By Dean Baker
It’s clear that Bernie Sanders
has gotten many mainstream types upset. After all, he is raising issues about
the distribution of wealth and income that they would prefer be kept in
academic settings, certainly not pushed front and center in a presidential
campaign.
In response, we are seeing
endless shots at Sanders’ plans for financial reform, healthcare reform and
expanding Social Security. Many of these pieces raise perfectly reasonable
questions, both about Sanders’ goals and his route for achieving them. But
there are also many pieces that just shoot blindly. It seems the view of many
in the media is that Sanders is a fringe candidate, so it’s not necessary to
treat his positions with the same respect awarded the views of a Hillary
Clinton or a Marco Rubio.
The New Yorker is clearly in
this attack mode. It ran a piece
by Alexandra Schwartz asking, “Should Millennials Get Over Bernie Sanders?” You
can guess the answer.
But the piece runs into
serious problems getting there. It tells readers:
[Sanders’] obsession with the
banks and the bailout is itself phrased in weirdly retro terms, the stuff of an
invitation to a 2008-election theme party. As my colleague Ben Wallace-Wells points
out, we voters under 30 have come of political age during the economic
recovery under President Obama. When I graduated from college, unemployment was
close to 10 per cent; it’s now at 5. Sanders’s attention to socioeconomic
justice is stirring and necessary, but when his
campaign tweets that it’s “high time we stopped bailing out Wall Street and
started repairing Main Street,” you have to wonder why his youngest supporters,
so attuned to staleness in all things cultural, are letting him get away with
political rhetoric that would have seemed old even in 2012.
Those familiar with economic
data know the labor market, which is the economy for the vast majority of the
public, is very far from recovering from the recession. While the unemployment
rate is reasonably low, this is largely because millions of workers have
dropped out of the workforce.
And, contrary to what is often
asserted, these are not retiring baby boomers or people without the skills
needed in a modern economy. The employment rate of prime-age workers (ages
25–54) is still down by 3.0 percentage points from its prerecession level.
Furthermore, this drop is for
workers at all levels of educational attainment. Employment rates are even
down for workers with college and advanced degrees. Other measures of labor
market strength, like the percentage of people involuntarily working part-time,
the quit rate and the duration of unemployment spells, are all still at
recession levels.
Furthermore, the huge shift
from wages to profits that we saw in the downturn has not been reversed. As a
result, wages are more than 6.0 percent lower than they would be if the labor
share had not changed.
[image]
If this stuff is hard for New
Yorker editor types to understand: If workers lose 6.0 percent of their wages
to profit, it has the same impact on their living standards as if they faced a
6.0 percentage point increase in the payroll tax. Would the New Yorker think
that today’s young people have anything to complain about if they had seen an
increase in the payroll tax in 2009–10 of 6.0 percentage points, which still
remains in place today?
If the answer to that one is
“yes,” then its editors should be able to understand why millennials in 2016
are unhappy about the state of the economy, and why they might find a figure
like Senator Sanders attractive.
Economist Dean Baker is
co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A
version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (2/3/16).
No comments:
Post a Comment