Carbon taxes and emissions trading systems have been instituted in many places, such as Denmark and California. But a federal measure in the United States, setting a cap on carbon emissions and letting companies trade their allotments, failed in 2010.

At the same time, Dr. Nordhaus’s model was drawing criticism for underestimating the havoc that climate change would wreak. Like other models, it has been revised several times, but it still relies on broad assumptions and places less value on harm to future generations than it places on harm to those today. It also doesn’t fully incorporate the risk of less likely but substantially worse trajectories of warming.

Dr. Nordhaus dismissed the criticisms. “They are all subjective and based on selective interpretation of science and economics,” he wrote in an email. “Some people hold these views, as would be expected in any controversial subject, but many others do not.”

Heather Boushey, a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers who handles climate issues, says the field is learning that simply tinkering with prices won’t be enough as the climate nears catastrophic tipping points, like the evaporation of rivers, choking off whole regions and setting off a cascade of economic effects.

“So much of economics is about marginal changes,” Dr. Boushey said. “With climate, that no longer makes sense, because you have these systemic risks.” She sees her current assignment as similar to her previous work, running a think tank focused on inequality: “It profoundly alters the way people think about economics.”

To many economists, the approach pioneered by Dr. Nordhaus was increasingly out of step with the urgency that climate scientists were trying to communicate to policymakers. But a carbon tax remained at the center of a bipartisan effort on climate change, supported by a panoply of large corporations and more than 3,600 economists, that also called for removing “cumbersome regulations.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/business/economy/economy-climate-change.html

After monthly payments are made for a set number of years — usually 20 — any remaining balance is forgiven. (The balance is taxable as income, though a temporary tax rule exempts balances forgiven through 2025 from federal income taxes.)

Monthly payments are often calculated as 10 or 15 percent of discretionary income, but one plan is 20 percent. Discretionary income is usually defined as the amount earned above 150 percent of the poverty level, which is adjusted for household size. PAYE usually has the lowest payment, followed by either I.B.R. or REPAYE, depending on the specific circumstances of the borrower, said Mark Kantrowitz, a student aid expert. The new plan will change that calculus (more on that below).

There’s a dizzying variety of rules, and the existing plans aren’t a cure-all. Even though some borrowers may be eligible for a $0 payment, the plans aren’t always affordable for everyone. The formulas aren’t adjusted for local cost of living, private student loans or medical bills, among other things.

How will the new plan work?

The proposed I.D.R. plan would reduce payments to 5 percent of discretionary income, down from 10 percent to 15 percent in many existing plans. Borrowers with original loan balances of less than $12,000 would make monthly payments for 10 years, while everyone else would pay for 20 years (similar to existing plans).

It would also allow more low-income workers to qualify for zero-dollar payments. The administration plans to tweak the payment formula by raising the amount of income deemed necessary for basic expenses, and thus shielded from the calculation: No borrower earning under 225 percent of the poverty level — or what a $15 minimum wage worker earns annually — will have to make a payment, the administration said.

There’s more: Unlike other existing income-driven plans, borrowers’ loan balances will not grow as long as they make their monthly payments, even when they are not required to make any payments because their income is too low.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/business/biden-student-loan-forgiveness.html

“But the alternative,” Mr. Summers argued — “simply pretending” the U.S. labor market can remain this hot — “is setting the stage for the mistakes we made in the 1970s, and ultimately for a far larger recession, to contain inflation.”

“These arguments have nothing to do with how much you care about unemployment, or how much you care about the unemployment of disadvantaged groups,” he continued. “They only have to do with technical judgment.”

Many progressive economists have been sharply critical of that view, arguing that Black workers should not be the collateral damage in a war on inflation. William Spriggs, an economist at Howard University, cautioned against overstating the Fed’s ability to bring inflation under control — especially when inflation is being driven in part by global forces — and underestimating the potential damage from driving interest rates much higher.

Black workers will suffer first under a Fed-induced recession, Mr. Spriggs said. When that happens, he added, job losses across the board tend to follow. “And so you pay attention, because that’s the canary in the coal mine,” he said.

In a 2020 research paper, the economists Jared Bernstein and Janelle Jones — both of whom subsequently joined the Biden administration — laid out the increasingly popular argument that in light of this, the Fed “should consider targeting not the overall unemployment rate, but the Black rate.”

In an accompanying essay in The Washington Post, they noted that Fed policy implicitly treats 4 percent unemployment as a long-term goal, but “because Black unemployment is two times the overall rate, targeting 4 percent for the overall economy means targeting 8 percent for blacks.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/business/economy/black-workers-recession.html

What is happening at the William Temple House is emblematic of the economic situation. Demand for food is swelling again, and officials here blame rising prices and lost federal aid. The people seeking help come from a wide variety of backgrounds: parents, retirees struggling to stretch Social Security benefits, immigrants who speak Mandarin, college graduates with jobs.

Waiting in line on a recent Wednesday, Susan B. Smith said federal aid had helped her family endure the pandemic over the last year. Direct payments, along with three months’ worth of rental assistance, “got us through a lot last winter,” she said. “Every little bit of help, we appreciate it. We just want to make it through, not starve.”

