicon Valley high-tech industry — sustained by four decades of large federal subsidies — would come into its own in the stock market during the 1990s. The economy grew for 116 months, with economic growth averaging 4 percent a year and twenty-two million private sector jobs being created.

But as Lichtenstein and Stein remind readers, much of this was impressive in numbers alone. Most of the job growth was in retail trade, hospitality, care work, and so on. These sorts of jobs — which Clinton had created as Arkansas governor — had no health benefits, pensions, or decent working conditions, and would soon morph into the "gig economy" work blighting the world today, with workers additionally subject to a growing culture of surveillance and workplace spying. The benefactors were companies such as Walmart, McDonald's, Amazon, and FedEx, not the software engineers and new technical specialists that many anticipated.....


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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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Tuesday, January 16, 2024

[NJFAC] Full Employment Is Good for Society

Full Employment Is Good for Society Paul Krugman, NYT, 1/15/24

....Why did wage inequality fall? A number of states increased their minimum wages. Unions won some victories, and fear of unionization may have pushed some employers to increase pay. The main factor, however, was surely a tight labor market: Full employment greatly increases workers' bargaining power.

Full employment also did wonders for another aspect of racial disparities: high Black unemployment. Last hired, first fired is still a very real fact of race relations in America; one measure of our success in finally achieving something like full employment is that the gap between Black and white unemployment rates is the smallest it has been since the government started collecting data on the subject.

....Full employment is extremely important not just because it leads to a higher gross domestic product but also because it helps create a healthier, fairer society. And we should fight back against political forces standing in the way of job creation. In particular, a gratuitous recession could all too easily undo much of the progress we've made.....

There are many things we still need to do to fulfill [the Rev. Martin Luther] King's vision, and some of them will be hard. But one thing that should be relatively easy is providing an economy in which Americans who are willing to work — which means a great majority of adults — can find jobs."

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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