Mr. Chair, with all respect, the cruel and unusual punishment is the Democratic-proposed substitute amendment. The raw deal is the Democratic-proposed substitute amendment that increases spending $6.2 trillion over our budget. This thing…
Mr. Chair, with all respect, the cruel and unusual punishment is the Democratic-proposed substitute amendment. The raw deal is the Democratic-proposed substitute amendment that increases spending $6.2 trillion over our budget.
This thing raises taxes--$2.7 trillion, the largest tax increase in American history, at a time when we are drowning in debt and stagnant wage growth.
It requires a one-to-one match of defense and nondefense discretionary spending at a time when we can't keep our F-18s flying and we have airplanes crashing around the country for lack of maintenance.
This is unconscionable. This budget never balances. It will leave us with an $852 billion deficit by fiscal year 2027. It expands ObamaCare, the most disastrous and heinous trick played on the American people that I can remember. It prioritizes amnesty over security.
We are never going to get our country straight and preserve our sovereignty if we don't protect our security. On the other hand, we have got the Republican budget that offers to do a lot of things. One thing it offers to do is put a work requirement for able-bodied adults with no dependent children into welfare.
Mr. Chair, I include in the Record an article by Nicholas Eberstadt of AEI talking about the horrible condition of our labor force now and how drastically important this is and how much it will improve the opportunities for people to rise out of poverty. We have got three 25- to 54-year-old males sitting out of the labor force collecting benefits for every one that is unemployed. The unemployed rate is 4.7 percent. That makes the total 20 percent. It is almost over 5 million people that we owe them a moral obligation to offer them an opportunity to rise out of poverty through work, and that is what the Republican budget does.
[Commentary, Feb. 15, 2017]
Economy: Our Miserable 21st Century
(By Nicholas N. Eberstadt)
On the morning of November 9, 2016, American's elite--its
talking and deciding classes--woke up to a country they did
not know. To most privileged and well-educated Americans,
especially those living in its bicoastal bastions, the
election of Donald Trump had been a thing almost impossible
even to imagine. What sort of country would go and elect
someone like Trump as president? Certainly not one they were
familiar with, or understood anything about.
Whatever else it may or may not have accomplished, the 2016
election was a sort of shock therapy for Americans living
within what Charles Murray famously termed ``the bubble''
(the protective barrier of prosperity and self-selected
associations that increasingly shield our best and brightest
from contact with the rest of their society). The very fact
of Trump's election served as a truth broadcast about a
reality that could no longer be denied: Things out there in
America are a whole lot different from what you thought.
Yes, things are very different indeed these days in the
``real America'' outside the bubble. In fact, things have
been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the
21st century.
It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical
milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the
Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive
generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living
and levels of social well-being, broke down around then--and
broke down very badly.
The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons
sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits
and prognosticators and professors and policymakers,
ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were
for the most part too distant from the distress of the
general population to see or hear it. (So much for the
vaunted ``information era'' and ``big-data revolution.'') Now
that those signals are no longer possible to ignore, it is
high time for experts and intellectuals to reacquaint
themselves with the country in which they live and to begin
the task of describing what has befallen the country in which
we have lived since the dawn of the new century.
Consider the condition of the American economy. In some
circles people still widely believe, as one recent New York
Times business-section article cluelessly insisted before the
inauguration, that ``Mr. Trump will inherit an economy that
is fundamentally solid.'' But this is patent nonsense. By now
it should be painfully obvious that the U.S. economy has been
in the grip of deep dysfunction since the dawn of the new
century. And in retrospect, it should also be apparent that
America's strange new economic maladies were almost perfectly
designed to set the stage for a populist storm.
Ever since 2000, basic indicators have offered oddly
inconsistent readings on America's economic performance and
prospects. It is curious and highly uncharacteristic to find
such measures so very far out of alignment with one another.
We are witnessing an ominous and growing divergence between
three trends that should ordinarily move in tandem: wealth,
output, and employment.
