The NFL Is “Socialist” on Purpose, and It Exposes Republican Economic Stupidity

 

NFL Super Bowl game was great. The guys wearing blue beat the guys wearing red, and Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga made MAGA snowflakes cry.

But the NFL can also teach Americans a huge lesson about economics, “socialism,” and the differences between Republican “free market” nuts and FDR’s re-regulation of the American economy that created the largest middle class in history and the first in the world to include more than half of a nation’s citizens.

Most Americans would be highly offended, for example, if the NFL took big bucks from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or somebody like these monopolists to change the rules so whichever team gave the League the most money could have an extra three players on the field at all times. 

But that’s pretty much exactly what Reaganomics and deregulation have brought us in our marketplaces; it’s the staggering difficulty that every small business in America faces today in the form of massive corporations like Walmart, Facebook, X, Google, and Amazon.

For capitalism to work in a way that doesn’t produce oligarchs and monopolies, it must be regulated. Capitalism, after all, is just a game that people play using money and mutually agreed-upon rules. Just like football.

The NFL heavily regulates football in the United States, at least the football played by its teams. Those regulations include how many players are on the field at any time, exactly what constitutes a down or a touchdown, and rules about how players may physically contact each other, and under what circumstances.

The NFL’s super-socialist regulations also decide which team gets first pick of new players: they decided that the worst-performing teams should have first choice of newly available players, giving every team an opportunity to rise through the ranks in the following season.

It’s much like progressive income taxation and the estate tax, giving the little guy a chance while slightly restraining those already at the top. These regulations guarantee the safety and stability of the game itself, and guarantee that fans of football have a consistent experience, because everybody understands and follows the rules.

That’s not meritocracy; it’s planned redistribution of future resources to maintain league balance. If American public policy worked this way, the millionaire opinion bots at billionaire-owned Fox “News” would spontaneously combust.

The league also pools its television and licensing revenue and divides it equally among all teams: No owner gets richer just because they’re in a bigger market. In a pure “free market,” the Cowboys and Giants would drown everyone else in cash. The NFL says, “Nope, everybody eats.” That’s redistribution by design.

And they impose a hard salary cap so rich owners can’t simply buy championships, and they require owners to spend what is effectively a minimum wage on players rather than hoarding profits. Teams that overspend are punished: that’s collective control of capital to prevent oligarchy, the exact thing conservatives scream about.

NFL teams are also required to spend a minimum percentage of shared revenue on their players. Owners can’t just hoard money; they must reinvest in labor. That’s closer to social democracy than laissez-faire capitalism.

The NFL figured out something America forgot after Reagan: markets only work when rules prevent the powerful from rigging the game.

In other words, the NFL is a regulated market with enforced rules that prevent monopolies, protect labor, and preserve competition. And because of that, small-market teams can win, dynasties don’t last forever, and fans get a fair game. If the American economy were run more like the NFL, we’d have fewer oligarchs, more competition, and a much healthier middle class.

But imagine if Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, or the other idiots like them who first advised the Reagan administration and now have guided Republicans ever since were to have taken over the NFL.

The teams with the wealthiest owners would always get the best players and thus would win every game. They might even decide that the team that gave the NFL the most money could have an extra player or three on the field at various times.

They’d assure us that the teams that didn’t perform as well just have to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Perhaps their problem is just that their players are “lazy,” these people would tell us, and the solution is to cut their salaries and reduce the amount of protective equipment they can wear so that they will have a “incentive” to play harder and increase their performance.

Then the richest teams would begin buying the poorer teams, until all the teams are owned by three or four billionaires. Sounds like every industry in today’s America. But conservatives would try to convince you it would create a football paradise, right?

Of course it wouldn’t be a paradise: Fans would stop watching, kids would stop dreaming of playing, and the game itself would collapse under the weight of rigging and unfairness. Not to mention that if the socialist NFL ever actually tried some crazy “free market” stupidity like that, Congress would be holding hearings within a week, and the public outrage would be deafening.

But when the same thing happens in our economy, we’re told by Republicans that it’s just “the free market.” We’re told that “monopolies are natural,” that “billionaires are geniuses,” and that working people who can’t get ahead in a rigged system somehow “deserve their fate.”

We’re told by these fools that any attempt to re-write the rules so the American economy is fair again and our middle class can recover from the massive $50+ trillion hit it’s taken from 45 years of Reaganomics is “socialism,” even though FDR’s system is exactly how every successful capitalist system in history has worked.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this. He knew markets don’t self-police any more than football does. Without referees, rules, and consequences, the biggest and most ruthless players take over, the game stops being a game, and democracy itself is put at risk. And when the morbidly rich write the rules, they inevitably only benefit themselves; everybody else gets screwed.

