Thursday, April 20, 2017

[NJFAC] Living New Deal Map

The National Jobs for All Coalition, along with several other organizations, will be celebrating the publication of a pocket map of New Deal sites and artworks in New York City. [A map for the whole country is at https://livingnewdeal.org/map/.

Two of those events will be at Roosevelt House, May 11th, and the Museum of the City of New York, May 18th. You may register for them at https://livingnewdeal.org/events/celebrate-new-map-new-deal-new-york/ [On that site, click RSVP here for each event.]

There will also be an all-day conference June 8th: When Government Was the Solution: The New Deal's Forgotten Legacy, Then & Now

For details, see http://njfac.org/index.php/living-new-deal-new-york-city/

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

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Tuesday, April 18, 2017

[NJFAC] "Supply Side Economics, but for Liberals"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/upshot/supply-side-economics-but-for-liberals.html

Are government assistance programs disincentives to work? Clearly, some are and were designed to be that way. Social Security is a prime example. Here Neil Irwin argues that research now shows that food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and child-care subsidies are linked to more work rather than less.

Other programs may have negative effects on the will to work. Disability benefits are supposed to keep people who are truly sick and disabled from having to work and that is a plus. But do they keep out of work people who should be working? That is a subject for another day, but it's pretty clear that when job markets are lousy and pay is low, as they have been for a long time for millions of workers, more people will apply for benefits, whether or not they are so disabled as to be unable to work.

Irwin does not delve into another issue: Do unemployment benefits keep many people out of the labor force for a longer time than if they had no benefits? Some research shows that the difference is very small. And is that a bad thing for the unemployed? If they find a job closer to what they want, they and their employers will be better off in the long run.

Finally, there is a larger point in this whole discussion: should our goal be to have as many people as possible working all the time? Aside from the social and moral issues the question raises, I think there is a growing army of smart robots who may provide an answer of their own.

Frank Stricker, NJFAC, and author of Why America Lost the War on Poverty.

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

[NJFAC] State incentives to corporations to create jobs "don't really work"

Corporate Incentives Cost U.S. $45 Billion in 2015, Don't Really Work

The corporate tax breaks you tend to hear about are the outliers: Tesla's $1.3 billion from Nevada, Boeing's $8.7 billion from Washington state, Mike Pence's deal to keep some Carrier jobs in Indiana.

The report, based on a database of 26 years of incentives in 33 states, affirms the consensus that these tax breaks—which have tripled since 1990, when the database begins keeping track—don't do much to convince companies to move. Plotting the effects of incentives and taxes on state GDP growth, the study concludes their effects are "always statistically insignificant ... the maximum possible effects of incentives on increasing growth ... are towards the lower end of the range of estimates in the previous literature." (And the literature, as Richard Florida reminds us at City Lab, does not smile on incentives.) And that null hypothesis seems to hold true even within the industries where the incentives were applied.....Less flashy but more important, a February report from the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research suggests, are the run-of-the-mill economic development incentives built into state law across the country and designed either to attract companies, to keep them in place, or to get them to add positions. In 2015, incentives for new or expanding export-based industries (i.e., manufacturing, tech, media, any company that sells its goods or services beyond the local economy) offset average state and local business taxes by 30 percent, costing the U.S. $45 billion.

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