Last December, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued a proposal to allow employers to collect their workers’ tips, ostensibly to distribute them more evenly through tip pools. However, the rule was written in such a way that it would have made it legal for employers to simply pocket tips. This would have been a major windfall to restaurant owners and other employers of tipped workers, out of the pockets of people who work for tips. We estimated that if that rule were finalized, workers would lose $5.8 billion a year in tips, with $4.6 billion of that coming from the pockets of women working in tipped jobs.

Because of the overwhelming outcry from workers and allies in response to the proposal, along with excellent investigative journalism that uncovered the administration’s cover-up of its analysis showing the rule would be terrible for workers, DOL came to the table to hammer out a compromise. As a result, last week’s spending bill included a provision that makes it clear that employers may not keep any tips received by their employees, and ramps up the punishment for violations. Those things are huge wins for workers.

The clear next steps for protecting workers in tipped occupations are eliminating the tip credit for minimum wage employers, enforcing one minimum wage for all workers regardless of whether they receive tips, and substantially increasing the federal minimum wage. The rest of this post explains why these next steps are so crucial.

It is not uncommon for servers in restaurants to voluntarily share a portion of their tips with kitchen staff. A provision in the spending bill passed last week allows employers to operate tip pools between tipped workers and “back-of-the-house” or other non-tipped workers. Under the new rules, employers can operate these pools if they pay their tipped workers a base wage of at least the federal minimum wage, which is currently $7.25—i.e. employers cannot operate a tip pool between tipped and non-tipped workers if they use a tip credit to cover any wages up to $7.25 an hour. Non-tipped workers in tip pools must still be paid a base wage of the full minimum wage in their city or state. And, as always, the total pay of tipped workers (base wage plus tips) must be at least the full minimum wage in their city or state.

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It is now widely recognized that the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is a uniquely powerful economic policymaking position. More crucially, it’s likely the most important such position that is not chosen by President Trump. Given the poor choices Trump has already made in choosing the leadership of the Fed, it is more important than ever to make a great choice for the NY Fed presidency.

The process so far has not been encouraging. Several on a list of highly qualified and diverse candidates were not contacted by the NY Fed. Worse, the leading candidate in today’s news reports wasn’t even being mentioned a week ago. This is not how a transparent and publicly accountable process should work, and it’s why the Fed needs fundamental reform.

This leading candidate is John Williams, the current president of the San Francisco Fed. Hiring the current leader of another regional Fed bank hardly constitutes out-of-the-box thinking for the NY Fed. Further, while Williams has done valuable economic research, his tenure as a policymaker at the Fed is frankly disappointing. He has consistently underestimated how much lower the unemployment rate could sustainably go. In 2012, he even thought that 6.5 percent might be the lower limit on the unemployment rate. Since then, he has modified his estimates, but he has seemingly not been chastened about making firm before-the-fact predictions about how low unemployment could go before sparking accelerating inflation.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has lost some of its leading proponents for testing the lower limits of unemployment, and has gained some members who have been deeply wrong in arguing that unemployment should not be allowed to fall as far and fast as it has in recent years. Shifting John Williams from the San Francisco Fed to the NY Fed does nothing to push back on this drift of the FOMC away from valuing genuine full employment.Read more

The GOP-led Congress is aiming to pass an omnibus appropriations bill to fund the federal government before the current temporary spending bill expires on March 23, 2018. Part of the negotiations include a major effort by legislators in both parties—who are being bombarded by corporate lobbyists in the hospitality, seafood, landscaping, and construction industries—to expand the H-2B temporary migrant worker program. We estimate the proposal would increase the number of H-2B workers that employers can hire in lesser-skilled occupations by at least 73 percent, from 66,000 per year to 114,000.

The H-2B program—like other temporary migrant worker programs—is not a work program that brings immigrants to the United States with equal rights and the option to stay permanently. Instead, it is used by employers carve out a lawless zone in the labor market where migrant workers have few workplace rights in practice, because they arrive indebted to labor recruiters and indentured to U.S. employers.

Nevertheless, rather than focusing on the most urgent immigration issues at hand, including a path to citizenship for immigrants who are in danger of becoming undocumented, like DACA recipients, and those who have Temporary Protected Status, Congress is instead focusing on making changes to temporary worker programs via the appropriations process. Congress has done this a number of times in recent years, something that Republican Senate Judiciary Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic Ranking Member Sen. Diane Feinstein came together last year to criticize for usurping the committee’s jurisdiction over immigration legislation. Other Senators have done the same, including Dick Durbin and Bernie Sanders. The New York Times editorial page and migrant worker advocates alike have also criticized this end-around the normal legislative process.

