(Bloomberg Opinion) — Joe Biden has been elected to be the next President of the United States. Now he’ll have to get creative.
When the President-elect takes office, he’ll confront the country’s two most acute challenges: an ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the economic damage it’s wrought. But he’ll have an uphill battle to enact the sort of bold policy agenda that many supporters were hoping for.
Barring a January surprise in Georgia’s runoff election, Republicans are likely to retain control of the Senate, denying Biden the unified control of government that his predecessors enjoyed when they came into office. With traditional relief and stimulus measures limited by opposition party intransigence, Biden might still be able to pass policies designed to resuscitate the stricken service sector directly.
The U.S. economy has bounced rapidly back since April, but only partially. Employment has only recovered about halfway to where it was before Covid-19 struck, giving it the shape of a reverse square-root sign:
Lower-wage employees, who tend to work at the local services businesses most deeply impacted by the virus, are suffering more.
The economy is being afflicted by two simultaneous maladies. The first is continued fear of the virus, now in the middle of a devastating third wave. Fear, more than lockdowns, has kept Americans shut inside their homes, reluctant to take the risk of going out to shop or eat. That in turn gives rise to the second problem of decreased demand, which filters through the entire economy.
Fear of the virus will eventually be reduced by vaccines, which may become available in early 2021. A national program of testing and contact tracing — which President Donald Trump long resisted — would also help speed Covid-19 on its way, and should be a priority for the incoming administration. But even when the virus is gone, the economy is likely to remain depressed for awhile, as the overhang of unemployment works its way out of the system.
Bold relief measures, of the type that sustained Americans through the pandemic’s dark early days, probably won’t be forthcoming given the GOP Senate’s inevitable turn towards austerity. The same is true of traditional fiscal stimulus, such as a burst of infrastructure spending, that might help boost demand back to normal levels. But there might be a chance for more targeted measures to help the sectors of the economy that Covid-19 has hurt the most — local services.
Restaurants, shops, and other establishments that cater in person to customers have gone bust in large numbers. After the threat of the virus has passed, the U.S. government might try to resuscitate local economies by subsidizing new shops to fill the empty storefronts that now dot America’s urban landscape. Some of these new establishments would be run by the same owners whose businesses went under during the pandemic, while others would be run by enterprising newcomers. But all would be able to draw on the local pool of unemployed, most of whom were working in these same types of businesses in 2019.
Subsidizing new local businesses would accomplish several goals at once. It would put people back to work at jobs they know how to do, and start pumping demand through the ecosystems of local economies. It would help prevent cities’ commercial retail space from being riddled with unsightly boarded-up vacancies — a blight that hurts viable businesses next door. And it would help sustain and preserve the small business class.
This last aspect might make local business formation subsidies attractive to Republicans in the Senate; small businesspeople are a reliable Republican constituency. Additionally, this policy would be highly targeted; the subsidies could last only until a town’s existing commercial vacancies had been mostly filled, limiting the cost of the program and avoiding the appearance of handing out money at random.
Strict free-market adherents might worry that this plan would delay or prevent needed transformation in the U.S.’s industrial mix. The pandemic has shifted demand from local services to e-commerce; people are watching Netflix instead of going to movie theaters, and ordering things off of Amazon instead of buying them in stores. Some will question whether reversing that shift should be an economic priority.
But the benefit of quickly and cheaply resuscitating local U.S. economies far outweighs the danger of slightly delaying the evolution to a more online future. In fact, local business formation subsidies will simply accelerate a move that’s already in place; new business filings have been above trend since August, as entrepreneurs take advantage of cheap rents and labor. The local economy is restoring itself already — it could just use a push to get the job done faster.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.
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.