The NFL doesn’t regulate football because it hates competition: it regulates football and “redistributes” wealth and opportunity so competition can exist at all. America once did the same thing with capitalism, and the result was the greatest middle class the world had ever seen.

Two-thirds of us were in the middle class when Reagan came into office and could get there with a single paycheck thanks to FDR‘s and LBJ‘s “socialist” New Deal and Great Society policies. Today it’s only roughly 45% of us and requires two paychecks. All because of 45 years of Reaganomics.

The choice in front of us is simple. We can keep pretending that letting billionaires write the political and economic rules and own the media is “freedom,” or we can remember that a fair game is what freedom looks like. Because when the rules only work for the owners, the rest of us aren’t players anymore. We’re just there to watch, pay, and lose what little we have so the billionaires can buy another super-yacht.

-Thom Hartmann

Labor Day, 2024

 

Almost one hundred and forty-two years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.

Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. 

Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity. But for all that the war had seemed to be about defending men against the rise of an oligarchy that intended to reduce all men to a life of either enslavement or wage labor, the war and its aftermath had pushed workers’ rights backward.   

The drain of men to the battlefields and the western mines during the war resulted in a shortage of workers that kept unemployment low and wages high. Even when they weren’t, the intense nationalism of the war years tended to silence the voices of labor organizers. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” one organization declared when the war broke out, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe, or we are whipped.” 

Another factor working against the establishment of labor unions during the war was the tendency of employers to claim that striking workers were deliberately undercutting the war effort. They turned to the government to protect production, and in industries like Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields, government leaders sent soldiers to break budding unions and defend war production.

During the war, government contracting favored those companies that could produce big orders of the mule shoes, rifles, rain slickers, coffee, and all the other products that kept the troops supplied. The owners of the growing factories grew wealthy on government contracts, even as conditions in the busy factories deteriorated. While wages were high during the war, they were often paid in greenbacks, which were backed only by the government’s promise to pay. 

While farmers and some entrepreneurs thrived during the war, urban workers and miners had reason to believe that employers had taken advantage of the war to make money off them. After the war, they began to strike for better wages and safer conditions. In August 1866, 60,000 people met as the National Labor Union in Baltimore, Maryland, where they called for an eight-hour workday. Most of those workers calling for organization simply wanted a chance to rise to comfort, but the resolutions developed by the group’s leaders after the convention declared that workers must join unions to reform the abuses of the industrial system. 

To many of those who thought the war would create a country where hard work would mean success, the resolutions seemed to fly in the face of that harmony, echoing the southern enslavers by dividing the world into people of wealth and workers, and asking for government intervention, this time on the side of workers. Republicans began to redefine their older, broad concept of workers to mean urban unskilled or semi-skilled wage laborers specifically.

Then in 1867, a misstep by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio made the party step back from workers. Wade had been a cattle drover and worked on the Erie Canal before studying law and entering politics, and he was a leader among those who saw class activism as the next step in the party’s commitment to free labor. His fiery oratory lifted him to prominence, and in March 1867 the Senate chose him its president pro tempore, in effect making him the nation’s acting vice president in those days before there was a process for replacing a vice president who had stepped into the presidency.

Wade joined a number of senators on a trip to the West, and in Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers reported—possibly incorrectly—that Wade predicted a fight in America between labor and capital. “Property is not equally divided,” the reporter claimed Wade said, “and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” Congress, which Wade now led, had done much for ex-slaves and must now address “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.”

Republican newspapers were apoplectic. The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country, —can become capitalists themselves, —just

as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them, —by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.” Trying to get rich by force of law would undermine society.

Congress established an eight-hour day for federal employees in June 1868, but in that year’s election, voters turned Wade, and others like him, out of office. In 1869, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation saying that the eight-hour workday of "laborers, workmen, and mechanics" would not mean cuts in wages.

Then, in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. The transatlantic cable had gone into operation in 1866, and American newspapers had featured stories of the European war. Now, hungry for dramatic stories, they plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by crazed women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows. 

The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who planned to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to associations of workmen, American newspapers wrote. In their telling, the Paris Commune brought to life the chaotic world the elite enslavers foresaw when they said it was imperative to keep workers from politics. 

Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.” Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace looked at the rising numbers of industrial workers and the conditions of city life, and warned Americans, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

At the same time, it was also clear that wealthy industrialists were gaining more and more control over both state and local governments. In 1872 the Credit Mobilier scandal broke. This was a complicated affair, and what had actually happened was almost certainly misrepresented, but it seemed to show congressmen taking bribes from railroad barons, and Americans were ready to believe that they were doing so. Then, in July 1877, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 20 percent and strikers shut down most of the nation’s railroads, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent U.S. soldiers to the cities immobilized by the strikes. It seemed industrialists had the Army at their beck and call.

By 1882, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government so far toward men of capital that it seemed there was more room for workingmen to demand their rights. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.” 

The workers marching in New York City in the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.” 

Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.” 

In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESSMAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration businessmen will be thoroughly well content with it….” 

Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”

As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).

They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.  

In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor Day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.” Happy Labor Day.

—Heather Cox Richardson

Notes:

https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history-daze

New York Times, July 1, 1867, p. 4. 

New York Times, July 9, 1867, p. 4.

New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 8.

New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 4.

New York Daily Tribune, September 7, 1882, p. 4.

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/files/2011/09/S-730.pdf

https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-first-Labor-Day/

Grace Palladino, Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840–1868 (Fordham University Press, 2006).

Mark Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Johns Hopkins, 2006). 

Brace quotation is from Robert M. Fogelson, America’s Armories: Architecture, Society and Public Order (Harvard University Press, 1989).

Frank Norton, “Our Labor System and the Chinese,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (May 1871).

Chicago Tribune quoted in Harper’s Weekly, February 9, 1884, p, 86.

New York Times, November 10, 1892, p. 8. Statement from the Commercial Travelers’ Republican Club, quoted in Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1892, p. 2. Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1892, p. 2. Senator Teller, quoted in New York Times, November 15, 1892, p. 1. Washington Post, February 16, 1893, p. 7. Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1892, p. 4. Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1892, p. 4. Chicago Tribune, November 13, 1892, p. 4.

Grover Cleveland, Fourth Annual Message, December 3, 1888, at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fourth-annual-message-first-term

 

Why the U.S. Needs at Least a $17 Minimum Wage (Economic Policy Institute)

 

The federal minimum hourly wage is just $7.25, and Congress has not increased it since 2009. Low wages hurt all workers and are particularly harmful to Black workers and other workers of color, especially women of color, who make up a disproportionate share of workers who are severely underpaid. This is the result of structural racism and sexism, with an economic system rooted in chattel slavery in which these workers continue to be shunted into the most underpaid jobs.1

The Raise the Wage Act of 2023 would gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour by 2028, narrowing racial and gender pay gaps. Here is what the Act would do:

• Raise the federal minimum wage to $9.50 this year and increase it in steps until it reaches $17 an hour in 2028.
• After 2028, adjust the minimum wage each year to keep pace with growth in the median wage, a measure of wages for typical workers.
• Phase out the egregious subminimum wage for tipped workers, which has been frozen at a meager $2.13 since 1991.2
• Sunset unacceptable subminimum wages for workers with disabilities employed in sheltered workshops and for workers under age 20.
• Increase the federal minimum wage beyond the previous benchmark of $15 an hour to $17 by 2028, in order to adjust for inflation and the fact that many states and localities have already moved to or beyond a $15 minimum wage.

• The Raise the Wage Act follows the lead of the growing number of states and cities that have adopted significant minimum wage increases in recent years, thanks to the ‘Fight for $15 and a union’ movement led by Black workers and workers of color. Here is a summary of the ‘Fight for $15 and a union’ movement’s impact:

• Since the Fight for $15 was launched by striking fast-food workers in 2012,3 12 states—California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island—and the District of Columbia have approved raising their minimum wages to $15 or more an hour. These states and D.C. represent approximately 40% of the U.S. workforce.4
• Additional states—Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington—have approved minimum wages ranging from $12 to $14.75 an hour.
• In addition, more than four dozen cities and counties have adopted their own minimum wage laws of $15 or more.5
• The benefits of phasing in a $17 federal minimum wage by 2028 would be far-reaching, lifting pay for tens of millions of workers and helping reverse decades of growing pay inequality.
• Increased wages would make a tremendous difference in the life of a cashier, home health aide, or fast-food worker getting paid the minimum wage. These workers today often struggle to cover the basics, like food and rent, on less than $35,000 a year.6
• A majority (60.4%) of workers whose total family income is below the poverty line would receive a pay increase if the minimum wage were raised to $17 by 2028.7
• A $17 minimum wage would begin to reverse decades of growing pay inequality between the most underpaid workers and workers receiving close to the median wage, particularly along gender and racial lines. For example, minimum wage increases in the late 1960s explained 20% of the decrease in the Black-white earnings gap in the years that followed, whereas failures to adequately increase the minimum wage after 1979 account for almost half of the increase in inequality between women at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution.8
• A $17 minimum wage by 2028 would generate $86 billion in higher wages for workers and would also benefit communities across the country. Because underpaid workers spend much of their extra earnings, this injection of wages will help stimulate the economy and spur greater business activity and job growth.9

• Raising the minimum wage to $17 will be particularly significant for workers of color and would help narrow the racial pay gap. The majority of workers who benefit are adult women.

