Tag Archives: economy

Nuclear Talks With Iran Not Going Very Well

by AllanThurston Posted on December 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Paul Richter of the LA Times reports that talks with Iran aren’t going very well:

Three weeks after President Obama hailed a landmark deal to suspend most of Iran’s nuclear program for the next six months, the mood among U.S. officials about the next round of negotiations has shifted from elated to somber, even gloomy.

….Problems already have emerged. Technical talks in Vienna aimed at implementing the initial deal stopped Thursday when Iranian negotiators unexpectedly flew back to Tehran, reportedly in response to the Obama administration’s decision to expand its blacklist of foreign companies and individuals who have done business with Iran in violation of sanctions.

….Even before Thursday’s interruption, experts had struggled to determine how to sequence the complex next steps involved: neutralizing a stockpile of medium-enriched uranium and freezing most other enrichment operations in exchange for granting Iran access, in installments, to $4.2 billion of its own funds held in banks overseas and easing sanctions on petrochemical and auto exports.

None of this surprises me. Even with the incentive of shucking off the sanctions that have crippled their economy, the price the Western allies is asking might just be too high for Iran to accept. In the end, ensuring that Iran can’t build a bomb requires dismantling nearly all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and putting in place extremely intrusive monitoring of what’s left. There are a hundred different ways this could run aground on both sides.

Hopefully, this is just the normal trough in negotiations after the initial bloom of goodwill from getting talks started. After all, both sides have good reason to want to make a deal. But if I had to guess, I’d put the odds of success at 50 percent or less.

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Nuclear Talks With Iran Not Going Very Well

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If You Want Credit For an Improving Economy, You Have to Seize It

by GenevaN41gfx Posted on December 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman channels Simon Wren-Lewis today to complain about the economic triumphalism of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has been crowing that his austerity policies are finally paying off. In reality, both men say, Cameron implemented austerity policies in 2010 and 2011, but then eased up. And now that he’s eased up, the economy is starting to improve. Austerity had nothing to do with it.

I want to use this as a springboard to make two random-but-connected points:

Politically, message consistency is key. Ronald Reagan never varied from his insistence that tax cuts would supercharge the economy, so when the economy finally did pick up in 1983, tax cuts got the credit even though they almost certainly played only a small role. Likewise, austerity is getting the credit in Britain because Cameron has never varied from his insistence that it would work. Liberals tend to be much worse at this kind of economic message discipline. When the economy improves, they get a lot less credit because they haven’t relentlessly prepared the public with a very simple message about what they’ve been doing.
On a related note, Wren-Lewis points out that Britain’s central government deficit in 2013 was 7.5 percent of GDP. Cameron touts this as evidence of his fiscal stinginess. In America, the federal deficit in 2013 was 4.1 percent of GDP. Conventional wisdom ignores this and continues to wail that we need ever more spending cuts in order to reduce our still-unconscionable deficits. One again, note the difference that message discipline makes.

My point is not that message discipline is everything. The real world matters more. But it does matter. If you want credit for good things, you have to make up a simple, plausible story about what you’re doing and then stick to it like glue until things finally turn up. It worked for Reagan and it’s working for Cameron. Obama, on the other hand, never had a consistent story, so he’s not getting any credit as the economy improves.

POSTSCRIPT: Needless to say, Obama also had much less control over the economy than Cameron, who doesn’t have to put up with a fractious Congress. So from a message point of view, maybe he was just screwed. Still, I suspect Obama could have done better than he did.

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If You Want Credit For an Improving Economy, You Have to Seize It

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America’s new cars are more fuel-efficient than ever before

by RickPaceuorrp Posted on December 13, 2013

America’s new cars are more fuel-efficient than ever before

By

Shutterstock

The 1990s-style thirst for power that gave rise to America’s fleet of gas-guzzling SUVs is being replaced by a hunger for fuel-efficient cars, helping auto manufacturers in 2012 beat their previous record for overall gas mileage.

The average model-year 2012 vehicle got 23.6 miles per gallon, according to a new report from the EPA. OK, that’s still pretty lame — but it’s 1.2 mpg better than the previous year, the second-largest annual increase in history.

EPAClick to embiggen.

“More consumers value fuel economy than in the past,” Christopher Grundler, director of the EPA’s office of Transportation and Air Quality, told the AP.

The average new car last year had 222 horsepower. That’s a helluva lot of horses, but nonetheless a reduction of eight relative to 2011, according to the report. That helped improve overall mileage, as did a 150-pound reduction in the weight of the average car.