Now, most of that assistance is gone, and food and housing cost more, a reality that has forced Ms. Smith and one of her daughters, Tamela Clover, to seek help at the food pantry. Ms. Clover, a college graduate who works part time for a social services agency, said her salary had not kept pace with her cost of living: “Everything’s so expensive.”

Mr. Biden frequently acknowledges the high inflation is hurting people and has taken several steps to try to mitigate rising costs. He and his aides insist that while the pain is real, last year’s stimulus package has made the country and its most vulnerable people better positioned for any economic troubles ahead.

Administration officials point to a stronger job market, a lower eviction rate and healthier household finances than the nation has typically experienced at this point in a recovery from a recession, which the economy briefly entered early in the pandemic. They say the $350 billion that Congress gave to state, local and tribal governments should help fuel some assistance programs even after federal aid runs out.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/us/politics/food-insecurity-biden-stimulus.html

In most cases, an industry without enough workers to meet customer demand would simply hire more, or at least raise wages to attract them.

Yet, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, neither of those things happened last year. The number of pharmacists employed in the United States dropped about 1 percent from 2020 to 2021. On balance, employers did not raise wages — in fact, median pay fell slightly, even without adjusting for inflation.

While this data is not yet available for 2022, a contract signed in March by a union of Chicago-area Walgreens pharmacists reflected a similar approach. It provided maximum base pay of $64.50 per hour, the same as the previous contract, but lowered the starting wage from $58 per hour to $49.55 per hour by September. (Like many retail pharmacists, the union members also receive bonuses.)

CVS and Walgreens said they had made hiring pharmacists a priority during the pandemic — CVS said it employed nearly 6 percent more pharmacists today than it did in early 2020; Walgreens declined to provide a figure. CVS said its compensation was “very competitive” for pharmacists, and Walgreens cited “ongoing phased wage increases”; both chains have offered signing bonuses to recruit pharmacists. The Chicago union said Walgreens had recently offered to raise pay for about one-quarter of its lowest-paid members.

To explain the wage stagnation of upper-middle-class workers during the pandemic, some economists have suggested that affluent workers are willing to accept lower wage growth for the ability to work from home. Dr. Katz, of Harvard, said the wages of many affluent workers might simply be slower to adjust to inflation than the wages of lower-paid workers.

But Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah, said the fact that upper-middle-class workers were not able to claim a larger share of last year’s exceptionally high corporate profits “speaks to the disempowerment of workers at all levels of status.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/business/economy/pharmacists-job-inflation.html

The strategy of discounting might not actually get to the root cause, analysts say.

“There is a point at which lower prices don’t trigger incremental demand because the consumers already have it,” said Simeon Siegel, a managing director at BMO Capital Markets. “It’s not an indication that the company is dead. It’s not an indication that they’re never going to buy it again. They just need the time lag.”

Retailers need to realize that consumers are thinking differently, Mr. Siegel said. Some big-ticket purchases — like an exercise bike, living room couch or patio grill — will happen just once. In other cases, the amount of time between purchasing and replenishing will be longer. A person might now buy a candle every few months, compared to doing it every month in the early stages of the pandemic when they were home more often. And more people are choosing to spend their money on things like air travel and movie tickets this summer compared to last.

With all of these variables, lowering prices might not trigger the demand a retailer wants, Mr. Siegel said. It might simply just cut into a company’s profits.

For the stores that did see sales growth, like the big-box retailers Walmart and Target, most of that volume was attributed to higher food prices. Groceries have narrower margins than, say, a retailer’s private-label dress brand, and the shift in sales from one category to another affects the company’s overall profitability.

Along with pricing, retailers need to figure out how to deal with their inventory issues, especially with the all-important holiday season just a few months away.

“Getting through the inventory levels allows them to have a cleaner store, a cleaner supply chain,” said Bobby Griffin, equity research analyst at Raymond James. “They won’t be able to predict it perfectly, but getting through excess inventory will give them more flexibility to try to adapt to what the holiday is throwing at them.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/business/retailers-sales-inflation.html

That’s because a less-intense version of the rent surge that is pushing inflation higher across cities in the American south is beginning to play out in bigger cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Real-time market rent trackers that reported prices shooting up in Sun Belt cities last year are now showing bigger increases in places like New York, San Jose and Seattle.

Those market rent increases take time to trickle into official inflation figures because of the way the government calculates its data. Much as Phoenix’s official inflation numbers are surging now partly because of the run-up in market rents in 2021, nascent increases in big coastal cities could keep pressure on inflation in months to come. And the effect could be palpable at a national level: New York and its suburbs account for about 11 percent of the nation’s rental housing-related costs in the Consumer Price Index, compared to about 1 percent for Phoenix.

“Even if we get a slowdown in the Sun Belt, it may not be enough to offset what we’re seeing in other markets,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights.

Federal Reserve officials noted that risk at their July meeting, according to minutes released Wednesday, observing that “in some product categories, the rate of price increase could well pick up further in the short run, with sizable additional increases in residential rental expenses being especially likely.”