• Nearly one-third (29.7%) of Black workers and one-quarter (24.6%) of Hispanic workers would get a raise if the federal minimum wage were increased to $17.10
• African Americans are paid 10%–15% less than white workers with the same characteristics, so the Raise the Wage Act will deliver the largest benefits to Black workers: about $3,200 annually for a year-round worker.11
• Minimum wage increases in the 1960s Civil Rights Era significantly reduced Black-white earnings inequality and are responsible for more than 20% of the overall reduction in later years.12

• All across the country, workers need at least $17 per hour to, at a minimum, meet the cost of living.

• Today, in all areas across the United States, a single adult (without children) needs at least $17 an hour—roughly $35,000 annually for a full-time worker—to achieve a modest but adequate standard of living. By 2028, underpaid workers—especially those with children—will need even more, according to projections based on the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator.13
• For example, in rural Missouri, a single adult without children will need more than $41,000 (more than $20 per hour as a full-time worker) to cover typical rent, food, transportation, and other basic living costs.14
• In larger metro areas of the South and Southwest, a single adult without children will also need more than $17 an hour to get by: $24.30 in Fort Worth, $25.70 in Phoenix, and $26.20 in Miami.
• In more expensive regions of the country, a single adult without children will need far more than $17 an hour to cover the basics: $36.20 in New York City, $31.20 in Los Angeles, and $33.60 in Washington, D.C.

• Despite their indispensable roles during the COVID-19 pandemic, many essential workers are paid too-low wages and struggle to get by.

• Essential and front-line workers would benefit the most from a minimum wage increase.15 The median pay for many of these jobs is well under $17 an hour; examples include child care workers ($13.71), home health and personal care aides ($14.51), dining room and cafeteria attendants (including school cafeteria workers) ($14.00), and ambulance drivers and attendants ($14.61).16
• One in three retail-sector workers (33.5%) would get a raise.
• More than half (58.7%) of restaurant workers would see their earnings rise.
• 5.5 million workers in health care, social assistance, and education and 2.6 million workers in manufacturing and construction would see a raise.

• The federal minimum wage for tipped workers is still a deplorable $2.13 an hour. Phasing out a tipped wage would lift pay, provide stable paychecks, and reduce poverty for millions of tipped workers.

• Congress has not lifted the federal tipped wage of $2.13 per hour in 32 years. Phasing out the tipped wage will raise the take-home pay of 3.3 million workers in tipped occupations.17
• Seven states (Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) have already eliminated their lower tipped minimum wage. These states are known as “one fair wage” states for their equitable treatment of tipped workers. The cities of Washington, D.C., and Flagstaff, Arizona, are also in the process of phasing out their subminimum tipped wage; and pending the outcome of litigation, the state of Michigan may soon join them.
• Tipped workers in “one fair wage” states are paid the same minimum wage as everyone else before tips. For restaurant servers and bartenders, take-home pay in “one fair wage” states is 24% higher, on average, than in $2.13 states.18
• Having a lower minimum wage for tipped jobs results in dramatically higher poverty rates for tipped workers. In states that use the federal $2.13 tipped minimum wage, the poverty rate among tipped workers in restaurants and bars is 20.8%—7.6 percentage points higher than the 13.2% poverty rate in “one fair wage” states.19
• Eliminating the lower tipped minimum wage has not harmed growth in the restaurant industry or tipped jobs. From 2011 to 2019, “one fair wage” states had stronger restaurant growth than states that had a lower tipped minimum wage—both in the number of full-service restaurants (17.5% vs. 11.1%) and in full-service restaurant employment (23.8% vs. 18.7%).20

• Our economy can more than afford a $17 minimum wage, and a higher federal minimum wage would make our economy healthier.

• Workers earning the current federal minimum wage are paid less per hour in real dollars than their counterparts were paid 50 years ago. Yet businesses can afford to pay them substantially more.21
• The economy has grown dramatically over the past 50 years, and workers are producing more from each hour of work, with productivity doubling since the late 1960s. If the minimum wage had been raised at the same pace as productivity growth since the late 1960s, it would be over $24 an hour today.22
• The economic relief and recovery measures from the COVID-19 pandemic have helped to drive a tighter labor market, which gave many workers more options to find better pay. But some of those effects are wearing off as the labor market is beginning to return to more normal levels of growth compared with the last two years. Raising the minimum wage can help to lock in the historic pay gains that low-wage workers made during the recovery from the pandemic economic crisis.