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The H-2A guestworker program provides an unlimited number of temporary work visas to agricultural employers to hire farmworkers from abroad to fill temporary or seasonal jobs lasting for less than one year. Last year, over 200,000 H-2A jobs were certified by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)—the most ever—despite the many abuses and exploitation that continues to occur at the hands of employers and labor recruiters. Members of Congress are currently negotiating and debating the fiscal 2018 omnibus appropriations bill to fund the federal government, and hope to pass it before the current temporary spending bill expires on March 23, 2018. On the table is a proposal to allow employers to use the H-2A program to fill year-round, permanent jobs in agriculture with H-2A workers who have few rights and no path to permanence and citizenship. It was first proposed in July 2017 by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) but never became law.

We have already explained why making H-2A year-round via appropriations is a bad idea, but one other major consequence that Congress should consider is that it will result in allowing agricultural employers to pay much lower wages to H-2A workers in year-round jobs than they pay to the Americans and immigrants who are currently employed in those jobs.

Making H-2A year-round would expand the scope of H-2A by allowing employers offering year-round employment on dairy, livestock, and poultry and egg farms, as well as in nurseries and greenhouses and other non-seasonal agricultural occupations, to hire H-2A workers—bringing H-2A workers into sectors that offer approximately 260,000 year-round full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs. Table 1 lists some of the main year-round agricultural industries in major agricultural states, accounting for 123,000 of the 260,000 full-time equivalent jobs, and shows how much farmworkers earned annually, on average in 2016 in those occupations (according to the Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages, from DOL).

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On Valentine’s Day, a 19 year-old with a legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle stormed into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and murdered 14 students, and 3 educators. In Florida, an AR-15 military-style assault rifle is easier to buy than a handgun. Understandably, many of the students who survived the mass shooting and the families of the 17 victims have called for a change in the law, arguing that it shouldn’t be so easy to legally purchase weapons that powerful. I write here not to weigh in on the merits of any given gun law, but to comment on the process of advocating for legislative change, and the challenges at the local level with the preemption laws on the books.

In terms of advocating for a change in federal law, Congress’s ban on AR-15s and other semiautomatic assault weapons expired in 2004, and federal lawmakers have not been able to pass a similar ban since.

In terms of advocating for change in state law, dozens of Florida high school students recently loaded onto buses and drove to the Florida state capital to lobby for a bill banning assault rifles, which was voted down by the state’s House of Representatives.

In terms of advocating for a change in gun laws at the city and county level, the students, families of the victims, or anyone else won’t even have a chance because of Florida’s preemption law. “Preemption” in this context refers to a situation in which a state law is enacted to block a local ordinance from taking effect—or dismantle an existing ordinance.

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The past year has provided countless examples of the ways in which our nation’s labor and employment laws fail workers. From the #MeToo social media campaign that helped expose that for many women sexual harassment is a daily fact of life in the workplace to a recent report revealing that the vast majority (74 percent) of Uber and Lyft drivers earn less than the minimum wage in their state, it is clear that American workers need policymakers to act to reform the current system of worker protections. That is why stories like the one in Vox today that some congressional lawmakers require unpaid interns to sign broad nondisclosure agreements that may discourage them from speaking out if they experience harassment or encounter other workplace issues are so troubling. How can we expect our elected representatives to legislate effective worker protection measures when they themselves adopt exploitative employment practices?

Congress has a long history of exempting itself from workplace protection measures. When the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, Congress exempted itself from coverage. When the Civil Rights Act, including Title VII which protected workers from employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, was signed into law, Congress again exempted itself from these protections. It was not until 1995 that Congress passed the Congressional Accountability Act, finally extending workplace protections to congressional staff. However, recent reports of congressional settlements surrounding harassment claims have shown that Congress is not holding itself accountable for workplace protections.

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In 1967, young black men rioted in over 150 cities, often spurred by overly aggressive policing, not unlike the provocations of recent disturbances. The worst in 1967 were in Newark, after police beat a taxi driver for having a revoked permit, and Detroit, after 82 party-goers were arrested at a peaceful celebration for returning Vietnam War veterans, held at an unlicensed social club.

President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission to investigate. Chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner (New York City’s mayor John Lindsay was vice-chair), it issued its report 50 years ago today. Publicly available, it was a best-seller, indicting racial discrimination in housing, employment, health care, policing, education, and social services, and attributing the riots to pent-up frustration in low-income black neighborhoods. Residents’ lack of Fambition or effort did not cause these conditions: rather, “[w]hite institutions created [the ghetto], white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it… [and is] essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”

The report warned that continued racial segregation and discrimination would engender “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” So little has changed since 1968 that the report remains worth reading as a near-contemporary description of racial inequality.

Of course, not everything about race relations is unchanged. Perhaps most dramatic has been growth of the black middle class, integrated into mainstream corporate leadership, politics, universities, and professions. We’re still far from equality—affirmative action remains a necessity—but such progress was unimaginable in 1968. Today, 23 percent of young adult African Americans have bachelor’s degrees, still considerably below whites’ 42 percent but more than double the black rate 50 years ago.

