Reports from the Economic Front

The following comes from a blog post by the Rustbelt Radical:

In James Connolly’s introduction to his 1907 collection “Songs of Freedom,” he wrote:

No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression.  If such a movement has caught hold of the imagination of the masses, they will seek a vent in song for the aspirations, the fears and hopes, the loves and hatreds engendered by the struggle. Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement; it is a dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude.

The Rustbelt Radical then shared the top 10 musical offerings to come out of the Occupy movement as chosen by two Detroit DJs.  Here are a few of their selections—enjoy—and check out the post if you want to experience all of them (and read their short commentaries on the songs). 

It is no secret that our public sector is in trouble.  Our roads and bridges desperately need upgrading.  Our schools and libraries are being forced to slash staff and activities.  Our social services and program are being cut.  And the reason: not enough money.  

Yet at the same time, it is also no secret that our most powerful and profitable corporations are merrily finding countless ways to avoid paying taxes.  It might seem like this situation would produce a serious discussion about societal aims and values—but it hasn’t.  Our political and business leaders appear quite content that business as usual should not be inconvenienced for the sake of the economy.

The New York Times recently provided an excellent study of, in its words, “How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes.”  How does the company do it?  The answer is tax loopholes and a number of subsidiaries in low tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands.  Why does it do it?  We are talking real money here.  According to the New York Times, Apple “paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent.”  By comparison, Wal-Mart was downright patriotic—paying a tax rate of 24 percent.

Foreign Travel

Get your passports ready.  If a U.S. consumer buys an Apple product like a song from iTunes or an iPhone the royalties earned are routed to an Irish subsidiary.  That is because Apple assigned the rights to royalties on patents developed in its California operations to the subsidiary.  The royalities gathered in Ireland are then transferred, with few tax obligations thanks to Irish law, to another Apple subsidiary in the British Virgin Islands, where tax rates are extremely low.  Thus, not only does the U.S. lose out on tax revenue, so does Ireland.  And in case you have forgotten, Ireland is suffering massive cuts in public spending because of a lack of revenue.

If a product is purchased by someone residing outside the U.S., the patent royalties are routed to a different Irish subsidiary.  Apple then transfers those royalties through the Netherlands, tax free thanks to European laws, back to its primary Irish subsidiary and then on to its Caribbean subsidiary.  

If this is confusing check out this graphic.  How important is Ireland to Apple? In 2004, the country received more than one-third of Apple’s world wide revenue.  The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent.  The Irish corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent.  And the British Virgin Island tax rate is even lower.  

Of course Apple’s profits are not limited to patent royalties.  That is where its Luxembourg subsidiary comes into play.  As the New York Times explains:

 when customers across Europe, Africa or the Middle East — and potentially elsewhere — download a song, television show or app, the sale is recorded in this small country . . . In 2011 [the revenue of this Luxembourg subsidiary] exceeded $1 billion, according to an Apple executive, representing roughly 20 percent of iTunes’s worldwide sales.

The advantages of Luxembourg are simple, say Apple executives. The country has promised to tax the payments collected by Apple and numerous other tech corporations at low rates if they route transactions through Luxembourg. Taxes that would have otherwise gone to the governments of Britain, France, the United States and dozens of other nations go to Luxembourg instead, at discounted rates.

“We set up in Luxembourg because of the favorable taxes,” said Robert Hatta, who helped oversee Apple’s iTunes retail marketing and sales for European markets until 2007. “Downloads are different from tractors or steel because there’s nothing you can touch, so it doesn’t matter if your computer is in France or England. If you’re buying from Luxembourg, it’s a relationship with Luxembourg.”  

Back Home In The U.S. 

Of course Apple also makes money from sales in the United States.  But it has a way of handling that “problem” as well.  The company’s headquarters is in Cupertino, California but it has a Reno subsidiary, Braeburn Capital, collect and manage its profits.  According to the New York Times:

When someone in the United States buys an iPhone, iPad or other Apple product, a portion of the profits from that sale is often deposited into accounts controlled by Braeburn, and then invested in stocks, bonds or other financial instruments, say company executives. Then, when those investments turn a profit, some of it is shielded from tax authorities in California by virtue of Braeburn’s Nevada address.

Since founding Braeburn, Apple has earned more than $2.5 billion in interest and dividend income on its cash reserves and investments around the globe. If Braeburn were located in Cupertino, where Apple’s top executives work, a portion of the domestic income would be taxed at California’s 8.84 percent corporate income tax rate.