Depending upon which of these three indicators you choose,
America looks to be heading up, down, or more or less
nowhere. From the standpoint of wealth creation, the 21st
century is off to a roaring start. By this yardstick, it
looks as if Americans have never had it so good and as if the
future is full of promise. Between early 2000 and late 2016,
the estimated net worth of American households and nonprofit
institutions more than doubled, from $44 trillion to $90
trillion.
Although that wealth is not evenly distributed, it is still
a fantastic sum of money--an average of over a million
dollars for every notional family of four. This upsurge of
wealth took place despite the crash of 2008--indeed, private
wealth holdings are over $20 trillion higher now than they
were at their pre-crash apogee. The value of American real-
estate assets is near or at all-time highs, and America's
businesses appear to be thriving. Even before the ``Trump
rally'' of late 2016 and early 2017, U.S. equities markets
were hitting new highs--and since stock prices are strongly
shaped by expectations of future profits, investors evidently
are counting on the continuation of the current happy days
for U.S. asset holders for some time to come.
A rather less cheering picture, though, emerges if we look
instead at real trends for the macro-economy. Here,
performance since the start of the century might charitably
be described as mediocre, and prospects today are no better
than guarded. The recovery from the crash of 2008--which
unleashed the worst recession since the Great Depression--has
been singularly slow and weak. According to the Bureau of
Economic Analysis (BEA), it took nearly four years for
America's gross domestic product (GDP) to re-attain its late
2007 level. As of late 2016, total value added to the U.S.
economy was just 12 percent higher than in 2007. The
situation is even more sobering if we consider per capita
growth. It took America six and a half years--until mid-
2014--to get back to its late 2007 per capita production
levels. And in late 2016, per capita output was just 4
percent higher than in late 2007--nine years earlier. By this
reckoning, the American economy looks to have suffered
something close to a lost decade.
But there was clearly trouble brewing in America's macro-
economy well before the 2008 crash, too. Between late 2000
and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5
percent per annum. That compares with the nation's long-term
postwar 1948-2000 per capita growth rate of almost 2.3
percent, which in turn can be compared to the ``snap back''
tempo of 1.1 percent per annum since per capita GDP bottomed
out in 2009. Between 2000 and 2016, per capita growth in
America has averaged less than 1 percent a year. To state it
plainly: With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years
2000-2016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20
percent higher than it is today.
The reasons for America's newly fitful and halting
macroeconomic performance are still a puzzlement to
economists and a subject of considerable contention and
debate. Economists are generally in consensus, however, in
one area: They have begun redefining the growth potential of
the U.S. economy downwards. The U.S. Congressional Budget
Office (CBO), for example, suggests that the ``potential
growth'' rate for the U.S. economy at full employment of
factors of production has now dropped below 1.7 percent a
year, implying a sustainable long-term annual per capita
economic growth rate for America today of well under 1
percent.
Then there is the employment situation. If 21st-century
America's GDP trends have been disappointing, labor-force
trends have been utterly dismal. Work rates have fallen off a
cliff since the year 2000 and are at their lowest levels in
decades. We can see this by looking at the estimates by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the civilian employment
rate, the jobs-to-population ratio for adult civilian men and
women. Between early 2000 and late 2016, America's overall
work rate for Americans age 20 and older underwent a drastic
decline. It plunged by almost 5 percentage points (from 64.6
to 59.7). Unless you are a labor economist, you may not
appreciate just how severe a falloff in employment such
numbers attest to. Postwar America never experienced anything
comparable.
From peak to trough, the collapse in work rates for U.S.
adults between 2008 and 2010 was roughly twice the amplitude
of what had previously been the country's worst postwar
recession, back in the early 1980s. In that previous steep
recession, it took America five years to re-attain the adult
work rates recorded at the start of 1980. This time, the U.S.
job market has as yet, in early 2017, scarcely begun to claw
its way back up to the work rates of 2007--much less back to
the work rates from early 2000. U.S. adult work rates never
recovered entirely from the recession of 2001--much less the
crash of '08.
And the work rates being measured here include people who
are engaged in any paid employment--any job, at any wage, for
any number of hours of work at all.