Here are more report highlights from EPA:

Fuel economy has now increased in seven of the last eight years. …

The large fuel economy improvement in model year 2012 is consistent with longer-term trends. … While EPA does not yet have final data for model year 2013, preliminary projections are that fuel economy will rise by 0.4 mpg, and carbon dioxide emissions will decrease by 6 grams per mile in 2013.

EPA … attributes much of the recent improvement to the rapid adoption of more efficient technologies such as gasoline direct injection engines, turbochargers, and advanced transmissions.

Consumers have many more high fuel economy choices due to these and other technologies, such as hybrid, diesel, electric, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Consumers can choose from five times more car models with a combined city/highway fuel economy of 30 mpg or more, and from twice as many SUVs that achieve 25 mpg or more, compared to just five years ago.

Nearly every major automaker produced vehicles in 2012 that were more efficient than its models from the year before. Mazda now has the most efficient fleet, while Chrysler is the biggest laggard.

EPA


Source
Fuel Economy of New Vehicles Sets Record High / Fuel Economy Gains to Continue Under President Obama’s Clean Car Programs, EPA
Cars, trucks hit record gas mileage last year, The Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The Tea Party Takes One On the Chin

by ChiquitaMadiraz Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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We have a budget:

In their final action of the year, the House approved the budget 332 to 94, with 169 Republicans and 163 Democrats voting in favor….

Not bad! I guessed “at least 150 Republican votes,” and we got 169. And with that, I shall retire from the vote-counting game. This is likely to be my high point.

So is this the beginning of the end for the tea party, as their frothing charges of treason earned them nothing but a dressing down from John Boehner and the rest of the House leadership? Or does crossing the tea party just make Boehner and Ryan and the rest more vulnerable to future shakedowns? Stay tuned.

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The Tea Party Takes One On the Chin

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Repeat After Me: There’s No Such Thing as Socialsecurityandmedicare

by trasze2aja Posted on December 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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You may see some headlines today that report on a new study showing that boomer retirees will receive way more in Social Security and Medicare benefits than they pay in taxes. But be careful. Technically, that’s true, but it’s like saying the combined population of China and Vietnam is 1.4 billion. It’s true, but all the heavy lifting is being done by China.

In this case, all the heavy lifting is being done by Medicare. According to the latest estimates from the Urban Institute, current workers are paying far less in Medicare payroll taxes than they’ll eventually receive in health benefits when they retire. (Just as current retirees are receiving more benefits today than they paid in taxes during their working lives.) That’s a problem, and it’s the reason we need to focus so much attention on rising health care costs.

But Social Security? It varies a bit depending on whether you’re single or married, but generally speaking taxes and benefits are pretty similar. The chart below shows the Urban Institute’s estimates for workers who will retire in 2030, and it’s pretty obvious that future retirees aren’t getting an especially sweet deal here. They’re just getting back what they put in.

Generally speaking, you’re always being conned when people talk about “entitlements.” That usually means Social Security and Medicare, but they’re very different things. Social Security is fine, and will stay fine with nothing more than tweaks. Medicare is a bigger problem, and it’s the one that needs the most attention.

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Repeat After Me: There’s No Such Thing as Socialsecurityandmedicare

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The War Over Austerity Is Over. Republicans Won.

by nowy24login12 Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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The main thing you need to know about today’s budget agreement is that it’s very modest. It repeals a little bit of the sequester cuts, and pays for it with a few small cuts in entitlements and some even smaller increases in user fees. Overall, the numbers are tiny enough that it’s hard to see how anyone can get either too excited or too outraged over it.

Needless to say, this hasn’t stopped the usual suspects (Heritage, Club for Growth, various tea party groups) from acting as though it represents the end of Western civilization. But they’ve overplayed their hands this time, and GOP leaders in the House have apparently had enough of these clowns. Both John Boehner and Eric Cantor essentially told them to piss off, and I suspect that this agreement is going to get a lot of Republican votes. I’ll predict at least 150 Republican votes in the House, maybe more. The tea party rump is truly going to be a rump this time.

That said, it was interesting reading the reaction of conservative wonk-star Yuval Levin to the deal:

This deal would amount to the Democrats accepting the implications of their misjudgment in abiding the Budget Control Act in 2011….It doesn’t much change the terms reached in the original Budget Control Act and sequester deal, and essentially cements the Democrats’ loss and miscalculation in that deal.

The Democrats’ hope, given that they control both the White House and the Senate, was to replace the sequester with some combination of tax increases and more palatable spending cuts….That the Democrats would accept a deal like this is a pretty striking indication of how the Republican House has changed the conversation on the spending front since 2010. Think of it this way: In their first budget after re-taking the majority—the FY 2012 Ryan budget, passed in 2011—the House Republicans wanted discretionary spending to be $1.039 trillion in 2014 and $1.047 trillion in 2015. These budgets were of course described by the Democrats and the political press (but I repeat myself) as some reversion to humanity’s barbaric past. Yet this proposed deal with the Democrats would put discretionary spending at $1.012 trillion in 2014 and $1.014 trillion in 2015—in both cases below that first House Republican budget.