• Research confirms what workers already know: Raising wages benefits us all, and those benefits are wide-ranging.

• High-quality academic scholarship confirms that modest increases in the minimum wage have not led to detectable job losses.23
• After the federal minimum wage was raised to its highest historical peak in 1968, wages grew and racial earnings gaps closed without constricting employment opportunities for underpaid workers overall.24
• Comprehensive research on 138 state-level minimum wage increases shows that all underpaid workers benefit from minimum wage increases, not just teenagers or restaurant workers.25
• Multiple studies conclude that total annual incomes of families at the bottom of the income distribution rise significantly after a minimum wage increase.26 Workers in underpaid jobs and their families benefit the most from these income increases, reducing poverty and income inequality.
• The benefits of minimum wage increases are not limited to income gains for affected workers. By providing families with higher incomes, minimum wage increases have improved a range of important health, well-being, and educational outcomes—including infant health, mental health, children’s math and reading scores, and educational attainment—and have also reduced “deaths of despair,” child abuse, and teenage pregnancy.27

• ---

  Notes

  1. Kate Bahn and Carmen Sanchez Cumming, “Four Graphs on U.S. Occupational Segregation by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender,” Washington Center for Equitable Growth, July 1, 2020.

  2. Sylvia Allegretto and David Cooper, Twenty-Three Years and Still Waiting for Change: Why It’s Time to Give Tipped Workers the Regular Minimum Wage, Economic Policy Institute, July 2014.

  3. Alina Selyukh, “‘Gives Me Hope’: How Low-Paid Workers Rose Up Against Stagnant Wages,” National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, February 26, 2020; Kimberly Freeman Brown and Marc Bayard, “Editorial: The New Face of Labor, Civil Rights Is Black & Female,” NBC News, September 7, 2015; Amy B. Dean, “Is the Fight for $15 the Next Civil Rights Movement?” Al Jazeera America, June 22, 2015.

  4. Economic Policy Institute calculation using employment shares from the 2022 Basic Monthly Current Population Survey. For recent minimum wage changes, see EPI’s Minimum Wage Tracker. We include the District of Columbia in this list even though it is not a state.

  5. Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Minimum Wage Tracker, last updated July 1, 2023.

  6. The median annual wage for these occupations is about $30,000 according to the May 2022 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  7. Ben Zipperer, The Impact of the Raise the Wage Act of 2023, Economic Policy Institute, July 2023.

  8. Ellora Derenoncourt and Claire Montialoux, “Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 1 (February 2021); David Autor, Alan Manning, and Christopher L. Smith, “The Contribution of the Minimum Wage to U.S. Wage Inequality over Three Decades: A Reassessment,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 8, no. 1 (January 2016).

  9. Ben Zipperer, The Impact of the Raise the Wage Act of 2023, Economic Policy Institute, July 2023.

  10. Ben Zipperer, The Impact of the Raise the Wage Act of 2023, Economic Policy Institute, July 2023.

  11. Ben Zipperer, The Impact of the Raise the Wage Act of 2023, Economic Policy Institute, July 2023.

  12. Ellora Derenoncourt and Claire Montialoux, “Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 1 (February 2021).

  13. Based on Congressional Budget Office projections for the Consumer Price Index and calculations from the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator, which measures the income a family needs to attain a secure yet modest standard of living in all counties and metro areas across the country.

  14. The EPI Family Budget threshold for the least expensive county in Missouri is $41,558 in projected 2028 dollars.

  15. David Cooper, Zane Mokhiber, and Ben Zipperer, Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 by 2025 Would Lift the Pay of 32 Million Workers, Economic Policy Institute, March 2021.

  16. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2022 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates: United States (online database).

  17. Ben Zipperer, The Impact of the Raise the Wage Act of 2023, Economic Policy Institute, July 2023.

  18. EPI analysis of 2022 Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Groups.

  19. EPI analysis of the 2015–2019 American Community Survey.

  20. EPI analysis of 2011–2019 Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data.

  21. David Cooper, Sebastian Martinez Hickey, and Ben Zipperer, “The Value of the Federal Minimum Wage Is at Its Lowest Point in 66 Years,” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), July 14, 2022.

  22. The 2023 federal minimum would be $24.14 had the 1968 minimum wage of $1.60 been indexed to net productivity, defined as net national product divided by total economy hours.

