Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract

link: https://www.vivanewscast.com/economics/virus-lays-bare-the-frailty-of-the-social-contract/?fbclid=IwAR28JZBHLf_CRsTAZsqW_y6yigs4AU_rQhb4Ao4GGAx8kvJhQspb2vMNo2s

via Financial Times, H/T Joe Sims

text only: 

If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that it has injected a sense of togetherness into polarised societies. But the virus, and the economic lockdowns needed to combat it, also shine a glaring light on existing inequalities — and even create new ones. Beyond defeating the disease, the great test all countries will soon face is whether current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis. As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone.

Today's crisis is laying bare how far many rich societies fall short of this ideal. Much as the struggle to contain the pandemic has exposed the unpreparedness of health systems, so the brittleness of many countries' economies has been exposed, as governments scramble to stave off mass bankruptcies and cope with mass unemployment. Despite inspirational calls for national mobilisation, we are not really all in this together.

The economic lockdowns are imposing the greatest cost on those already worst off. Overnight millions of jobs and livelihoods have been lost in hospitality, leisure and related sectors, while better paid knowledge workers often face only the nuisance of working from home. Worse, those in low-wage jobs who can still work are often risking their lives — as carers and healthcare support workers, but also as shelf stackers, delivery drivers and cleaners.

Governments' extraordinary budget support for the economy, while necessary, will in some ways make matters worse. Countries that have allowed the emergence of an irregular and precarious labour market are finding it particularly hard to channel financial help to workers with such insecure employment. Meanwhile, vast monetary loosening by central banks will help the asset-rich. Behind it all, underfunded public services are creaking under the burden of applying crisis policies.

The way we wage war on the virus benefits some at the expense of others. The victims of Covid-19 are overwhelmingly the old. But the biggest victims of the lockdowns are the young and active, who are asked to suspend their education and forgo precious income. Sacrifices are inevitable, but every society must demonstrate how it will offer restitution to those who bear the heaviest burden of national efforts.

Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

The taboo-breaking measures governments are taking to sustain businesses and incomes during the lockdown are rightly compared to the sort of wartime economy western countries have not experienced for seven decades. The analogy goes still further.

The leaders who won the war did not wait for victory to plan for what would follow. Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, setting the course for the United Nations, in 1941. The UK published the Beveridge Report, its commitment to a universal welfare state, in 1942. In 1944, the Bretton Woods conference forged the postwar financial architecture. That same kind of foresight is needed today. Beyond the public health war, true leaders will mobilise now to win the peace.

--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

Enlighten Radio

Socialist Economics

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New Issue: The Coronavirus Economy [feedly]

New Issue: The Coronavirus Economy
http://dollarsandsense.org/blog/2020/04/new-issue-the-coronavirus-economy.html

Our March/April issue is out, with coverage of the emerging coronavirus economic crisis. Today we posted Gerald Epstein's piece on Fed Policy, The Fed and the Coronavirus Crisis.

Here is the p. 2 editors' note for the issue:

The Coronavirus Crisis

We're still in the early days of the economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, yet the economic data are already unprecedented—and frightening. Our cover art by Brian Hubble includes a stunning graph showing how the spike of 3.3 million new unemployment claims from the third week of March towered above the one-week claims over the previous 20 years. Now we have data for the last week of March—an even more astonishing 6.6 million initial claims, for a total of 10 million new claims so far, just weeks into the crisis. By all accounts, we are facing a severe recession, even with the unprecedented multi-trillion-dollar spending by the federal government.

The virus is not the sole cause of this economic meltdown. A political and economic system that was unprepared for either a pandemic or its economic fallout has made both crises far worse than they needed to be, as Richard D. Wolff points out in the first of three "Making Sense" pieces on the coronavirus crisis in this issue. The private profits of capitalist firms didn't give them the incentive to prepare for a pandemic, and a corporate-minded government wasn't able to put public health first, as governments elsewhere have been able to. Leaving such a system intact after all of this "will guarantee the next catastrophe."

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman offer a proposal for social insurance to deal with the economic disruption of stay-at-home orders during the pandemic, based on the idea that the government should act as a "buyer of last resort." Such a plan would keep businesses alive through the crisis, preserving difficult-to-restore relationships between businesses and employees until demand picks up and social distancing is no longer required.

