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The CARES Act and the Tantalizing Promise of a Universal Basic Income

The CARES Act and the Tantalizing Promise of a Universal Basic Income

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[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Miranda Perry Fleischer, (Professor Law and Co-Director of Tax Programs at the University of San Diego School of Law); and Matt Zwolinski (Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego; founder and director, USD Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy; founder and contributor, Bleeding Heart Libertarians Blog)

This week, Americans began receiving cold, hard cash from the government. Meant to cushion the economic fallout of Covid-19, the CARES Act provides households with relief payments of up to $1200 per adult and $500 per child. As we have written elsewhere, direct cash transfers are the simplest, least paternalistic, and most efficient way to protect Americans’ economic health – pandemic or not. The idea of simply giving people money has deep historical and wide ideological roots, culminating in Andrew Yang’s popularization of a universal basic income (“UBI”) during his now-suspended presidential campaign. The CARES Act relief provisions embody some of the potential benefits of a UBI, but nevertheless fail in key ways to deliver its true promise.

Provide Cash, No-Strings-Attached

Most promisingly, the relief payments are no-strings-attached. Recipients can use them as they – not the government – think best, be it for rent, food, or a laptop for a child to learn remotely. This freedom is a welcome departure from most current aid programs, which are often in-kind or restricted transfers. Kansas prohibits welfare recipients from using benefits at movie theaters and swimming pools. SNAP recipients cannot purchase “hot food” such as a ready-to-eat roasted chicken; California has a 17-page pamphlet identifying which foods users of Women, Infants and Children (“WIC”) benefits can buy (for example, white eggs but not brown). 

These restrictions arise from a distrust of beneficiaries. Yet numerous studies show that recipients of cash transfers do not waste benefits on alcohol, drugs or gambling. Instead, beneficiaries in developing countries purchase livestock, metal roofs, or healthier food. In wealthier countries, cash transfers are associated with improvements in infant health, better nutrition, higher test scores, more schooling, and lower rates of arrest for young adults – all of which suggest beneficiaries do not waste cash.

Avoid Asset Tests

A second positive of the relief payments is that they eschew asset tests, unlike many welfare programs. For example, a family can lose hundreds of dollars of SNAP benefits if their countable assets exceed $2,250. Such limits act as an implicit wealth tax and discourage lower-income individuals from saving. Indeed, some recipients report engaging in transactions like buying furniture on lay-away (which does not count) to avoid the asset limits. Lower-income individuals, for whom a car repair bill or traffic ticket can lead to financial ruin, should be encouraged to – not penalized for – saving for a rainy day.

Don’t Worry So Much about the Labor Market  

A third pro is that the direct relief payments are not tied to a showing of desert. They do not require one to work, be looking for work, or show that one is either unable to work or engaged in a substitute such as child care or school. Again, this contrasts with most current welfare programs. SNAP requires able-bodied childless adults to work or participate in training or education 80 hours a month. Supplemental Security Income requires non-elderly recipients to prove that they are blind or disabled. Nor do the relief payments require recipients to pass a drug test, or prove they have no criminal record.

As with spending restrictions, these requirements display distrust of beneficiaries. The fear is that “money for nothing” will encourage low-income individuals to leave their jobs en masse. But this fear, too, is largely overblown. Although past experiments with unconditional transfers show that total work hours drop, the bulk of this drop is from teenagers staying in school longer, new mothers delaying entrance into the workforce, and primary earners reducing their hours from say, 60 to 50 hours a week. We could also imagine UBI recipients spending time volunteering, engaging in the arts, or taking care of friends and relatives. None of these are necessarily bad things.