In the mid-1960s, I assisted in a study of Chicago’s power elite. We identified some 4,000 policymaking positions in the non-financial corporate sector. Not one was held by an African American. The only black executives were at banks and insurance companies serving black neighborhoods. Today, any large corporation would face condemnation, perhaps litigation, if no African American had achieved executive responsibility.

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New Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testified before Congress this week, roughly a month after replacing Janet Yellen. The key question many have is whether or not a change in personnel will mark a break with past policy. If it does, and if the Fed starts crediting arguments for raising interest rates that they correctly rejected before, then today’s low unemployment rate might be unfortunately short-lived.

Under Yellen’s leadership, the Fed was notably “dovish” in that it strove to keep monetary policy expansionary with the goal of pushing unemployment down, rather than contractionary in the service of guarding against an outbreak of inflation. Her replacement, Jerome Powell, served on the Fed’s Board of Governors with Yellen between 2012 and early 2018. Powell was by most accounts supportive of the policy path blazed by Yellen, so in that sense a radical change in the Fed’s stance would be surprising. But Yellen wasn’t just a dovish vote on the Fed, she was an intellectual leader in the defense of expansionary monetary policy over the past decade. As a highly respected academic macroeconomist and policymaker, Yellen had the ability and confidence to push back hard on weak arguments about why the Fed should reverse course and begin worrying about containing inflation rather than pushing down unemployment.

One of these weak arguments is that the Fed needs to raise rates faster and sooner so that when the next recession hits, there will be enough “room” to lower them. Proponents of this argument point out that in previous recessions the Fed lowered the short-term “policy” interest rates that it controls by 3–5 percentage points in an effort to restart growth. Today these rates are at 1.5 percent, and, they really can’t go much below zero for any extended period of time. This “zero lower bound” (ZLB) on interest rates is driven by the fact that once these rates hit zero, wealth-holders will just stop demanding bonds and will be happy to hold cash instead. This means that further Fed purchases of bonds to lower rates will have no effect. What hitting the ZLB means for policy is that we could enter the next recession without the ability of the Fed to lower policy rates as far as they have in the past.

While the constraints put on monetary policymaking by the ZLB are real, raising rates now to clear out room for cutting them later remains a silly idea. First, raising rates sooner and further doesn’t just give the Fed more interest rate “room” to fight the next recession, it also makes the next recession more likely. Post-war recessions have largely occurred because of asset market bubbles popping or the Fed raising rates too far and too fast.

An analogy might help point out the absurdity of this. Say that your house is a cool 50 degrees and you hike the thermostat to your desired temperature of 70 degrees. After the heat has been running for a while, the house has warmed to 60 degrees, and your roommate argues you should turn the thermostat off because if the room gets really cold again, you’ll want “room” to warm it by cranking the thermostat up again.

Does this make sense? Of course not. So long as one believes that the economy has not warmed up to its optimal setting, then one should not be using policy tools to cool it back down. Is there a convenient summary measure that can guide us as to whether or not the economy is running hot enough? There are lots, actually, but let’s use the Fed’s own announced measure: 2 percent price inflation. The economy has been running beneath this 2 percent inflation target for years now, and there is little evidence of any acceleration. Further, if one excludes rental prices, then inflation has been even lower. Fighting rent inflation (which occurs due to low supply of housing units relative to demand) by raising interest rates which will curtail home-building would be perverse.

So, the economy is by the Fed’s own definition not running hot enough, yet they’ve already begun raising rates to cool it off, backed in part by arguments that this is necessary because one day they might want to try to heat it back up. This is a terrible way to prepare for the next recession.

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There is no starker metric for our unequal age than the stagnation of American wages over the last generation. Since 1973, productivity has grown about 75 percent, while the compensation of the typical worker has grown only about 12 percent. Since 1979, the hourly median wage has grown less than 10 percent in real dollars, or an average annual raise of barely 4 cents. While wages grew for many workers in 2017, wage growth is still far slower—and more unequal—than where it needs to be.

The interactive graphic below shows the change in real (inflation-adjusted) wages by wage decile, with drop-down filters for gender, race, educational attainment, and time period. This affords comparison of the wage gains (or losses) experienced by particular workers, and comparison across the full 1979–2017 span, or its constituent business cycles. The choice of “African-American” and “1979–1989,” for example, charts how black workers fared during the dismal 1980s; the choice of “BA or higher” and “2009–2017” charts how well-educated workers fared during the long recovery from the Great Recession.

There are a lot of moving pieces here—including shifting economic opportunities, changes in educational attainment, policy drifts and shifts, and five recessions that swallow up almost 6 of the 39 years since 1979. But here are four key takeaways:

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Ron Blackwell, a friend to EPI since its early days, died on February 25.