To some extent, Levin is probably overstating his case in order to nudge conservatives on board a deal he thinks is palatable—and away from yet another round of government shutdowns, which he correctly views as disastrous for Republicans. Still, he’s basically right: Democrats originally believed the sequester would never happen. Either the supercommittee would replace it, or else Republicans would eventually cave in because they couldn’t tolerate the defense cuts. But that turned out not to be true. They aren’t happy with the defense cuts, but in the end, to the surprise of Democrats, they’ve decided they can live with them.

The ultimate result, as Levin says correctly, is a budget that’s below even the pipe-dream Ryan budget of 2011. I’d make a bit less of this than Levin, since Ryan’s budgets have always backloaded their cuts, but it’s still pretty remarkable. Two years ago, Ryan’s budget was basically at the outer limit of mainstream conservative wish lists. Today it looks tame.

Quibbles aside, Levin is right: Republicans have massively changed the spending conversation since 2010. Austerity has won.

Originally posted here: 

The War Over Austerity Is Over. Republicans Won.

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Here’s the Story Behind the Big Wall Street Reform Rule That Was Just Approved

by HoseaHarpur Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, banking regulators finalized one of the most important provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. It’s called the Volcker rule, and it’s supposed to prohibit the high-risk trading by commercial banks that helped cause the financial crisis. Here’s what you need to know about it.

What’s the reason for the new rule? In the run-up to the financial crisis, big banks invested in low-quality mortgage-backed securities. When those over-leveraged bets turned sour, the economy collapsed, and the government had to bail out big financial institutions. The Volcker rule ensures that banks don’t engage in what is called proprietary trading—that is, when a firm trades for its own benefit instead of trading on behalf of its customers. In May 2012, JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion on a bad trade, which led to calls for a strong Volcker rule.

Why is it called the Volcker rule? The rule is named after Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1980s, and later an adviser to President Barack Obama. He advocated this change in financial regulation and persuaded the president to back the rule in 2010, when the Dodd-Frank bill was passed.

2010? What took so long? One reason it took three years to finish the rule is that after the legislation was passed, the actual regulation had to be crafted jointly by five banking regulators—the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). That’s a lot of coordination amongst people with different backgrounds and priorities. And during the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney vowed to repeal Dodd-Frank. So for several months, wait-and-see regulators slowed down devising the details of the rule.

Wall Street lobbying also played a big part in delaying the unveiling of the final rule. The financial industry pushed like mad to get key loopholes into the regulation. “It’s relentless, nonstop, day and night lobbying,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of the financial reform advocacy group Better Markets, said a year ago. “It is absolute total nuclear war that Wall Street is engaged in here.” One loophole Wall Street tried to get written into the regulation would characterize certain forms of risky trading as hedging against risk. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

So who won? Kelleher says financial reformers won; these loopholes were not included. “Today’s finalization of the Volcker rule ban on proprietary trading is a major defeat for Wall Street and a direct attack on the high-risk ‘quick-buck’ culture of Wall Street,” he said in a statement. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the rule would have prevented JPMorgan’s $2 billion trading loss last year. CFTC commissioner Bart Chilton, a fierce Wall Street critic, is happy with the rule. Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of the authors of the Dodd-Frank law, told Mother Jones today, “I have been confident all along that it would be a tough rule. I’ll make one prediction: all of the cries of doom that you’re going to hear from the financial institutions, three years from now will come to about as much validity as the cries of doom we heard about same-sex marriage.”

Obama noted, “Our financial system will be safer and the American people are more secure because we fought to include this protection in the law….I encourage Congress to give these regulators adequate funding to effectively and efficiently implement the rule, which will help protect hardworking families and business owners from future crisis, and restore everyone’s certainty and confidence in America’s dynamic financial system.”

But the success of the rule depends on how it is implemented. Marcus Stanley, the policy director at Americans for Financial reform, says that he’s “lukewarm” on the rule, mostly because a lot hangs on how it is interpreted by banking regulators who supervise compliance. “Whoever is the primary supervisor has enormous discretion about how this rule will affect trading,” he says, adding that the final Volcker rule does not include transparency provisions that would allow the public to judge whether banks are complying.