Gerald Epstein's contribution to this issue helps us understand the Federal Reserve's actions so far in response to the crisis. The Fed must deal with both its traditional mandate of managing unemployment and price stability and also with preventing a meltdown of the financial sector. Epstein's analysis puts the Fed's actions in the context of the mostly unregulated financial system outside the banks and the troubles in the corporate bond market that were already brewing even before the pandemic hit. Epstein's prescription is to turn the Fed into more of a public bank, but with greater accountability, transparency, and help for the (non-financial) "real economy" than we saw in the last crisis.
Paul Engler's feature article depicts the pandemic as a "trigger event" that should show us the need to remake our social, political, and economic landscape through social movements. Reactionary forces will push austerity and a corporate agenda, so activists need to have plans for how to seize the moment and push forward "a counter-agenda rooted in a commitment to democracy and a deep sense of collective empathy."

When you publish a bimonthly magazine, most articles are in the works for two months or more. But D&S's perennial topics like inequality (the focus of John Miller's column in this issue) and the need to move to a green-energy economy (the focus of Arthur MacEwan's column) are as salient as ever. Débora Nunes's feature on Brazil's Movement of People Affected by Dams shows the struggles of activists in a country with a reactionary leadership whose response to the current pandemic will likely be catastrophic.

Our May/June issue will be our Annual Labor Issue, and we have lots of coverage in the works on the ongoing crisis and the labor movement's response to it. Until then, stay healthy and safe. We will weather the storm.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Tim Taylor: Is It Getting Harder for Research to Boost Productivity? [feedly]

Is It Getting Harder for Research to Boost Productivity?
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/04/is-it-getting-harder-for-research-to.html

New technologies are the beating heart of productivity growth and a rising standard of living. But Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb ask "Are Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" (American Economic Review, April 2020, pp. 1104-44, not freely available online). The fact that the are asking you the question tells you that their answer is a pessimistic one. This economics research article will be tough sledding for the uninitiated, but the heart of their case is made with some graphs suitable for anyone to mull over.

For example, take an overall look at the US economy, considering the number of researchers and productivity growth. You find that the number of researchers grows by multiples, but productivity growth rises and falls by small amounts. The inference is that it's taking a lot more researchers just to keep productivity growth at the same level.

For a specific example, consider Moore's law, the notion that the density of semiconductors on a computer chip will double every two years or so. Moore's law turned 50 a few years ago, and as I noted at the time, it's been getting more and more expensive and difficult to keep doubling the density of chips. As Bloom, Jones, van Reenen and Webb write: "In particular, the number of researchers required to double chip density today is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. At least as far as semiconductors are concerned, ideas are getting harder to find. Research productivity in this case is declining sharply, at a rate of 7 percent per year."

Or how about agricultural crop yields? The green lines show the number of researchers, rising; the blue line shows agricultural productivity growth, falling.

Or how about inventions of new drugs? The authors write:

New molecular entities (NMEs) are novel compounds that form the basis of new drugs. Historically, the number of NMEs approved by the Food and Drug Administration each year shows little or no trend, while the number of dollars spent on pharmaceutical research has grown dramatically ... We reexamine this fact ... The result is that research effort rises by a factor of 9, while research productivity falls by a factor of 11 by 2007 before rising in recent years so that the overall decline by 2014 is a factor of 5.

Or how about reductions in cancer? Yes, death rates for cancer are falling, but research into fighting cancer has been rising quite rapidly. As a result, it seems to be taking more and more research publications about cancer and more and more clinical trials to reduce cancer deaths by an equivalent amount.

Based on these and other examples, the authors write: "[J]ust to sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the United States must double the amount of research effort every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas."

