Any replication of this chart should be credited to The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.
May 6, 2011
As of April 2011, 395 countries across the nation were designated “non-attainment” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because their poplution concentrations of cetrain containments exceeded the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Each of the 395 counties exceeded standards for either ozonce, particulate matter, sulfer dioxide, lead, or a combination of the four.
While the private sector has added jobs to the economy in every month since March 2010, a total increase of approximately 6.8 million jobs through April 2013, the public sector has contracted. To put this in perspective, federal, state, and local governments added jobs in only twelve of the thirty-eight months between March 2010 and April 2013 and have lost more than 625,000 jobs over this period. This figure shows the ratio of government employment to the civilian non-institutional population going back to 1980. For the twenty years prior to the Great Recession, this ratio stayed relatively constant, but since then it has dropped precipitously (except for the temporary uptick in 2010 when government employment rose to accommodate demand for U.S. Census workers). The ratio of government employment to population is currently at a decades-long low: it has not been below 9 percent since the mid-1960s.
The Hamilton Project tracks the monthly “job gap,” which is the number of jobs that need to be created in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while still absorbing the workers entering the labor force each month.
Many workers can benefit substantially from worker training programs, which provide education and skill development that lead to increased economic opportunities and better jobs. Students who earn two-year degrees in a high-return field, four-year degrees after a two-year degree, or certain career-oriented certificates, earn median salaries of $34,000 or more per year. Students who earn two-year degrees in low-return fields or who do not complete their programs earn around 33 percent less. Using data to help prospective trainees make better, informed decisions on which training programs offer the best returns based on trainee-specific criteria can help put more workers on a path to greater prosperity.
Every month, The Hamilton Project tracks the “jobs gap,” which is the number of jobs that need to be created in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while still absorbing the workers entering the labor force each month. Here, the Project compares changes in employment levels since the onset of the Great Recession across states.
The U.S. personal saving rate has declined dramatically over the past several decades and is currently very low by historical standards. Americans saved about 4 percent of after-tax personal income in 2012, down from average saving rates of 5.5 percent in the 1990s, 8.6 percent in the 1980s, and 9.6 percent in the 1970s. Although, in the short run, higher personal savings reduces consumption and can slow the economic recovery, over the longer run, higher personal saving would lead to stronger economic growth. The correlation between a country’s saving rate and its investment rate remains large and significant despite the globalization of international capital market.
The U.S. military is the strongest in the world, but it is also by far the most costly. The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) legislated $500 billion of cuts to the national defense budget over the next ten years—an abrupt change that could weaken the Department of Defense (DoD) if the cuts are not distributed efficiently. However, as this graph demonstrates, sudden and significant changes to defense spending are not new challenges. Although the national defense budget has seen many fluctuations from 1940 to 2010, it is now at its highest level since World War II. With the right policy changes, the DoD can absorb the BCA cuts while strengthening our force and maintaining its powerful position in the world.
Over the next ten years, approximately $4 trillion of deficit reduction are set to take place through the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA) and the sequestration, which went into effect on March 1, 2013. This graph, from the introduction of The Hamilton Project’s 15 Ways to Rethink the Federal Budget shows how these policies are projected to affect the debt-to-GDP ratio over the next decade. With the sequester in place, our debt will rise to a high of about 78 percent of GDP in 2014 before falling and reaching about 74 percent by 2023.
This figure shows the effects of the recent budget changes, including the sequester, on non-defense discretionary spending. Under these cuts this category of spending would fall to its lowest level in recent history. In today’s increasingly competitive global economy, many Americans have seen their wages stagnate or even decline over the last several decades, and non-defense discretionary spending includes the public investments that, for generations, have helped improve the lives of Americans and provide economic opportunities of the working and middle classes. Reductions in these spending categories mean less funding for the National Science Foundation, less research into new sources of energy, less training and workforce development, and less spending on education through initiatives such as Pell Grants. This funding provides support to our ailing infrastructure, enables research and development to improve health and foster innovation, and increases access to higher education at a time when we have fallen from second to fifteenth in international college completion rates.
According to the official poverty measure calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau, prior to the start of the recession in 2007, the poverty rate was only slightly below its 1980 level, and has since climbed to the highest level in over thirty years. Many economists, however, advocate using an alternative measure of poverty, developed by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in the 1990s. This NAS rate accounts for changes in the costs of goods other than food—notably, health care—and makes different adjustments for family size and inflation. Most importantly, the official poverty rate only considers a family’s pre-tax money income, while the NAS measure also accounts for tax credits and noncash benefits like the earned income tax credit (EITC), child tax credit, housing stipends, energy assistance, and food and nutrition programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps). When we take these programs into account, the pre-recession poverty rate had declined significantly since 1980.
While the last-minute fiscal-cliff legislation left much to be desired, it managed to avert most of the near-term drag on the economy that would have occurred in the absence of an agreement as well as enact deficit reduction of $700 billion over the next 10 years. This represents a 7 percent decrease in the expected $10 trillion increase in the national debt over the next decade.
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