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The war in Iraq is a strategic and moral disaster. But one issue relating to the war that hasn’t been addressed in depth is its impact on the U.S. economy. In the first of a series of research papers that will consider this issue, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier consider the impact of military spending versus spending on a series of peaceful priorities -- including health care, education, and energy conservation -- on job creation in the U.S. The study finds, for example, that while investing a billion dollars of tax revenue in the military creates 8,500 jobs, investing the same amount in education or mass transit yields more than twice that number of jobs. This study is co-sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies and Women’s Action for New Directions.

>> Download "The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities"

To honor the life work of Professor Sumner Rosen, this lecture examines approaches to promoting full employment at decent jobs within our contemporary era of globalization. The lecture briefly summarizes the theories of unemployment of Marx, Friedman, Keynes and Kalecki. It then addresses the meaning of full employment within the alternative theories and under different historical and country settings. It next considers the issue of the inflation/unemployment trade-off, and the Meidner-Rehn Swedish approach to inflation control under full employment. It concludes by presenting a sketch of something approximating a full employment program for the contemporary U.S. economy, focusing on ending the Iraq war and reallocation public spending toward health care, education, and green growth. 

>> Download "Is Full Employment Possible under Globalization?"

Right before the Memorial Day recess, Congress finally passed into law, and President Bush signed, the first federal minimum wage increase in 10 years. The federal minimum will now rise in three steps up to $7.25 as of July 2009. This is a positive, but still very modest gain for low-wage workers in the U.S. In his new 'Economic Prospects' column for New Labor Forum, PERI Co-Director Robert Pollin, evaluates the new minimum wage law and proposes a strategy for bringing the federal minimum much closer to a living wage standard.

>> Download "Making the Federal Minimum Wage a Living Wage"

 On November 7, 2006, six states voted on whether to set a minimum wage higher than the $5.15 federal rate. The outcome was a powerful affirmative--66% in Arizona, 69% in Nevada, 73% in Montana, 76% in Missouri, and 53% in Colorado.

PERI continues to be a critical voice in this national trend, providing campaigns with rigorous economic analysis of the impact of wage floors, in time to feed into campaigns like these. In October, PERI researchers Robert Pollin and Jeannette Wicks-Lim completed an analysis of the Arizona ballot proposal to set a $6.75 minimum wage with automatic inflation adjustments. The research was sponsored and published by the Center for American Progress. The report provided the basic facts that policymakers and voters needed to assess the likely economic impact of this proposal. Pollin and Wicks-Lim presented their study in Phoenix on October 31, in a series of press events and meetings with policymakers.

Among the studies key findings are:

• About 345,000 workers--13% of Arizona’s total workforce--will receive wage increases through this measure.
• The average net income gain for low-wage workers and their families will be between $650 and $700 per year.
• The total costs of these wage increases to businesses in Arizona will be about $312 million per year, 0.08% of the total sales by these businesses in 2005.
• These costs can be readily absorbed by businesses and consumers, primarily through very small price increases. A representative restaurant would have to raise the price of a $20 meal to $20.28 to cover its costs of 1.4% of sales.
• The rough fiscal savings for the State of Arizona would be $4.1 million, the net result of positive and negative impacts on tax revenues, increased public employee wage costs, and savings in state-funded health care programs.

>> Read the full study