In the fashion of honest academics, the authors note in a number of places and in a number of ways that examples like these don't prove conclusively that it's becoming more costly to find ideas and harder for research to boost productivity. For example:

• Perhaps the measured growth of GDP doesn't capture many of the gains that are happening, like free or zero-marginal-cost access to so many goods and services over the internet. 
• Perhaps  there are other examples measures of the gains from research would be rising, not falling. 
• Perhaps Moore's law is a bad example, because it involves running into physical  limits, and thus isn't representative of other research efforts. 
• Perhaps we are doing fine at discovering new ideas, but our economy is doing a poor job of turning these ideas into commercial products and at diffusing the ideas and products across a wide spectrum of industries and companies. 
• Perhaps the shift away from "basic research" funded by governments and toward applied research largely funded by companies has reduced the number of big new ideas. 
• Perhaps more firms are using intellectual property as a defensive technique for warding off competition rather than as a method of moving forward with productivity gains. 
• Overall US R&D spending has been pretty flat for several decades at about 2.5% of GDP, and maybe that's the measure of "research" on which we should be focusing.
• Perhaps there is some technology threshold for technologies like artificial intelligence, such that once that threshold is reached, very large productivity gains will then be possible, but we just haven't hit the threshold yet.   

You can probably add some possibilities to this list. But the weight of the argument from Bloom, Jones, van Reenen and Webb is that if we want technology and new ideas to ride to our rescue in a variety of areas--productivity growth, reducing pollution, improving health care and education, and many others--we need to step up our efforts considerably.  

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Bloomberg: The Recession Bread Lines Are Forming in Mar-a-Lago's Shadow [feedly]

The Recession Bread Lines Are Forming in Mar-a-Lago's Shadow
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-04/the-recession-bread-lines-are-forming-in-mar-a-lago-s-shadow

Though it's just a four-minute drive across the lagoon from Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's private club, and ten minutes from the Palm Beach outposts of Chanel and Louis Vuitton, Howley's diner has become an emblem of America's stark new economic reality.

With more than 10 million people across the nation suddenly unemployed, bread lines are forming in the shadows of privileged enclaves like this one in Florida.

ADVERTISING

For the past two weeks, the kitchen staff at Howley's has been cooking up free meals—the other day it was smoked barbecue chicken with rice and beans, and salad—for thousands of laid off workers from Palm Beach's shuttered restaurants and resorts. The rows of brown-bag lunches and dinners are an early warning that the country's income gap is about to be wrenched wider as a result of the Covid-19 crisis, and the deep recession it has brought with it.

Even as much of America is fretting about supermarket shelves depleted of their favorite cereal brands and toilet paper or the logistics of curbside pickup from favorite restaurants, a brutal new hunger crisis is emerging among laid-off workers that has begun to overwhelm the infrastructure that normally takes care of the needy.

America's Hunger Problem

More than 1 in 8 people in over half of U.S. counties don't have adequate food

Source: Bloomberg analysis of data from Feeding America 2019.

"We're seeing about a 650% increase in our request for support," said Sari Vatske, executive vice president of Feeding South Florida, which before the pandemic was already serving more than 700,000 people a year in four counties including Palm Beach County. "The growth is exponential."

The surge in demand is not just in Palm Beach. Food banks around the world have recorded increases in requests for assistance as government-ordered lockdowns have started to bite, prompting employers to lay off staff.

Food insecurity was already a chronic problem in many U.S. communities. Across the U.S. 14.3 million households were short of food in 2018, the last year for which government data are available. That equates to just over one in ten American households. For Black and Hispanic households the rate is closer to one in five.

That is likely only to get worse with the number of people losing jobs at historic levels. In the final two weeks of March alone an unprecedented 10 million workers applied for unemployment insurance. And some economists predict about 20 million people will have lost their jobs by July.

Those being thrown out of work are often people who were living paycheck-to-paycheck beforehand and are therefore among the most vulnerable.

The $2 trillion rescue package Congress passed on March 27 includes $1,200 emergency payments for most Americans and extended unemployment benefits. But the speed in which the aid finds its way to the segments of the population that need it the most will have consequences for how long and deep the recession that's already underway is.

"It's just really hitting people who are already the most vulnerable workers in our society so that is going to mean the pain will propagate faster," said Heidi Shierholz, a former Labor Department chief economist now at the Economic Policy Institute. "They're more likely to be living paycheck to paycheck than anyone else, and so if their income falls, they're more likely to actually have to cut back on necessities like rent and food. So that just makes the recession deeper and longer by pulling even more economic activity out."

Rodney Mayo, center, and volunteers prepare bags of food to give out to residents outside Howley's Restaurant in West Palm Beach, on April 3.

Photographer: Saul Martinez/Bloomberg

Rodney Mayo, whose 17-location Subculture restaurant group owns Howley's, started handing out free meals in the diner's parking lot on Saturday, March 21, after having to lay off 650 workers the day before.