Don’t Limit Aid to the “Deserving”

On these three counts, the CARES Act embraces the promise of a UBI. But the CARES Act departs from key aspects of a well-designed, true UBI. Most importantly, the size of the relief payments – one-time transfers of $1200 per adult – pale in comparison to the Act’s enhanced unemployment benefits of $600/week. This mismatch underscores how deeply ingrained our country’s obsession with helping only the “deserving” poor is and how narrowly “desert” is defined. The Act’s most generous aid is limited to individuals with pre-existing connections to the formal labor market who leave under very specific conditions. Someone who cannot work because they are caring for a family member sick with COVID-19 qualifies, but not an adult child who left a job months ago to care for an aging parent with Alzheimer’s. A parent who cannot work because her child’s school was cancelled due to the pandemic qualifies, but not a parent who hasn’t worked the past couple years due to the lack of affordable child care. And because unemployment benefits not only turn on being previously employed but also rise the higher one’s past wages were, this mismatch magnifies that our safety net helps the slightly poor much more than the very poorest among us. 

Don’t Impose Bureaucratic Hurdles

The botched roll-out of the enhanced unemployment benefits illustrates another downside to targeting aid only to the “deserving”: It is far more complicated than giving aid to all who need it. Guidance for self-employed workers (newly eligible for such benefits) is still forthcoming. Individuals with more than one employer before the crisis struggle to input multiple jobs in the system, even though their benefits increase as their past wages do. Even college graduates have trouble completing the clunky forms; a friend who teaches yoga had to choose between “aqua fitness instructor” and “physical education” when listing her job. 

These frustrations are just another example of the government’s ineptitude at determining who is and is not work capable – even in good times. Often, the very people that can navigate the system to convince the government they are unable to work are actually the most work-capable. Those least capable of work, unable to navigate the system, receive nothing. And as millions of Americans spend countless hours on the phone and navigating crashing websites, they are learning what has been painfully obvious to many lower-income individuals for years – the government often puts insurmountable barriers in the way of even the “deserving poor.” These barriers – numerous office visits, lengthy forms, drug tests – are sometimes so time consuming that beneficiaries must choose between obtaining benefits to which they are legally entitled and applying for jobs or working extra hours. Lesson one from the CARES Act is that universal payments, paid to all, avoid these pitfalls. 

Don’t Means Test Up Front

The CARES Act contains three other flaws that a well-designed UBI would also fix. First, the structure of the cash transfers highlights the drawbacks of upfront means testing. In an attempt to limit aid to Americans in financial distress, the $1200 relief payments begin to phase-out at five cents on the dollar when income exceeds a certain threshold: $75,000 for childless, single individuals and $150,000 for married couples. The catch is that for most Americans, their 2019 or 2018 incomes will determine whether their relief payments phase-out – and therefore how much aid they receive now, in 2020. In a world where 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past month, looking to one or two-year old data to determine need is meaningless. Many Americans whose pre-pandemic incomes exceeded the threshold are now struggling to make mortgage payments and put food on the table, but will receive little or no direct cash aid under the CARES Act until April of 2021.

This absurdity magnifies a problem inherent in ex ante means tests. Often, one’s past financial status does not tell us much about an individual’s current needs. This is particularly true when incomes fluctuate from period to period, as is the case with many lower-income workers. Imagine a fast food worker and SNAP beneficiary whose schedule changes month to month, if not week to week. If she is lucky enough to work a lot in November, she may see her December SNAP benefits reduced. But what if her boss gives her fewer shifts in December? Both her paycheck and her SNAP benefits will be lower in December, leaving her struggling.

The solution is to send cash to all Americans, and recapture the transfer through the income tax system. Mathematically, an ex post tax is exactly the same as an ex ante phase out. Consider the CARES Act. A childless single individual with an income of $85,000 is $10,000 over the threshold, reducing her benefit by $500 and netting her $700. Giving her a check for $1200 and taxing her an additional 5% on income above $75,000 also nets her $700. As a practical matter, however, an ex post tax is more accurate because hindsight is 20-20. Lesson two from the CARES Act is that universal payments offset by taxes are superior to ex ante means-testing.

Provide Regular Payments

Third, the CARES Act provides one lump sum payment, with struggling Americans wondering whether Congress will act again. This is a missed opportunity: Studies show that families receiving SNAP benefits face challenges planning for even a month at a time. Lesson three is that guaranteed monthly or bi-weekly payments – as a true UBI would provide — would help households plan and provide some peace of mind amidst this uncertainty.

