Squared Away Blog

January 11, 2022

Federal labor officials are giving Amazon employees in Alabama a second shot at forming a union, and their coworkers in Staten Island are seeking clearance to hold a vote. Americans, more confident of their employment prospects, are leaving their jobs in record numbers, with much of the activity in low-wage industries like hospitality.

Employers, having taken note, are combatting high quit rates and staff shortages by raising pay at the bottom of the wage scale. Also fueling the hikes has been a series of increases in state minimum wages, including automatic annual cost-of-living increases in a growing number of states.

Various economists, using different data sources, have reached a similar conclusion about these recent developments: pay for low-income workers – the same people who suffered the highest unemployment rates during the pandemic – is currently outpacing inflation.

It’s unclear whether that trend will continue in 2022, if, as some economists now predict, inflation becomes more persistent. The government will report December’s inflation rate tomorrow.

But between the third quarters of 2020 and 2021, Arindrajit Dube, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, estimated that wage increases for workers in the bottom 30 percent of the pay scale outpaced inflation. Another economist, Geoffrey Sanzenbacher at Boston College, reached a similar finding: inflation-adjusted pay for people with earnings in the bottom 25 percent of all earnings rose last year while workers in the top 10 percent saw a decline.

When inflation first started picking up, economists said it would be a temporary blip that would ease when the goods piled up at West Coast ports started moving onto store shelves. But some economists are changing their tune and worry that high inflation will last longer than they’d predicted.

This would especially be a problem for low-wage workers, who spend most of their income on necessities. Rental housing is a good example. In a recent Federal Reserve survey, consumers estimated their rents would rise by 10 percent over the next year. An increase of this size would mark a new high for low-wage workers’ largest single expense – rent consumes more than half of their monthly income. …Learn More

Money Culture

December 7, 2021

The pandemic exposed inequities in the U.S. healthcare system. It also revealed a related shortcoming in our workplaces: the lack of mandated paid family and medical leave for most Americans – and especially lower-paid workers.

The United States is the only developed country that does not have a national policy of paid time off for an extended period for illness or maternity leave. In that way, we are keeping company with places like Micronesia and Tonga.

Many major employers do offer sick time and paid or unpaid maternity leave. Even so, 60 percent of the highest-paid workers, who tend to work in larger companies, don’t have access to paid leave for themselves or a family member for extended periods for a severe illness, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families. The situation is much tougher for lower-paid workers, who are concentrated in small business: 93 percent lack access to paid leave.

Last month, the House approved a reconciliation bill that would mandate four weeks of paid leave for all workers in the event that they or family members become ill. It’s uncertain whether this provision of the reconciliation bill will clear the Senate.

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) has opposed paid leave in the past, arguing that workers who take extended time off strain under-staffed small employers. Although the federal government would pay a supplement to employers for the leave under the House bill, NFIB said the required paperwork creates administrative headaches.

But this position isn’t supported by small business owners, according to a new study. Even prior to the pandemic, they were in favor of a paid leave policy for employees to take care of family members – and COVID has only strengthened their resolve.

In the fall of 2019, 62 percent of small businesses in New Jersey and New York were very or somewhat supportive of paid family leave, the researchers found. By the fall of 2020 – after months of wrestling with how to handle employees whose family members had contracted COVID – small employers’ support had jumped to 71 percent. …Learn More

November 30, 2021

Texas Securities Commissioner Travis Iles says we’re living in a perfect storm – for financial fraud.

Isolated at home to avoid COVID, people are spending more time online, and he suspects that some have become more susceptible to fraud because they think a big win would take the edge off of the financial uncertainties of the pandemic. And social media only feeds the frenzy, giving scam artists a natural audience for selling their “investments” – and for recruiting others on social media to help them.

“People look for follows and likes and they’re dialed in on a lot of social media platforms that three to four years ago were very foreign,” Iles said in a recent interview. “It’s actually influencing people’s decisions about where” to invest their money.

In March 2020, just as the pandemic took hold, he began tracking how many administrative and enforcement actions his office had taken. Over the next 18 months, his office launched some 450 investigations, resulting in more than 60 actions against suspicious companies selling investments to Texans.

“We’ve never been more prolific in terms of output,” he added.

The craziness of these times can be seen in a recent cease-and-desist order issued by the Texas Securities Division against a company promising wild returns of 30 percent in 60 days or 50 percent in 90 days to investors in a nebulous operation: cryptocurrency cloud mining.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are complicated enough – but mining cryptocurrency? As one law firm explains, it’s a treasure hunt that “involves validating cryptocurrency transactions on a blockchain network and adding them to a distributed ledger.” …Learn More

November 16, 2021

Manhattan residents who itemize their federal tax returns pay an average $102,000 in state and local taxes – more than anywhere else. The second highest tax tabs, nearly $50,000, are in Marin County, the home of musicians and movie stars across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

Other enclaves with large bills for property, sales, and income taxes include Falls Church, Virginia, a high-income community outside Washington, D.C., and Teton County, Wyoming, where the super-wealthy buy property on the open range surrounding Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park.

In 2017, Congress put a $10,000 cap on the amount of state and local taxes – or SALT – that all homeowners could deduct on their federal income tax filings. The proposed reconciliation bill being hashed out in Congress might increase or remove that cap.

The Brookings Institution argued that lifting the cap would “massively favor the rich” at a time U.S. inequality is already at historic levels. There is no shortage of evidence to back that up.

