Logo for The Tapback from Civic Action [[link removed]]
CONSEQUENCES
In the face of the remarkable early success of President Biden’s signature public investments in infrastructure, clean energy, and high-tech manufacturing, Jeff Stein reports in the Washington Post [[link removed]] that the trickle-down dead-enders giving economic advice to Donald Trump are cooking up an economic plan that consists largely of… cutting the corporate tax rate from 21% down to 15% . One supposed benefit of further reducing corporate tax rates, according to Stein, is that “the sharp new tax cuts would help offset higher consumer costs” caused by Trump’s proposal to impose a 10% tax on all imports.
OK, sure, there’s certainly a neoliberal economic model or two that assumes lowering corporate taxes or reducing marginal rates for the richest people leads to lower consumer prices, but is there any evidence of that happening in the real world? The corporate tax cut Trump previously engineered reduced the standard rate from 35% to 21% and certainly didn’t seem to keep prices down over the past few years… so what exactly is the rationale for asserting that lowering taxes results in lower prices rather than higher profits ? It’s been more than four decades since the arrival of trickle-down economics, but somehow reporters continue to write stuff like this, and apparently they still expect us to pretend it adds up.
Make it make sense.
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5 million [[link removed]] error are made each year by California pharmacies [[link removed]] , according to an estimate by the state Board of Pharmacy. The lobbying group for big pharmacy chains is opposing a proposed state law that would require errors to be reported and empower pharmacists to increase staffing if workloads are unsafe.
32 hours [[link removed]] would become the standard full-time workweek [[link removed]] under a United Auto Workers proposal for new union contracts with the Big 3 US automakers. Six decades ago, Richard Nixon stated that “ the time is not far distant when the working man can have a four-day week ” during his campaign for re-election as Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President.
187,000 jobs [[link removed]] were created in August [[link removed]] , and the share of people working or looking for work surpassed the mark reached before the onset of the COVID pandemic . The biggest job gains were seen in health care, leisure and hospitality, and construction.
A Chart [[link removed]]
The federal government responded with remarkable speed and vigor to the economic crisis brought on by COVID , providing substantial stimulus to consumers, significant support for small businesses, extensive relief to local governments, and other critical investments. This was a sharp change from the response to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, which fell well short of what was necessary to return the economy to vigorous growth.
As the chart below recently highlighted by Paul Krugman [[link removed]] shows, the difference is immediately apparent: after the 2008 crash, what’s called “prime-age employment” — the share of working-age people 25-54 who are working — remained depressed for many years. In other words: fewer people were able to get jobs for a long time . But today, just a few years after COVID completely disrupted the economy and caused a far sharper initial reduction in jobs than the 2008 crisis, we’re not only back — we’ve reached a higher level of prime-wage employment than before the crisis began . This is a testament to the power of the trillions of dollars of relief funds that were provided and public investments that have been made since 2020. And it’s also evidence that something truly remarkable happened between 2008 and 2020 — economic policymakers actually learned something .
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Blowing up the Groupchat [[link removed]]
Just out on our YouTube channel this week, Civic Action founder Nick Hanauer digs into an incredibly consequential new academic study on the minimum wage [[link removed]] . The study looks at large increases in several dozen counties that raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour and finds that raising the minimum wage doesn't kill jobs — it creates them.
This is a groundbreaking analysis that defies the assumptions of conventional economic thinkers, who have long simply assumed that raising wages must reduce jobs, because that’s what their models show. Now for the first time we have actually have a study that focuses on a large increase to the minimum wage , and it finds that higher the wage was raised, the more jobs were created . Take three minutes to watch Nick step through the study and explain why it’s so important [[link removed]] .
What did you think? Choose a reaction:
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