"They were asking 'Where do we go? What do we do?' All I really had was the unemployment site that was crashing and nobody could file anything on it," Mayo said. "But I did promise them: No matter what, you and your families will get fed by us. And I said tomorrow we'll be open at Howley's."

What started with his own employees quickly grew into a bigger effort as friends, suppliers, and fellow restaurateurs  pitched in, and area charities began sending other people needing meals his way.

Two weeks on, Mayo has opened another of his restaurants to distribute meals and is preparing to open a third. He's also turning a warehouse into a food pantry that will distribute groceries. He has secured funds from the local government and set up a charity called Hospitality Helping Hands that is taking donations to keep the effort going.

The 15,000 meals he gave away in the first ten days cost an average of $1.30 each, Mayo said. The bonus has been being able to rehire some of his kitchen staff and to let the others who volunteer keep tips handed out by passersbys.

Just a few days into April, Mayo already expects that he will be handing out meals into June. Even if and when the $1,200 payments the federal government has promised land and unemployment benefits kick in there will be a lingering need, he said.

The current crisis, Mayo said, shone a spotlight on the divide between the pastel-clad privileged lives in the city of Palm Beach, an enclave on a barrier island connected to the mainland by a series of bridges, and the wider county around it. "There's east of the bridge, which is Palm Beach, and then there's everything west which is everything else," Mayo said. "We have some very poor communities."

Even before the current crisis, three in five children in Palm Beach County's public schools were eligible for federally-funded free or subsidized lunches, a measure of poverty. "When I tell people there's hunger in Palm Beach County people think I'm kidding," said Karen Erren, executive director of the Palm Beach County Food Bank. "But in south Florida our poverty level is always significant."

The threat of Covid-19 infections has caused food pantries in the area to change how they operate, or shut down. About a third of the 125 that the Palm Beach County Food Bank supplies are now closed, Erren said. Also a rush of panic buying has depleted stocks at supermarkets, particularly of shelf-stable foods, meaning donations from grocery chains are shrinking. 

Vatske said a sharp reduction in the supply from retailers to Feeding South Florida alongside the surge in demand had almost tripled its running costs. "It costs us about a $125,000 a week to operate under blue skies. Right now we're looking at about $350,000 with having to purchase food. So we'll need about $1.4 million a month to keep this going," she said.

Closed luxury stores on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach.

Photographer: Saul Martinez/Bloomberg

Food banks and pantries are also planning for what they fear will be a longer term effect from the Covid-19 crisis. "What I'm thinking about right now is 'Call me in a month's time. Call me in two month's time.' Because that's when reality will have hit," said Ruth Mageria, executive director of Christians Reaching Out to Society Ministries, in Lake Worth, another town in Palm Beach County. 

Local food banks and pantries interviewed for this story said they have not had any contact with the Trump Organization or Mar-a-Lago, which was shut for cleaning last month after a cluster of Covid-19 cases was linked to a member of the entourage of visiting Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro and has not reopened.

Neither the club's general manager nor spokespeople for the Trump Organization responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Venues with a more upscale clientele than Howley's are doing their part. At The Addison, a venue for weddings and other events in nearby Boca Raton, chefs have started working with a local charity and preparing 100 meals a day for delivery to elderly people stuck inside and other people affected. On the menu one day earlier this week: maple and mustard glazed Atlantic salmon with rice and broccoli.

"We decided since we can't host events we'd use resources to help our non-profit partner," said Melanie De Vito, the business' marketing director. It has helped fill one small gap, De Vito said, in a place where social distancing is far from the norm, "Boca is a very tight-knit community" in which "events are a big thing,'' she said. "Having the socializing stop has been really surreal."

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

EPI: How state attorneys general are protecting workers during the coronavirus pandemic [feedly]

Uneven, but some good examples:

How state attorneys general are protecting workers during the coronavirus pandemic
https://www.epi.org/blog/how-state-attorneys-general-are-protecting-workers-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/

Attorneys general (AGs) in some states are:

• Protecting nonessential workers from the risks of contracting COVID-19 by enforcing or leading implementation of stay-at-home orders.
• Ensuring that workers who are misclassified as independent contractors can access the unemployment insurance and paid leave they are entitled to.
• Protecting employees from losing unpaid wages.
• Protecting workers seeking safe working conditions.
• Providing clear and accessible public information about workers' rights and legal protections.