So is financial reform all finished now? No. Proprietary trading contributed to the crisis, but it was not the main cause. Regulators still have other Dodd-Frank provisions to finalize. Wall Street watchdogs have to implement plans to wind down failing banks; finish writing rules governing derivatives trading (which was largely unregulated before the financial crisis); and enforce strong requirements regarding the level of reserves banks must maintain.

What’s next? Wall Street is already preparing to fight the Volcker rule in the courts. The regulation could slash the combined annual profits of the eight largest banks by between $2 billion to $10 billion, according to Standard and Poor’s. “Wall Street’s loophole lawyers and other hired guns will… continue to hit at the rule as if it were a piñata,” Kelleher says.

Additional reporting by Patrick Caldwell.

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Here’s the Story Behind the Big Wall Street Reform Rule That Was Just Approved

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Does the Minimum Wage Look Better if You Account for the EITC?

by SashaCfkiqxdl Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over at the Economix blog, minimum wage skeptic David Neumark makes a reasonable point: sure, adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage has declined since the 1960s. But we’ve created and then expanded the EITC as a wage support tool since then, so you need to look at the two together. If you do that, wage support for low-income families looks a lot better.

Like I said, it’s a reasonable point. The problem is that Neumark appears to use the statutory EITC amount in his calculations. In the case of the minimum wage, using statutory amounts is OK since it’s a universal policy. But for EITC, you really want to look at actual average benefits and how they’ve changed over time.

This is very, very difficult. Or, to put it more bluntly, it was too difficult for me, and I couldn’t find any authoritative measure of this. However, by cobbling together a few different sources and making some (hopefully reasonable) assumptions about average hours worked and so forth, I took a crack at estimating the value of the EITC converted into hourly wages. The CBPP, for example, says that the average EITC for a family with children was $2,805 in 2010. Nearly all of this goes to families in the bottom quintile with wages under $20,000, which means it goes to workers who are probably making the minimum wage or only slightly more. Some of those families have a single earner working 2,000 hours per year. Some work less. Some families have multiple earners working more than 2,000 hours together. But if you use 2,000 hours as a horseback guess, the average EITC payment comes to about $1.40 per hour worked.

I can’t emphasize enough how rough this is. But I doubt it’s off by a huge margin. Putting this together with a bit of other data, here’s what it produces:

If there’s better data bearing on this point, I’m happy to post about it. For now, though, my best guess is that even when you account for the EITC, income support for poor families remains a couple of dollars per hour below its 1960s level.

My personal policy preference is to divide income support between the EITC and the minimum wage. They address different problems and they have different targets (the EITC, for example, is heavily targeted toward families with children, while the minimum wage is universal). Although Neumark is not a fan of increasing the minimum wage, he suggests this is a reasonable policy choice:

There is a more subtle argument — that the combination of an earned-income tax credit with a higher minimum wage can lead to better outcomes than the earned-income tax credit alone….My work with William Wascher has explored the interactions of higher minimum wages and a more generous earned-income tax credit. We indeed find that a combination of these two policies leads to higher employment and income among single women with children who are eligible are for the credit. At the same time, the combined policies lead to more adverse employment effects on specific groups — like teenagers and less-skilled minority men — who are not eligible for the earned-income tax credit and have to compete with the new labor market entrants who are eligible for it.

Thus, on distributional grounds there may be an argument for coupling the earned-income tax credit with a higher minimum wage. But to be clear, the higher minimum wage entails some job loss. We may simply be willing to accept this job loss in return for better distributional outcomes.

Although Neumark disagrees, my reading of the literature as a whole suggests that the adverse employment effects are very small, even on the groups most strongly affected by a higher minimum wage. That said, if anyone wants to propose a significant expansion of EITC instead of an increase in the minimum wage, I’m all ears. Generally speaking, though, I’m in favor of guaranteeing a certain minimum compensation to everyone, not just families with children. For that reason, I’d like to see the minimum wage increased.

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Does the Minimum Wage Look Better if You Account for the EITC?

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November’s Jobs Report Is Good, But Many Americans Are Still Struggling

by Isabelta5 Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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The economy added 203,000 jobs in November, according to new numbers released Friday by the Labor Department. The unemployment rate dropped to 7 percent—the lowest level in five years. But many Americans are still struggling.

Employment increased in the private and public sectors, despite the continuing effects of the drastic budget cuts that went into effect in March. Industries including transportation, manufacturing, retail, and leisure and hospitality saw jobs gains, and average hourly earnings increased by 4 cents to $24.15.

The stock market rose on the news, and economists say the new employment numbers make it likely that the Federal Reserve will halt its stimulus efforts early next year. But many Americans are still out of luck.