Provide Equal Payments to Children and Adults

Finally, the CARES Act provides a smaller benefit to children than adults. This is nonsensical. A single parent with two children faces greater hardship than a married couple with one child, as she has the same number of mouths to feed with fewer earners. Further, social science evidence suggests that augmenting family income has positive long-run consequences for children. Lesson four from the CARES Act – the empirical case for a UBI is strongest for families with children.

It’s Better to Be Overly, not Underly, Generous

The Act’s direct cash payments are a step in the right direction. But they demonstrate that not all cash assistance plans are created equal. Uniform and periodic payments to all – regardless of age and one’s relationship to the workforce – is the best way to protect Americans’ economic health, pandemic or not. This is not the time to be stingy or moralistic in our assistance. Better to err on the side of being overly generous now, especially when we can correct that error later through the tax system. Errors that result in withholding aid from those who need it, alas, might not be so easy to correct.

The post The CARES Act and the Tantalizing Promise of a Universal Basic Income appeared first on Truth on the Market.

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Mistakes Were Made

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that…

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Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.

Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”

And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.

Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.

And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …

And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …

And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …

And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”

And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …

Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …

… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 23:20

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Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A…

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Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Harvard Medical School professor who refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine has been terminated, according to documents reviewed by The Epoch Times.

Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist and statistician, at his home in Ashford, Conn., on Feb. 11, 2022. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist, was fired by Mass General Brigham in November 2021 over noncompliance with the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate after his requests for exemptions from the mandate were denied, according to one document. Mr. Kulldorff was also placed on leave by Harvard Medical School (HMS) because his appointment as professor of medicine there “depends upon” holding a position at the hospital, another document stated.

Mr. Kulldorff asked HMS in late 2023 how he could return to his position and was told he was being fired.

You would need to hold an eligible appointment with a Harvard-affiliated institution for your HMS academic appointment to continue,” Dr. Grace Huang, dean for faculty affairs, told the epidemiologist and biostatistician.

She said the lack of an appointment, combined with college rules that cap leaves of absence at two years, meant he was being terminated.

Mr. Kulldorff disclosed the firing for the first time this month.

“While I can’t comment on the specifics due to employment confidentiality protections that preclude us from doing so, I can confirm that his employment agreement was terminated November 10, 2021,” a spokesperson for Brigham and Women’s Hospital told The Epoch Times via email.

Mass General Brigham granted just 234 exemption requests out of 2,402 received, according to court filings in an ongoing case that alleges discrimination.

The hospital said previously, “We received a number of exemption requests, and each request was carefully considered by a knowledgeable team of reviewers.

A lot of other people received exemptions, but I did not,” Mr. Kulldorff told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Kulldorff was originally hired by HMS but switched departments in 2015 to work at the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is part of Mass General Brigham and affiliated with HMS.

Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls,” an HMS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “Hospital-based faculty, such as Mr. Kulldorff, are employed by one of the affiliates, not by HMS, and require an active hospital appointment to maintain an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School.”

HMS confirmed that some faculty, who are tenured or on the tenure track, do not require hospital appointments.

Natural Immunity

Before the COVID-19 vaccines became available, Mr. Kulldorff contracted COVID-19. He was hospitalized but eventually recovered.

That gave him a form of protection known as natural immunity. According to a number of studies, including papers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, natural immunity is better than the protection bestowed by vaccines.

Other studies have found that people with natural immunity face a higher risk of problems after vaccination.

Mr. Kulldorff expressed his concerns about receiving a vaccine in his request for a medical exemption, pointing out a lack of data for vaccinating people who suffer from the same issue he does.

I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency,” Mr. Kulldorff wrote in an essay.

In his request for a religious exemption, he highlighted an Israel study that was among the first to compare protection after infection to protection after vaccination. Researchers found that the vaccinated had less protection than the naturally immune.

“Having had COVID disease, I have stronger longer lasting immunity than those vaccinated (Gazit et al). Lacking scientific rationale, vaccine mandates are religious dogma, and I request a religious exemption from COVID vaccination,” he wrote.

Both requests were denied.

Mr. Kulldorff is still unvaccinated.

