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Some bad ideas never die

April 24, 2013
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

The Iowa House today proved that bipartisanship is no guarantor of good policy. On a vote of 87-9, the House approved HF 641, which would authorize a new and wasteful incentive program that would divert money from the state general fund to support hotel and retail projects in cities. So we will be taking money that should be supporting state investments in education, health, the environment, public safety, and other services, and using it to subsidize hotel developers and retail strip malls. All in the name of “economic development.”

Cities already have more than enough ability to divert taxes to development projects through property tax TIFs and abatements. There is no need for additional diversions of revenue from other jurisdictions.

The House bill would authorize any city or county to establish “Reinvestment Districts.” From the date of establishment onward for the next 25 years, 4 cents of the 6-cent statewide sales tax, and all 5 cents of the state hotel-motel tax, from all “new” sales or room rentals would be diverted from the state general fund to the city for use in the district. What uses? Pretty much anything; any building, public or private, could qualify for a subsidy, and there is no limit on how much of the cost of a project can be subsidized.

“New sales” are sales from a business that first got a state sales-tax permit (or hotel-motel tax permit) after the date the district was established. Given the high rate of turnover among retail businesses, it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which most of the sales taxes in a district are diverted from the state general fund even though there has been little additional economic activity, or even decline. All that is needed is that old businesses are replaced by new ones, even if that means replacing an Applebees with a pawn shop.

Why will a city ever again be content to finance commercial redevelopment on their own, or with property tax TIFs alone? Why will a developer ever again finance a project entirely from private sources – try to remember, if you can, when that was the norm – when he or she can just ask the city to get the money from the state?

More importantly, what will become of market standards? While every legislator who voted for the bill surely believes in free markets and private enterprise, this measure undermines markets. There was a time, before the incentive wars got out of hand, when a project had to stand on its own – there had to be a sufficient market to support it, and banks had to be convinced that revenues would be sufficient to repay the loans. No more. Now local government officials are determined to force development to happen when it can’t stand on its own, creating oversupply that hurts existing businesses. Or the private sector happily rakes in all the new incentive cash to do something it would have done anyway. Those are really the only two alternatives for a local market activity: either market conditions support it and it can be financed privately, or the market can’t support it, and the city uses taxpayer money to force overbuilding.

We can hope that this bill gets careful scrutiny before it goes any further.

Posted by Peter Fisher, Research Director

Categories: Budget and Tax, Economic Opportunity, Organization
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Looking past the distractions on job numbers

April 23, 2013

Colin Gordon

Colin Gordon

Each month about this time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics updates its regional and state job numbers. It’s an important monthly scorecard, an opportunity to measure the state’s performance against the experience of other states, the national picture, and our own recent employment trends. And it’s an important political moment — especially as Governors around the country (and here in Iowa) have tied policy and budgetary decisions to job creation or employment targets.

But this monthly flurry of interest can also distract us from the bigger picture. How many jobs we added this month or last, after all, is less important than the larger and longer term goal of real recovery from the Great Recession. And on that score, we still have some ground to cover.

The graph below (from our State of Working Iowa report, updated through March 2013) compares the 2007 recession to all other postwar recessions, for Iowa and the United States. For the country, the 2007 recession is deeper and longer than any other postwar downturn. Now more than five years (63 months) since the onset of the recession in December 2007, we are far short of pre-recession employment levels.  For Iowa, the picture is a little better — but we are still 7,700 jobs short of the pre-recession peak.

http://public.tableausoftware.com/shared/5DDG8FS3T?:display_count=no

This is only part of the story.  As the recessions (and weak recovery) have dragged on, the state has continued to add to its labor force:  now five year’s worth of immigration, in-migration, and high school or college graduations. So our real jobs deficit is not the number of jobs we are short of the pre-recession peak. It is the number of jobs, given our current labor force, we are short of returning to pre-recession rates of employment. That deficit, captured in the graph below, is over 65,000 jobs. In order to clear that deficit in the next three years (during which time the labor force will continue to grow), we would need to add over 80,000 jobs — about 2,000 a month over that span.  Over the past year, or rate of job creation has been about half that (averaging only 920 jobs/month).

Basic RGB

Posted by Colin Gordon, Senior Research Consultant

Categories: Economic Opportunity, Organization
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Iowa’s decline in job-based health insurance

April 11, 2013

The Cedar Rapids Gazette today offered an interesting look at the question of where Iowans get their insurance. It’s less and less something that comes through employment. And when the costs of insurance keep rising, that makes it tougher on the household budget — or results in people not having insurance.

