SALON

Monday, May 4, 2015 02:58 PM EDT

Republican presidents flunk the economy: 11 reasons why America does worse under the GOP

The data is unequivocal: The economy performs far better under Democrats than Republicans. Here's why

Sean McElwee

Topics: Hillary Clinton, 2016 Elections, Economics, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, The Republican Party, The Democratic Party, economic policy, News, Politics News

George W. Bush (Credit: AP/Susan Walsh)

 

Consider the following fact: The last time a Republican president created an average of 1 million jobs a year over the course of his presidency was nearly three decades ago, under Ronald Reagan. When the the 2016 election comes around, a full 44 percent of voters will have entered the workforceafter that period of time. Then consider that Barack Obama has created 7.35 million jobs since taking office, and will almost certainly cross the million-per-year threshold. And that, for many Americans, the last time the economy was working for them was under Bill Clinton.

As the chart below (using data from the Economic Policy Institute) shows, the last time Americans at the bottom of the income distribution had a raise was during the sustained employment growth under Bill Clinton.



The conclusion? If Democrats want to win the White House, they need to promote a progressive, pro-jobs agenda.

I’ve previously discussed the rather large body of research suggesting that not only does the economy perform better under Democrats, it tends toperform better for everyone under Democrats. People of color do far better in terms of employment, incarceration and income growth when a Democrat is in office. The incomes of the poorest tend to increase more rapidly as well. Both effects are likely tied to two major policies: First, Democrats tend to preside over lower unemployment rates; and, second, they are far more likely to raise the minimum wage. There are other factors at work, of course: I’ve noted how market conditioning (things like regulatory policy) can change outcomes as well. But another major factor is that the key to increasing the bargaining power of workers and creating a more racially just society is jobs. And progressive policy creates jobs.

There are several specific factors that explain this.

(1) Liberal governments tend to invest more money in infrastructure and education, both of which bolster growth.

(2) While conservative governments try to maximize growth for the rich by reining in inflation, progressives benefit everyone by reducing unemployment.

(3) Conservatives spend a large amount of their political capital reducing labor force participation among gays, people of color and women. Conservatives oppose policies that would help women balance work and family responsibilities, openly sabotage their economies to discriminate against gays, and pursue policies that overwhelmingly harm people of color. By doing this, conservative governments shut out talent and competition, in all probability harming economic growth: One study finds that about one-fifth of the increase in productivity growth between 1960 and 2008 can be explained by the increase in talent from women and people of color getting jobs they were previously excluded from.

(4) Conservatives pursue policies that increase inequality, which studies suggest can also slow growth.

(5) Conservatives are less queasy about the influence of money on politics, fostering cronyism that can undermine growth.

(6) A weak safety net means that fewer Americans can take entrepreneurial risk, when entrepreneurship is a key factor in bolstering growth.

(7) By creating a winner-take-all economy, conservative governance reduces social trust necessary for growth.

(8) By promoting war and violence abroad, and a bloated military at home, conservative governments reduce the money available for clean energy, healthcare, education and tax cuts for the middle class, which create more jobs. Matt Yglesias also argues it could increase oil shocks, thereby harming growth.

(9) By promoting an oversized and unregulated financial system, conservative governments make crisis more likely. Studies also suggest that when the financial sector gets too large it starts to reduce growth.

(10) By reducing upward mobility, conservative governments reduce growth by leaving millions of opportunity-less youth mired in poverty.
(11) Conservatives are less amenable to more open immigration policies, when immigration boosts growth.

Whichever of these factors cause conservative governments to be less effective, the differences are stark. The chart below shows the average job growth under each president over the last 75 years.





Bloomberg examined private sector job growth between January 1961 and April 2012. Over that period, Republicans have held the Presidency for 28 years and Democrats for 23. Republican presidents created 71,000 jobs per month, while Democratic presidents created 150,000. In total, Democrats created 42 million jobs, compared to Republicans 24 million.

All of this means that Hillary Clinton should embrace jobs and argue that progressive policies can unleash economic growth. She should argue that the country needs a proactive government working with the free market to best promote the interests of all Americans, not just the rich. As Bob Moser notes in the American Prospect, the most successful Democratic candidates have been those who embraced economic populism rather than a fuzzy centrism. He points to Gary Peters, the only freshman Democratic Senator, who ran a populist campaign that targeted the Kochs for their plutocratic policies. Moser notes that three of unabashed populist progressives — Jeanne Shaheen, Jeff Merkley and Al Franken — not only won their elections but also won white working class voters at a time when Democrats nationally lost them by 30 percentage points.
(Peters lost the white working class, but only 47 percent to 48 percent.)
Dorian Warren is an associate professor at Columbia and a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who is leading “Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All,” ​which seeks to put jobs at the center of the political agenda. He tells Salon via e-mail that a jobs-centered Presidential campaign could be a political winner: “It is time to embrace a simple but achievable idea: that government should take action to create millions of good, new jobs in emerging sectors and ensure these jobs are open and accessible to all, guarantee decent wages and benefits for all who want to work, and ensure equity in the labor market for women and people of color.”

Warren cites research by Celinda Lake showing that three core messages resonate with Americans across the political spectrum: infrastructure spending, government investment in green energy and government creating jobs in high unemployment communities, particularly communities of color. As the chart below shows, progressive policies are popular with the Rising American Electorate (African Americans, Hispanics, millennials, and unmarried women) who veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg notes will be more than half of the electorate in 2016.




The Lake memo also notes that turnout is key to a progressive victory. In 2014, 34.5 percent of the Rising American Electorate who voted Obama for Obama’s re-election in 2012 stayed home. Mobilizing these voters will be key.

