NDN Blog

Wages Stagnant Again.

Another month passes, another set of figures show no rise in real wages. Figures out today from the Bureua of Labor Statistics show that real average weekly earning fell in July. Or, to put it much more tediously and longwindedly:

Real average weekly earnings decreased by 0.1 percent from June to July after seasonal adjustment, according to preliminary data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. A 0.4 percent increase in average hourly earnings was more than offset by a 0.5 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). Average weekly hours were unchanged. (PDF)

This is not great news. Wage growth seemed to be picking up in two out of the last three months. Given that yesterday's mild CPI figures seemed to show a slowing in price rises, it might have been hoped that robust wage growth and slowing prices might translate into real wage growth. Instead, we're now 6 for 12: six out of the past twelve monthly statements have shown weekly earnings declining in real terms. With growing concerns about the state of the economy, most apocalyptically from economist Nouriel Roubini, we wonder again if this economic cycle will see no rise in real wages at all.

Alan Schlesinger is The Third Man

In between Joementum and Nedrenaline, spare a thought for Alan Schlesinger. The President conspicously failed to back him. The rest of his party can't distance themselves quickly enough. He polls in (low) single figures. And now, so goes the conventional wisdom in blog land, he has just had his campaign handed to him by Chris Mathews on Hardball. I'll go out on a limb here and say that Schleisinger actually comes off well. Despite the predictably aggressive questioning about gambling debts and his party dropping him like a dose of the plague, he seeemd calm, straight forward, honest and relatively likeable. If he doesn't get the axe, perhaps he'll pick up a vote in the teens after all?

The Era of Big Government Isn't Over

NDN tentatively peeked its head out of the trench, intrepidly scuttled across ideological lines, and went to a seminar at CATO today. I'd like to write about why the right wing have such nice offices, and the oddity of a libertarian think tank handing out free sandwiches, rather than letting the market prepare lunch. But, as we were notionally there went to see Stephen Slivinski discuss his new book, Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government, i'd better write about that. Alongside Slivinski, Robert Novack played the vastly more famous cameo role. Both were withering about Bush, highlighting the Farm (2002), Medicare (2003) and Highways (2005) Acts as particular offenders of reckless fiscal spending. Amidst the general tone of libertarian dispair, the best the chair could say what that voters did have a choice. It just that it was between tax-and-spend Democrats and borrow-and-spend Republicans.

The gist of the two presentations was - whisper it quietly - that with the glorious, exhalted exceptions of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, Republicans don't really believe in cutting Government spending after all. The most striking comment of all came from Novack discussing the political shift following Clinton's 1996 victory. His basic point was that Republicans were faced with a choice, with their '94 agenda stalled and Dole's recent defeat still close at hand. Did they concentrate on building a machine to getting back into office, and ditch their class of '94 principles? Or vice-versa? Karl Rove chose the machine. He, Bush and Dick "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" Cheney went on to win handsomely twice as big government conservatives. One way to interpret this would be to say they did what it took to win. But might another be that that Clinton, so often maligned as leaving little political legacy, rescued the reputation of the state sufficiently to banish talk of starving the beast?

Lots of Immigrants. Get Used to It.

New Census Bureau stats on immigrants are  much covered in this morning's news, and take top billing on the front page of the Times. Numbers are up in the usual places. But politically the most intriguing data seems to show that immigrant levels are rising in less expected corners of the country:

Indiana saw a 34 percent increase in the number of immigrants; South Dakota saw a 44 percent rise; Delaware 32 percent; Missouri 31 percent; Colorado 28 percent; and New Hampshire 26 percent. “It’s the continuation of a pattern that we first began to see 10 or 15 years ago,” said Jeff Passel, senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center, who has examined the new census data. “But instead of being confined to areas like the Southeast, it’s beginning to spill over into some Midwestern states, like Indiana and Ohio. It’s even moving up into New England.”

The Bureau lets you play around with the data in various ways here. You never know. If immigration continues rising in New Hampshire at this sort of rate, perhaps the nation's first primary competition will not always be dominated by white, rural libertarians after all. 

 

Liberal Bloggers Are Closet New Dems. Discuss.

TNR's Noam Schreiber's can't exactly be accused of trying to build bridges between his magazine and its blogging critics. His latest collumn accuses Lamont supporters and associated bloggers of being - gasp! - secrret New Democrats. Schreiber is a talented writer, and his case is worth reading, especially for the links to research by PEW looking at self-identified political tribes within the two parties:

An interesting thing happened between 1999 and 2005, when Pew conducted another detailed analysis of the electorate: The New Democrats had entirely disappeared as a group while the liberals had doubled in size. The strong implication was that the New Democrats had been driven into the liberal camp by the extremism of the Bush administration. .... Of course, there are other reasons affluent Democrats might have moved leftward on economics in recent years. Certainly the consequences of globalization--outsourcing, the decline of traditional pensions, et cetera--have raised voters' economic anxieties. But, as a group, the former New Democrats tend to be more insulated from these trends than most. They are, by and large, still society's success stories. As such, they generally benefit from a smaller and leaner (though nonetheless active) government, which suggests to me that Bush is behind most of the group's leftward drift.