Ron had a long career in the labor movement, starting with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in New York, moving to the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. until he retired in 2012.

Raised in Alabama, he was a steadfast defender of the rights of working people and a life-long enemy of economic injustice in its many forms.

He pioneered in the design and management of campaigns to use the financial and pension assets of labor unions as a tool of organizing and collective bargaining.

Having studied economics and political economy at the New School, he understood how elite decisions hidden from the public can destroy efforts by ordinary people to better their lives. His was a relentless voice urging the labor movement to demand a seat at the table of economic policy. He also played an important role in efforts to create international labor solidarity in a world of globalizing capital.

Above all, Ron Blackwell was the rare man of principle who actually had the courage of his convictions. As a young man, he chose to go to prison rather than submit to those who were waging the unjust and terrible war in Vietnam. In his years as a labor advocate, he was quick to spot hypocrisy among political leaders, who—as the late mineworkers’ leader John L. Lewis once put it—“supped at labor’s table and sheltered in labor’s house” but then, “cursed with equal impartiality both labor and its adversaries.”

Ron told it like it was.

EPI, the labor movement, and the country have lost a valiant warrior in the struggle for justice.

Anniversaries of major events are nearly irresistible opportunities to reflect on the past, often with the hope that there has been some progress. So it is this year, 50 years after the Kerner Commission Report on Civil Disorders found systemic inequality and racial discrimination to be at the root of riots across America.

In a new report, Janelle Jones, John Schmitt and I present statistics showing what life was like for African Americans in this country 50 years ago compared to now. That document is a straightforward, unfiltered presentation of the facts, covering a wide range of economic, social, and health outcomes. In the spirit of reflection, I want to use this blog post to focus on racial economic inequality in the labor market, which directly affects approximately 20 million African Americans who get up every day and either go to work or go to find work.

The bottom line is simple. Despite decades of policies, programs, protests and outstanding achievements by African American men and women in many aspects of American life, race far too often remains a deciding factor in the economic status of African Americans relative to whites.

Great strides have been made toward raising educational attainment among African Americans and closing the education gap relative to whites, especially with regard to completing high school. In 1968, just over half (54.4 percent) of African American adults age 25-29 were high school graduates, compared to nearly three-quarters (75.0 percent) of whites. In 2016, 92.3 percent of African American adults age 25-29 were high school graduates with 22.8 percent having gone on to complete a bachelor’s degree or higher (up from 9.1 percent in 1968). Among whites, 95.6 percent are high school graduates and 42.1 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher (up from 16.2 percent in 1968).

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In the context of this week’s immigration debate in the Senate, Republican Senators will push for the reforms in the Secure and Succeed Act of 2018, which reflect the White House’s policy priorities for immigration. It’s likely, however, that one or more Senators will try to attach legislation to increase the number of temporary migrant workers who lack adequate wage and worker protections onto any bill that emerges. The thrust of any guestworker proposals that may arise will be to widen the essentially lawless zone in the labor market that has been carved out by the proliferation of temporary work visa programs, which put American and permanent immigrant workers into competition with temporary migrants who are denied all opportunity to bargain meaningfully for higher wages. This week’s debate in the Senate should prioritize providing a path to citizenship for DREAMers, not opportunistically expanding the share of workers in America who are not protected by labor standards.

As the Los Angeles Times recently suggested, there may be an attempt to include a bill from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that would triple the number of college-educated temporary migrant workers who are employed in the H-1B visa program—a flawed guestworker program used mainly to outsource jobs in information technology and send high-tech jobs offshore. Hatch’s bill is known as I-Squared, and although Hatch is trying to sell it as an increase in “merit-based” immigration, it is primarily an attempt to increase the number of temporary migrant workers the tech industry can hire at low wages.

There is no question in anyone’s mind that the United States will always need to attract the best and brightest workers from abroad, and many employers claim the H-1B visas is a tool to achieve that. But any migrant workers who enter the U.S. labor market must do so with equal rights, fair pay, and a quick path to permanent residence and citizenship that the worker controls—not the employer. Unfortunately, the H-1B guestworker program fails to meet any of those requirements. Hatch’s I-Squared bill would exacerbate the problems the H-1B program creates by vastly increasing the number of H-1B workers while failing to fix the three main problems with the H-1B program: first, employers are allowed to legally underpay H-1B workers compared to similarly situated U.S. workers; second, employers do not have to recruit U.S. workers before hiring H-1B workers, allowing them to ignore the U.S. workforce altogether; and third, the H-1B program allows employers to replace U.S. workers with much lower-paid H-1B workers—a deplorable practice that has occurred far too many times—and the laid-off workers are often forced to train their own H-1B replacements as a condition of their severance pay.

