More than a half century after Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, President Joe Biden is planning to take on the nation’s enduring challenge of inequality with a mass expansion of government spending and a revamp of the tax code.
The effort, which Biden will start to detail in a speech Wednesday in Pittsburgh, is already proving just as divisive among economists as it is among lawmakers. While right-leaning economists warn about damage to overall growth from higher taxes on companies and the wealthiest Americans, liberals say the “trickle-down” approach of recent decades has failed and it’s time for a new strategy.
The president’s remarks will lay out the infrastructure portion of an overall package expected to total more than US$3 trillion. While social-spending programs will be outlined later in April, the administration’s drive to expand help for the poor will be visible even in infrastructure, through proposals such as the provision of safe drinking water.
“It’s important to acknowledge that we’ve seen decades of this rising economic inequality,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said last week in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. “The ultimate measure of success of the economy is how well it’s working for people all across these United States.”
For many, it’s not working well. The gaps between the richest Americans and the middle class, along with the lowest-income households, widened in the years before the pandemic struck — even amid the longest U.S. expansion on record. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is among those agreeing that inequality holds the economy back, something that contributed to the overhaul in long-term monetary policy strategy he’s instituted.
Halting or reversing the trend even with major changes in policy won’t come easily or quickly, economists widely agree.
“You’re turning a supertanker, and it’s taken us a generation and half to get here,” said Brad Delong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “But, yes, you can start to turn the supertanker.”
No single statistic captures the problem, but simple dispersions of wealth and income tell a discouraging tale:
Average incomes for the top 5 per cent of households were quadruple those of the middle fifth of Americans in 1979. That swelled to 5.7 times as much in 2007 and further to 6.6 times by 2018, U.S. Census data compiled by the Tax Policy Center show.
The net worth of the top 10 per cent of households in 1989 was 9.4 times that of the middle fifth, according to Fed data compiled by the Tax Policy Center. That increased to 13 times by 2007 and 17 times by 2017.
The share of total income going to upper-income households — defined as double the median level — surged to 48 per cent from 29 per cent from 1970 to 2018, according to the Pew Research Center. Middle-income households’ share of total earnings dropped to 43 per cent from 62 per cent.
Americans have long accepted some level of inequality, given the rationale that it reflects the rewards for hard work, risk-taking and ingenuity. Yet for researchers like John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University, the problem is not just about outcomes.
“It’s not just that there’s growing inequality from an ex-post perspective, but there’s tremendous inequality of opportunity,” he said.
He points to data showing how children who display similar academic abilities at very young ages, but come from different income and racial backgrounds and varying types of neighborhoods end up with very different outcomes when it comes to incomes and career advancement.
“It’s not just about who’s smart,” Friedman said. “And there’s almost universal agreement that having your life possibilities determined by the accident of your birth is not something we’re OK with.”
But economists are in sharp disagreement on whether Biden’s economic agenda will be well-aimed at addressing inequalities. One example: Biden is expected to propose free tuition at the nation’s community colleges.
Free Tuition
Glenn Hubbard, a Columbia University professor who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, has called community colleges “the logical workhorses of skill development.”
But in an interview, Hubbard said the free-tuition idea gets it “exactly backward” by subsidizing the demand for community colleges. He backs a supply-side concept of federal grants to those schools that are contingent on better graduation rates and employment outcomes after graduation.
And that’s not strictly a conservative approach. The proposal’s co-authors included Austan Goolsbee, who served as CEA chair under Democratic President Barack Obama.
There’s a wider divide over Biden’s tax policy.
Higher taxes on companies and the rich will only weaken the dynamic of wealth accumulation that drives investment, which in turn powers economic growth, conservatives argue.
“In this debate, there is a fair element of ‘We just need to punish the rich; they are rich inappropriately,’” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative research group. “With that, it’s hard to get agreement on policy.”
Liberal economists respond unapologetically, that so-called trickle-down economics — where overall economic growth lifts all boats across the income spectrum — just haven’t proved true over the last 40 years.
Spending on investment outside of housing rose an average of 3.4 per cent a year from 2000 through 2019, down from 5.2 per cent the prior two decades and a heady 7.2 per cent in the 1960s — when tax rates were substantially higher.
Companies have the cash to grow, but with wealth and income skewed to the top, “there’s not enough customers to buy the new output,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
OTTAWA – The federal government is expected to boost the minimum hourly wage that must be paid to temporary foreign workers in the high-wage stream as a way to encourage employers to hire more Canadian staff.
Under the current program’s high-wage labour market impact assessment (LMIA) stream, an employer must pay at least the median income in their province to qualify for a permit. A government official, who The Canadian Press is not naming because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the change, said Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault will announce Tuesday that the threshold will increase to 20 per cent above the provincial median hourly wage.
The change is scheduled to come into force on Nov. 8.
As with previous changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker program, the government’s goal is to encourage employers to hire more Canadian workers. The Liberal government has faced criticism for increasing the number of temporary residents allowed into Canada, which many have linked to housing shortages and a higher cost of living.
The program has also come under fire for allegations of mistreatment of workers.
A LMIA is required for an employer to hire a temporary foreign worker, and is used to demonstrate there aren’t enough Canadian workers to fill the positions they are filling.
In Ontario, the median hourly wage is $28.39 for the high-wage bracket, so once the change takes effect an employer will need to pay at least $34.07 per hour.
The government official estimates this change will affect up to 34,000 workers under the LMIA high-wage stream. Existing work permits will not be affected, but the official said the planned change will affect their renewals.
According to public data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 183,820 temporary foreign worker permits became effective in 2023. That was up from 98,025 in 2019 — an 88 per cent increase.
The upcoming change is the latest in a series of moves to tighten eligibility rules in order to limit temporary residents, including international students and foreign workers. Those changes include imposing caps on the percentage of low-wage foreign workers in some sectors and ending permits in metropolitan areas with high unemployment rates.
Temporary foreign workers in the agriculture sector are not affected by past rule changes.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2024.
OTTAWA – The parliamentary budget officer says the federal government likely failed to keep its deficit below its promised $40 billion cap in the last fiscal year.
However the PBO also projects in its latest economic and fiscal outlook today that weak economic growth this year will begin to rebound in 2025.
The budget watchdog estimates in its report that the federal government posted a $46.8 billion deficit for the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland pledged a year ago to keep the deficit capped at $40 billion and in her spring budget said the deficit for 2023-24 stayed in line with that promise.
The final tally of the last year’s deficit will be confirmed when the government publishes its annual public accounts report this fall.
The PBO says economic growth will remain tepid this year but will rebound in 2025 as the Bank of Canada’s interest rate cuts stimulate spending and business investment.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
OTTAWA – Statistics Canada says the level of food insecurity increased in 2022 as inflation hit peak levels.
In a report using data from the Canadian community health survey, the agency says 15.6 per cent of households experienced some level of food insecurity in 2022 after being relatively stable from 2017 to 2021.
The reading was up from 9.6 per cent in 2017 and 11.6 per cent in 2018.
Statistics Canada says the prevalence of household food insecurity was slightly lower and stable during the pandemic years as it fell to 8.5 per cent in the fall of 2020 and 9.1 per cent in 2021.
In addition to an increase in the prevalence of food insecurity in 2022, the agency says there was an increase in the severity as more households reported moderate or severe food insecurity.
It also noted an increase in the number of Canadians living in moderately or severely food insecure households was also seen in the Canadian income survey data collected in the first half of 2023.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct 16, 2024.
