Women

A few years back in the American Prospect, Linda Hirshman argued that the leveling off and decline of women's employment wasn't due to a bad economy, but rather the fault of what she labeled "choice feminism" which encouraged mothers to "opt out" of the workforce and care for children. She later wrote the charmingly titled book "Get to Work!"

Since then economist Heather Boushey has throughly debunked the opt out myth. In yesterday's NYT she pounded another nail in its coffin:

“When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which did the Congressional study, said in an interview. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.”

The full report is available on the JEC's website. Among the findings:

• Over the past three decades, only those families who have a working wife have seen real increases in family income.

• The 2001 recession hit the jobs that women held especially hard. Unlike in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, during the 2001 recession, the percent of jobs lost by women often exceeded that of men in the industries hardest hit by the downturn.

• The lackluster recovery of the 2000s made it difficult for women to regain their jobs –women’s employment rates never returned to their pre-recession peak.

• If the prior recession’s trend holds, women will suffer equally to men in the 2008 recession. Because women are disproportionately represented in state and local government services, their job losses are likely to grow in the latter part of the recession as state and local governments are forced to implement cut-backs in spending in areas that women are disproportionately employed, such as education and health care.

From a speech by Barack Obama in Albuquerque yesterday:

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I’ll also stand up for paid leave. Today, 78 percent of workers covered by FMLA don’t take leave because it isn’t paid. That’s just not fair. You shouldn’t be punished for getting sick or dealing with a family crisis. That’s why I’ll require employers to provide all of their workers with seven paid sick days a year. And I’ll support a 50-state strategy to adopt paid-leave systems, and set aside $1.5 billion to fund it. I have a clear plan to expand paid leave and sick leave, Senator McCain doesn’t, and that’s a real difference in this election.

And at a time when folks are struggling with the rising price of everything from gas to groceries, I’ll provide working women with immediate relief. While Senator McCain wants to continue the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans who don’t need them and didn’t ask for them, I’ll pass a middle class tax cut of $1,000 for each working family. This will deliver tax relief for over 70 million working women. And we need to help folks at the bottom of the ladder. Almost 60 percent of Americans who benefited from raising the minimum wage were women. I won’t leave any working people behind. That’s why, unlike Senator McCain, I’ll index the minimum wage to inflation so that it goes up each year to keep pace with rising costs.

We can’t afford an economy where folks keep working harder for less. We can’t let the women in our workforce get paid even less for doing the same work. And we can’t keep pushing more and more of the burden on to the backs of working parents who are struggling to balance their jobs and their family. Because what binds us together, what makes us one American family, is that we stand up and fight for each other's dreams, and for the dreams of all of our children.

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The National Women's Law Center recently unveiled womenstake.org, a new addition to the emerging policy blogosphere. In a good post from last week, they explain the problem with preferential tax treatment for hedge fund managers and provide an update on Congressional efforts to fix it.

Top hedge fund managers, some earning over $1 billion a year, ... manage to pay tax on most of their income at just 15%.

How is this possible? Two words: capital gains.

Currently, the highest tax rate on capital gains income is 15%, while the highest tax rate on “ordinary earned income” is 35%. This 20 percentage point difference creates a lot of incentive to try to turn ordinary income from earnings into capital gain. And super-wealthy private equity managers have learned to be creative. The typical fee arrangement pays the managers an annual fee of about 2% of fund assets (taxed as ordinary income) and a 20% share of fund profits—the carried interest. The payments of income from the “carried interest” are taxed as capital gains, rather than as ordinary income—so managers pay only 15% federal income tax instead of 35% on the larger part of their compensation.

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Some members of Congress are starting to go after the private equity tax loopholes. Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI), along with Ways and Means Committee Chair Charles Rangel (D-NY) and House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank (D-MA), introduced a bill (HR 2834) to treat income from carried interests as compensation and tax it as ordinary income. Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-MT) and ranking member Charles Grassley (R-IA) introduced a bill (S. 1624) that would tax as corporations publicly traded partnerships that derive their income from investment advising or management services, such as the newly public Blackstone Group. Most publicly traded partnerships are already taxed as corporations.