  23. Arindrajit Dube, Impacts of Minimum Wages: Review of the International Evidence, report prepared for Her Majesty’s Treasury (UK), November 2019.

  24. Ellora Derenoncourt and Claire Montialoux, “Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 1 (February 2021).

  25. Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer, “The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs: Evidence from the United States Using a Bunching Estimator,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 134, no. 9 (May 2019).

  26. Arindrajit Dube, “Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11, no. 4 (October 2019); Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis, “The Distributional Effects of Minimum Wages: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data,” U.S. Census Bureau Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications Working Paper 2018-02, 2018.

  27. George L. Wehby, Dhaval M. Dave, and Robert Kaestner, “Effects of the Minimum Wage on Infant Health,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 39, no. 2 (Spring 2020); Kerri M. Raissian and Lindsey Rose Bullinger, “Money Matters: Does the Minimum Wage Affect Child Maltreatment Rates?” Children and Youth Services Review 72 (January 2017); Lindsey Rose Bullinger, “The Effect of Minimum Wages on Adolescent Fertility: A Nationwide Analysis,” American Journal of Public Health, March 2017; William H. Dow, Anna Godoy, Christopher Lowenstein, and Michael Reich, “Can Labor Market Policies Reduce Deaths of Despair?” Journal of Health Economics 74 (December 2020); Anna Godøy and Ken Jacobs, “The Downstream Benefits of Higher Incomes and Wages,” Federal Research Bank of Boston Community Development Discussion Papers 21-1, 2021.

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-08-12/why-us-needs-least-17-minimum-wage

"Our Future Is Public": Santiago Declaration Envisions End of Neoliberalism Death Spiral

 

A new manifesto calls for building "a sustainable social pact for the 21st century" in which "our rights are guaranteed, not based on our ability to pay, or on whether a system produces profit, but on whether it enables all of us to live well together in peace and equality."

An international coalition made up of more than 200 trade unions and progressive advocacy groups on Thursday published the Santiago Declaration, a manifesto for "a complete overhaul of our global economic system."

The undeniably anti-neoliberal document proclaiming that "our future is public" is the product of a meeting held in Chile—the "laboratory of neoliberalism" where Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago acolytes' upwardly redistributive economic model was first imposed at gunpoint by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military junta.

From November 29 to December 2, more than 1,000 organizers from over 100 countries gathered in Santiago and virtually to germinate a left-wing movement against "the dominant paradigm of growth, privatization, and commodification."

"Who owns our resources and our services is fundamental. A public future means ensuring that everything essential to dignified lives is out of private control."

"We are at a critical juncture," the manifesto begins. "At a time when the world faces a series of crises, from the environmental emergency to hunger and deepening inequalities, increasing armed conflicts, pandemics, rising extremism, and escalating inflation, a collective response is growing."

"Hundreds of organizations across socioeconomic justice and public services sectors—from education and health services, to care, energy, food, housing, water, transportation, and social protection—are coming together to address the harmful effects of commercializing public services, to reclaim democratic public control, and to reimagine a truly equal and human rights-oriented economy that works for people and the planet," reads the document. "We demand universal access to quality, gender-transformative, and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society."

The Santiago Declaration continues:

“The commercialization and privatization of public services and the commodification of all aspects of life have driven growing inequalities and entrenched power disparities, giving prominence to profit and corruption over people's rights and ecological and social well-being. It adversely affects workers, service users, and communities, with the costs and damages falling disproportionately on those who have historically been exploited.

“The devaluation of public service workers' social status, the worsening of their working conditions, and attacks against their unions are some of the most worrying regressions of our times and a threat to our collective spaces. This is deeply linked with the patriarchal organization of society, where women as workers and carers are undervalued and absorb social and economic shocks. They are the first to suffer from public sector cuts, losing access to services and opportunities for decent work, and facing a rising burden of unpaid care work.

“Austerity cuts in public sector budgets and wage bills are driven by an ideological mindset entrenched in the International Monetary Fund and many ministries of finance that serve the interests of corporations over people, perpetuating dependencies and unsustainable debts. Unfair tax rules, nationally and internationally, enable vast inequalities in the accumulation and concentration of income, wealth, and power within and between countries. The financialization of a wide range of public actions and decisions hands over power to shareholders and undermines democracy.”

Against the heavily privatized status quo, "we commit to continue building an intersectional movement for a future that is public," the document says. "One where our rights are guaranteed, not based on our ability to pay, or on whether a system produces profit, but on whether it enables all of us to live well together in peace and equality: our buen vivir."