“I had COVID. I had it badly. So I have infection-acquired immunity. So I don’t need the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times.

Dissenting Voice

Mr. Kulldorff has been a prominent dissenting voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, countering messaging from the government and many doctors that the COVID-19 vaccines were needed, regardless of prior infection.

He spoke out in an op-ed in April 2021, for instance, against requiring people to provide proof of vaccination to attend shows, go to school, and visit restaurants.

The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune,” he wrote at the time.

Mr. Kulldorff later co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of people at high risk while removing restrictions for younger, healthy people.

Harsh restrictions such as school closures “will cause irreparable damage” if not lifted, the declaration stated.

The declaration drew criticism from Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who became the head of the CDC, among others.

In a competing document, Dr. Walensky and others said that “relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed” and that “uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity(3) and mortality across the whole population.”

“Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades,” Mr. Kulldorff later said in an EpochTV interview. “I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.

Surveys indicate that people have less trust now in the CDC and other health institutions than before the pandemic, and data from the CDC and elsewhere show that fewer people are receiving the new COVID-19 vaccines and other shots.

Support

The disclosure that Mr. Kulldorff was fired drew criticism of Harvard and support for Mr. Kulldorff.

The termination “is a massive and incomprehensible injustice,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, an ethics expert who was fired from the University of California–Irvine School of Medicine for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine because he had natural immunity, said on X.

The academy is full of people who declined vaccines—mostly with dubious exemptions—and yet Harvard fires the one professor who happens to speak out against government policies.” Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiologist at the University of California–San Francisco, wrote in a blog post. “It looks like Harvard has weaponized its policies and selectively enforces them.”

A petition to reinstate Mr. Kulldorff has garnered more than 1,800 signatures.

Some other doctors said the decision to let Mr. Kulldorff go was correct.

“Actions have consequence,” Dr. Alastair McAlpine, a Canadian doctor, wrote on X. He said Mr. Kulldorff had “publicly undermine[d] public health.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 21:00

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Correcting the Washington Post’s 11 Charts That Are Supposed to Tell Us How the Economy Changed Since Covid

The Washington Post made some serious errors or omissions in its 11 charts that are supposed to tell us how Covid changed the economy. Wages Starting with…

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The Washington Post made some serious errors or omissions in its 11 charts that are supposed to tell us how Covid changed the economy.

Wages

Starting with its second chart, the article gives us an index of average weekly wages since 2019. The index shows a big jump in 2020, which then falls off in 2021 and 2022, before rising again in 2023.

It tells readers:

“Many Americans got large pay increases after the pandemic, when employers were having to one-up each other to find and keep workers. For a while, those wage gains were wiped out by decade-high inflation: Workers were getting larger paychecks, but it wasn’t enough to keep up with rising prices.”

That actually is not what its chart shows. The big rise in average weekly wages at the start of the pandemic was not the result of workers getting pay increases, it was the result of low-paid workers in sectors like hotels and restaurants losing their jobs.

The number of people employed in the low-paying leisure and hospitality sector fell by more than 8 million at the start of the pandemic. Even at the start of 2021 it was still down by over 4 million.

Laying off low-paid workers raises average wages in the same way that getting the short people to leave raises the average height of the people in the room. The Washington Post might try to tell us that the remaining people grew taller, but that is not what happened.

The other problem with this chart is that it is giving us weekly wages. The length of the average workweek jumped at the start of the pandemic as employers decided to work the workers they had longer hours rather than hire more workers. In January of 2021 the average workweek was 34.9 hours, compared to 34.4 hours in 2019 and 34.3 hours in February.

This increase in hours, by itself, would raise weekly pay by 2.0 percent. As hours returned to normal in 2022, this measure would misleadingly imply that wages were falling.

It is also worth noting that the fastest wage gains since the pandemic have been at the bottom end of the wage distribution and the Black/white wage gap has fallen to its lowest level on record.

Saving Rates

The third chart shows the saving rate since 2019. It shows a big spike at the start of the pandemic, as people stopped spending on things like restaurants and travel and they got pandemic checks from the government. It then falls sharply in 2022 and is lower in the most recent quarters than in 2019.