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Spurred on by President Trump’s ending of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative in September 2017, on Monday the Senate began an “open-ended” debate on immigration, which is set to only last for this week. The debate is centered around possible legislation to legalize and provide a path to citizenship for the up to 1.8 million unauthorized immigrants who entered the United States as minors, known as DREAMers, including the 700,000 current recipients of DACA. Without the protection of DACA or new legislation, DACA recipients will be left without the ability to attend college or work legally, leaving them unable to access labor and employment law protections because they’ll fear deportation. Passing a bill that legalizes DACA recipients and DREAMers is an urgent priority that Congress should focus on, but the debate will unfortunately spend far too much time this week on adding new immigration enforcement measures and cutting the number of permanent immigrant visas (also known as “green cards”).

The White House and some Republican senators have made it clear that in return for DREAMer legalization, they’d like a large expansion in immigration enforcement and cuts to the number of immigrants that can become permanent residents and American citizens in the future. It is obvious to any rational observer that President Trump intentionally created a crisis for DREAMers by ending DACA as a way to achieve these immigration policy goals—which reflect the misguided and draconian priorities of his administration and Republicans on the hard-right—in exchange for ending the crisis Trump created. Both Republican Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ariz.) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have expressed their support for Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley’s Secure and Succeed Act of 2018—which is based on the White House’s proposed framework for an immigration deal that includes DREAMer legalization—and both believe it’s the only piece of legislation that can become law. Other Republican Senators who have co-sponsored the Secure and Succeed legislation include Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), David Perdue (R-Ga.), and James Lankford (R-Okla.).

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The Trump administration has released another variation of their long-dormant infrastructure plan. Just like the previous version, the plan amounts to empty talk. To understand why, one must examine the fiscal year 2019 budget proposal, released alongside their infrastructure proposal. While the administration trumpets an infrastructure plan, their budget radically cuts federal investments.

Even their trumpeting of the stand-alone infrastructure plan is hugely misleading. Instead of the $1 trillion being claimed by the administration (already pared back from the $1.5 trillion they claimed they’d be investing in infrastructure in earlier discussions), the plan only calls for $200 billion in federal funds. Finding the rest of the $1 trillion will be left overwhelmingly to states and localities, despite the fact that they already bear the brunt of paying for public infrastructure spending. In total, state and local governments account for 77 percent of public infrastructure spending in the United States. They account for 62 percent of capital investment and 88 percent of operations and maintenance. It is odd to argue that the United States needs a substantial infrastructure push to deal with past underinvestment, and then to propose that the same system that yielded this underinvestment—relying too much on state and local governments—should just be continued. If we want a real investment in infrastructure, continuing to kick the problem to state and local governments won’t solve anything.

The Trump administration will claim that their plans are different because they will leverage the private sector. This claim doesn’t change anything. Private entities will not build infrastructure for free, but will expect a return on investment. That means state and local governments will have to pay for the infrastructure with taxes, tolls, or other user fees. And if state and local governments predictably dodge the task of financing and funding projects directly, public-private partnerships come with their own set of problems, as natural monopoly characteristics can leave the private partner in a position to hike tolls and degrade service quality.

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Conventional wisdom is firming up quickly around the story that recent stock price declines are a result of the market realizing (in proper Wile E. Coyote fashion) that the economy has overheated. This conclusion is far too premature and ignores plenty of contrary evidence.

The story goes that the 2.9 percent year-over-year wage growth in last Friday’s jobs report is a signal that a tsunami of inflation is heading our way. This would force the Fed to step in and stop the inflationary wave by sharply hiking interest rates. Higher interest rates, in turn, can depress stock prices both by restraining overall growth and by attracting people towards buying bonds rather than stocks. The fiscal stimulus provided by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and new higher spending caps is thought to add fuel to an already raging economic fire (side note: the TCJA is expensive in budgetary terms, but is so inefficient as fiscal stimulus that its effect is very easy to overstate).

People have gotten way ahead of the facts on this. Yes, the unemployment rate is low, but it’s certainly been this low or lower for a longer span of time without the economy overheating. In 1999 and 2000, the unemployment rate averaged 4.1 percent for two years (and sat below 4 percent for five months), and core inflation nudged up for sure but never broke 2 percent (and the Fed had not even specified a 2 percent target in those years).

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The U.S. Census Bureau reported that the annual U.S. trade deficit in goods and services increased from $504.8 billion to $566.1 billion from 2016 to 2017, an increase of $61.2 billion (12.1 percent). The rapid growth of the overall U.S. trade deficit reflects the failure of Trump administration trade policies to materially affect trade flows in its first year, and its failure to address currency misalignment and prolonged overvaluation of the U.S. dollar.