On Wall Street and in some parts of Washington these days,
one hears that America
has gotten back to ``near full employment.'' For Americans
outside the bubble, such talk must seem nonsensical. It is
true that the oft-cited ``civilian unemployment rate'' looked
pretty good by the end of the Obama era--in December 2016, it
was down to 4.7 percent, about the same as it had been back
in 1965, at a time of genuine full employment. The problem
here is that the unemployment rate only tracks joblessness
for those still in the labor force; it takes no account of
workforce dropouts. Alas, the exodus out of the workforce has
been the big labor-market story for America's new century.
(At this writing, for every unemployed American man between
25 and 55 years of age, there are another three who are
neither working nor looking for work.) Thus the
``unemployment rate'' increasingly looks like an antique
index devised for some earlier and increasingly distant war:
the economic equivalent of a musket inventory or a cavalry
count.
By the criterion of adult work rates, by contrast,
employment conditions in America remain remarkably bleak.
From late 2009 through early 2014, the country's work rates
more or less flatlined. So far as can be told, this is the
only ``recovery'' in U.S. economic history in which that
basic labor-market indicator almost completely failed to
respond.
Since 2014, there has finally been a measure of improvement
in the work rate--but it would be unwise to exaggerate the
dimensions of that turnaround. As of late 2016, the adult
work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more
than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation's
work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century
highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently
have paying jobs.
There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers. They are
not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by
population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for
adult students, or by any other genuine change in
contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-
century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.
For an apples-to-apples look at America's 21st-century jobs
problem, we can focus on the 25-54 population--known to labor
economists for self-evident reasons as the ``prime working
age'' group. For this key labor-force cohort, work rates in
late 2016 were down almost 4 percentage points from their
year-2000 highs. That is a jobs gap approaching 5 million for
this group alone.
It is not only that work rates for prime-age males have
fallen since the year 2000--they have, but the collapse of
work for American men is a tale that goes back at least half
a century. (I wrote a short book last year about this sad
saga.) What is perhaps more startling is the unexpected and
largely unnoticed fall-off in work rates for prime-age women.
In the U.S. and all other Western societies, postwar labor
markets underwent an epochal transformation. After World War
II, work rates for prime women surged, and continued to
rise--until the year 2000. Since then, they too have
declined. Current work rates for prime-age women are back to
where they were a generation ago, in the late 1980s. The
21st-century U.S. economy has been brutal for male and female
laborers alike--and the wreckage in the labor market has been
sufficiently powerful to cancel, and even reverse, one of our
society's most distinctive postwar trends: the rise of paid
work for women outside the household.
In our era of no more than indifferent economic growth,
21st-century America has somehow managed to produce markedly
more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided
markedly less work for its workers. And trends for paid hours
of work look even worse than the work rates themselves.
Between 2000 and 2015, according to the BEA, total paid hours
of work in America increased by just 4 percent (as against a
35 percent increase for 1985-2000, the 15-year period
immediately preceding this one).
Over the 2000-2015 period, however, the adult civilian
population rose by almost 18 percent--meaning that paid hours
of work per adult civilian have plummeted by a shocking 12
percent thus far in our new American century.
This is the terrible contradiction of economic life in what
we might call America's Second Gilded Age (2000--). It is a
paradox that may help us understand a number of overarching
features of our new century. These include the consistent
findings that public trust in almost all U.S. institutions
has sharply declined since 2000, even as growing majorities
hold that America is ``heading in the wrong direction.'' It
provides an immediate answer to why overwhelming majorities
of respondents in public-opinion surveys continue to tell
pollsters, year after year, that our ever-richer America is
still stuck in the middle of a recession. The mounting
economic woes of the ``little people'' may not have been
generally recognized by those inside the bubble, or even by
many bubble inhabitants who claimed to be economic
specialists--but they proved to be potent fuel for the
populist fire that raged through American politics in 2016.
So general economic conditions for many ordinary
Americans--not least of these, Americans who did not fit
within the academy's designated victim classes--have been
rather more insecure than those within the comfort of the
bubble understood. But the anxiety, dissatisfaction, anger,
and despair that range within our borders today are not
wholly a reaction to the way our economy is misfiring. On the
nonmaterial front, it is likewise clear that many things in
our society are going wrong and yet seem beyond our powers to
correct.