The piece tells readers:

“But as the world reopened — and people resumed spending on dining out, travel, concerts and other things that were previously off-limits — savings rates have leveled off. Americans are also increasingly dip into rainy-day funds to pay more for necessities, including groceries, housing, education and health care. In fact, Americans are now generally saving less of their incomes than they were before the pandemic.

This is an incomplete picture due to a somewhat technical issue. As I explained in a blogpost a few months ago, there is an unusually large gap between GDP as measured on the output side and GDP measured on the income side. In principle, these two numbers should be the same, but they never come out exactly equal.

In recent quarters, the gap has been 2.5 percent of GDP. This is extraordinarily large, but it also is unusual in that the output side is higher than the income side, the opposite of the standard pattern over the last quarter century.

It is standard for economists to assume that the true number for GDP is somewhere between the two measures. If we make that assumption about the data for 2023, it would imply that income is somewhat higher than the data now show and consumption somewhat lower.

In that story, as I showed in the blogpost, the saving rate for 2023 would be 6.8 percent of disposable income, roughly the same as the average for the three years before the pandemic. This would mean that people are not dipping into their rainy-day funds as the Post tells us. They are spending pretty much as they did before the pandemic.

 

Credit Card Debt

The next graph shows that credit card debt is rising again, after sinking in the pandemic. The piece tells readers:

“But now, debt loads are swinging higher again as families try to keep up with rising prices. Total household debt reached a record $17.5 trillion at the end of 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And, in a worrisome sign for the economy, delinquency rates on mortgages, car loans and credit cards are all rising, too.”

There are several points worth noting here. Credit card debt is rising, but measured relative to income it is still below where it was before the pandemic. It was 6.7 percent of disposable income at the end of 2019, compared to 6.5 percent at the end of last year.

The second point is that a major reason for the recent surge in credit card debt is that people are no longer refinancing mortgages. There was a massive surge in mortgage refinancing with the low interest rates in 2020-2021.

Many of the people who refinanced took additional money out, taking advantage of the increased equity in their home. This channel of credit was cut off when mortgage rates jumped in 2022 and virtually ended mortgage refinancing. This means that to a large extent the surge in credit card borrowing is simply a shift from mortgage debt to credit card debt.

The point about total household debt hitting a record can be said in most months. Except in the period immediately following the collapse of the housing bubble, total debt is almost always rising.

And the rise in delinquencies simply reflects the fact that they had been at very low levels in 2021 and 2022. For the most part, delinquency rates are just getting back to their pre-pandemic levels, which were historically low.  

 

Grocery Prices and Gas Prices

The next two charts show the patterns in grocery prices and gas prices since the pandemic. It would have been worth mentioning that every major economy in the world saw similar run-ups in prices in these two areas. In other words, there was nothing specific to U.S. policy that led to a surge in inflation here.

 

The Missing Charts

There are several areas where it would have been interesting to see charts which the Post did not include. It would have been useful to have a chart on job quitters, the number of people who voluntarily quit their jobs during the pandemic. In the tight labor markets of 2021 and 2022 the number of workers who left jobs they didn’t like soared to record levels, as shown below.

 

The vast majority of these workers took other jobs that they liked better. This likely explains another item that could appear as a graph, the record level of job satisfaction.

In a similar vein there has been an explosion in the number of people who work from home at least part-time. This has increased by more than 17 million during the pandemic. These workers are saving themselves thousands of dollars a year on commuting costs and related expenses, as well as hundreds of hours spent commuting.

Finally, there has been an explosion in the use of telemedicine since the pandemic. At the peak, nearly one in four visits with a health care professional was a remote consultation. This saved many people with serious health issues the time and inconvenience associated with a trip to a hospital or doctor’s office. The increased use of telemedicine is likely to be a lasting gain from the pandemic.

 

The World Has Changed

The pandemic will likely have a lasting impact on the economy and society. The Washington Post’s charts captured part of this story, but in some cases misrepr

The post Correcting the Washington Post’s 11 Charts That Are Supposed to Tell Us How the Economy Changed Since Covid appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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