What U.S. Economic Recovery? Five Destructive Myths
I haven’t read Time for some time, but the dentist office gave me the opportunity today. This article has some common sense analysis of what has become Republican mythology on economics.
Read the whole thing, or excerpts below.
There may be $2 trillion sitting on the balance sheets of American corporations globally, but firms show no signs of wanting to spend it in order to hire workers at home, however much Washington might hope they will. Meanwhile, the average American is feeling poorer by the week. “If one looks at unemployment and housing, it’s clear that for all practical purposes, we have yet to fully get out of recession,” says Harvard economist Ken Rogoff, summing up what everyone who doesn’t live inside the Beltway Bubble is thinking.
The Republicans have pulled off a major (some would say cynical) miracle by convincing the majority of Americans that the way to jump-start the economy is to slash taxes on the wealthy and on cash-hoarding corporations while cutting benefits for millions of Americans. It’s fun-house math that can’t work; we’ll need both tax increases and sensible entitlement cuts to get back on track. Yet surveys show 50% of Americans think that not raising the debt ceiling is a good idea — that you can somehow starve your way to economic growth.
But it’s important to understand that our economy has changed over the past several decades in important and profound ways that politicians at both ends of the spectrum still don’t get. There are half a billion middle-class people living abroad who can do our jobs. At the same time, technology has allowed companies to weather the recession almost entirely through job cuts. While Democrats may be downplaying the bad news, Republicans, obsessed with the sideshow that is the debt-ceiling debate, haven’t offered a more cohesive explanation for the problems or any real solutions.
We would need to create 187,000 jobs a month, growing at a rate of 3.3%, to get to a healthy 5% unemployment rate by 2020. At the current rate of growth and job creation, we would maybe get halfway there by that time.
Myth No. 3: The private sector will make it all better
There is a fundamental disconnect between the fortunes of American companies, which are doing quite well, and American workers, most of whom are earning a lower hourly wage now than they did during the recession. The thing is, companies make plenty of money; they just don’t spend it on workers here.
Nobel laureate Michael Spence, author of The Next Convergence, has looked at which American companies created jobs at home from 1990 to 2008, a period of extreme globalization. The results are startling. The companies that did business in global markets, including manufacturers, banks, exporters, energy firms and financial services, contributed almost nothing to overall American job growth. The firms that did contribute were those operating mostly in the U.S. market, immune to global competition — health care companies, government agencies, retailers and hotels. Sadly, jobs in these sectors are lower paid and lower skilled than those that were outsourced. “When I first looked at the data, I was kind of stunned,” says Spence, who now advocates a German-style industrial policy to keep jobs in some high-value sectors at home. Clearly, it’s a myth that businesses are simply waiting for more economic and regulatory “certainty” to invest back home.
Myth No. 5: Entrepreneurs are the foundation of the economy
Entrepreneurship is still one of America’s great strengths, right? Wrong. Rates of new-business creation have been contracting since the 1980s. Funny enough, that’s just when the financial sector began to get a lot bigger. The two trends are not disconnected. A study by the Kauffman Foundation found an inverse correlation between the two.