Much of the coverage of state attorneys general work during the coronavirus crisis has focused on consumer protection, but many state AGs—even those without dedicated workers' rights units—are helping protect workers facing unprecedented challenges.

These efforts come in the midst of a general increase over the past several years in state attorney general activity to enforce labor laws and advocate for workers.

Five years ago, only three state AG offices had dedicated workers' rights units: California, Massachusetts, and New York. Since then, six other AGs have created workers' rights units: the AGs of the District of Columbia, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania). Other state AG offices, even without dedicated bureaus or divisions, have also become more involved in worker issues in recent years. With or without dedicated worker rights units, state AGs have a range of powers that enable them to advance workplace protections.

Workers' needs during the coronavirus crisis are urgent and stark. Some workers who are not essential are being required to work despite state or local stay-home orders. Other workers who are unquestionably essential are working without adequate protection.

A record number of workers have lost their jobs; among them are workers who have been misclassified as independent contractors and will struggle to get unemployment insurance they're entitled to. And workers may require enforcement in order to access any legally required paid sick or family leave. On top of these challenges, there is a serious dearth of readily accessible public information about workers' rights and legal protections, particularly in light of the rapidly changing legal landscape.

Following are examples of how state attorneys general are responding to these challenges.

• Implementing and enforcing stay-at-home orders. Several attorneys general are helping protect workers by implementing and enforcing stay-at-home, quarantine, shelter-in-place, and other similar public health‒related executive orders. For example, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has been particularly active in this area. Her office created a "Know Your Employment Rights" section on its website clarifying which workers are exempt from the state's stay-at-home order and posted an online video on the subject. Her office also provided guidance to law enforcement ("Suggested Practices for Police and Prosecutors") in relation to the orders, with a section addressing common issues encounteredthat include two scenarios of employers that do not fit the guidelines of businesses allowed to stay open under the order. Most recently, her office sent the national retailer JoAnn Fabrics a cease and desist letter based on the office's conclusion that JoAnn Fabrics retail stores do not constitute an essential business under the state's stay-at-home order. Her office also sent a cease and desist letter to the home improvement store Menards, based on its business practices that might endanger both customers' and workers' health, including marketing and sales designed to increase customer traffic.
  —
  New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal publicly urged the state's residents and businesses to comply with the governor's stay-at-home order and publicized recent enforcement actions statewide of alleged violations of the stay-at-home order. He also issued a public warning that businesses or individuals that violate the state's retail restrictions or stay-at-home order would face consequences: "If you're a retail store or an entertainment center and you stay open, or if you're a bar and you keep serving patrons in your establishment, consider this as your final warning."  New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a press release urging employees to file complaints with her office against employers ignoring New York's executive orders, and circulating contact information for the office.

• Protecting misclassified gig workers. The plight of workers in the so-called gig economy has become increasingly visible in light of the coronavirus; these workers are typically misclassified as independent contractors instead of being treated as direct employees of a business. Because workplace laws, like paid sick leave and unemployment insurance (UI), cover employees and not independent contractors, misclassification often renders these protections difficult or impossible for gig workers to access. Misclassification also means that companies are failing to pay required unemployment insurance taxes which help maintain the solvency of the system. While the recently enacted federal CARES Act created a new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program that will allow some temporary income via the unemployment system through the unemployment system for genuine independent contractors, pursuing misclassification is still important because (1) PUA is temporary (expiring December 31, 2020) while regular unemployment insurance is longstanding; (2) PUA is paid by the federal government, thereby allowing misclassifying gig companies to shift their responsibility (UI taxes) to the American people; and (3) virtually all other workplace laws protect employees only.
  —
  Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey recently filed amicus briefs in support of an emergency motion by Uber and Lyft drivers seeking a determination that they are employees and thus covered by paid sick leave laws during the pandemic, in order to protect themselves and the public. New York Attorney General Letitia James shared news that her office won a case in the state's highest court regarding access to unemployment insurance benefits for a Postmates worker, previously misclassified as an independent contractor, and other Postmates workers similarly situated.