The U.S. goods trade deficit increased from $752.5 billion in 2016 to $810.0 billion in 2017, an increase of $57.5 billion (7.6 percent). The U.S. goods trade deficit is dominated by the trade deficit in manufactured products (including re-exports), which increased from $648.7 billion in 2016 to $699.8 in 2017, an increase of $51.1 billion (7.9 percent). Rapidly growing trade deficits in manufactured goods are a threat to future employment in this sector, which remains a large employer despite decades of policy-inflicted decline.

The U.S. trade deficit with China reached a new record of $375.2 billion in 2017, up from $347 billion in 2016, an increase of $28.2 billion (8.1 percent). China is a particular source of concern in trade in steel and aluminum, industries in which that country has accumulated massive amounts of subsidized, and often state-owned excess production capacity, over the past two decades. The president needs to promptly take trade action in pending national security investigations in these sectors.

The remainder of the goods trade deficit is composed of trade in petroleum and other energy products, and miscellaneous transactions. The United States also had a small trade surplus in agricultural commodities, which reached $22.1 billion (including re-exports) in 2017. The U.S. surplus in services trade declined from $247.7 billion in 2016 to $244.0 billion in 2017, a decline of $3.7 billion (1.5 percent).

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Last week, Janelle Jones and I released a new study showing that opening an Amazon fulfillment center does not actually boost overall employment in the county where it opens. Analyzing data for counties in 19 states containing Amazon fulfillment centers, we found that within two years, the opening of such a facility leads to a 30 percent increase in warehouse and storage employment in the surrounding county. However, this does not lead to an increase in overall employment in the county.

In response to our study, Amazon circulated a comment arguing that “Amazon’s investments led to the creation of 200,000 additional non-Amazon jobs” and “counties that have received Amazon investment have seen the unemployment rate drop by 4.8 percentage points on average.”

Both of these claims are misleading. First, although it’s true that unemployment fell during the economic recovery in places that Amazon opened fulfillment centers, unemployment also fell substantially in places without an Amazon presence at all. Nationally, over 2010–2016, unemployment fell by 4.7 percentage points—essentially the same as the 4.8 percentage point fall Amazon touts—even though most areas of the country did not have an Amazon warehouse. Amazon is simply riding the tide of the national economic recovery. Unlike the analysis that Amazon presented, our study actually accounts for employment changes that are happening regardless of Amazon during the recession and recovery, by controlling for national, regional, and state-specific employment shocks.

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If you follow the news, it’s hard to avoid the constant claims that President Trump has made, taking credit for a strong economy. This claim raises a bunch of questions, but a tl;dr assessment of the Trump economy in 2018 is pretty simple: It’s good, but not great. The Trump administration deserves zero credit for its pockets of strength. And everything they’ve done on economic policy indicates that they will be terrible macroeconomic managers, and will bungle any challenge that comes their way in the next few years.

The longer version of this is below.

The economy going into 2018: Good, but not great

By almost any measure, the economy today is stronger than it has been in a decade. But that’s a really low bar! This decade began with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the economy’s growth has been severely hamstrung ever since. After eight-and-a-half years of steady recovery, the unemployment rate today sits at 4.1 percent, lower even than its pre-Great Recession level. This is unambiguously good news. But other measures of health in the job market tell a bit less-rosy story.

For example, the share of “prime-age” adults (between the ages of 25 and 54) with a job remains below its pre-Great Recession peak even after years of improvement. We would need to add millions more jobs to push it back to levels it reached in the not-so-distant past of the early 2000s. Wage growth also remains distressingly weak, and this wage weakness has blunted the incentive for employers to make productivity-enhancing investments. After all, there’s not much point in spending money to economize on labor costs when workers are cheap and easy to find.

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After the passage of the GOP Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in December, multiple companies announced decisions to give out bonuses or raise wages for workers and claimed that these decisions were driven by the corporate tax cuts embedded in the TCJA. Since proponents of the tax bill sold it to the public based on claims that corporate rate cuts would trickle down to typical workers, it’s no surprise those proponents would point to these companies’ announcements and claim vindication for their claims. And far too much reporting took the claims of corporations at face value, though some recent exceptions stand out as being much better at evaluating those claims.

While we’re not surprised by the cynicism of these corporate claims, that doesn’t change the fact that there is absolutely no economic evidence to think they’re true. What these companies are doing amounts to nothing more than PR. As we’ll detail, immediately handing out bonuses and raises is simply not how the economic theory that links corporate tax cuts to wage growth works. And we aren’t the only ones pointing this out. Companies are engaged in a clear campaign to gin up support for unpopular corporate tax cuts by crediting each new check they write to those tax cuts.

We’ve spent plenty of time detailing why we think corporate tax cuts won’t actually end up raising wages in the real-world, but even the theory that links corporate tax cuts to wages looks nothing like the campaign corporations are currently engaged in.