But in Nevada there is no state corporate income tax and no capital gains tax. What’s more, Braeburn allows Apple to lower its taxes in other states — including Florida, New Jersey and New Mexico — because many of those jurisdictions use formulas that reduce what is owed when a company’s financial management occurs elsewhere.

California has lost billions of dollars in tax revenue—oh yes and is deep in a budget crisis.  

In fairness to Apple it is far from alone in using these tricks of the trade.  Almost all technology companies do it.  So, here is the thing—if we really care about our public infrastructure and programs we have to start getting tough on these companies.  Their success was aided by past public investment–there should be payback.   But then again perhaps there is no such thing as society–only the corporation counts.   

The media is full of stories about the ever more heated debate over the best way to reignite growth: austerity or deficit spending.  

Paul Krugman, a leading proponent of the deficit spending side, puts it like this:  

Britain has fallen into its first double-dip recession since the 1970s, according to official figures released Wednesday, a development that raised more questions about whether government belt-tightening in Europe has gone too far. Britain is now in its second recession in three years. . . .

In a packed British Parliament, Prime Minister David Cameron had to defend his austerity drive against critics like Ed Miliband, head of the opposition Labour Party, who called the economic numbers “catastrophic.”

The raucous scene was the latest manifestation of growing popular frustration with the strict fiscal diet that has been prescribed by the European Central Bank and German leaders in response to the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis. While Britain is not a member of the euro zone, its economic fortunes are closely linked with those of the currency union.

The discontent was on view in French elections last weekend and played a role in the collapse of the Dutch government on Monday. Greece, Spain and Italy have been the scene of mass demonstrations for months, but the turmoil now seems to be spreading to countries that were not seen as being at the heart of the crisis. Britain joined Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain in recession.

Of course, as Krugman notes, that doesn’t mean that the austerity defenders have given up. Here is the solution to the crisis put forward by Mr. Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, as reported by the New York Times:

He urged national leaders to take steps to promote long-term growth even when it is politically difficult. Some leaders have raised taxes or cut infrastructure projects, when instead they should be reducing government operating expenses, Mr. Draghi said.

Tragically, those in Mr. Draghi’s camp continue to blame Europe’s crisis on too much government spending when its roots lie far more in the collapse of speculative bubbles driven by private financial interests and German austerity policies.  Of course, this understanding would require taking a critical stance against dominant capitalist interests; far easier to make the working class pay.  

However, we should also be careful about assuming that the bankruptcy of the austerity strategy proves the wisdom of relying on deficit spending to solve our economic problems.  The fact of the matter is that spending to stimulate growth will not solve our problems.  The reason is that existing economic structures operate to generate what the United Nations Development Program has called “savage growth.”  Savage growth refers to a growth process that enriches the few at the expense of the many.  In other words, a process that is neither desirable nor sustainable.  Therefore, unless we change the nature of our economy, deficit spending will just temporarily postpone the start of a new crisis.

Here are two charts from an Economic Policy Institute report that highlight the workings of savage growth in the United States.  The first shows a sharp divergence, beginning in the mid-1970s, between productivity and hourly compensation for private-sector production/nonsupervisory workers (a group comprising over 80 percent of payroll employment).  In other words, the owners of the means of production have basically stopped sharing gains in output with their workers.  This wedge between productivity and compensation helps explain both the growth in inequality and the need for debt to sustain consumption.

The second provides a closer look at post-1973 trends.  A key point: median hourly compensation basically stopped growing starting early in the 2000s, even though the economy continued to expand for several more years, and it continues to fall despite the end of the recession.

In sum, if we are serious about improving economic conditions we need to move past the austerity-deficit financing debate and begin pressing for adoption of trade, finance, production, and labor policies that strengthen the position of workers relative to those who own the means of production.  Anything short of that just won’t do.

Too big to fail—that was the common explanation voiced at the start of the Great Recession for why the Federal Reserve had no choice but to channel trillions of dollars into the coffers of our leading banks. But, the government also pledged that once the crisis was over it would take steps to make sure we would never face such a situation again.  

The chart below shows the growing concentration of bank assets in the hands of the top 3 U.S. banks. The process really took off starting in the late 1990s and never slowed down right up to the crisis.  It was the reality of the top three banks controlling over 40 percent of total bank assets that gave meaning to the “too big to fail” fears.    

But what has happened since the crisis?  According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the largest banks have only gotten bigger: 

Not surprisingly, this kind of economic dominance translates into political power.  For example, the U.S. financial sector is leading the charge for new free trade agreements that promote the deregulation and liberalization of financial sectors throughout the world.  Such agreements will increase their profits but at the cost of economic stability; a trade-off that they apparently find acceptable.  