• Advocating for protections for essential workers. A coalition of 16 attorneys general, led by Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, sent a letter urging President Trump to fully utilize the Defense Production Act to prioritize production of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as masks, needed by health care workers and first responders across the country, as well as respirators and needed medical equipment.

• Protecting workers' wages. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is pursuing the owner of multiple restaurants for allegedly withholding wages and tips owed to workers recently laid off because of the COVID-19 crisis. His office also provided guidanceto other workers whose wages may have similarly been withheld. A group of 18 attorneys general urged the Trump Administration and the U.S. Department of Labor to suspend implementation of a new rule making it harder to find up-chain companies (like franchisers) liable for complying with wage and hour laws as joint employers. As a statement from New York AG Letitia James explains, the new rule woould make it harder for hourly workers to collect back wages.

• Advocating for paid leave for at-risk workers. A group of 15 attorneys general, led by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, called on Amazon and Whole Foods to immediately improve paid leave for employees during the emergency. Although the recently-enacted Families First Coronavirus Response Act guaranteed paid leave for some workplaces, it does not apply to employers with 500 or more employees.

• Providing clear and accessible public information. Some state attorney general offices have played an important public education role by providing information on their websites about employee rights and employer obligations. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued a press release informing workers of their rights under the state's paid sick leave law. District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine's office held a tele-town hall about workers' rights. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey posted COVID-19-related guidance for employers and workers, including information about unemployment insurance, paid sick leave, wage payment, and other issues, available in multiple languages. Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan issued workplace guidance on COVID-19-related concerns, to help workers and employers navigate a range of issues that arise.
• Protecting workers seeking safe working conditions. New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal and the state's securities regulator announced an emergency action allowing New Jersey financial services professionals (who presumably usually work in New York City) to work from home (thereby enabling social distancing) by exempting them from otherwise-applicable state registration and filing requirements. And New York Attorney General Letitia James stated that her office "is considering all legal options" in response to the termination of an Amazon worker who organized a walkout to protest the company's failure to ensure employee safety in a warehouse where workers had tested positive for COVID-19.
• Protecting laid-off workers from scams. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro issued a press release warning of scams preying on the newly unemployed: fake unemployment websites created with the purpose of stealing personal information or harvesting the data to sell to others.

The above actions are surely only the beginning. In coming weeks, state attorneys general are likely to use their extensive legal authority and considerable soft powers in many additional ways to protect their states' workers at this unprecedented moment.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The South’s worst unemployment numbers may be yet to come given social distancing delays in the region [feedly]

The South's worst unemployment numbers may be yet to come given social distancing delays in the region
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-souths-worst-unemployment-numbers-may-be-yet-to-come-given-social-distancing-delays-in-the-region/

The first set of data on unemployment insurance claims amid the coronavirus pandemic were unprecedented, but the hardest-hit areas were not generally states in the South. A second week of data shows a portrait of a disaster with 6.6 million people filing for unemployment insurance (UI) in the week ending March 28. Every single state has now reported a record number of claims during one of those two weeks.

Some Southern states were particularly hard hit, with North Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana all ranking among the five states with the largest two-week percent increase in UI claims. But since the most recent data is from the week ending March 28, the greatest spike in the South's unemployment may be yet to come. That's because there is strong evidence that much of the South (and broad swaths of the West) was not engaging in widespread social distancing by that week.

Many Southern policymakers were slow to accept that stopping the pandemic required social distancing, closing schools and nonessential businesses, and limiting public gatherings. Stay-at-home orders have only begun to ramp up in Southern states in recent days, and some Southern states still don't have them. For many businesses, layoffs and closures will only take place as these necessary public health measures are implemented, and the general public follows suit. Some of the Southern states that saw the largest increases in unemployment claims for the week ending March 28 were those that instituted stay-at-home orders earlier than others, like Kentucky and Louisiana. This suggests that the largest unemployment claims in many Southern states have yet to materialize.

Further, it is only now in the wake of the CARES Act's passage that some Southern states are waiving stringent eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits. This means that the early UI claims are the ones that made it through more onerous eligibility requirements, and as more Southern states loosen their eligibility requirements, more claims will be filed.