Here’s how that economic theory actually works: Corporate tax cuts increase the after-tax returns to owning capital like stocks and bonds. These higher after-tax returns induce households to save more. Higher after-tax profitability incentivizes firms to invest more and the new savings needed to finance these investments come from increased household savings in response to higher returns. The resulting investments in plant and equipment give workers better tools with which to do their jobs, and this boosts productivity (how much income or output is generated in an average hour of work). In turn, these increases in productivity are seamlessly translated into across-the-board wage growth.

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February 3, 2018 marks one year since President Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum to “review” the fiduciary rule. This was just two weeks into his administration, a clear signal that undermining this common sense rule is a top priority for the administration.

If fully implemented, the fiduciary rule would require that financial professionals presenting themselves as investment advisers act in their clients’ best interests. The rule is needed because “conflicted” advice leads to lower investment returns, causing real losses for workers saving for retirement—an estimated $17 billion a year—for the clients who are victimized. The rule would prohibit common practices such as steering clients toward investments that pay the adviser a commission but provide the client a lower rate of return. It was exhaustively researched by the Department of Labor and debated over several years, survived several court challenges, and was completed in 2016. It was supposed to be implemented on April 10, 2017.

However, unscrupulous players in the financial industry are working to kill the rule so they can continue fleecing retirement savers—and the Trump administration is doing everything it can to help them out. Here’s the rundown of the fiduciary rule shenanigans from Trump’s first year:

February 3, 2017: President Trump issues a Presidential Memorandum ordering the Labor Department to needlessly reexamine the fiduciary rule.

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The United Nations Secretary General (UNSG) released a report in January 2018 titled Making migration work for all, that laid out four “considerations” to guide governments negotiating a Global Compact for Migration, an agreement to promote more “safe, orderly, and regular” international migration. The four considerations focus on how to maximize migration’s benefits, increase labor migration, address the legitimate security concerns of unauthorized migration, and address issues arising as a result of mixed flows of migrants and refugees.

The report is aimed primarily at governments that are major destination countries for migrants, urging them to open doors wider to legal migrant workers, protect migrant workers during recruitment and employment abroad, and during their return to their home countries or re-integration there, and to offer protection to vulnerable migrants who are not refugees but nevertheless require some form of protection.

While the report offers many thoughtful and useful recommendations, there are no priorities among the long list of “shoulds” and no analysis of the trade-offs between competing recommendations. For example, is there competition or are there trade-offs that must be balanced between opening doors wider to migrant workers and protecting the rights and labor standards of local, destination country workers? Can both be done while ensuring that migrant workers are fully protected?

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February 5, 2018 marks the 25^th anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows eligible employees to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave within a calendar year for a serious health condition, the birth of a child or to care for a newly born, adopted, or foster child, or to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition. While it’s important to celebrate this important milestone, stopping there on the national level has been a huge mistake. Because eligibility is limited based on size of firm, work hours, and tenure at job, the FMLA only provides access to an estimated 56 percent of the workforce. But the largest loophole in the FMLA is that it is unpaid, so many workers who would want to take advantage of it to care for themselves or a family member, simply cannot afford to.

Only 13 percent of private-sector workers have access to any paid family leave, which means that 87 percent do not. Due to this widespread lack of paid family leave, workers have to make difficult choices between their careers and their caregiving responsibilities precisely when they need their paychecks the most, such as following the birth of a child or when they or a loved one falls ill. This lack of choice can often lead workers to not take any leave or cut their leave short; about 45 percent of FMLA-eligible workers did not take leave because they could not afford unpaid leave and among workers who took time off for caregiving responsibilities, about one-third of leave-takers cut their time off short due to cover lost wages.

The distribution of workers with paid family leave is skewed toward higher-wage workers. As shown in the figure below, workers in the top 10 percent of the wage distribution are six times more likely to have paid family and medical leave to care for themselves or a family member when coping with a serious health condition or to care for a new child in their family than workers in the bottom 10 percent. This bears repeating: only 4 percent of the lowest-wage workers have access to paid family leave. The disparities are stark, but even among the highest paid workers, only about one-fourth have paid family leave.

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Tomorrow, President Trump is set to deliver his first State of the Union speech, in which he will likely provide a triumphalist account of the economic policy changes made during the first year of his presidency. But despite big talk on the campaign trail about how he would stand up for the forgotten working man (for Trump, it was always men who were left behind), the first year of the Trump presidency has been no triumph for typical American workers. Instead the big winners over the past year have been the already rich.

This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Trump’s was crystal clear in his inaugural address about who he considers the cause of American workers’ disempowerment: foreigners. This diagnosis is stunning not just in how wrong and bigoted it is, but how cynically it attempts to distract from the privileged group that really was reaping gains that should have been broadly shared—the top 1 percent and their enablers. His agenda of continuing the upward redistribution of income to this top 1 percent while scapegoating immigrants and allegedly nefarious foreign governments is essentially the orthodoxy among the Republican Congressional majority, and it will do nothing to help America’s workers.