Schreiber's ultimatel conclusion is, it seems to me, less good. He seems unable to avoid taking a rather odd pot-shot at Libertarians (via, predictably, a Daily Kos post.) Instead, what seems to me to follow from his piece is much more interesting. Kos and his allies, as exemplified in Crashing the Gates, always have shown a pragmatic, heterodox "winning is what matters" streak, contrary to many of their more orthodox liberal followers. This pragmatic approach to politics used to be wholly owned by the centrist Dems. Thus, is it too much of a stretch to say that while moderate "New Democrat" politics has been on the backfoot in oppostion, that the Lamont-ites might find it more palatable as a governing philosophy when the Dems return to power?

NDN in the News

Simon was quoted in Dan Balz's interesting take on the Lieberman race, in Saturday's Post.

Simon Rosenberg, founder of the Democratic group NDN that has sought to be a bridge between centrist Democrats and the more liberal world of bloggers and Internet activists, said: "Lieberman's calculation here that there is a revulsion against Washington is not correct. There's revulsion at Republican governance."

Immigration Reform: Not Dead?

Pence-Hutchison might sound like a character from a British colonial novel, but the Washington post thinks it might just be the last, best hope for Immigration reform.

Pence-Hutchison concentrates on benchmarks tied to resources and capabilities: hiring more agents, increasing detention capacity and making certain that employers poised to hire immigrant workers have a reliable system (secure identification cards, accurate databases) to verify eligibility. Postponing the rest of reform for two years while these goals are met isn't ideal, but it's a reasonable compromise.

The as-yet-unwritten proposals from this Texan / Indianan Senatorial Team is
gathering a moderate head of steam. But, intriguingly, there still seems to be little agreement amongst conservatives about its merits. The American Spectator, for instance, seems to like the smell of it. The National Review doesn't: they "aren’t persuaded that the country needs a guest-worker program to begin with." If the President's backers can't figure out which strip of reform they like, the likelyhood of compromise is greatly lessened. And, in the end, it is the GOP who lose most if no reform is passed. Perhaps they haven't figured that one out yet?

 

 

Outsourcing Fails to Destroy America Shock

If the past is any guide to the present, then scaremongering over outsourcing will increase as we get closer to the November elections. As polling day approaches, any candidate seeking a few extra votes is more likely to throw their lot in with Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, Lyndon LaRouche and the wild-eyed hairy man on the street corner in predicting the swift economic collapse of the American economy due to foreign competition. All the more reason, then, to read this sane, interesting article by Daniel Gross in the sunday Times business section. Gross uses the story of Greg Manciw's public defenestration two years ago,

Economists have also found that jobs or sectors susceptible to outsourcing aren’t disappearing. Quite the opposite.... in recent years there has been greater job insecurity in the tradable job categories. But they [Economists] also concluded that jobs in those industries paid higher wages, and that tradable industries had grown faster than nontradable industries. “That could mean that this is our competitive advantage,” Mr. Jensen says. “In other words, what the U.S. does well is the highly skilled, higher-paid jobs within those tradable services.”

Look out for that one on the stump in the fall. You might be looking for a while.

New Dem Foreign Policy Shop Opens

As things go from bad to ouch in the middle east, Democrats need another conflicting opinion on security issues like a, well, a high profile infighting senate contest. But that, according to the WSJ's excellent Washington Wire, is what we have.

As divided Democrats reacted to the U.K. terrorist plot, a new voice was emerging, pitched somewhere between those pushing for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and those who advocate staying the course. The National Security Network, aimed at gathering the best progressive ideas on national security and providing a counter to the firepower of conservative think tanks, will officially open for business in September.

The group, which doesn't have a website as yet, kicks off at the end of the summer. It is lead by Rand Beers. Beers, in addition to being part of a teaching double act with Dick Clarke at the Kennedy School, advised the Kerry campaign on foreign policy. Which, upon reflection, might be why that "between those pushing for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and those who advocate staying the course" angle is so eerily familiar...........

Why Immigrants Boost American Jobs

NDN’s Globalization Initiative and our Hispanic Strategy Centre tend to roam in different parts of the forest. But we join in our interest in story’s like this morning’s Post piece saying that immigrants don’t destroy American jobs. Why is this news? Apocalyptic visions of House Republicans certainly has more to do with it than any earth shattering economic revelation. It is worth restating, nevertheless, that there is no reason in theory to think that immigrants “take American jobs.” (See the “Lump of Labor fallacy for more on this.) In fact, there are some reasons to think that immigrants can increase employment. A recent study of immigrant workers in North Carolina found that Latino immigrants did cost $100m more in services than they paid in taxes, something which shouldn’t really be too surprising given the profile of public assistance users generally. But the same group contributed nearly $10 bn – yes, ten billion – in spending, or approximately 90,000 extra jobs.

Wages are a thornier issue. In theory, low skilled immigrants lower the wages of low skilled Americans, for instance high school dropouts or illiterate adults. Whether they do or not is hotly contested in academic literature. But the wider point is that the type of wage stagnation discussed in Rob and Simon's NDN memo earlier this month has, say most economists, almost nothing to do with immigration levels. (Most agree that this is a long-term term trend born of changing returns to skills, new technologies and patterns of trade.) The best overview i've seen of all of this is the excellent Economist Economics Focus for the pros and cons. But note in particular the final line:

None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it.

Nicely said. I wonder if anyone is listening?

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