This is a trend we’ve been watching and reporting on at the Iowa Policy Project for many years, as have several good research organizations such as the Economic Policy Institute.

The Affordable Care Act offers at least a partial remedy. As health insurance exchanges are developed, affordable insurance should be more readily available. Tax credits for employers providing insurance will provide a targeted incentive to offer employees a better option than what employees might find on the individual insurance market.

Colin Gordon

Colin Gordon

Our State of Working Iowa report for 2012 offers another good look at this issue. As author Colin Gordon observes, wage stagnation, erosion of good jobs and recession have combined to batter workers, at the same time non-wage forms of compensation, health and pension benefits, also have declined. This has eroded both job quality and family financial security, and increased the need for public insurance. In Chapter 3, “The Bigger Picture,” Gordon writes that Iowa is one of 15 states, including five in the Midwest, to lose more than 10 percent of job-based coverage in a decade. He continues:

These losses reflect two overlapping trends. The first of these is costs. Health spending has slowed in recent years, but still runs well ahead of general inflation. Both premium costs … and the employee’s share of premiums have risen sharply — especially for family coverage — while wages have stagnated.

In 1999, a full-time median-wage worker in Iowa needed to work for about 10 weeks in order to pay an annual family premium; by 2011, this had swollen to nearly 25 weeks. Steep cost increases have pressed employers to drop or cut back coverage, or employees to decline it when offered. High costs may also encourage more employees to elect single coverage — counting on spousal coverage from another source and kids’ coverage through public programs. The second factor here is the shift in sectoral employment outlined above: Job losses are heaviest in sectors that have historically offered group health coverage; and job gains (or projected job gains) are strongest in sectors that don’t offer coverage.

This graph looks at the rate of employer-sponsored coverage, by industry sector, from 2002 to 2012.

job-based coverage comparison, Iowa 2002-2012

An interactive version of that graph in the online report allows the reader to toggle between those two years; the colored balloons sink on the graph in moving from 2002 to 2012, as if they all are losing air — the result of declining rates of coverage.

Good public policy could help to fill them again.

2010-mo-blogthumbPosted by Mike Owen, Assistant Director

 

Categories: Budget and Tax, Economic Opportunity, Organization
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The limits of transparency

April 3, 2013
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

You can’t fix problems you can’t find. That’s why transparency is so important in public policy and especially spending through the tax code.

You would never find some of this information just going to the Iowa Economic Development Authority website — you have to know where to look. And even then, there are limitations on what is available from the state for its citizens to see.

The Iowa Policy Project and Iowa Fiscal Partnership have long argued for greater transparency with regard to the state’s expenditures on economic development through the tax code. We are happy to see a new report from the Iowa Public Interest Research Group that brings attention to this issue, properly including business tax credits and other tax expenditures among the categories of state spending that citizens have a right to know about.

But it’s very important to look at the deficiencies that remain in Iowa. In our view, those problems tell far more about the state’s interest in transparency than the items that are given a favorable rating by PIRG.

While the PIRG report gives Iowa credit for having a website that allows a citizen to find economic development subsidies awarded by company name (including the amount, the jobs promised, the jobs created, and the location), two problems in particular should be addressed in the future.

  • First, only tax credits that must be awarded are listed; similar information should be available for all economic development tax credits, including those that are automatic.
  • Second, the database of subsidies is buried deep in the website of the Iowa Economic Development Authority (for those interested it is here: http://www.iowaeconomicdevelopment.com/annualrpt/?cmd=default&rptyear=2011). It’s hard for the public to find. A link to this database should be posted on the state’s DataShare website, where only aggregate information on tax credits is available.

The Legislature did pass a notable transparency improvement in 2009 that requires the state to identify by name the recipients of Research Activities Credits in excess of $500,000. The bill failed, however, to require identification of how much of a company’s credit was in the form of a refund check. Taxpayers have a right to know how much of their tax dollars are going to subsidize corporations that are paying no state income tax.

It should be clear by now that the disclosure of company-specific subsidy information does no harm to the company or to the state’s economic development efforts; there is no excuse not to make all of our business tax subsidies transparent.

Posted by Peter S. Fisher, Research Director

Categories: Budget and Tax, Economic Opportunity, Organization
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Different goals for progress on Iowa jobs

April 2, 2013
David Osterberg

David Osterberg

The graph below offers one way — actually, four ways — to look at the latest nonfarm job numbers in the context of history and job goals for Iowa.

As of February, we’re 4,100 behind where we were at the start of the recession in December 2007, and 7,200 behind Iowa’s peak nonfarm job level in May 2008.