The cynicism is clearest when considering the signature piece of legislation signed by Trump, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The TCJA provides a number of temporary tax cuts to households, most of which will accrue to those at the top of the income distribution. But it saves its permanent tax cuts for the nation’s corporations, whose profits eventually flow overwhelmingly to the richest households in America. By 2027, when the household tax cuts have expired but the corporate tax cuts remain, the top 1 percent will see 83 percent of the gains from the TCJA. Corporations have been so giddy about the windfall they’ve reaped from the TCJA that they’ve mounted an absurdly transparent public relations campaign on its behalf, claiming that every bonus and wage increase they have bestowed since its passage was somehow the result of it—even those that occurred before the TCJA actually took effect. This is, needless to say, not how economics argues that tax cuts can potentially boost wages. It’s also important to note that in any given year about half of all workers see raises, and nearly 40 percent receive bonuses. In short, it is extremely likely that not a single worker who wasn’t a high-placed CEO or corporate manager has seen a raise because of the TCJA. And if they got a bonus this year because of the TCJA, it was a likely a one-time attempt by their employer to sneak in a deductible expense before the tax cuts made these deductions less profitable, and no future TCJA-linked bonuses will be seen again.

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Yesterday the White House one-page framework for a legislative deal to provide a permanent immigration status to DACA recipients was made public, which is in addition to the four-page memo released on January 9 that included the Department of Homeland Security’s priorities for an “immigration deal.” The new one-page memo includes a long list of far-reaching demands to “reform” the immigration system, in exchange for remedying the crisis that President Trump himself imposed on the nearly 700,000 immigrants who were brought to the United States as children by their parents, and who voluntarily availed themselves to the U.S. government after they were promised that they would be protected and not deported by the Obama administration.

President Trump’s latest demands for major changes to the U.S. immigration system include additional legal authority to deport unauthorized immigrants, $25 billion in new funding for more border security and immigration enforcement agents, an end to the diversity visa program, and cuts to permanent immigrant visas for family reunification, among other things. All of this would be in exchange for putting up to 1.8 million DACA recipients and DREAM Act-eligible immigrants on a path to citizenship.

It is notable that the Trump administration is willing to extend the possibility of legalization and citizenship beyond just the current 700,000 DACA recipients, but doing so would still only legalize 16 percent of the total unauthorized immigrant population (1.8 million out of 11.3 million). DACA recipients and potential DREAMers themselves have made it clear that they reject a path to citizenship if it means that their parents and the millions of unauthorized immigrants left behind will be terrorized through a vastly expanded national deportation apparatus and additional border militarization, plus sharp cuts to future immigration levels.

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The global punditry is all a twitter this week with the prospect of Donald Trump going to Davos—the chic winter gathering place of the world’s rich and powerful.

The media narrative is that this will be a titanic clash of opposites. Populist, “America First” Trump confronting the high-minded capitalist builders of the global economy.

“It’s going to be a hell of a show,” a Vox writer assures us. “Fox in the Globalist Henhouse?” headlines the New York Times. The internationalist intellectual Niall Ferguson explains that: “Trump is as loathed by the elites of Western Europe as he is by the elites of Manhattan.”

No doubt many of Manhattan’s rich and powerful would agree with Trump’s Secretary of State (the former CEO of Exxon) that the president is a moron. But so what? Rather than drain the Washington swamp he pumped it even more full of Wall Street financiers, international business interests and lobbyists from virtually every sleazebag business interest in the country.

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Republican congressional leaders and President Trump have made loud claims about how great the recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) will be for typical American families. When will these families be able to conclusively judge the truth of these claims? Not for a long while. The changes from the new tax law took effect on January 1. Companies now have to figure out how much to change workers’ tax withholdings to comply with the new law. To do that, they need guidance from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

But this is the same IRS that has seen its budget cut by 18 percent and its workforce cut by 14 percent since 2010. And it’s the same IRS that would send home over half of its workforce if the government shuts down again. While a deal was reached to end the current shutdown, that deal only funds the government through February 8th. All as the 2018 tax filing system ramps up and 2017 tax returns flood into the agency.

Typically, this shouldn’t be much of an issue. A shutdown would usually only push back the timing of withholding changes. The IRS would understandably take more time to issue guidance, and companies would simply implement the new withholdings later in the year.

But the Trump administration has already been pressuring the IRS to aim for speed over accuracy in new withholdings. Further, they would love companies to err on the side of withholding too little and boosting workers’ take-home pay, even if this meant that these workers have to make large payments back to the government in 2019. After all, the salience of the TCJA is as high as it’s going to be, and this administration is not shy at all about putting political expedience over smart policy. And telling workers that the tax cut is already working for them is awfully expedient in a mid-term election year. If the administration continues to focus on speed, then what was already a risk of under-withholding would be augmented by a government shutdown.

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