As my colleague Kevin Drum notes, 90,000 of the 203,000 new jobs created last month were needed to keep pace with population growth. That means net job growth last month was more like 113,000.

And although about 2.1 million unemployed workers found jobs last month, 2.4 million stopped looking. November is the 43rd month in a row in which more job seekers left the labor force than found employment. A total of only 63 percent of American adults are either working or looking for work. That’s the second-lowest monthly labor force participation rate in 35 years. (The lowest-ever labor force participation rate was recorded in October, but the data for that month was skewed because of the government shutdown.)

The number of long-term unemployed—those without a job for 27 weeks or more—edged up slightly to 4.1 million. Unemployment amongst African-Americans and Latinos remains much higher than average—at 12.5 percent, and 8.5 percent, respectively. For those without a high school diploma, the unemployment rate is 10.8 percent. It’s 14 percent for people under 25.

About a third of employment gains in the private sector last month came in the form of low-wage service jobs in retail, hotels, restaurants, bars and temp agencies. Retail employment added 22,000 jobs last month, and bars and restaurants added 18,000. Low-paying service sector jobs have been the hallmark of the recovery. The growth of these low-wage jobs has given rise to a string of strikes over the past year by workers at Wal-mart, and fast-food joints like Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Burger King, who are demanding a living wage.

In his speech on the economy on Wednesday, President Barack Obama called on Congress to boost job growth by investing in infrastructure and education; doing away with harmful sequestration cuts; ending incentives for companies to ship jobs overseas; and increasing the minimum wage. “If we refocus our energies on building an economy that grows for everybody,” the president said, “then I remain confident that the future still looks brighter than the past.”

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November’s Jobs Report Is Good, But Many Americans Are Still Struggling

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ALEC Boots Mother Jones From Its Annual Conference

by KianHeinrich Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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Starting Wednesday, hundreds of state lawmakers descended on downtown Washington, DC, for a big three-day confab hosted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative advocacy group that that brings together lawmakers and representatives of major corporations to draft model legislation on issues such as taxes, energy, workers’ rights, education, and agriculture. These bills are then introduced in state legislatures around the country—in some cases, lawmakers pass ALEC-inspired bills without changing a word.

There were dozens of press credentials laid out on ALEC conference’s check-in table when I arrived Thursday morning. Mother Jones‘ was not among them. ALEC’s board of directors had refused my request for credentials, according to spokesman Bill Meierling.

More MoJo reporting on the American Legislative Exchange Council.


ALEC’s Campaign Against Renewable Energy


ALEC Boots Mother Jones From Its Annual Conference


What Kind of Crazy Anti-Environment Bills Is ALEC Pushing Now?


Study: ALEC Is Bad for the Economy


Forced to Work Sick? That’s Fine With ALEC


ALEC in 1985: S&M Accidents Cause 10 Percent of San Francisco’s Homicides

When asked why I’d been turned away, Meierling pointed to our previous coverage of ALEC and said it’s clear that Mother Jones “fundamentally hates” ALEC. We’ve covered ALEC for more than a decade—a 2002 exposé titled “Ghostwriting the Law,” coverage of the group’s proposals regarding voting rights and workers’ rights, and more recently the departures of big-name corporate members.

At the same time he was explaining why I couldn’t attend, Meierling stressed to me that ALEC is “moving toward transparency.” To his credit, he acknowledged the irony.

If ALEC had given me a press credential, the only events I would’ve been allowed to cover were keynote speeches by Republican luminaries Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, and Grover Norquist. But the real action at ALEC conferences, the meat-and-potatoes work, happens at the meetings of the group’s many task forces—the environment and energy task force led by American Electric Power, the tax and fiscal policy task force led by tobacco giant Altria, and the international relations task force run by tobacco company Philip Morris. Meierling says that even credentialed reporters can’t cover those meetings. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank learned this firsthand on Wednesday, when DC police and ALEC staff stopped him from attending the group’s private task force meetings.

It’s been a tough week for ALEC. On Tuesday, the Guardian reported that the group faced a “funding crisis” after 40 of its corporate members and hundreds of state lawmakers ditched ALEC in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s killing last year. Those members fled after it was revealed that ALEC’s model legislation included the same Stand Your Ground law invoked by George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed Martin. ALEC has since eliminated its gun-related advocacy and, with a narrower fiscal focus, is trying to woo its erstwhile members to back into the fold.

Given the organization’s recent struggles, I can understand why ALEC would be feeling defensive. Meierling, the ALEC spokesman, was polite throughout our conversation. We traded business cards before I left and promised to get a drink to talk more about Mother Jones. Fingers crossed for next year.

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ALEC Boots Mother Jones From Its Annual Conference

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