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    Even With $900 Billion Stimulus, Biden Faces Fragile Economy

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story$900 Billion Won’t Carry Biden Very FarDespite new pandemic aid, he confronts an economic crisis unlike any since he last entered office in 2009. And political headwinds have only stiffened.The challenges greeting President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. rival those of the Great Recession, when he became vice president.Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesJan. 4, 2021Updated 5:48 p.m. ETWith his presidential inauguration just weeks away, Joseph R. Biden Jr. is confronting an economic crisis that is utterly unparalleled and yet eerily familiar.Millions of Americans are out of work, small businesses are struggling to survive, hunger is rampant, and people across the country fear getting kicked out of their homes. The moment was similarly perilous exactly 12 years ago, when Mr. Biden was the vice president-elect and preparing to take office.“I remember the utter terror,” said Cecilia Rouse, who was an economic adviser in the Obama White House and has been chosen to lead Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.The $900 billion pandemic relief plan that moderate lawmakers powered through Congress last month provides the incoming administration with some breathing room. This second tier of aid will deliver $600 stimulus checks, assist small businesses and extend federal unemployment benefits through mid-March.But as Mr. Biden has made clear, it is simply a “down payment” — a brief bridge to get through a dark winter and not nearly enough to restore the economy’s health.Roughly 19 million people are receiving some type of unemployment benefit, and many business owners wonder whether they will be able to survive the year. The coronavirus crisis has worsened longstanding inequalities, with workers at the lower end of the income spectrum — who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic — bearing the brunt of the pain.At the same time, bottlenecks in the Covid-19 vaccines’ rollout as well as fears about a much more transmissible variant of the virus could further delay the revival of large swaths of the economy like restaurants, travel, live entertainment and sports.“We are in for some choppy waters, even as we continue to get to the other side of the pandemic,” Ms. Rouse said.Yet despite the scorched earth left by the coronavirus, the economy is on a more stable footing in several ways than it was at the start of 2009.Instead of hurtling down a hole with no clear view of the bottom, Mr. Biden is taking office when the economy is on an upward trajectory. However anemic the growth, most analysts predict that 2021 will end better than it began even if there are stumbles along the way.While this pandemic-related recession was larger in terms of initial job losses and closings, it is what Ms. Rouse labeled “collateral damage” from a health emergency and not a crack in the underlying global financial system.“Now we know what to do: Provide the kind of social safety net for households, businesses and communities so they can get to the other side of the pandemic intact,” Ms. Rouse said.The Biden administration will also focus on attacking the deep-rooted inequalities that this crisis aggravated, she added.Volunteers distributing food donations in Bradenton, Fla. Four million U.S. workers have been unemployed for at least six months.Credit…Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesA closed flower shop in Tampa, Fla. The pandemic has shut down more businesses than the Great Recession did.Credit…Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesAdding to the positive side of the ledger, many households have socked away money, lifting the savings rate to a 40-year high. In contrast, the Great Recession razed storehouses of wealth, in retirement accounts and homes, virtually overnight.“Walking in this time, there is at least a cushion,” said Jason Furman, who led President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and is now an economist at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 4, 2021, 6:43 p.m. ETSenator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia says she will join the vote to overturn Biden’s electors.The leader of the far-right Proud Boys was arrested in Washington.In Georgia, Jon Ossoff warns Trump not to ‘mess with our voting rights.’But if the Biden administration will have a bit more running room on the economy, it is likely to have a lot less politically than Mr. Obama did in the first two years of his presidency, when his party controlled both houses of Congress.If the Democrats retake control of the Senate by winning both seats in the Georgia runoff election on Tuesday, Mr. Biden’s path will be much easier. Otherwise, the new president will have to deal with a Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has stymied legislation from the Democratic-controlled House.In that case, the administration will have an uphill slog persuading lawmakers to approve more aid when this round ends. With a Democrat headed for the Oval Office, many Republicans who put aside their concerns about debt when it came to cutting taxes in 2017 have rediscovered their inner deficit hawk.Mr. McConnell successfully resisted President Trump’s calls — echoed by Democrats — to increase the latest stimulus payments to $2,000 from $600.The failure to extend or expand federal aid when it expires this spring not only would cause significant hardships and needless suffering but could seriously scar the economy, said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist.Even though economic activity will most likely be on an upswing, the economy will remain weakened, Mr. Stiglitz said. Eviction moratoriums and mortgage forbearance have prevented families from losing their homes, but their housing debt has been accumulating even if it has not yet shown up on household balance sheets.Covid-19 vaccinations are crucial to getting the economy back on track.Credit…Alex Welsh for The New York TimesA coronavirus testing site in Los Angeles. Cities and states also have a big role to play in distributing vaccines. Credit…Alex Welsh for The New York TimesMany small businesses, particularly in the hard-hit service sector, which has been a source of low-wage jobs, will not survive. Economic inequality will increase.