Some of these gnawing problems are by no means new: A
number of them (such as family breakdown) can be traced back
at least to the 1960s, while others are arguably as old as
modernity itself (anomie and isolation in big anonymous
communities, secularization and the decline of faith). But a
number have roared down upon us by surprise since the turn of
the century--and others have redoubled with fearsome new
intensity since roughly the year 2000.
American health conditions seem to have taken a seriously
wrong turn in the new century. It is not just that overall
health progress has been shockingly slow, despite the
trillions we devote to medical services each year. (Which
``Cold War babies'' among us would have predicted we'd live
to see the day when life expectancy in East Germany was
higher than in the United States, as is the case today?)
Alas, the problem is not just slowdowns in health
progress--there also appears to have been positive
retrogression for broad and heretofore seemingly untroubled
segments of the national population. A short but electrifying
2015 paper by Anne Case and Nobel Economics Laureate Angus
Deaton talked about a mortality trend that had gone almost
unnoticed until then: rising death rates for middle-aged U.S.
whites. By Case and Deaton's reckoning, death rates rose
somewhat slightly over the 1999-2013 period for all non-
Hispanic white men and women 45-54 years of age--but they
rose sharply for those with high-school degrees or less, and
for this less-educated grouping most of the rise in death
rates was accounted for by suicides, chronic liver cirrhosis,
and poisonings (including drug overdoses).
Though some researchers, for highly technical reasons,
suggested that the mortality spike might not have been quite
as sharp as Case and Deaton reckoned, there is little doubt
that the spike itself has taken place. Health has been
deteriorating for a significant swath of white America in our
new century, thanks in large part to drug and alcohol abuse.
All this sounds a little too close for comfort to the story
of modern Russia, with its devastating vodka- and drug-
binging health setbacks. Yes: It can happen here, and it has.
Welcome to our new America.
In December 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) reported that for the first time in decades,
life expectancy at birth in the United States had dropped
very slightly (to 78.8 years in 2015, from 78.9 years in
2014). Though the decline was small, it was statistically
meaningful--rising death rates were characteristic of males
and females alike; of blacks and whites and Latinos together.
(Only black women avoided mortality increases--their death
levels were stagnant.) A jump in ``unintentional injuries''
accounted for much of the overall uptick.
It would be unwarranted to place too much portent in a
single year's mortality changes; slight annual drops in U.S.
life expectancy have occasionally been registered in the
past, too, followed by continued improvements. But given
other developments we are witnessing in our new America, we
must wonder whether the 2015 decline in life expectancy is
just a blip, or the start of a new trend. We will find out
soon enough. It cannot be encouraging, though, that the Human
Mortality Database, an international consortium of
demographers who vet national data to improve comparability
between countries, has suggested that health progress in
America essentially ceased in 2012--that the U.S. gained on
average only about a single day of life expectancy at birth
between 2012 and 2014, before the 2015 turndown.
The opioid epidemic of pain pills and heroin that has been
ravaging and shortening lives from coast to coast is a new
plague for our new century. The terrifying novelty of this
particular drug epidemic, of course, is that it has gone (so
to speak) ``mainstream'' this time, effecting breakout from
disadvantaged minority communities to Main Street White
America. By 2013, according to a 2015 report by the Drug
Enforcement Administration, more Americans died from drug
overdoses (largely but not wholly opioid abuse) than from
either traffic fatalities or guns. The dimensions of the
opioid epidemic in the real America are still not fully
appreciated within the bubble, where drug use tends to be
more carefully limited and recreational. In Dreamland, his
harrowing and magisterial account of modern America's opioid
explosion, the journalist Sam Quinones notes in passing that
``in one three-month period'' just a few years ago, according
to the Ohio Department of Health, ``fully 11 percent of all
Ohioans were prescribed opiates.'' And of course many
Americans self-medicate with licit or illicit painkillers
without doctors' orders.