The failure of many Southern governors to quickly institute necessary public health measures will likely have disastrous effects, and the South's economic and social conditions leave it particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemics' dual health and economic crises. COVID-19 hits those with underlying health conditions hardest, and people in the South—where rates of chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are especially high—are particularly at risk. An overreliance on employer-provided health insurance and inadequate access to health care due to the failure of many Southern states to expand Medicaid create further inequities.

These decisions mean that the economic effects of the pandemic are going to be felt a bit later, and many Southern states are only beginning to see the damage show up in unemployment claims data. As states that instituted timelier public health measures are possibly able to bring their economies back in the coming months, Southern states will continue to be a drag on the U.S. economy.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Saez & Zucman: Jobs Aren’t Being Destroyed This Fast Elsewhere. Why Is That?

Jobs Aren't Being Destroyed This Fast Elsewhere. Why Is That?

It's not too late to start protecting employment or to make medical care for Covid-19 free.

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

text  only:

The authors are economists at the University of California, Berkeley.

The coronavirus pandemic is laying bare structural deficiencies in America's social programs. The relief package passed by Congress last week provides emergency fixes for some of these issues, but it also leaves critical problems untouched. To avoid a Great Depression, Congress must quickly design a more forceful response to the crisis.

Start with the labor market. In just one week, from March 15 to March 21, 3.3 million workers filed for unemployment insurance. According to some projections, the unemployment rate might rise as high as 30 percent in the second quarter of 2020.

This dramatic spike in jobless claims is an American peculiarity. In almost no other country are jobs being destroyed so fast. Why? Because throughout the world, governments are protecting employment. Workers keep their jobs, even in industries that are shut down. The government covers most of their wage through direct payments to employers. Wages are, in effect, socialized for the duration of the crisis.

Instead of safeguarding employment, America is relying on beefed-up unemployment benefits to shield laid-off workers from economic hardship. To give just one example, in both the United States and Britain, the government is asking restaurant workers to stay home. But in Britain, workers are receiving 80 percent of their pay (up to £2,500 a month, or $3,125) and are guaranteed to get their job back once the shutdown is over. In America, the workers are laid off; they must then file for unemployment insurance and wait for the economy to start up again before they can apply for a new job, and if all goes well, sign a new contract and resume working.

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Even if unemployment is generously compensated — as it is in the $2.2 trillion bill Congress passed — there is nothing efficient in letting the unemployment rate rise to double digits. Losing one's job is anxiety inducing. Applying for unemployment benefits is burdensome. The unemployment system risks being swamped soon by tens of millions of claims. Although some businesses may rehire their workers once the shutdown is over, others will have disappeared. When social distancing ends, millions of employer-employee relationships will have been destroyed, slowing down the recovery. In Europe, people will be able to return to work, as if they had been on a long, government-paid leave.

The battle for the speediest recovery starts today. The next congressional bill needs measures to protect employment for the duration of the shutdown. This does not raise insuperable technical difficulties. The bill passed last week provides support for wages in one industry, airlines. Congress could easily extend this program to other sectors. Some countries — like Germany, with its Kurzarbeit system, a policy aimed at job retention in times of crisis — already had the government infrastructure in place to send workers home while the state replaced most of their lost earnings. But several nations with no experience in that area — like Britain, Ireland and Denmark — were able to introduce brand-new employment guarantee programs on the fly during the epidemic.

This situation for laid-off workers would be bad enough if it were not aggravated by a second American peculiarity. As they are losing their jobs, many workers are also losing their employer-provided health insurance — and now find themselves faced with the Kafkaesque task of obtaining coverage on their own.

One option involves continuing to be covered by one's former employer, a program known as COBRA. It is prohibitively expensive: Participants have to bear the full cost of insurance, $20,500 per year on average. Another option is to go shopping for a plan on the Affordable Care Act insurance exchange, where one is faced with a bewildering choice between plans like Blue Shield's Bronze 60 PPO (with a deductible of up to $12,600 per year) and Aetna's Silver Copay HNOnly (with a $7,000 deductible and up to $14,000 in annual out-of-pocket expenses). The last option is to join the ranks of the uninsured, a catastrophic solution during a pandemic. There are reports that people have already died of Covid-19 because they refused to go to the hospital, worried about bills, or because they were denied treatment for lack of insurance.