Whenever people propose increasing taxes on the wealthy to maintain our needed public programs and services it doesn’t take long for someone to raise the following objection: if we do that, the rich will flee, thereby weakening rather than strengthening our (fill in the blank: city, state, or national) economy.

How seriously should we take this threat?  Opponents of Oregon Measures 66 and 67, which raised taxes on the wealthy and corporations and were approved by voters in 2010, cited just this danger in campaigning against them. Among those business leaders most upset with the outcome were some of Oregon’s most well known corporate leaders, for example Phil Knight (Nike) and Tim Boyle (Columbia Sportswear).  Knight gave some $100,000 to the anti-Measures campaign, Boyle approximately $75,000.

 Here is what Knight had to say about Measures 66 and 67 in an article he wrote for the Oregonian newspaper: 

Measures 66 and 67 should be labeled Oregon’s Assisted Suicide Law II.

They will allow us to watch a state slowly killing itself.

They are anti-business, anti-success, anti-inspirational, anti-humanitarian, and most ironically, in the long run, they will deprive the state of tax revenue, not increase it.

The current state tax codes are all of those things as well. Measures 66 and 67 just take it up and over the top. . . .

Reputable economists forecast 66 and 67 will cost the state thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of jobs, and that thousands of our most successful residents will leave the state. 

Well, despite the threats, there is no evidence that the wealthy or jobs fled the state to escape the tax increases.  Rather the state got some desperately needed revenue.

 Here is another data point, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, that also suggests we should take this threat of flight with a grain of salt:  

According to a new study from Lloyds TSB, nearly one in five affluent Britons plan to leave the country in the next two years. That’s up from 14% a year ago. The study measured those with around $400,000 in investible assets.

Conservatives point out this sudden flight comes on the back of the 50% tax rate that was imposed on top earners during the recession. That hike was widely blamed for U.K. wealth flight and for not raising nearly as much revenue as expected.

But a closer look at the study provides a different picture. The top reason that the study group (it’s a stretch to call them “wealthy”) gave for leaving were crime and “anti-social behavior.” About the same number, however, cited the British weather as the top reason for leaving.

The study really gets interesting when you look at where these affluent folks want to go to. The top destination is high-tax France, where the leading Presidential contender is pushing a 75% tax rate on the wealthy.  The second choice is Spain, followed by the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.

When asked what would make the U.K. a better place to live, most cited infrastructure spending. That was followed by “cutting red tape for business.” Cutting taxes got about the same number of votes as “improving public services like healthcare, education and the police.”

 In other words, the affluent want more government services not less. And taxes were a relatively minor concern in their decision to move. 

Returning to the U.S., it is important to remember that the rich have not only succeeded in capturing an ever greater share of national income, they have also enjoyed steady and disproportionately large cuts in their tax rates (see below). This trend was the result of deliberate policy, which was defended by claims that lower tax rates on the wealthy would deliver robust investment and job creation. It clearly has not worked out that way; in fact quite the opposite has taken place.  This seems a very opportune time to reverse the trend.

While the press cheers on every sign of private sector job creation, little attention is being paid to public sector job destruction.  As the Economic Policy Institute reports, while there has been an increase of some 2.8 million private sector jobs since June 2009, public sector employment (federal, state, and local governments combined) has actually fallen by approximately 600,000.  This is a very unusual development as the figure below reveals.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, if the percentage growth of public sector employment in this recovery had followed past recovery trends, we would have an additional 1.2 million public sector jobs and some 500,000 additional private sector jobs. A separate reason for concern about this trend is that lost public sector jobs generally means a decline in the services that we need to sustain our communities.  The withering away of our public sector during a period of expansion should worry us all.

It is common around election time to hear politicians talk about how they are standing up for ”America,” as if we all had similar interests and were well served by the same policies.   Sounds nice.  The problem is that it is just not true.  

Want evidence?  Look at the distribution of gains from our current economic recovery.  According to a New York Times summary of a recent study of inequality: 

In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.

Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.

The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income.

Moreover, ”the top 1 percent has done progressively better in each economic recovery of the past two decades. In the Clinton era expansion, 45 percent of the total income gains went to the top 1 percent; in the Bush recovery, the figure was 65 percent; now it is 93 percent.”

It is hard to celebrate economic expansion when we have an economy structured in such a way that the income generated by our collective efforts ends up in the pockets of a very few.   