In the fall of 2016, Alan Krueger, former chairman of the
President's Council of Economic Advisers, released a study
that further refined the picture of the real existing opioid
epidemic in America: According to his work, nearly half of
all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts--an army now
totaling roughly 7 million men--currently take pain
medication on a daily basis.
We already knew from other sources (such as BLS ``time
use'' surveys) that the overwhelming majority of the prime-
age men in this un-working army generally don't ``do civil
society'' (charitable work, religious activities,
volunteering), or for that matter much in the way of child
care or help for others in the home either, despite the
abundance of time on their hands. Their routine,
instead, typically centers on watching--watching TV, DVDs,
Internet, hand-held devices, etc.--and indeed watching for an
average of 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job.
But Krueger's study adds a poignant and immensely sad detail
to this portrait of daily life in 21st-century America: In
our mind's eye we can now picture many millions of un-working
men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for
jobs, sitting in front of screens--stoned.
But how did so many millions of un-working men, whose
incomes are limited, manage en masse to afford a constant
supply of pain medication? Oxycontin is not cheap. As
Dreamland carefully explains, one main mechanism today has
been the welfare state: more specifically, Medicaid, Uncle
Sam's means-tested health-benefits program. Here is how it
works (we are with Quinones in Portsmouth, Ohio):
[The Medicaid card] pays for medicine--whatever pills a
doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who
receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a
federal disability program known as SSI. . . . If you could
get a prescription from a willing doctor--and Portsmouth had
plenty of them--Medicaid health-insurance cards paid for that
prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay,
therefore, addicts got pills priced at thousands of dollars,
with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A
user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for
that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars
on the street.
In 21st-century America, ``dependence on government'' has
thus come to take on an entirely new meaning.
You may now wish to ask: What share of prime-working-age
men these days are enrolled in Medicaid? According to the
Census Bureau's SIPP survey (Survey of Income and Program
Participation), as of 2013, over one-fifth (21 percent) of
all civilian men between 25 and 55 years of age were Medicaid
beneficiaries. For prime-age people not in the labor force,
the share was over half (53 percent). And for un-working
Anglos (non-Hispanic white men not in the labor force) of
prime working age, the share enrolled in Medicaid was 48
percent.
By the way: Of the entire un-working prime-age male Anglo
population in 2013, nearly three-fifths (57 percent) were
reportedly collecting disability benefits from one or more
government disability program in 2013. Disability checks and
means-tested benefits cannot support a lavish lifestyle. But
they can offer a permanent alternative to paid employment,
and for growing numbers of American men, they do. The rise of
these programs has coincided with the death of work for
larger and larger numbers of American men not yet of
retirement age. We cannot say that these programs caused the
death of work for millions upon millions of younger men: What
is incontrovertible, however, is that they have financed it--
just as Medicaid inadvertently helped finance America's
immense and increasing appetite for opioids in our new
century.
It is intriguing to note that America's nationwide opioid
epidemic has not been accompanied by a nationwide crime wave
(excepting of course the apparent explosion of illicit heroin
use). Just the opposite: As best can be told, national
victimization rates for violent crimes and property crimes
have both reportedly dropped by about two-thirds over the
past two decades. The drop in crime over the past generation
has done great things for the general quality of life in much
of America. There is one complication from this drama,
however, that inhabitants of the bubble may not be aware of,
even though it is all too well known to a great many
residents of the real America. This is the extraordinary
expansion of what some have termed America's ``criminal
class''--the population sentenced to prison or convicted of
felony offenses--in recent decades. This trend did not begin
in our century, but it has taken on breathtaking enormity
since the year 2000.
Most well-informed readers know that the U.S. currently has
a higher share of its populace in jail or prison than almost
any other country on earth, that Barack Obama and others talk
of our criminal-justice process as ``mass incarceration,''
and know that well over 2 million men were in prison or jail
in recent years. But only a tiny fraction of all living
Americans ever convicted of a felony is actually incarcerated
at this very moment. Quite the contrary: Maybe 90 percent of
all sentenced felons today are out of confinement and living
more or less among us. The reason: the basic arithmetic of
sentencing and incarceration in America today.
