While in New Hampshire, Jeb Bush offered his economic plan if he is elected president: People need to work longer hours.
With all the millions of dollars that are being pumped into the 2016 campaign, you would expect a candidate such as Jeb Bush would have someone on staff to vet his comments such as this, especially after the last time he stepped in it. (Remember his inept answer to whether he agreed with his brother’s rationale for invading Iraq?)
While some economists agree with Bush’s solution to reaching 4 percent growth, it is neither here nor there. It’s the tone-deafness of his comment that illustrates the insularity of his position in relation to Americans who work 40 hours and more a week just to pay the bills and put food on the table.
As Robert Reich noted, Americans already work long hours, on average 47 hours for salaried workers. “Hourly workers are putting in even more time. Contract workers, free-lancers, and temp workers are working longer hours than ever. Most part-time workers are doing more than one part-time job.”
And if we consider the nature of modern technology, with email and text messages following us around 24 hours a day, are many of us ever really off the clock?
To be fair, Bush’s complete statement is as follows: “My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.”
But, as Reich notes, the problem isn’t the hours we work, but the wages we receive. “Half of Americans are earning less now than they did 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation.”
The stock market is through the roof and corporate profits have never been higher, but almost all of the economic gains of the past seven years have gone to the top.
Matt Philips, writing for Quartz, notes that Bush is correct in his conclusion that work force participation is now at its lowest level since the late 1970s, but much of that has to do with the graying of the U.S. population due to aging baby boomers. According to the International Labour Organization, Americans work the equivalent of two extra weeks compared to every other developed country with the exception of South Korea.
“To top it off, much of the U.S. work force isn’t even being counted – that sector comprised of undocumented workers, who work more service, construction, and other manual labor jobs than US citizens,” writes Julianne Escobedo Shepherd for Jezebel.
Matthew Yglesias, writing for Vox, notes that in the old days of rapid productivity and wage growth, “Average annual hours worked tended to fall steadily, as a more prosperous America chose to take some of its additional prosperity in the form of leisure time.”
While many of our readers might be lucky enough to earn $50,000 a year, Jeb Bush pulls in that much for giving a one-hour speech. Is it any wonder he other candidates are living in a bubble of affluence and fail to truly understand the bind in which most working Americans find themselves?
Ben Casselman, writing for FiveThirtyEight, notes Bush’s comment “may have been bad politics, but he got the economics pretty much right. Bush is highlighting one of the most basic formulas in macroeconomics: In its most simplified form, a country’s economic output is the product of its number of workers times how many hours they work times how much they can produce in an hour. If you want the economy to grow faster, you have to get at least one of those three factors – workers, hours or productivity – to accelerate.”
While Bush might be right, notes Casselman, he hasn’t provided much detail on how he would get the nation to 4 percent annual growth.
“Most economists are skeptical that any president has enough control over the economy to make good on such a promise. Saying we need more full-time jobs is easy; creating them is much tougher.”
What most economists and pundits are missing in this whole debate, notes Shepherd, is the fact that “among the cluttered landscape of trash-can Republican presidential nominees, he’s easily one of the most moderate, espousing looser views on topics like immigration and mostly eschewing the … delusions of his peers. And when Jeb Bush seems tolerable just because he’s producing garbage conservative arguments that you can at least conceptualize and take down with logic, you know you’re ‘tween a rock and a hard place.”
