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Two points with regards to things I’ve heard Rep. Paul Ryan say in recent days.

First, he’s downplayed the increase in income inequality that’s gotten a lot of play out of the new CBO study. His claim is that there’s enough mobility in the American economy to offset any increase in inequality.

I examine that claim in some detail here but to summarize, imagine the income scale as a hotel with floors that improve as you go up. The basement is funky; the penthouse, sublime. Rep. Ryan’s argument is that sure, the distance between the floors may have grown — with increased dispersion of incomes, there’s a greater economic distance between the top and the bottom — but the rate at which people move between floors has accelerated.

Except for it hasn’t. There is no evidence that the rate of mobility has increased — there’s some evidence that it’s slowed (though other evidence shows no change). In fact, according to mobility data covering a few decades, relative to their cohort (families in the same age range), most families end up close to where they started in the income scale, i.e., either in the income fifth in which they started or in the one either above it or below it (see tables 1-2 here).

Second, in a radio interview this AM I heard Rep. Ryan claim that the Republicans on the deficit reduction super-committee were in fact putting revenues on the table. That surprised me since I’d thought they’d pledged to stonewall on that point.

Well, according to this report most of what they’re calling revenues are not what the Democrats, including the president, are thinking about — we’re not exactly talking shared sacrifice here: (more…)

Next week President Obama travels to Wall Street where he’ll demand – in light of the Street’s continuing antics since the bailout, as well as its role in watering-down the Volcker rule – that the Glass-Steagall Act be resurrected and big banks be broken up.

I’m kidding. But it would be a smart move — politically and economically.

Politically smart because Mitt Romney is almost sure to be the Republican nominee, and Romney is the poster child for the pump-and-dump mentality that’s infected the financial industry and continues to jeopardize the American economy.

Romney was CEO of Bain & Company – a private-equity fund that bought up companies, fired employees to save money and boost performance, and then resold the firms at a nice markups. (more…)

Sam Cooke (January 22, 1931-December 11, 1964), who co-wrote and recorded the original song “Wonderful World,” is considered one the pioneers and founders of soul music. He is often called the King of Soul. He stood up for equal rights and took an active part in the Civil Rights Movement.

Earlier this year, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proposed some modest rule changes to streamline and modernize the way union elections are conducted. While those rules are still under review, Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee today approved a bill that would add months- or years-long delays to union elections.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) says the Republican bill (H.R. 3094) would “encourage employers to spend thousands of dollars on attorneys to file frivolous appeals to gum up the election process.”

The bill’s clear intention is to wear down workers so that they give up fighting for a better deal.

(more…)

Early last Friday morning, as the Occupy Wall Street protesters were just uncurling from their sleeping bags, I went downtown for a walkthrough of their campsite at Zuccotti Park, now also known as Liberty Plaza. I met up there with AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and New York City Central Labor Council President Vincent Alvarez. (I’m president of an AFL-CIO affiliated union.)

There were just a few of us in our group, and as the sun burned through the dawn’s chill, not much attention was paid as we took the tour. We kept our voices low and walked carefully, doing our best to keep from tripping over and waking those who were still asleep

One or two reporters hooked up with us, not including the kid you may have seen with the fake cardboard Fox News camera and microphone, who tossed out questions as he walked along behind us. That was the extent of the media coverage.

Every once in a while someone would ask who Trumka was and he would stop and chat. At the end of our visit, he sat with a group at the west end of the park, across from ground zero, and quietly offered encouragement, discussing strategy, goals and on a practical level, the essentials needed to keep the protest going.

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For-Profit “grassroots” group Tea Party Nation demands members pledge not to hire any new workers.

Businesses are not creating jobs for one simple reason, says Jan Eberly, assistant treasury secretary for economic policy: lack of demand for the products those businesses make or sell.

