Make it harder for people to retain a job, and fewer people will. Adequate pay that makes a job worthwhile is one factor, but frequently overlooked are support structures that facilitate employment.
Contrary to orthodox economic ideology, punishing people does not increase employment.
Countries that provide more subsidies toward services that are complementary to work — such as child care, elder care and transportation — have higher workforce participation rates. This shouldn’t be surprising as we don’t leave the rest of our lives behind when we go to our jobs, however much bosses insist we should. Such a finding can only be controversial in a world dominated by ideologies that insist that conditions be made as harsh as possible to “force” people to work.
Alas, such a world is the one most of us live in, particularly in the English-speaking advanced capitalist countries. I have often noticed that the thinking of middle-class conservatives often boils down to “I had to suffer, so everybody else should have to suffer.” I’ve heard words to this effect from many conservatives. Although people who have enunciated that to me often are people who did indeed work hard to rise from modest circumstances, the reductionist hyper-individualism it reflects is blind to the social solidarity necessary for society to function.
More subsidies lead to a higher percentage of working-age people holding regular employment, and these subsidies are possible through higher taxation. Contrary to orthodox economics, higher rates of taxation lead to more employment. This is the conclusion of a study by Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, “How Can Scandinavians Tax So Much?” Professor Kleven, a professor at the London School of Economics, compared Denmark, Norway and Sweden with other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries (a club of the world’s advanced capitalist and some of the largest developing countries) and found strong correlations between taxation rates and workforce participation.
More social services, more employment
Plotted on a graph, there is a steady progression of countries with higher “participation tax rates” having greater percentages of their population employed. This pattern, not surprisingly, is even stronger for women than men. The author defines a country’s “participation tax rate” as the average effective tax rate when including all income and consumption taxes, and public benefits. This rate is far higher in Denmark, Norway and Sweden than it is in, inter alia, the United States, Japan or Britain. Professor Kleven writes:
“[T]he Scandinavian countries spend relatively large amounts on means-tested transfer programs that create implicit taxes on working and therefore reinforce the distortions coming from the tax system. On the other hand, these countries also spend relatively large amounts on the public provision and subsidization of goods that are complementary to working, including child care, elderly care, and transportation. Such policies represent subsidies to the costs of market work, which encourage labor supply and make taxes less distortionary. Furthermore, Scandinavian countries spend heavily on education, which is complementary to long-run labor supply.” [page 7, citations omitted]
Denmark, Norway and Sweden also have unusually low rates of tax avoidance. Professor Kleven writes that systematic third-party reporting is “crucial” to minimizing tax avoidance. (If your income is reported, it is very difficult to avoid paying taxes on it.) The three countries also have a broad tax base and Denmark in particular allows very few deductions and exceptions.
The United States, in contrast, has a complicated tax system riddled with loopholes. U.S. tax policy for low-income workers centers on the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), yet the Scandinavian countries have higher rates of workplace participation without such tax deductions. Because child care subsidies act as a subsidy to labor participation, Professor Kleven argues, those countries have no need for a U.S.-style income tax credit.
Although the author recoils somewhat from his own conclusions at the end of his paper, he does earlier write:
“[E]empirical and theoretical arguments above suggest that public spending on work complements such as child care, preschool, and elder care allows for a more efficient provision of low-income support and at the same time weakens the argument for low participation tax rates at the bottom of the distribution through an EITC. In this sense, it is conceivable that Scandinavian countries (with their large subsidies to work complements and no EITC) got it right, while the US (with its small subsidies to work complements and a large EITC) got it wrong.”
More health care earlier, better jobs later
Perhaps imposing ever harsher conditions on working people makes for a weaker economy? It would seem that several years of punishing austerity has not exactly brought prosperity to the world. Another study daring to offer heterodox economic ideas, just released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, calculates that spending by the U.S. government on child health care through the Medicaid insurance program likely will pay for itself by the end of a recipient’s adult working career.
Providing health care ought to be a human right; it is something that should be provided as a matter of basic humanity to enable better lives. In the U.S., of course, such is not the case; health care there is a privilege reserved for those with full-time employment that provides benefits or for those who can afford it. But, in raw economic terms, Medicaid for children may be cost-free over the long term.
This study, “Medicaid as an Investment in Children: What is the Long-Term Impact on Tax Receipts?,” prepared by Amanda E. Kowalski of Yale University and two economists with the U.S. Treasury Department, David W. Brown and Ithai Z. Lurie, found that children who were Medicaid recipients as adults earn more money on average and thus pay more in taxes than those who did not receive that benefit. These cohorts were followed until age 28, but, projecting the results over a full working career, the authors estimate that the extra taxes accruing to the federal government will amount to 56 cents for every Medicaid dollar. That is virtually identical to the 57 cents that the federal government pays out of every Medicaid dollar.
Professor Kowalski, in summarizing the study, said:
“Although it will take years to know the long-term impact of current expansions of Medicaid undertaken as part of the Affordable Care Act, this study shows that the investments that the government made in Medicaid in the 1980s and 1990s are paying off in the form of higher tax payments now.”
The study did not take into account the extra tax money paid to state and local governments, nor benefits from decreases in mortality and increases in college attendance. If all factors could be calculated over a lifetime, it is conceivable that Medicaid for children will actually be a direct financial benefit. Such a crass calculation shouldn’t be necessary, but the U.S. health care system exists to provide corporate profits rather than provide health care, which is why U.S. spends much more on health care than other countries while achieving inferior results.
A society that provides the infrastructure for a productive, balanced life, as opposed to one that imposes grim struggles to survive, is a healthy society. We are, after all, a social species, something that the ever more propagandized individualist ideology of capitalism seeks to erase.
Pete Dolack writes the Systemic Disorder blog. He has been an activist with several groups.