The bill passed last week does nothing to reduce co-pays, deductibles or premiums on the insurance exchanges; nor does it reduce the price of COBRA. The next bill should introduce a Covidcare for All program. This federal program would guarantee access to Covid-19 care at no cost to all U.S. residents — no matter their employment status, age or immigration status. Fighting the pandemic starts with eradicating the spread of the virus, which means that everybody must be covered.

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Covidcare for All would also cover the cost of Covid-19 treatments for people who are insured. Insurance companies would be barred in return from hiking premiums, which might otherwise spike as much as 40 percent next year.

The United States also needs to ramp up its support to businesses. Since containing the epidemic requires government-mandated economic shutdowns, it is legitimate to expect the government, in return, to shelter businesses from the economic disruptions. To keep businesses alive through this crisis, the government should act as a payer of last resort. In other words, the government should pay not only wages of idled workers, but also essential business maintenance costs, like rents, utilities, interest on debt, health insurance premiums, and other costs that are vital for the survival of businesses in locked down sectors. This allows businesses to hibernate without bleeding cash and risking bankruptcy. Denmark was the first nation to announce such a program; it is being emulated by a growing number of countries, including Italy.

In the United States, calls to support businesses have been met with excessive skepticism so far. To be sure, the congressional relief package includes $350 billion in help for small businesses, but the program is complex, limited in scope and only a fraction of eligible businesses are likely to use it.

A liquidationist ideology seems to have infected minds on both the left and the right. On the right, opposition to government grants to businesses is grounded in the view that markets should be left to sort out the consequences of the pandemic. Let airlines go bankrupt; shareholders and bondholders will lose but the airlines will restructure and re-emerge. The best way government can help is by slashing taxes, according to this view. The relief package includes more than $200 billion in tax cuts for business profits.

This view is misguided. There is nothing efficient in the destruction of businesses that were viable before the virus outbreak. The crisis cannot be blamed on poorly managed corporations. Government support, in the case of a pandemic, does not create perverse incentives. Bankruptcies redistribute income, but in a chaotic and opaque way. And while bankruptcy might be a way to deal with the economic fallout of the pandemic for large corporations, it is not well adapted to small businesses. Without strong enough government support, many small businesses will have to liquidate. The death of a business has long-term costs: The links between entrepreneurs, workers and customers are destroyed and often need to be rebuilt from scratch.

On the left, a popular view contends that the government should help people, not corporations. It holds that big corporations acted badly before the crisis — buying back their shares, paying C.E.O.s exorbitant salaries — and should not be bailed out. If they are, in this view, they should be subject to strict conditions, like swearing off share buybacks, reducing C.E.O. pay, and a $15 minimum wage for their employees.

The concerns underlying this view are understandable. Inequality has surged since the beginning of the 1980s. This crisis, however, is unlike the financial crisis of 2008-9. The firms seeking aid today bear no direct responsibility for the disaster that threatens their survival. If the government mandates a shutdown for public health reasons, why should it attach any conditions to temporary financial support for directly affected industries?

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No doubt some companies will exploit loopholes in government relief plans. Some businesses, more broadly, will disproportionately benefit from the pandemic. While tens of thousands of brick-and-mortar stores are closed, Amazon sales rise. The Seattle-based company is one of the few S&P 500 firms whose stock price is higher today than at the beginning of the year. Cloud computing is exploding. Facebook traffic is booming.

But these windfall profits have a fair, comprehensive and transparent solution: The government should impose excess profits taxes, as it has done several times in the past during periods of crisis. In 1918, all profits made by corporations above and beyond an 8 percent rate of return on their capital were deemed abnormal, and abnormal profits were taxed at progressive rates of up to 80 percent. Similar taxes on excessive profits were applied during World War II and the Korean War. These taxes all had one goal — making sure that no one could benefit outrageously from a situation in which the masses suffered.

To help make this happen, the next bill needs an excess profits tax. If Congress fails to act, the pandemic could well reinforce two of the defining trends of the pre-coronavirus American economy: the rise of business concentration and the upsurge of inequality.

Some will say that the solutions we've outlined show excessive faith in government. They will correctly point out that some of these policies are undesirable in normal times. But these are not normal times. The big battles — be they wars or pandemics — are fought and won collectively. In this period of national crisis, hatred of the government is the surest path to self-destruction.

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) are economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the authors of "The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay."


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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV
Enlighten Radio
Socialist Economics
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