Biden's Unheralded War on Poverty [View all]

[BeckyDem]

By creating a full-employment economy, Biden enabled millions of low-wage workers to raise their pay.

BY HAROLD MEYERSON JULY 10, 2023

The Great American Quit Rate (full name: Great American Quit-Your-Stinkin’-Job-for-a-Better-One Rate) has finally subsided. While it lasted, though, it enabled the nation’s low-wage workers to make the first substantial economic gains they’ve made in 40 years. And that the GAQR existed at all was due almost entirely to President Biden’s war on poverty—a war that has gone largely unnoticed by both the public and the media.

How sizable were the gains that those low-wage workers made? According to a study by economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew, so many workers—predominantly young, with no more than high school educations, working overwhelmingly in low-wage service-sector jobs—quit those jobs in 2021 and 2022 for better-paying ones that this collective job switch actually reduced such indices of inequality as the gaps between college-educated and non-college workers, and that between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile, by a full 25 percent. Both those gaps had been steadily widening for the past four decades. So sizable were these gains among low-wage workers that they were the only group of workers over the past two years who have seen wage increases that outpaced the rise in inflation. It was chiefly they who were doing the quitting and moving to better jobs over the past several years; better-paid workers largely stayed put.

Autor, Dube, and McGrew attribute this entirely unexpected boost to the fortunes of the working poor to the equally unexpected conditions of full employment that followed the economic collapse brought on by the COVID pandemic. It was only under those conditions that the job-quitters could feel assured that they’d find better-paying work.

At that point, the study ends, because the question of where that full employment came from is not, strictly speaking, an economic one. It’s a political question. And the answer to the whence-full-employment question is the policies that Biden and the Democratic Congress enacted soon after Biden took office. Specifically, it’s the much maligned $1.9 trillion recovery bill that Congress passed in the late winter of 2021.
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/

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