However, Economic Policy Institute analysis suggests that those historical numbers don’t give an apples-to-apples picture for how well the economy is producing jobs to meet the demand for jobs — that you need to factor in growth in the population. When that is done, Iowa still has 60,900 to go to reach where we were before the recession.

Yet another number to consider is Governor Branstad’s goal of creating 200,000 jobs in five years. Since his term started in January 2011, Iowa has produced a net total of 44,900 jobs, which works out to a pace of 1,800 net new jobs per month. At that pace, the state is well off what is necessary to reach the Governor’s goal — 4,400 per month for the remaining 35 months of the five-year period.

Inline image 1

As we point out in our monthly Iowa JobWatch report, the overall job numbers do not tell the full story about the job climate in our state. One thing those monthly numbers do not disclose is any detail about job quality — whether jobs gained or lost are full-time or part-time jobs, or are permanent or temporary positions, or pay well, or offer health and/or retirement benefits.

For more, see our latest Iowa JobWatch report and also The State of Working Iowa 2012.

Posted by David Osterberg, Executive Director

Categories: Economic Opportunity, Organization
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Stagnant objections to minimum wage increases

March 7, 2013
Heather Gibney, Research Associate

Heather Gibney

Dialogue about increasing the minimum wage is finally emerging in 2013. President Obama proposed an increase in the minimum wage to $9.00 per hour in his State of the Union address, and Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller have introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 — which would raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10. The Harkin-Miller bill would raise the wage in three steps of 95 cents before indexing it to keep up with the rising cost of living.

Iowa’s minimum wage now matches the federal. Raising it to $10.10 per hour would put nearly $6,000 more dollars in the pockets of Iowa families, and for the first time since the late 1970s a single parent with two children would be above the federal poverty level — a wage gap that we should have seen diminishing over time, but have not.

poverty vs min wage

Recognizing that the federal minimum wage is too low, 19 other states, including the District of Columbia have a higher minimum wage than the federal and 10 states annually increase their minimum to keep up with the rising cost of living. Unfortunately, attempts to raise the federal minimum wage and set automatic adjustments to keep pace with the rising cost of living have been hindered by bad economics. Beliefs that increasing the minimum wage will lead to job loss, that the majority of those benefiting would be teenagers and that it would decrease output for certain industries is the consensus among opponents, however unfounded. A recent report from the Center on Economic Policy and Research (CEPR) looked at the most influential research done on the minimum wage in the last 20 years and continuously found insignificant or no discernible effects feared — and promoted — by opponents of raises in the minimum wage.

While the passage of any of these proposals remains uncertain, Iowans working for the minimum wage will have to get by with their creativity; possibly working two jobs, relying on cash assistance and tax credits, going without those amenities that make life a little more enjoyable and hoping that one day they might join the middle class.

Posted by Heather Gibney, Research Associate

Categories: Economic Opportunity, Organization
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Why the minimum wage matters

February 13, 2013
Heather Gibney, Research Associate

Heather Gibney

It doesn’t take long after someone proposes an increase in the minimum wage — as President Obama did in his State of the Union message — to hear the same, tired arguments against it.

Rather than repeat them, and the bad economics behind them, it’s important to put the minimum wage in the context of the cost of making ends meet. It doesn’t come close — which means two things: (1) the wage itself needs to keep pace with increases in typical household costs, and (2) to fill gaps between the wage and the cost of basic needs, and to encourage people to work, we can through public policy offer work supports, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, as well as assistance with the costs of food, health care and child care.

The Cost of Living in Iowa analysis by the Iowa Policy Project last year provides a look at just how far short a $7.25 hourly wage would fall for a single parent even working two full-time jobs. It would not come close to paying the bills without work-support programs. Note these estimates in the accompanying table (Table 3 from that May 2012 report) of a basic-needs, no-frills household budget for a single-parent family of two or three.

120531-COL-Table3

The national minimum wage of $7.25 has not been increased in almost four years — and in Iowa it’s already been over five years, as the state’s $7.25 minimum took effect in January 2008. Prices are higher than they were then, and employers cannot be counted upon to raise pay for minimum-wage workers without the stick of wage-and-hour laws. That is why there’s a minimum.

Posted by Heather Gibney, Research Associate

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How to make Iowa’s tax system more unfair

February 5, 2013
David Osterberg

David Osterberg

How odd that a new proposal to make Iowa’s tax system more regressive and unfair comes out just when new evidence shows it already is unfair. HF3 would make the Iowa income tax rate flat where it needs to reflect ability to pay. Since higher income people pay more in income tax, and because they are expected to pay a greater percentage as their income rises, moving to a flat or flatter income tax is a reward to them. It does not help low- and moderate-income people.