Representative Paul Ryan (Wisconsin), the chairman of the House Budget Committee, recently put forward his party’s budget plan.  Dean Baker reports on the Washington Post story which says of the plan that it “calls for spending cuts and tax changes that would put the nation on course to wipe out deficits and balance the budget by 2040.”  He notes that unfortunately the Post forgot to mention that the plan also largely does away with the government.  

The following table comes from the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Ryan budget plan.  

In 2011, spending on “health care” came to 5 percent of GDP, spending on “social security” equaled 4.75 percent of GDP, and spending on “other mandatory and defense and nondefense discretionary spending” totaled 12.5 percent of GDP.  Congressional Budget Office estimates are that by 2040, the Ryan plan will have reduced spending on “other mandatory and defense and nondefense discretionary spending” to 4.75 percent of GDP.  By 2050, that category will be down to 3.75 percent of GDP. 

The Obama administration continues to push new free trade agreements, arguing that they are needed to boost job creation.  The latest attempt is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).    So far nine countries are engaged in negotiating this free trade agreement: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States.  The United States in particular is thinking big; it insisted that the agreement also have a “docking clause,” which means that it is structured to make it easy for other Pacific Rim countries to join.  Canada, Japan and Mexico have already expressed interest.

Following standard procedures, the U.S. trade representative is negotiating the terms of the agreement with other trade representatives with the support and active involvement of some 600 multinational corporations.  Unfortunately, they are the only ones who know what is being negotiated.  As the Eyes on Trade Blog writes:  

Not only is the text secret during the negotiations, but all TPP countries signed a secret agreement to classify the negotiating texts for at least four years after the TPP goes into effect. After taking heat for this secret agreement that keeps everything secret, New Zealand was forced to release the text of the secrecy pact. Though neither the public nor members of Congress are permitted to view the negotiating texts, over 600 representatives from corporations have access to the texts, allowing them to steer the negotiations in their favor.

In brief—this is another terrible free trade agreement.  Beyond reducing tariffs what little we do know of the treaty suggests it will also include 26 chapters designed to enhance the freedom and profits of multinational corporations at majority expense.  There is nothing about this agreement that will promote jobs or a higher quality of life for workers in any of the participating countries.

One way to appreciate just how damaging capitalist structured globalization has been to the health of the U.S. economy is to read Michael Spence and Sandile Hlatshwayo’s study of trends in U.S. employment and value added in both tradeable and nontradeble sectors over the period 1990 to 2008.    

Starting with employment, the authors found that almost all job growth from 1990 to 2008 occurred in the nontradeable sector.  Specifically, there was a 27.3 million increase in jobs between 1990 and 2008, from a starting a base of 121.9 million.  Approximately 98 percent of that increase, 26.7 million jobs, was generated in the nontradeable sector.  Job creation in the tradeable sector was basically nonexistent in the aggregate. 

In 2008, the nontradeable sector had 114.9 million jobs and the tradeable sector 34.3 million jobs. Government at all levels was the largest employer in the nontradable sector, accounting for 22.5 million jobs in 2008.  Health care was second, with a total of 16.3 million.  In terms of job growth over the period, health care generated the most new jobs, followed by government, with a growth of 6.3 million and 4.1 million respectively.  These two sectors together combined for approximately 40 percent of total net employment gains.  The other large job creating sectors were retail, accommodation and food service and construction.  In 2008, these five accounted for 73.5 million jobs or approximately 50 percent of total employment.

Significantly, employment in both government and health care depends heavily on public spending.  Current austerity trends threaten to limit future employment gains in these sectors, foreshadowing future difficulties for U.S. workers.  Retail, accommodation and food service, and construction employment growth was largely supported by debt-financed consumption.  The end of the housing bubble will likely limit future employment growth in those sectors as well. 

As noted above, trends in employment creation in the tradeable sector have been dismal, strongly suggesting that workers have good reason to fear the ongoing restructuring of the U.S. economy in line with capitalist globalization plans.  Growing numbers of workers will be forced to compete for jobs in the nontradeable sector at a time when employment opportunities in that sector will also be limited. 

Of course, the lack of aggregate job growth in the tradeable sector masks the existence of divergent trends within the sector.  In particular, globalization did produce employment increases in industries that service transnational corporations and their international operations.  As Spence and Hlatshwayo noted:

The tradable sector experienced job growth in high-end services including management and consulting services, computer systems design, finance, and insurance. These increases were roughly matched by declines in employment in most areas of manufacturing.

