Jeb Bush thinks you're all a bunch of lazy miscreants who need to work more.
Or, at least, that's the spin the Democrats are putting on an awkward comment Bush made to The Union Leader. In the interview, the GOP presidential contender said "people need to work longer hours" if the country is to boost economic growth.
"Workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows," Bush said in the full comment. "It means that people need to work longer hours, and through their productivity, gain more income for their families."
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Once the hubbub started, he quickly backtracked, saying he meant that lots of people are working part-time who'd like to be working full-time, and that they need "access to greater opportunities to work." Commentators, including my colleague Paul Waldman, are already begging the collective American political id to not leap onto the accusation-counter-accusation-gaffe merry-go-round, and I have to agree.
Bush's clarification is fair enough: The portion of Americans in the labor force really is lower than it's been in decades. Seven years after the Great Recession, the U-6 unemployment rate — which takes the official unemployment rate, and adds both part-time workers who want full-time work and workers who want to work but have given up on the job market — is still at a whopping 10.5 percent. That's a grinding, years-long crisis for the economy and the American social fabric.
Where Bush's argument breaks down, and where substantive and productive debate really does begin, is why this has happened and what to do about it.
He has yet to offer any comprehensive economic plan, or an underlying theory of what forces have been holding the economy back since the 2008 collapse. But he's dropped a few hints, including barely veiled potshots at ObamaCare for requiring businesses to offer health coverage to any employee working more than 30 hours. The criticism is that this will incentivize employers to push employees below full-time work to avoid the costs of insuring them. In theory, it's a fair thing to worry about. But stupid policy or no, there's zero evidence it's having any effect on the trend lines in part-time employment.
Bush has also taken the government to task for creating "welfare programs and tax rules that punish people with lost benefits and higher taxes for moving up those first few rungs of the economic ladder."
Again, this isn't a crazy critique: As people move up the income ladder, they cease to qualify for various forms of government aid, which can mean less income in real terms even as they're technically being paid more. Of course, the way to fix this is to make the fall-off in benefits for people earning more as slow and gradual as possible. But that requires spending more money on these programs, not less, because you’re extending the aid higher up the income spectrum. And more spending on the safety net seems an unlikely thing to come out of Bush's Republican Party, to put it very mildly.
More fundamentally, the idea that there's work out there, but people are being suckered by the welfare state out of taking advantage of it, doesn't square with the data, either. For every job opening in the economy, there's still 1.7 Americans looking for work. (It was 1.1 seekers per job at the peak of the late-90s boom.) In practically every sector of the economy, unemployed people looking for work still outnumber actual job openings, often by very large margins.
At the risk of being pedantic, before the welfare state can dissuade people from taking jobs, jobs have to actually be on offer.
Bush seems guilty of a basic failure to think through where jobs actually come from. Businesses hire people when they believe the added cost of taking that person on is worth the added revenue they'd generate in moving whatever good or service the firm provides. Which is to say, they hire in response to untapped demand.
Economies grow from the bottom up. So if the ability of everyday Americans to buy stuff is low enough, it's entirely possible for the economy, on a collective ecological level, to simply fail to provide enough jobs for everyone. When this happens, workers lose bargaining power because employers can pick and choose at their convenience from a pool of workers who are desperate for any opportunity.
This has cascade effects up and own the economic ladder. The most vulnerable Americans get pushed off the twig entirely, and labor force participation goes down. Then people who want to work full-time get stuck working part-time, because that's all employers need them for. And people who are working full-time are paid less than they otherwise would be, because they're just happy not to be as bad off as the less fortunate below them.
Evidence like the job seekers ratio is pretty clear evidence that, seven years out from the Great Recession, this is still exactly what's going on. On top of that, corporate profits are doing fine, which certainly suggests that regulations and taxes aren't holding back businesses from making money.
So there's a weird top-down unreality to Bush's remarks. His criticisms rest on the assumption that there are already enough jobs out there, but government is preventing people from getting them. Or that there's enough demand out there, and government is preventing businesses from turning that demand into jobs. It's rather like telling someone trying to grow a garden in the desert that what they need is more sunlight, rather than more water and nutrients. Conservatives' recent experiment in tax-cutting in Kansas was based on this same thinking, and it's been a spectacular failure.
This problem can only be fixed by bulking up the ability of everyday people to provide goods and services. That implies increases in government spending, from safety net programs to public infrastructure investment, to more radical policy ideas like job guarantees and universal benefit programs. More money flowing to the bottom of the economy, not less.
Cutting low-end taxes could help. But roughly half of Americans already pay no income tax, and if the pre-tax distribution of incomes is sufficiently skewed — and it is — cutting payroll or state taxes that hit the poor will be of limited usefulness.
The problem, as I'm sure you noticed, is that Bush is a Republican. So all of these solutions are anathema. Even further tax cuts for the poor are highly contested fringe ideas in the party.
The only solutions Bush has are to problems that, by all accounts, the country does not face.