As shown in the recent “Who Pays?” report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the poorest pay the highest portion of their income in taxes. (See graph.) The sales tax is much steeper as a share of income from low-income Iowans than it is from high-income Iowans, and the property tax is marginally more expensive to low-income people as a share of income than it is to those with high incomes. The income tax is the only progressive element of Iowa’s state and local tax system.

graph of Who Pays Iowa taxesTo flatten the only progressive feature of Iowa’s tax system would make the overall tax system more regressive. That would be the inevitable effect of HF3.

The problem with Iowa’s tax system is not that it’s too progressive. In fact, it is regressive — taking a larger share of the income of people at low incomes and middle incomes than of people at the top. HF3 would compound this.

Posted by David Osterberg, Executive Director

Categories: Budget and Tax, Economic Opportunity, Organization
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Sound budgeting doesn’t include blanket tax credit

January 28, 2013
Mike Owen

Mike Owen

This session of the Iowa Legislature offers a tremendous opportunity to move the state forward with a balanced approach — including responsible, fair tax reform and investments in critical needs that have gone unmet, in education at all levels, in environmental quality and public safety.

The proposal for a blanket $750 tax credit to couples, regardless of need and blind to the opportunity cost of even more lost investments, does not fit that approach. To compound a penchant to spend money on tax breaks is fiscally irresponsible to the needs of Iowa taxpayers, who will benefit from better services, and to the promise that we would return to proper investments when the economy turned up, as it has. Furthermore, to give away Iowa’s surplus when uncertainty remains about the impact of federal budget decisions on our state’s tax system and services is tremendously short-sighted.

As the Iowa Fiscal Partnership has established, cutbacks in higher education funding have caused costs and debt to rise for students and their families, not only at the Regents institutions but community colleges as well. While Iowa voters, through a statewide referendum, have expressly called for new revenues to go toward better environmental stewardship, lawmakers have not taken action. The surplus we now see should be used responsibly for the future of Iowans, who patiently endured budget austerity for the day when we could once again see support for critical services. This is no time to be forgetting our responsibilities.

Iowa can do better by returning to the basics of good budgeting, crafting budget and tax choices that keep a long-term focus on the needs of young and future generations, whose lives will be shaped by the foundations we leave them.

Posted by Mike Owen, Assistant Director

Categories: Budget and Tax, Economic Opportunity, Energy & Environment, Organization
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EITC boost would help families who need it — and economy

January 17, 2013
Heather Gibney, Research Associate

Heather Gibney

If you imagine a packed Kinnick Stadium on game day you have an idea of how many Iowans were kept out of poverty from 2009 to 2011 thanks to two refundable tax credits.

A new state-by-state analysis from the Brookings Institution finds that the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) kept 71,123 Iowans out of poverty, over half of them children.

The Governor’s Condition of the State speech Tuesday missed an opportunity to discuss the value of Iowa’s own Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to Iowa families and prospects for an expansion — something he has twice vetoed on grounds that he wanted more comprehensive tax reforms.

The Brookings analysis uses a new way of looking at poverty: the Supplemental Poverty Measure, an updated approach to the calculation of whether an Americans household is in poverty. So it’s a valuable look that we haven’t seen for state-level figures.

The EITC is designed to encourage work when low-income jobs don’t provide enough for a family to make ends meet. So, as a family earns more income, they become eligible for a larger credit; as their income approaches self-sufficiency the EITC gradually phases out.[1]

At the state level, Iowa families who are eligible for the federal EITC also qualify for the state EITC, which is set at 7 percent of the federal credit. Proposals in the past would take that higher, to 10 percent or even 20 percent. It can be an important break for lower-income working families because Iowa already taxes the income of many who don’t earn enough to pay federal income tax. Currently, a married couple with two incomes and two children who qualifies for the federal EITC doesn’t have to start paying federal income taxes until their incomes reach $45,400. That same family would have to pay Iowa income taxes when their incomes reached $22,600.[2]

The EITC is the the nation’s largest and most successful anti-poverty program, largely because it encourages and rewards working families. With Iowa’s 85th General Assembly under way, discussions about raising Iowa’s EITC above 7 percent may once again emerge after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement last year.

An EITC increase would raise the threshold at which Iowa families start to owe income taxes — putting more money into the pockets of those who need it the most and encouraging them to spend that money in their local communities.

Posted by Heather Gibney, Research Associate

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