High-income Americans on both coasts and in major cities like Chicago and Dallas would save thousands of dollars from lifting the cap on SALT deductions. In Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley, for example, the average high-income taxpayer who itemized reported that they paid nearly $47,000 in state and local taxes in 2018, according to the bipartisan Tax Foundation’s analysis of IRS data.

But due to the current cap, the IRS permitted county residents to deduct only about $9,000 for their SALT taxes. (The number is slightly below the $10,000 cap because some itemizers take smaller deductions if, for example, they are renters and don’t pay property taxes.)

One proposal gaining currency in the House would increase the cap on deductions from $10,000 to $80,000, as an alternative to eliminating it entirely. Garrett Watson, author of the Tax Foundation report, said that either raising the cap or another idea – limiting the cap to the nation’s top earners – would still mainly benefit the top 5 percent.

But, he added, preserving some type of cap, even if it’s more generous, “will be less regressive than eliminating it altogether, because the folks at the very top – the multimillionaires and billionaires – would still face that curtailed SALT deduction.”

The Tax Policy Center, an affiliate of the Urban Institute and Brookings, estimates that repealing the cap on SALT deductions would increase after-tax income for households earning more than $100,000 by between 1 percent and 2 percent. Families with lower earnings would be unaffected. …Learn More

Money Culture

November 9, 2021

Social Security’s great achievement for retirees is a guarantee that they’ll get a check every month, without fail. Less appreciated is the stability the program brings to local economies and businesses.

Retirees use their Social Security benefits to patronize establishments that sell goods and services locally such as restaurants, car repair shops, banks, and hospitals. That steady supply of spending in good times and bad helps to stabilize economies, according to research conducted by the Center for Retirement Research and funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration.

Between 2000 and 2018, working-age adults’ employment levels and earnings were less affected by the ups and downs in the state unemployment rate in counties where Social Security provides a higher percentage of residents’ total income.

During the Great Recession, for example, when unemployment rates surged across the country, earnings and employment did not decline as much in counties that were more reliant on the federal retirement benefits.

The researchers’ analysis of U.S. Census data produced similar results when they tested Social Security’s stabilizing effects on specific industries that sell locally. Businesses in several industries – retail and entertainment, healthcare, education, financial services, and other services – had more stable employment and earnings when county residents got a higher percentage of their total income from the program. Manufacturers, which tend to sell their products nationally or internationally, were excluded from the industry analysis.

Social Security’s regularity and reliability set it apart from the countercyclical federal programs that were designed to ease the pain of recessions, such as unemployment benefits or food assistance distributed through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Social Security, the researchers concluded, serves as a valuable “stabilizer for the local economy, above and beyond its direct value to beneficiaries.”

To read this study, authored by Laura Quinby, Robert Siliciano and Gal Wettstein, see “Does Social Security Serve as an Economic Stabilizer?” …Learn More

Money Culture

October 21, 2021

The federal tax code offers a nifty tax credit to low-income workers who save for retirement. If only it reached more people.

The Saver’s Credit offers what appears on its face to be a strong incentive: the IRS will return up to 50 percent of the amount low-income workers and married couples put into a retirement plan.

But Barbara Wollan, an 18-year volunteer in Iowa with the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, or VITA, which provides free tax preparation to low-income workers, said her clients often don’t qualify. The reason: the tax credit is not what the IRS calls “fully refundable.”

For example, a single person earning $19,750 or less is eligible for a tax credit equal to 50 percent of the amount saved – the maximum retirement plan contribution eligible for the credit is $2,000. The credits are either 10 percent or 20 percent for single workers earning between $19,751 and $33,000. (The income limits are higher for households.)

The catch is that the credit is subtracted from the taxes owed, and low-income people usually pay little or no taxes to the IRS after they take the standard deduction given to all taxpayers. If they don’t owe taxes, they don’t get the credit.

“To dream big about helping low-income people save for retirement, we would make it a refundable credit,” said Wollan, an educator with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, which distributes research information in her state on topics like finance and agriculture.

Congress is considering providing a refundable credit of up to $500 to single and married savers even if they don’t owe anything at tax time. But lawmakers often get into a political disagreement about whether people who don’t pay taxes should get money back from the IRS.

Wollan feels her low-income clients should be rewarded for making what is, for them, a Herculean effort to save. “When I see that they have contributed to a 401(k) or other retirement account, I just want to jump up and down and cheer and pat them on the back,” she said. But “because their income is so low, they don’t get to take advantage of these credits, and that is so sad.” …Learn More

September 7, 2021

In the second half of 2020, the number of retired homeowners who fell behind on their mortgage payments doubled to about 1 million per month.

By July of this year, it had dropped to 680,000 retirees. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which issued the report on homeowners over age 65, said about 12 percent of this population is vulnerable to imminent foreclosure and possibly homelessness. Some of the people who are having the hardest time paying their loans either have disabilities or are over 75.

But most the retirees in the CFPB report are largely reliant on Social Security, so their income is stable. To understand why they’re having problems paying the mortgage requires reading the tea leaves in the CFPB report. More than half of the retirees with past due mortgages live with at least two other people, including children and teenagers.

Lower-income people in multigenerational households typically share the burden of paying their living expenses. If a retired homeowner’s adult family member lost a job because of the pandemic, the homeowner might not be getting the money she needs to pay the mortgage. The CFPB survey confirms this is occurring: more than a third of older homeowners who are behind on their mortgages said a family member was unemployed.

Many of the people who are struggling had less than $25,000 in retirement income or were people of color. Their family members in the multigenerational households – presumably people of color – also may have worked in lower-paid jobs and bore the brunt of last year’s layoffs and reduced hours at work. …Learn More