Jared Bernstein
Jared Bernstein
Jared Bernsteinis a Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden in the Obama Administration. Bernstein's appointment was considered to represent a progressive perspective and "to provide a strong advocate for workers"...
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We have welcomed past efforts by the Bureau to offer alternative poverty measures. Their most recent release, however, ignores critical innovations and omits essential costs like child care for working parents and thus represents a step backwards.
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In a strong economy, hours and output can both grow, so long as output grows at a faster rate, thus resulting in productivity growth. But... productivity can also grow in a slowdown or recession, when a decline in hours outpaces weak or nonexistent output growth.
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This report shows a race between factors boosting net worth such as home ownership and factors pushing the other way such as weak wage growth. Unless we start to see better income growth from jobs and wages, it is hard to see major gains in net worth for the typical family.
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This report may give pause to some of the optimists looking for a stronger second half, ... We need a real boost if we're going to reverse some of these trends that are even more negative than we thought they were.
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As this recovery gets under way, professional services have begun adding jobs fairly broadly.
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While we continue to generate middle-class jobs, I would say we're doing so at a slower pace than we have in the past.
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Firms were trying desperately to maintain the levels of output without expanding the work force, and in some cases contracting it.
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Firms have to be very concerned about rising prices. They're protecting their profit margins. They're going to be looking at every nook and cranny to absorb this increase.
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Explaining the unique characteristics of this unbalanced recovery is more like 'Murder on the Orient Express' than finding a smoking gun in somebody's hands. There are a lot of suspects.
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There is no reason to believe...that Congress has authorized the Department of Labor to dramatically reduce coverage...taking overtime protection away from millions of workers. Yet that is exactly what the Department of Labor has proposed.
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Maybe we were looking under the wrong rock.
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Of course there are jobs that few Americans will take because the wages and working conditions have been so degraded by employers. But there is nothing about landscaping, food processing, meat cutting or construction that would preclude someone from doing these jobs on the basis of their nativity. Nothing would keep anyone, immigrant or native born, from doing them if they paid better, if they had health care.
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I and others have been looking desperately for silver linings in this tragedy and if Katrina were to motivate Congress to look at this issue seriously, that would be great.
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Maybe by the second quarter of next year, we'll be looking at some lower unemployment rate -- say in the 5 to 5.5 percent range, if we're lucky. But that would be the best to hope for, and it's based on our working through these excesses that persist.