According to Global Justice Now, the Transnational Institute, and other signatories, the creation of an egalitarian and sustainable society hinges on ensuring universal access to life-sustaining public goods delivered by highly valued workers.

"We need to take back control of decision-making processes and institutions from the current forms of corporate capture to be able to decide for what, for whom, and how we provide."

"Who owns our resources and our services is fundamental," the manifesto argues. "A public future means ensuring that everything essential to dignified lives is out of private control, and under decolonial forms of collective, transparent, and democratic control."

As the Santiago Declaration explains:

“A future that is public also means creating the conditions for enabling alternative production systems, including the prioritization of agroecology as an essential component of food sovereignty. To that end, we need to take back control of decision-making processes and institutions from the current forms of corporate capture to be able to decide for what, for whom, and how we provide, manage, and collectively own resources and public services.

“The public future will not be possible without taking bold collective national action for ambitious, gender-transformative, and progressive fiscal and economic reforms, to massively expand financing of universal public services. These reforms must be complemented by major shifts in the international public finance architecture, including transformations in tax, debt, and trade governance.

“Democratizing economic governance towards truly multilateral processes is critical to overhaul the power of dominant neoliberal organizations and reorient national and international financial institutions away from the racial, patriarchal, and colonial patterns of capitalism and towards socioeconomic justice, ecological sustainability, human rights, and public services. It is equally essential to enforce the climate and ecological debt of the Global North, to carry out an expedited reduction of energy and material resource use by wealthy economies, to hold big polluters liable for their generations-long infractions, to accelerate the phasing-out of fossil fuels, and to prioritize finance system change.”

The call to build "a sustainable social pact for the 21st century," the coalition observes, "follows years of growing mobilization around the world."

It also comes as a complimentary alliance convened by Progressive International meets in Havana, Cuba to map out an emancipatory "new international economic order."

During Friday's opening session, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called for the establishment of a movement capable of dismantling "the existing, exploitative, catastrophically extractive imperialist international economic order so as to build a new one in its place... in which people and planet can breathe, live, and prosper together."

-Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams

 

"The road to a twenty-first-century version of fascism" by Joseph E. Stiglitz

 

NEW YORK – Economics has been called the dismal science, and 2023 will vindicate that moniker. We are at the mercy of two cataclysms that are simply beyond our control. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to threaten us with new, more deadly, contagious, or vaccine-resistant variants. The pandemic has been managed especially poorly by China, owing mainly to its failure to inoculate its citizens with more effective (Western-made) mRNA vaccines.

The second cataclysm is Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. The conflict shows no end in sight, and could escalate or produce even greater spillover effects. Either way, more disturbances to energy and food prices are all but assured. And, as if these problems weren’t vexing enough, there is ample reason to worry that the response from policymakers will make a bad situation worse.

Most importantly, the US Federal Reserve may raise interest rates too far and too fast. Today’s inflation is largely driven by supply shortages, some of which are already in the process of being resolved. Raising interest rates therefore might be counterproductive. It will not produce more food, oil, or gas, but it will make it more difficult to mobilize investments that would help alleviate the supply shortages.

Monetary tightening also could lead to a global slowdown. In fact, that outcome is highly anticipated, and some commentators, having convinced themselves that combating inflation requires economic pain, have been effectively cheering on the recession. The quicker and deeper, the better, they argue. They seem not to have considered that the cure may be worse than the disease.

The global tremors from the Fed’s tightening could already be felt heading into winter. The United States is engaged in a twenty-first-century beggar-thy-neighbor policy. While a stronger dollar tempers inflation in the US, it does so by weakening other currencies and increasing inflation elsewhere. To mitigate these foreign-exchange effects, even countries with weak economies are being forced to raise interest rates, which is weakening their economies further.

Higher interest rates, depreciated currencies, and a global slowdown have already pushed dozens of countries to the edge of default. Higher interest rates and energy prices will also push many firms toward bankruptcy, too. There have already been some dramatic examples of this, as with the now-nationalized German utility Uniper.

And even if companies don’t seek bankruptcy protection, both firms and households will feel the stress of tighter financial and credit conditions. Not surprisingly, 14 years of ultra-low interest rates have left many countries, firms, and households overindebted.

The past year’s massive changes in interest rates and exchange rates imply multiple hidden risks – as demonstrated by the near-collapse of British pension funds in late September and early October. Mismatches of maturities and exchange rates are a hallmark of under-regulated economies, and they have become even more prevalent with the growth of non-transparent derivatives.