One of the lingering effects of the 2007 housing crash and the ensuing 2008 stock market crash is a lack of spending among those who are holding on to decent jobs, and the obvious lack of available disposible income among those who have found themselves either unemployed or underemployed. Ken Lansing, an economist at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, found in July that since the the recession began in 2007, Americans spent $7,356 less per person (in inflation-adjusted dollars).

Yet right-wing politicans continue to blame the jobs crisis on either existing government regulation of businesses or on proposed regulations in such areas as greenhouse gas emissions. But data presented by Eberly today demonstrates that the assertions of the anti-regulation crowd are patently false. He writes:

If regulatory uncertainty was a major impediment to hiring right now, we would expect to see indications of this in one or more of the following: business profits; trends in the workforce, capacity utilization, and business investment; differences between industries undergoing significant regulatory changes and those that are not; differences between the United States and other countries that are not undergoing the same changes; or surveys of business owners and economists…none of these data support the claim that regulatory uncertainty is holding back hiring. (more…)

Those who follow the rants from our business leaders and their allies in politics and the media have been struck by a disquieting cry in recent months. We have been repeatedly told that, even though we have more than 25 million people unemployed or underemployed, businesses are unable to find qualified workers.

For example, last week New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman took us to Illinois where Doug Oberhelman, the CEO of Caterpillar, one of the largest companies in the country, complained that he could not find qualified hourly workers for his manufacturing facilities. Oberhelman went on to complain that he also could not find engineering service technicians or even welders.

Friedman also recounted a conversation with Chicago’s new mayor, former Obama Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. According to Friedman, Emanual complained about “staring right into the whites of the eyes of the skills shortage.” Friedman recounts a story from Emanuel about two young CEOs in the healthcare software business who claimed that they have 50 job openings today, but can’t find the people.

There are many other accounts like the ones in Friedman’s column of businesses who find their growth prospects stunted by their inability to hire good workers. There are two parts to this story that should bother people.

First, in spite of all the complaints in the media about businesses not being able to find good workers, this problem doesn’t seem to show up in the data. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall ratio of job openings to existing jobs is just 2.3 percent. This is down by almost a third from its pre-recession level.

Mr. Oberhelman’s experience at Caterpillar doesn’t seem to be common among his peers; the job opening rate in manufacturing is just 2.0 percent. Even in professional and business services, the category that would likely include the workers that the software execs wanted, the job opening rate is just 3.5 percent, down by more than 25 percent from pre-recession levels. (more…)

Police violently remove Occupy Oakland protesters.

It’s hard to believe that nearly four years into the worst Recession since the Second World War, while mired in a jobless recovery of unprecedented length and magnitude, we continue to hear that manufacturing jobs don’t matter.

Take, for example, the recent uninformed (and insensitive) remark of Steven Rattner, the President’s former co-auto advisor, that “restoring lost manufacturing jobs” is nothing more than “pervasive, politically attractive happy talk” (see “Let’s Admit It: Globalization Has Losers” by Steven Rattner, New York Times, 10-15-11). He went on to say — ironically given his prior administration position — that America’s “greatest strength… lies in service industries with high intellectual content, like education, entertainment, digital media, and financial services.”

The reality is that anyone rightly concerned about the current almost unprecedented real unemployment rate of more than 18 percent must first focus on resuscitating our depleted manufacturing sector.

It’s a recipe for economic disaster for an economy as large, complex and geographically far-flung as ours to have less than 20-25 percent of its workers in manufacturing and for the sector to not be contributing a similar percentage of GDP.

Yet as it is, only around 9 percent of Americans now work in manufacturing, and as a percent of GDP, the sector now provides just 11 percent of our total.

In 1955, the largest U.S. employer was the auto manufacturer General Motors, which had a unionized workforce with good pay and quality retirement and health benefits. Today, the top U.S. employer is Wal-Mart, which pays its employees a pittance and just last week announced a major cutback in its employee health benefits. How can anyone favor an economic system that assumes American workers will either have the education and ability to work at Goldman Sachs or Google, or be left to work forever with entry-level wages at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s — with no robust manufacturing sector in the middle? (more…)