“There’s been a lot of long-term damage,” Mr. Stiglitz said.At the same time, the ranks of workers who have been unemployed for six months or longer have swelled to more than four million, increasing the chances that they may never find another job. Growing numbers of men and women are also dropping out of the labor force altogether.None of those problems can really begin to be addressed without widely distributing the vaccines and reopening the schools so that parents, particularly mothers, can return to the work force.That is why economists say that funneling direct aid to state and local governments is so crucial.“That sector has been gutted,” said Abigail Wozniak, a labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, but it “is the sector that allows all the other sectors to operate.”States and localities will play a critical role in the vaccine rollout and in providing emergency medical personnel. They will also be responsible for sending teachers back to classrooms that are safe, and helping disadvantaged students regain lost ground.Senate Republicans have been dead set against providing that kind of direct aid. Mr. McConnell has criticized it as a “blue-state bailout,” even though many red and blue states — and rural areas in particular — have lost revenues and public sector jobs.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, has opposed direct aid to state and local governments.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesEconomists say Congress and the White House must recognize the differences as well as the similarities between the pandemic and the Great Recession.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesEconomists on the right and left agree that while there are echoes from the Great Recession, there are also important distinctions. Restoring the economy this time, they warn, will require a kind of economic serenity prayer: recognizing the similarities, identifying the contrasts, and having the wisdom to know the difference.For Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the economy has repaired itself more quickly than expected. He worries that some aid proposals, particularly those that prop up specific industries, would keep some dying businesses alive and “slow down the process of adjustment to a new post-virus economy.“The faster that process happens, the faster the economy heals,” Mr. Strain said.Many liberal economists, though, including those on the Biden team, warn against ignoring a crucial lesson from the last recession: Failing to move quickly to provide sufficient money to the people and businesses that need it can damage the economy far into the future.Brian Deese, whom Mr. Biden has picked to lead the National Economic Council, where he worked as an assistant during the Obama administration, said making public investments was necessary to ensure economic growth.“We’re in a moment where the risk of doing too little outweighs the risk of doing too much,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    How Biden Can Move His Economic Agenda Without Congress

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Biden Can Move His Economic Agenda Without CongressUnion leaders and policy experts say the next administration could do plenty on behalf of workers through regulation and other powers.President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. may be able to achieve his goals on labor policy even without a cooperative Congress.Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020, 9:00 a.m. ETPresident-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ability to reshape the economy through legislation hinges in large part on the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs in January that will decide control of the Senate. But even without a cooperative Congress, his administration will be able to act on its agenda of raising workers’ standard of living and creating good jobs by taking a series of unilateral actions under existing law.“If you pay attention to what Trump did and go about it from a different viewpoint, you can accomplish a lot,” said Thomas M. Conway, the president of the United Steelworkers union. Much of this work will fall to the incoming labor secretary, whose department has the authority to issue regulations and initiate enforcement actions that could affect millions of workers and billions of dollars in income.Mr. Biden’s labor secretary could substantially expand eligibility for time-and-a-half overtime pay. In 2016, the Obama administration extended that eligibility to salaried workers making less than about $47,500 a year, but a federal court suspended the Obama rule, and President Trump’s Labor Department set the cutoff at roughly $35,500 rather than continue to appeal. The Biden administration could make millions more salaried workers eligible for time-and-a-half overtime pay by reviving or expanding the Obama criterion and defending it in court.The Labor Department will also have an opportunity to fill several monitoring and enforcement positions created under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that are likely to go unfilled during the Trump administration. The accord, a revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement, allows the United States to block imports from facilities in Mexico that curtail workers’ rights to unionize and bargain collectively. Pursued aggressively, the enforcement could help mitigate downward pressure on U.S. manufacturing wages stemming from unfair competition with Mexico.Mr. Biden’s Labor Department is likely to be more assertive in a variety of other enforcement efforts than its predecessor, which ended an Obama-era policy of typically trying to collect double the amount of wages that lawbreaking employers failed to pay workers under minimum-wage or overtime requirements.