These economic travails will, of course, fall hardest on the most vulnerable countries, providing even more fertile ground for populist demagogues to sow the seeds of resentment and discontent. There was a global sigh of relief when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential election. But let us not forget that Bolsonaro got almost 50% of the votes and still controls Brazil’s Congress.

Across every dimension, including the economy, the greatest threat to well-being today is political. Over half the world’s population lives under authoritarian regimes. Even in the US, one of the two major parties has become a personality cult that increasingly rejects democracy and continues to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election. Its modus operandi is to attack the press, science, and institutions of higher learning, while pumping as much mis- and disinformation into the culture as it can.

The aim, apparently, is to roll back much of the progress of the past 250 years. Gone is the optimism that prevailed at the end of the Cold War, when Francis Fukuyam could herald “the end of history,” by which he meant the disappearance of any serious challenger to the liberal-democratic model.

To be sure, there is still a positive agenda that could forestall a descent into atavism and despair. But in many countries, political polarization and gridlock have pushed such an agenda out of reach. With better-functioning political systems, we could have moved much faster to increase production and supply, mitigating the inflationary pressures our economies now confront.

After a half-century of telling farmers not to produce as much as they could, both Europe and the US could have told them to produce more. The US could have provided childcare – so that more women could enter the labor force, alleviating the alleged labor shortages – and Europe could have moved more quickly to reform its energy markets and prevent a spike in electricity prices.

Countries around the world could have levied windfall-profit taxes in ways that might actually have encouraged investment and tempered prices, using the proceeds to protect the vulnerable and to make public investments in economic resilience. As an international community, we could have adopted the COVID-19 intellectual-property waiver, thereby reducing the magnitude of vaccine apartheid and the resentment that it fuels, as well as mitigating the risk of dangerous new mutations.

All told, an optimist would say that our glass is about one-eighth full. A select few countries have made some progress on this agenda, and for that we should be grateful. But almost 80 years after Friedrich von Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, we are still living with the legacy of the extremist policies that he and Milton Friedman pushed into the mainstream. Those ideas have put us on a truly dangerous course: the road to a twenty-first-century version of fascism.

-Project Syndicate

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, is a former chief economist of the World Bank (1997-2000), chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and co-chair of the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices. He is a member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation and was lead author of the 1995 IPCC Climate Assessment.

 

July 4, 2022

 
What Biden and the democratic leadership need to address before it is too late, besides the antiquated filibuster and Freedom to Vote Act, is the lack of unity in the Democratic Party; Republican propagation of lies; the ongoing Republican subversion of the next elections; the Republican attempt to rigged the voting system in their favor; the Republican focus on voting in partisan supervisors for elections; Republican gerrymandering; Republican legislator purges; Republican sabotage of the U.S. mail system; Republican attacks on Medicare and Social Security; Republican obstruction of serious gun control legislation; Republican (or theocratic) takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court; rising American religious fundamentalism; the pandemic and its effects on healthcare; the unvaccinated and their effects on hospitals and the economy; the global demand for thermal energy; the climate crisis; the education and teacher crisis; cyber security; immigration reform; corporate corruption; pharmaceutical greed; wage stagnation, inflation and reflation; Russia, China, North Korea...  

-Glen Brown

What President Biden and the Democratic Leadership Need to Address Before November 2022

 

I am afraid that today’s Democratic Party’s ill-advised priorities, political stupidity, schizophrenic identity, split coalition, endless procrastination and vulnerable candidacies will enable the Republican Party to take over the House and Senate in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.

What Biden and the democratic leadership need to address before it is too late, besides the antiquated filibuster and Freedom to Vote Act, is the lack of unity in the Democratic Party (e.g. centrists Manchin and Sinema); Republican propagation of lies; the ongoing Republican subversion of the next elections; the Republican attempt to rigged the voting system in their favor; the Republican focus on voting in partisan supervisors for elections; Republican legislator purges; Republican sabotage of the U.S. mail system; Republican attacks on Medicare;  partisan gerrymandering; the pandemic and the effects on healthcare; inadequate testing, vaccine, and N-95 mask distributions; the unvaccinated and their effects on hospitals and the economy; the global demand for thermal energy; the climate crisis; the education and teacher crisis; cyber security; immigration reform; corporate corruption; pharmaceutical greed; rising American religious fundamentalism; wage stagnation, inflation and reflation; China, Russia, North Korea...

What Biden and the democratic leadership also need to address is an expansion of Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing benefits; an expansion of the Child Tax Credit; an ample reduction of prescription drug prices; the availability of healthcare for those who cannot afford it; the income inequality and unfair taxation of the wealthy elite, and the Build Back Better legislation, to name just a few.  

-Glen Brown