Correctional release and sentenced community supervision
(probation and parole) guarantee a steady annual ``flow'' of
convicted felons back into society to augment the very
considerable ``stock'' of felons and ex-felons already there.
And this ``stock'' is by now truly enormous.
One forthcoming demographic study by Sarah Shannon and five
other researchers estimates that the cohort of current and
former felons in America very nearly reached 20 million by
the year 2010. If its estimates are roughly accurate, and if
America's felon population has continued to grow at more or
less the same tempotraced out for the years leading up to
2010, we would expect it to surpass 23 million persons by the
end of 2016 at the latest. Very rough calculations might
therefore suggest that at this writing, America's population
of non-institutionalized adults with a felony conviction
somewhere in their past has almost certainly broken the 20
million mark by the end of 2016. A little more rough
arithmetic suggests that about 17 million men in our general
population have a felony conviction somewhere in their CV.
That works out to one of every eight adult males in America
today.
We have to use rough estimates here, rather than precise
official numbers, because the government does not collect any
data at all on the size or socioeconomic circumstances of
this population of 20 million, and never has. Amazing as this
may sound and scandalous though it may be, America has, at
least to date, effectively banished this huge group--a group
roughly twice the total size of our illegal-immigrant
population and an adult population larger than that in any
state but California--to a near-total and seemingly unending
statistical invisibility. Our ex-cons are, so to speak,
statistical outcasts who live in a darkness our polity does
not care enough to illuminate--beyond the scope or interest
of public policy, unless and until they next run afoul of the
law.
Thus we cannot describe with any precision or certainty
what has become of those who make up our ``criminal class''
after their (latest) sentencing or release. In the most
stylized terms, however, we might guess that their odds in
the real America are not all that favorable. And when we
consider some of the other trends we have already mentioned--
employment, health, addiction, welfare dependence--we can see
the emergence of a malign new nationwide undertow, pulling
downward against social mobility.
Social mobility has always been the jewel in the crown of
the American mythosand ethos. The idea (not without a measure
of truth to back it up) was that people in America are free
to achieve according to their merit and their grit--unlike in
other places, where they are trapped by barriers of class or
the misfortune of misrule. Nearly two decades into our new
century, there are unmistakable signs that America's fabled
social mobility is in trouble--perhaps even in serious
trouble.
Consider the following facts. First, according to the
Census Bureau, geographical mobility in America has been on
the decline for three decades, and in 2016 the annual
movement of households from one location to the next was
reportedly at an all-time (postwar) low. Second, as a study
by three Federal Reserve economists and a Notre Dame
colleague demonstrated last year, ``labor market fluidity''--
the churning between jobs that among other things allows
people to get ahead--has been on the decline in the American
labor market for decades, with no sign as yet of a
turnaround. Finally, and not least important, a December 2016
report by the ``Equal Opportunity Project,'' a team led by
the formidable Stanford economist Raj Chetty, calculated that
the odds of a 30-year-old's earning more than his parents at
the same age was now just 51 percent: down from 86 percent 40
years ago. Other researchers who have examined the same data
argue that the odds may not be quite as low as the Chetty
team concludes, but agree that the chances of surpassing
one's parents' real income have been on the downswing and are
probably lower now than ever before in postwar America.
Thus the bittersweet reality of life for real Americans in
the early 21st century: Even though the American economy
still remains the world's unrivaled engine of wealth
generation, those outside the bubble may have less of a shot
at the American Dream than has been the case for decades,
maybe generations--possibly even since the Great Depression.
The funny thing is, people inside the bubble are forever
talking about ``economic inequality,'' that wonderful seminar
construct, and forever virtue-signaling about how personally
opposed they are to it. By contrast, ``economic insecurity''
is akin to a phrase from an unknown language. But if we were
somehow to find a ``Google Translate'' function for
communicating from real America into the bubble, an important
message might be conveyed:
The abstraction of ``inequality'' doesn't matter a lot to
ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does.
The Great American Escalator is broken--and it badly needs to
be fixed.
With the election of 2016, Americans within the bubble
finally learned that the 21st century has gotten off to a
very bad start in America. Welcome to the reality. We have a
lot of work to do together to turn this around.