Why Tuesday’s numbers will look artificially high. View this in your browser and share with your friends. <[link removed]>



<[link removed]>







How to Interpret Next Week’s Inflation Numbers



When the latest inflation numbers come out on April 13, they’ll look a bit higher than usual, and opponents of the American Jobs Plan are likely to pounce.

Don’t be fooled.



As Roosevelt’s Mike Konczal, J.W. Mason, and Lauren Melodia explain in a new blog post, those high-on-paper figures won’t be what they seem.



“. . . for the next several months, the conventional [year-over-year] YoY measures of inflation will be comparing today’s prices to those of the depression-level COVID lockdown, when official unemployment was near 15 percent,” they write. 



That means the annual inflation rate revealed next week will reflect deflation in 2020 rather than inflation in 2021.



“Anyone who wants an objective assessment of economic reality, either in reporting or policy conversations, will need to correct for this distortion. If a seemingly big spike in . . . YoY inflation is misunderstood as a sign of rising prices today rather than of falling prices a year ago, debates over the American Jobs Plan and future infrastructure proposals could go off the rails,” they argue.



Read on for three reasons <[link removed]> next week’s inflation numbers are a bad argument against infrastructure investment.



And for more from Konczal, listen to this week’s episode of Pitchfork Economics <[link removed]>, which includes an interview about his new book, Freedom from the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand <[link removed]>.







A Fair Share



In a Wall Street Journal op-ed <[link removed]> this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for “a more effective global minimum tax” so that “corporations can’t shift profits around the world to minimize their tax bills”—an essential step for global fairness, as Roosevelt Fellow Darrick Hamilton explained on Democracy Now! <[link removed]>

“Another way to conceive of this is, think of it as not only an industrial policy <[link removed]>, but even a trade policy through tax reform, to make sure that we have fair standards, when we think about ways in which nation-states engage across borders,” he told hosts Amy Goodman and Juan González.



Yellen’s pitch builds on the Biden administration’s broader plans <[link removed]> to increase corporate taxes, which could “reshape US politics,” as Roosevelt Director of Governance Studies Todd Tucker writes in a Washington Post op-ed. 



"President Biden’s measure would raise $2.7 trillion over 15 years, nearly half of which—$1.2 trillion—would come from increasing the statutory corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. While this would put business taxes at only half thepeak rate levied in the 1960s <[link removed]>, it would still be the biggest tax hike on business in US history that’s not related to funding war."Read more. <[link removed]>







Catch Up



Earlier this week, Roosevelt hosted How to Achieve a Climate-Forward Recovery <[link removed]>, in which moderator Rhiana Gunn-Wright <[link removed]> and speakers Brandon Hurlbut <[link removed]>, Lenore Palladino <[link removed]>, and John Washington <[link removed]> discussed what the Biden administration's economic and infrastructure plans mean for climate change and environmental justice.“If you don’t deliberately think about equity, and design policy so that the outcomes are more likely to be equitable, then it’s just not going to happen. And I think it’s very similar with climate . . . Including climate continually in the plan for economic recovery and in the ways that we think about economic policy is incredibly crucial,” said Gunn-Wright.



Watch the webinar now. <[link removed]>



What We’re Reading <[link removed]>Four Ways of Looking at the Radicalism of Joe Biden [feat. Roosevelt’s Felicia Wong] <[link removed]> - New York Times



The Urgency of the Black Climate Agenda <[link removed]> - Vox



A Novel Effort to See How Poverty Affects Young Brains <[link removed]> - New York Times



Biden Wants to Go Big on Infrastructure. History Says That’s the Right Call. [by Roosevelt Senior Fellow David B. Woolner] <[link removed]> - Washington Post



“Woke Capital” Doesn’t Exist <[link removed]> - The Atlantic











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