The Fed has been raising interest rates since March to try to slow consumer and business demand and cool inflation and is expected to lift them again at its meeting in September.

To date, much of the regional divide in price increases — from rents to consumer goods and services — has traced back to migration. People have been flocking to less expensive cities from big coastal ones for years, but that trend accelerated sharply with the onset of the pandemic. The pattern is playing out across both the Mountain West, where inflation is also remarkably high, and the Sun Belt.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/business/economy/sun-belt-inflation.html

“We just don’t have enough to give to everyone,” he said, his voice wavering. “I don’t know what is going to happen next week.”

People across Britain are confronting similar problems.

At the Blackburn Food Bank, in the north of England, more people with full-time employment are turning up as wages have not keep up with the inflation.

“People are very shocked that they have to be here,” said Gill Fourie, operations manager at Blackburn. “People don’t even have gas and electricity to cook,” she said, referring to mounting household energy prices which are forecast to climb to 3,500 pounds (about $4,240) a year in October, triple what were a year ago. She added, however, that the facility continued to receive support from the community.

Even people who are in less vulnerable situations have had to watch their wallets.

“I would love to get some Mutti, but I cannot afford it,” said Melanie McHugh, an actress, as she looked at cans of tomato sauce at her local supermarket in south London. She said she was going to make shakshuka, a vegetable dish that could last for several days. She went for a cheaper brand of sauce.

Ms. McHugh, who has stopped buying butter, also grabbed a lower cost brand of chorizo.

“I am aware that I am lucky,” she said. “But I am also aware my habits have changed.”

The British government has allocated £15 billion (about $18 billion) in benefits for the most vulnerable families. Ms. Smith, the mother of three, said she had received about 300 pounds this month. She has also stockpiled laundry soap, but said that did not ease her worries. She has started thinking of giving up her car and getting another job, as a cleaner, on weekends.

“It’s not what I would like to do,” she said. “But you have to do what you need to survive.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/world/europe/britain-inflation-prices.html

Mr. Biden also sees human investment as crucial. The American economy remains dominated by service industries like restaurants and medicine. Its recovery from the pandemic recession has been stunted, in part, by breakdowns in support for some of the workers who should be powering those industries’ revival. The cost and availability of child care alone is keeping many potential workers sidelined, leading to an abundance of unfilled job openings and costing business owners money.

Yet Mr. Biden has so far been unable to deliver on many of the programs he proposed to help Americans balance work responsibilities with care for children or aging parents, and to pursue high-quality education from a young age. He could not secure universal prekindergarten or free community college tuition. He could not find support to fund child care subsidies or to extend a tax credit meant to fight child poverty. And his plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to expand and improve home health services for seniors and disabled people have also foundered.

Those omissions add up to what liberal economists call a missed opportunity to help Americans work more and earn more, and to make the economy run more efficiently.

Mr. Biden has had more success in getting Democrats, and some Republicans, to invest in the physical economy and to embrace a more interventionist view of federal power, said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the liberal Groundwork Collaborative in Washington. By embracing industrial policy and government-induced emissions reduction, she said, “He’s moved to an economic system and an economic agenda where the government is really throwing its weight around, putting its thumb on the scale,” she said.

But, she added, “we didn’t get the care agenda. That’s a huge miss. Until we get affordable child care, our economy’s not going to be at full strength.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/us/politics/biden-climate-health-bill.html

“I just seen 30 cards land in one day. Got straight on the phone and activate,” Mr. Baines rapped in the song, flashing cash and envelopes with preloaded debit cards from the state.

“Unemployment so sweet,” Mr. Baines said.

All three of those programs are now over. There is no official estimate for the amount of money that was stolen from them — or from pandemic-relief programs in general. The Justice Department has charged people with about $1 billion in fraud so far, and is investigating other cases involving $6 billion more, investigators said.

But other reports have suggested the real number could be much higher. One official said the total of “improper” unemployment payments could be more than $163 billion, as first reported by The Washington Post. In the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, a watchdog found that $58 billion had been paid to companies that shared the same addresses, phone numbers, bank accounts or other data as other applicants — a sign of potential fraud.

“It’s clear there’s tens of billions in fraud,” said Michael Horowitz, the chairman of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which includes 21 agency inspectors general working on fraud cases. “Would it surprise me if it exceeded $100 billion? No.”

The effort to catch fraudsters began as soon as the money started flowing, and the first person was charged with benefit fraud in May 2020. But investigators were quickly deluged with tips at a scale they’d never dealt with before. The Small Business Administration’s fraud hotline — which had previously received 800 calls a year — got 148,000 in the first year of the pandemic. The Small Business Administration sent its inspector general two million loan applications to check for potential identity theft. At the Department of Labor, the inspector general’s office has 39,000 cases of suspected unemployment fraud, a 1,000 percent increase from prepandemic levels.

But prosecutors face a key disadvantage: While fraud takes minutes, investigations take months and prosecutions take even longer.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/business/economy/covid-pandemic-fraud.html