“Just getting back wages in small amounts doesn’t provide any incentives for companies to comply,” said Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel of the National Employment Law Project, which has ties to the Biden transition team. The Biden administration is likely to revive the Obama approach.Revisiting Labor RulesUnion membership, which has dropped to 10 percent of U.S. workers from roughly double that figure in the early 1980s, could receive a significant boost during the Biden administration, which has signaled that it intends to work closely with the labor movement.Under Mr. Biden, the National Labor Relations Board is likely to be far more aggressive in punishing employers that appear to break the law while fighting union campaigns. It can issue a regulation making it easier for the employees of contractors and franchises to hold parent companies accountable for violations of their labor rights, such as firing workers who try to unionize.According to Benjamin I. Sachs, a Harvard Law School professor, the board could also seize on a legal provision that allows the federal government to cede jurisdiction to the states for regulating labor in certain industries. That could enable a state like California or Washington to create an arrangement in which gig workers, with the help of a union, negotiate with companies over wages and benefits on an industrywide basis in that state, a process known as sectoral bargaining.Under such a system, a union would have to show support from a fraction of workers in the industry, such as 15 or 20 percent, to be able to negotiate with multiple gig companies on behalf of all workers. By contrast, under federal law, the union would typically have to win majority support among the workers it sought to represent, a daunting challenge in a high-turnover industry like gig work.Other labor experts, like Wilma B. Liebman, who led the labor board in the Obama administration, affirm that the board can cede its authority to states but are more skeptical that it would do so in the case of gig workers.Helping Home-Care WorkersThe federal government, through its control of the Medicaid program, could accomplish something similar for home-care workers, who usually work independently or for small agencies that have little power to raise pay because states set the rates for their services. The agencies sometimes resist union campaigns aggressively for fear that allowing workers to bargain for higher wages will put them at a competitive disadvantage.A handful of Democratic-leaning states, like Washington, have addressed this issue by allowing workers to bargain with the state for rate increases that effectively apply industrywide, eliminating the downside that a single agency would face if it raised wages unilaterally.The Service Employees International Union, which represents home-care workers across the country, believes that the Biden administration could encourage other states to create such industrywide bargaining arrangements — for example, by making additional money available to states that adopt this approach. Hundreds of thousands of additional home-care workers could benefit.The federal government, under a provision in the Medicaid law that requires states to keep payments high enough to ensure an adequate supply of home-care workers, could also intervene directly to raise wages and benefits for these workers.“We look forward to working with the Biden administration to make changes to the Medicaid program that can turn home-care jobs into good union jobs,” said Mary Kay Henry, the president of the service employees union.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 15, 2020, 6:45 p.m. ETBiden will name Gina McCarthy as the White House’s climate coordinator.Dominion’s C.E.O. defends his firm’s voting machines to Michigan lawmakers, denouncing a ‘reckless disinformation campaign.’Biden will nominate Jennifer Granholm for energy secretary.Using Federal Contract CloutOutside of specific agencies like the Labor Department, the Biden administration will have considerable leverage over the working conditions of the roughly five million workers employed by federal contractors and subcontractors.President Barack Obama signed executive orders raising the minimum wage for these workers to $10.10 an hour and entitling them to at least seven days a year of paid sick leave. Mr. Biden could raise the minimum wage for contractors much further — some are urging $15 an hour — while also mandating that they receive paid family leave and paid vacation days, as proposed by Heidi Shierholz, a senior Labor Department official under Mr. Obama.Mr. Biden could also use the federal government’s buying power to create more domestic manufacturing jobs, a goal he highlighted during the campaign. One approach would be to sign an executive order laying the groundwork for a Buy Clean program of the sort that California introduced in 2017.Under the program, contractors bidding on state infrastructure projects, like steel makers and glassmakers, must adhere to a certain standard for so-called embodied emissions, essentially the amount of carbon emitted when the material is produced, transported and used in construction. Tighter limits tend to favor domestic manufacturers over competitors in countries, like China, that are farther away and where production is often less environmentally friendly.