If Clinton is the nominee, she should emphasize the track record of Democrats creating and sustaining jobs. Instead of running away from Obama’s achievements should build on them. She should focus her message on a strong public sector being necessary for a strong private sector. By setting the rules for fair play, the government ensures that those who get ahead do so by creating value, rather than extracting it. By investing in the next generation, government gives private companies an educated and highly trained workforce. By ensuring paid sick leave, childcare and universal pre-k, the government allows women to bring their skills to creating prosperity. The difference between conservative and progressive governance is simple: one benefits a small elite while the other promotes widespread prosperity.

Sean McElwee's writing may be viewed at seanamcelwee.com. Follow him on Twitter at @seanmcelwee.
 

Robert Reich: The Nightmarish Future for American Jobs and Incomes Is Here

Economy

Robert Reich: The Nightmarish Future for American Jobs and Incomes Is Here

Even knowledge-based jobs will disappear as wealth gets more concentrated at the top in the next 10 years.

 

 

By Robert Reich / RobertReich.org

 

May 7, 2015

 

 

Photo Credit: via YouTube

What will happen to American jobs, incomes, and wealth a decade from now?
Predictions are hazardous but survivable. In 1991, in my book The Work of Nations, I separated almost all work into three categories, and then predicted what would happen to each of them.

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The first category I called "routine production services," which entailed the kind of repetitive tasks performed by the old foot soldiers of American capitalism through most of the twentieth century -- done over and over, on an assembly line or in an office.

I estimated that such work then constituted about one-quarter of all jobs in the United States, but would decline steadily as such jobs were replaced by new labor-saving technologies and by workers in developing nations eager to do them for far lower wages. I also assumed the pay of remaining routine production workers in America would drop, for similar reasons.

I was not far wrong.

The second category I called "in-person services." This work had to be provided personally because the "human touch" was essential to it. It included retail sales workers, hotel and restaurant workers, nursing-home aides, realtors, childcare workers, home health-care aides, flight attendants, physical therapists, and security guards, among many others.

In 1990, by my estimate, such workers accounted for about 30 percent of all jobs in America, and I predicted their numbers would grow because -- given that their services were delivered in person -- neither advancing technologies nor foreign-based workers would be able to replace them.

I also predicted their pay would drop. They would be competing with a large number of former routine production workers, who could only find jobs in the "in-person" sector. They would also be competing with labor-saving machinery such as automated tellers, computerized cashiers, automatic car washes, robotized vending machines, and self-service gas pumps -- as well as "personal computers linked to television screens" through which "tomorrow's consumers will be able to buy furniture, appliances, and all sorts of electronic toys from their living rooms -- examining the merchandise from all angles, selecting whatever color, size, special features, and price seem most appealing, and then transmitting the order instantly to warehouses from which the selections will be shipped directly to their homes. So, too, with financial transactions, airline and hotel reservations, rental car agreements, and similar contracts, which will be executed between consumers in their homes and computer banks somewhere else on the globe."

Here again, my predictions were not far off. But I didn't foresee how quickly advanced technologies would begin to make inroads even on in-person services. Ten years from now I expect Amazon will have wiped out many of today's retail jobs, and Google's self-driving car will eliminate many bus drivers, truck drivers, sanitation workers, and even Uber drivers.

The third job category I named "symbolic-analytic services." Here I included all the problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic thinking that go into the manipulation of symbols—data, words, oral and visual representations.
I estimated in 1990 that symbolic analysts accounted for 20 percent of all American jobs, and expected their share to continue to grow, as would their incomes, because the demand for people to do these jobs would continue to outrun the supply of people capable of doing them. This widening disconnect between symbolic-analytic jobs and the other two major categories of work would, I predicted, be the major force driving widening inequality.

Again, I wasn't far off. But I didn't anticipate how quickly or how wide the divide would become, or how great a toll inequality and economic insecurity would take. I would never have expected, for example, that the life expectancy of an American white woman without a high school degree would decrease by five years between 1990 and 2008.

We are now faced not just with labor-replacing technologies but with knowledge-replacing technologies. The combination of advanced sensors, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, big data, text-mining, and pattern-recognition algorithms, is generating smart robots capable of quickly learning human actions, and even learning from one another. A revolution in life sciences is also underway, allowing drugs to be tailored to a patient's particular condition and genome.
If the current trend continues, many more symbolic analysts will be replaced in coming years. The two largest professionally intensive sectors of the United States -- health care and education -- will be particularly affected because of increasing pressures to hold down costs and, at the same time, the increasing accessibility of expert machines.

We are on the verge of a wave of mobile health applications, for example, measuring everything from calories to blood pressure, along with software programs capable of performing the same functions as costly medical devices and diagnostic software that can tell you what it all means and what to do about it.

Schools and universities will likewise be reorganized around smart machines (although faculties will scream all the way). Many teachers and university professors are already on the way to being replaced by software -- so-called "MOOCs" (Massive Open Online Courses) and interactive online textbooks -- along with adjuncts that guide student learning.

As a result, income and wealth will become even more concentrated than they are today. Those who create or invest in blockbuster ideas will earn unprecedented sums and returns. The corollary is they will have enormous political power. But most people will not share in the monetary gains, and their political power will disappear. The middle class's share of the total economic pie will continue to shrink, while the share going to the very top will continue to grow.

But the current trend is not preordained to last, and only the most rigid technological determinist would assume this to be our inevitable fate. We can -- indeed, I believe we must -- ignite a political movement to reorganize the economy for the benefit of the many, rather than for the lavish lifestyles of a precious few and their heirs. (I have more to say on this in my upcoming book, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, out at the end of September.)

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." His homepage is www.robertreich.org.