"Most people who lose their jobs don't even qualify for unemployment insurance."
"Unemployment benefits are only available to those who lost a job through no fault of their own. ... Many of the unemployed are recent college or high school graduates who are now looking for work. Others may have quit their jobs, or they left work years ago to take care of children and are now job-hunting again. People in those categories make up 52 percent of the unemployed."
In reading the [CBO's analysis of ACA marginal tax rates and the labor market], questions that occurred to me, admittedly a non-economist, included why there is no accounting for the increased employment of health care workers which surely must accompany the coverage expansions?
The President was ... lacking that dominating intellectual equipment which would have been necessary to cope with the subtle and dangerous spellbinders.... (p. 25)
...the President had thought out nothing; when it came to practice his ideas were nebulous and incomplete. He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House. (p. 27)
...he was in many respects, perhaps inevitably, ill-informed as to European conditions. And not only was he ill-informed--that was true of Mr. Lloyd George also--but his mind was slow and unadaptable. (p. 27)
The recent book by today's Nobel Prize winner -- congratulations to him!! -- says good intentions are a barrier to equality and to progress among the world’s poor.
For most of human history, family incomes were barely enough to survive and life was short. But in “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality,” Professor Angus Deaton of Princeton writes that while economic progress allowed much of the world to escape poverty, “escapes leave people behind, and luck favors some and not others; it makes opportunities, but not everyone is equally equipped or determined to seize them.”
Professor Deaton also deals with the events after the great escape: that is, how the progress of some families and nations affects the prospects for progress of those initially left behind.
Imitation is one force and works in the direction of progress for all. The poor can look to the progress of others to embark on their own escape. Professor Deaton shows how the imitation of new methods has occurred, for example, with medical technologies that have allowed the residents of a number of poor nations to live longer than Americans did just a hundred years ago, and sometimes longer than Americans live today.
But new methods can harm those with vested interests in the old ones, and the vested interests can use their political power to block competition and progress. Professor Deaton explains how “the emperors of China, worried about threats to their power from merchants, banned oceangoing voyages in 1430,” adding, “Similarly, Francis I, emperor of Austria, banned railways because of their potential to bring about revolution and threaten his power.”
Progress begets inequality, and the resulting inequality can either encourage more progress or impede it, or both. Professor Deaton suggests that inequality in the modern United States has had both of these effects.
He points to a third influence of progress and inequality on outcomes for those left behind: good intentions. As part of the world becomes rich and no longer worries about day-to-day survival, it can look outward. Many residents of developed countries have a “need to help” those less fortunate.
But the attempts to help often – perhaps even usually – go awry.
As medical progress began to diffuse around the world, people stopped dying so young, and that made for an increase in population, especially in less-developed countries. Developed countries thought they would help poor nations by encouraging population control, based on the dubious proposition that more people means more poverty.
“What the world’s poor – the people who were actually having all these babies – thought about all this was not given much consideration,” Professor Deaton says, citing China’s continuing one-child policy as an example. He adds: “The misdiagnosis of the population explosion by the vast majority of social scientists and policy makers, and the grave harm that the resultant mistaken policy did to many millions, were among the most serious intellectual and ethical failures of a century in which there were many.”
Other types of foreign aid to developing nations have also been a disaster, he says, with “pictures of starving children being used to raise funds that were used in part to prolong war, or to N.G.O.-funded camps being used as bases to train militias bent on genocide.”
Professor Deaton’s book is primarily international in focus, and he insists that help for the American poor is different and more effective than aiding the world’s poor. Nevertheless, American readers may be left wondering how much aid to American poor, is, as Professor Deaton says, “more about satisfying our own need to help, and less about improving the lot of the poor.”
It seems odd that critics of the ACA emphasize the potentially adverse impacts of the law on workers forced to accept part-time jobs but fail to notice that their logic suggests more workers in total must be employed.
A conventional wisdom [e.g., Burtless quote] says that employment rates increase to “compensate” for work hours lost from taxes on full-time schedules. Under this view, more people working 29 hours rather than, say, 35, would mean that employers simply have to hire more or keep workers on the payroll longer in order to accomplish the tasks necessary to conduct their business. The conventional wisdom fails in two ways. ...full-time employment taxes can be avoided by reducing employment and increasing hours per employee. My conservative estimates suggest that this case will be far more prevalent than the twenty-niner situation: the ACA will reduce the nationwide weekly employment rate by 3 percent below what it would have been without the ACA.
...Moreover, even if full-time employment taxes were avoided by reducing weekly work hours, there would not be a commensurate increase in the employment rate because weekly hours would not be reduced for normal business or personal reasons, but rather to avoid penalties and implicit taxes. The penalties and implicit taxes make the business of an employer more expensive, or being an employee less rewarding, even in those cases when people avoid the new tax by adjusting their employment conditions rather than writing a check to the federal treasury. Some employers may go out of business, or never start their businesses in the first place, because of the extra cost of the tax (or the costs of adjustments needed to avoid the tax) or because of the additional costs (e.g., higher wages) needed to attract workers to positions that render them ineligible for exchange subsidies. The net result is that the labor market will involve fewer total hours, and that higher employment rates, if any, will not be enough to compensate for the reduced hours per week. This economic reasoning has been confirmed by empirical studies of previous public policies that raised the relative employer cost of weekly work hours, and failed to create a commensurate increase in employment because the average hour worked by employees had been made more expensive or less productive.
The war on poverty of which so much has been made since then has been a very good thing indeed for many thousands of civil servants who have been able to make excellent careers and many thousands of academic people who have been able to do study after study on poverty.