“The incoming administration has broad power to put forth an idea like Buy Clean,” said Mike Williams, deputy director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental groups. That includes establishing a way to measure emissions and creating a database in which manufacturers are required to disclose them.Promoting Job CreationWhile existing law requires the federal government to favor domestic suppliers in procurement, a variety of waivers allow agencies to award contracts to overseas companies. Mr. Biden noted during the campaign that the Defense Department spent billions on foreign construction contracts in 2018, and he has pledged to close such loopholes.The most aggressive version of this approach would be to revoke a broad waiver that allows agencies to treat purchases from dozens of countries with which the United States has trade relations — including Japan, Mexico and many in Europe — as though they were made in America. Mr. Biden has indicated that he is more likely to try to negotiate new rules with trading partners to address this issue.The Biden administration could also instruct contracting officers to broaden the criteria they use to assess bids. A set of contracting rules laid out in a 1984 law, along with Washington’s growing preoccupation with spending cuts in recent decades, led administrations of both parties to focus on seeking the lowest upfront price.But the Biden administration could elevate value over price — under the same logic that says a $30,000 Cadillac may be a better deal than a $25,000 Ford Focus. The approach would favor companies whose workers are better paid but also better trained and more productive than competitors’.Mr. Biden could set some of these changes in motion through an executive order stating that federal agencies should focus more on quality and working conditions when assessing value. But because executing many of these shifts would be a question of day-to-day management rather than sweeping changes, some policy experts have proposed that the Biden White House create a dedicated office to oversee procurement across the administration.Anastasia Christman, an expert on government contracting at the National Employment Law Project, compares the idea to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives that George W. Bush created in the early 2000s, whose goal was to scour the federal bureaucracy for ways that religious organizations could compete for government funds. In this case, Ms. Christman said, the objective would be to ensure that contracting officers across agencies are using the right criteria in awarding contracts.“It would help contracting offices think differently about how to do the assessment,” Ms. Christman said. “How do you ask right kind of follow-up questions? Why is this bid lower than all others? What is that resting on?”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Biden Picks Katherine Tai as Trade Representative

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden Picks Katherine Tai as Trade RepresentativeMs. Tai, a chief trade lawyer in the House, has extensive experience with China and played a key role in hammering out the new North American Free Trade Agreement.Katherine Tai appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee last year. If confirmed, Ms. Tai would be the first woman of color to serve as U.S. trade representative.Credit…C-SPANPublished More

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    Biden and His Economic Team Urge Quick Action on Stimulus as Risks Mount

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetSecretary of StateElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden and His Economic Team Urge Quick Action on Stimulus as Risks MountThe president-elect introduced key nominees in Delaware, while lawmakers exchanged new proposals with prospects for a deal still dim.President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. acknowledged that any stimulus agreement would necessarily fall far short of the trillions of dollars that Democratic leaders have insisted on for months.Credit…Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesBy More

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    Biden Expected to Name Top Economic Officials This Week

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    WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is expected to name top members of his economic team this week, including Cecilia Rouse, a Princeton labor economist, to run the Council of Economic Advisers, and Neera Tanden, the chief executive of the Center for American Progress, to lead the Office of Management and Budget, according to people familiar with the matter.The announcement — which will include Mr. Biden’s decision to name Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, as Treasury secretary — will culminate in several women in top economic roles, including the first Black woman to lead the Council of Economic Advisers. All three jobs require Senate confirmation.With the picks, Mr. Biden is showcasing a commitment to diversity in his advisers and sending a clear message that economic policymaking in his administration will be shaped by liberal thinkers with a strong focus on worker empowerment as a tool for economic growth.Two of Mr. Biden’s top economic aides during his presidential campaign, Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey, will also be named to the Council of Economic Advisers, which is a three-member team that advises the president on economic policy. Both Ms. Boushey and Mr. Bernstein come from a liberal, labor-oriented school of economics that views rising inequality as a threat to the economy and emphasizes government efforts to support and empower workers.In many ways, his team is unified by a commitment to running the economy hot — with strong growth and low unemployment — in order to drive up wages. And it is likely to signal an embrace of spending to help workers, businesses and local governments recover from the pandemic recession, regardless of the effect on the federal budget deficit.“President Biden’s appointments show that he is quadrupling down on his commitment to working people and raising wages,” said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the former head of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. “He has appointed four of the best labor market economists in the country to head the Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisers.”In addition to those roles, Mr. Biden is expected to name Adewale Adeyemo, a senior international economic adviser in the Obama administration, as deputy Treasury secretary.Mr. Biden has also selected Brian Deese, a former Obama economic aide who helped lead that administration’s efforts to bail out the American automotive industry, to lead the National Economic Council, according to three people with knowledge of the selection.Mr. Deese, 42, is not an academic economist but a veteran of economic policymaking, having served as the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget and the deputy director of the Economic Council under Mr. Obama. He was also a special adviser on climate change to Mr. Obama, a role that could signal Mr. Biden’s commitment to fashioning an infrastructure bill for his legislative agenda that heavily features spending on clean energy initiatives.Mr. Biden on Sunday announced an all-female White House communications staff, with Jennifer Psaki, a veteran of the Obama administration, in the most visible role as White House press secretary.Kate Bedingfield, 39, who served as a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, will serve as the White House communications director. Karine Jean Pierre, who previously served as the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn.org, will be the principal deputy press secretary. Pili Tobar, a former immigrant advocate with the group America’s Voice, will serve as the deputy White House communications director.Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden on the campaign, will serve as the senior adviser and chief spokeswoman for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Ashley Etienne, a former senior adviser to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will serve as the communications director for Ms. Harris.The appointments indicate Mr. Biden’s plan to include racial, gender and ideological diversity in top roles, fulfilling a campaign pledge to ensure that a broad swath of America is represented in policymaking decisions.But they could fall short of hopes within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which has been frustrated that their views are not being sufficiently represented in early personnel decisions. In particular, the decision to select Ms. Tanden, a divisive and partisan figure in the Democratic Party, could culminate in an intraparty fight, as well as a confirmation battle.Republicans, who are expected to retain control of the Senate, are unlikely to easily pass Ms. Tanden, an Indian-American who advised Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and has been one of the most outspoken critics of President Trump.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Nov. 29, 2020, 6:35 p.m. ETBiden names all-female communications team with Jen Psaki as press secretary.Biden sees orthopedic doctor after spraining his ankle while playing with family dog.Biden team wants to tackle child care, elder care, preschool in one overarching plan.She also faces a challenge from Senate Democrats given her role in the 2016 election: Many of those who worked for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who ran against Mrs. Clinton, remain convinced that Ms. Tanden was part of a group of Democrats working behind the scenes to scuttle his nomination.Mr. Sanders, who ran against — and ultimately endorsed — Mr. Biden, is the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, which vets the director of the Office of Management and Budget, putting the fate of Ms. Tanden’s nomination under his watch.Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, referred to Ms. Tanden on Twitter on Sunday as a “sacrifice to the confirmation gods,” suggesting that her downfall would sate Republican anger toward Mr. Biden’s presidency and allow other nominees to more easily win confirmation.Drew Brandewie, a spokesman for Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on Twitter on Sunday evening that Ms. Tanden “stands zero chance of being confirmed.”The selection of Ms. Tanden, who was involved in the development of the Affordable Care Act as an adviser to the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration, is likely to resurface questions about the funding of the Center for American Progress. The New York Times reported last year that from 2016 through 2018, the center accepted nearly $2.5 million from the United Arab Emirates to fund its National Security and International Policy initiative.In addition, hacked emails from Ms. Tanden that were released through WikiLeaks in 2016 could also provide additional fodder for her critics.Mr. Biden’s other picks are most likely less contentious. Ms. Rouse, a labor economist, worked on Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011 and at the White House’s National Economic Council during the Clinton administration in the late 1990s.Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, a pioneer in research on the role of women in the American economy and one of Ms. Rouse’s thesis advisers in graduate school, called her a leading expert on labor markets and education.“She is a deeply thoughtful person and a superb listener who brings out the best of those around her,” Ms. Goldin said.Mr. Bernstein was Mr. Biden’s first chief economist when he was vice president and has written extensively on the power of low unemployment and strong economic growth to bolster workers and wages. Ms. Boushey runs the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a liberal think tank focused on inequality, and was a top policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton in 2016. She has focused much of her research and writing on government initiatives meant to increase women’s participation in the labor force, such as paid leave programs.The appointments drew praise from Kevin A. Hassett, Mr. Trump’s first Council of Economic Advisers chairman.“They have put together a very strong team of experienced policymakers and smart economists,” Mr. Hassett said. “At this difficult time, it is great to know that a strong C.E.A. will be helping to guide policy.”Mr. Adeyemo is an immigrant from Nigeria and has extensive experience working at the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, when he was a senior adviser and deputy chief of staff. Mr. Adeyemo was also Mr. Obama’s chief negotiator for the macroeconomic policy provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Democrats ultimately opposed, and served as the first chief of staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. After a two-year stint as a senior adviser at BlackRock, he joined the Obama Foundation in 2019 as its president.Michael D. Shear and Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting. More