The loss of employment in the manufacturing sector was caused by the out-migration of functions in global supply chains associated with lower valued added per job. But as the emerging markets grow, they will compete for more sophisticated functions. This does not mean that the United States will lose all the sectors in which it has developed a comparative advantage—just that more potential competition is on the horizon.

Despite past growth, largely made possible by the rapid run-up in consumer debt, private sector employment gains in the nontradeable sector were not large enough to compensate for the lack of job creation in the tradeable sector.  Michael Mandel summed up the situation as follows:

Between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector only rose by 1.1 percent, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period. It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is. Basically speaking, the private sector job machine has almost completely stalled over the past ten years.

Over the past 10 years, the private sector has generated roughly 1.1 million additional jobs, or about 100K per year. The public sector created about 2.4 million jobs.

But even that gives the private sector too much credit. Remember that the private sector includes health care, social assistance, and education, all areas which receive a lot of government support.

Without a decade of growing government support from rising health and education spending and soaring budget deficits, the labor market would have been flat on its back.

Total private sector wage growth, critical to any sustainable consumption driven expansion, has also stagnated.  As Jed Graham noted:

The increase in total real private-sector wages over the period 2001-11 was smaller than in any other 10 year period since World War II.  In fact its 4 percent growth rate was even lower than the 5 percent increase from 1929 to 1939.  To put that in perspective, since the Great Depression, 10-year gains in real private wages had always exceeded 25 percent with one exception: the period ending in 1982-83, when the jobless rate spiked above 10 percent and wage gains briefly decelerated to 16 percent.

Spence and Hlatshwayo also examined trends in value added in both nontradeable and tradeable sectors.  Significantly, the lack of net job creation in the tradeable sector, especially in manufacturing, did not translate into a decline in value added.  According to the authors, “Valued added in the tradable and nontradable parts of the economy grew at similar rates [over the years 1990 to 2008]. In fact, the tradable sector, though smaller than the nontradable, grew slightly faster and hence marginally increased its share of total value added, in marked contrast to the employment trends.”

Ironically, the cause of both the loss in employment and rise in value added in tradeable sectors like manufacturing was the same: the internationalization of production.  For example, the decline in manufacturing production was encouraged by multinational corporations shifting production to other lower labor cost locations. The rise in manufacturing value added was due in large part to the fact that, by cheapening the cost of production, such activity not only expanded the market for many manufactures (such as consumer electronics), it also widened the gap between final sales price and production cost, thereby raising both profit and value added.  Not surprisingly, then, according to Spence and Hlatshwayo, tradeable value added over the period 1990 to 2008 rose by 363 percent in electronics.

This outcome makes clear why U.S. multinational corporations, especially those involved in the tradeable sector, have embraced the internationalization of production and the free trade agreements that encourage it.  Of course transnational retailers have also benefited.  In fact, retailers like Walmart have aggressively pushed manufacturers to move their production offshore in order to lower production costs.  Finally, the new international division of labor has also created profitable opportunities for business and financial service companies.

In short, it is perfectly understandable why most major corporations happily support U.S. government efforts to enhance corporate mobility through new international agreements.  And given the negative consequences of these agreements for most working people, it is also perfectly understandable why they want the terms of negotiation kept secret.  At issue is whether we will find a way to deny them what they want.    

The news is filled with reports of positive economic trends–supposedly we are making slow but steady progress in recovering from the Great Recession.  The Great Recession ended in June 2009, which means we have been in economic expansion for almost 3 years.  So, how seriously should we take these reports?  

One indicator worth looking at is median household income.  Unfortunately its trend suggests little reason for cheer. In January 2012, median household income was $50,020.  That was 5.4% lower than it was in June 2009.  Even worse, as the chart below reveals, after a brief uptick it headed back down again.

It is true that employment is finally growing, a development reflected in the decline in the unemployment rate (see above).  Unfortunately, this has done little to boost wages.  In fact, real wages actually fell in 2011.  The first chart below highlights the downward turn.  The second chart reveals just how far per capita earnings remain below historical trend.

This situation helps to explain why growth has been so anemic.  As the Wall Street Journal wrote:

Many economists in the past few weeks have again reduced their estimates of growth.  The economy by many estimates is on track to grow at an annual rate of less than 2% in the first three months of 2012.  The economy expanded just 1.7% last year.  And since the final months of 2009, when unemployment peaked, the economy has expanded at a pretty paltry 2.5% annual rate. 

Without a dramatic change in median household income, growth will remain slow and even the limited employment gains we currently celebrate will likely prove impossible to sustain.  Given the current political climate, it is hard to see how this expansion will be either long lasting or bring meaningful improvements in majority living and working conditions.