Fiscal Collisions Ahead

Phillip Swagel is a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and was assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department from 2006 to 2009.

Even as serious decisions loom regarding Syria, Congress and President Obama still must deal with two related fiscal policy issues:  raising the debt ceiling before the government’s borrowing authority runs out around mid-October, and funding government operations beyond the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. Democrats and Republicans are on collision courses on both matters. Republicans (the pragmatic ones, at least) seek further spending cuts to address the still-wide fiscal deficit, while the president is focused instead on reversing the cuts set to take hold through the sequester mechanism he signed into law as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. The focus on Syria means that fiscal decisions could be put off for a short period. Even that, however, would require compromise that might prove challenging, such as agreement by the president to accept the continued sequester and by Repblicans to raise the debt ceiling without accompanying spending cuts.

A failure to act would harm the economy.  Not lifting the debt ceiling in particular would be expected to have catastrophic economic effects.  Interest rates could skyrocket if investors question the full faith and credit of the United States government, leading to a credit crunch that pummels business and consumer spending.  The calamity might be avoided if the Treasury Department makes payments to bondholders to avoid a default, but even with this contingency plan (which the Treasury shows no sign of putting into place), the spectacle of a government that cannot finance its routine operations would doubtless translate into a severe negative impact on private confidence and spending.

A shutdown of nonessential government operations on Oct. 1 would mean an unintended reduction in spending that could retard the recovery, but the larger consequence again would be indirect through a hit to confidence. With the government unable to attend to routine matters, it does not take much to imagine that American families and companies would halt plans to spend, invest and hire. This would repeat the natural instinct that contributed to the plunge in economic activity in the fall of 2008.

Fiscal uncertainty matters for monetary policy as well, because the Federal Reserve will hesitate to start unwinding its expansionary policy if a serious fiscal drag seems imminent.

Administration officials like Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew have stated that they will not negotiate on raising the debt limit, which is something of a red herring when Mr. Lew will routinely engage in discussions on funding bills with members of the House and Senate, and it would be natural to expect the two issues of the debt ceiling and government funding to be resolved together. Even so, for now the administration is not putting forward a new proposal.

Such a hardball approach worked for the president in resolving the fiscal cliff in late 2012, when Republicans were forced to accede to allowing tax increases for upper-income households even as most of the Bush-Obama tax cuts from 2001, 2003 and 2010 were made permanent. But the “no negotiation” tack worked less well during the sequester fight two months later, as a deal was not reached to avoid broad spending cuts. The administration’s warnings of calamitous impacts from the sequester for teachers, preschool children and homebound seniors do not appear to have had the intended political impact in pressuring Republicans to reverse their position on spending, perhaps because the labor market and the overall economy improved in the first half of 2013 dspite the government cuts.

Another approach by the administration in looking for political leverage is to warn that failing to lift the debt ceiling puts the incomes of the elderly at risk. The White House has asserted that the Treasury might be forced to put payments to bondholders ahead of Social Security recipients, for instance. This talking point is actually not correct. Hitting the debt ceiling would force difficult decisions over which bills to pay first, but Social Security payments could be made regardless. This is because redeeming the Treasury securities in the Social Security Trust Fund would actually create more room against the debt ceiling - this is all government accounting, but in this case it goes in the favor of Social Security checks.  Still, it is revealing of the political stakes that the White House is making this claim.

Both sides in the political tussle actually have substantive arguments on the economics â€" but only on half of the issue per side. President Obama has a reasonable point in looking to avoid fiscal retrenchment while the economy remains in a lackluster recovery and operating below potential. This includes both averting the sequester-related spending cuts and even increasing spending on initiatives like infrastructure that have the potential for a high social return.  I wish the administration would focus more carefully on value-for-money rather than burning taxpayer money on wasteful projects such as high-speed rail and subsidies for green jobs that do not materialize.  But there is a good argument to be made for avoiding near-term austerity.

At the same time, Republicans rightly point to the need to tackle the deficit over time. The improvement in the budget outlook for this year and the next several has empowered the fiscal “ostrich caucus,” but does not change the reality of a “severe long-run fiscal imbalance.” President Obama has spoken about the need to take on the long-term fiscal challenge. But this requires making difficult choices to address the funding gaps in Social Security and Medicare, and on this Mr. Obama has flinched, setting aside the recommendations of his own Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission and instead putting forward only modest entitlement eform proposals â€" enough for a talking point but by far not addressing the imbalances. Indeed, in his 2013 State of the Union address, Mr. Obama spoke merely of “the need for modest reforms” in Medicare, when the decisions will be wrenching, not modest, since ultimately they will involve how to allocate health care resources for people in the final year of life when costs, ethics and human dignity crowd around the beeping hospital equipment.

What is needed is to address the fiscal imbalance â€" not all at once, but with a credible program that phases in over time. If anything, Mr. Obama has done the opposite by putting forward inadequate and noncredible proposals while failing to prepare the American people for the difficult decisions he will leave for his successors.

In the face of this approach to fiscal policy, so aptly labeled by Keith Hennessey as a strategy of “whistling past the graveyard” and so at odds with the self-righteous tone of President Obama’s first budget with its cover proclaiming “A New Era of Responsibility,” it is difficult to blame Republicans for pushing for fiscal restraint in any way possible.

Hence the fiscal situation that will be rejoined when Congress returns from recess next week. Perhaps the most that can be hoped for is that grave issues presented by the Syrian atrocities will lead to a budgetary cease-fire rather than a stalemate.  Under this sequence of events, the debt ceiling will be raised and bond default averted, while the inartful spending changes of the sequester remain in place rather than a more thoughtful and gradual approach to addressing the nation’s fiscal challenge.  This outcome would be satisfactory to no one but better than the alternatives of bond default or government shutdown.

Obamacare vs. Romneycare: The Labor Impact

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.”

From a tax perspective, the Affordable Care Act is in a different league than the Massachusetts health reform law passed in 2006.

The Affordable Care Act was intended to expand the fraction of the United States population covered by health insurance. The law includes taxes on employers and various implicit taxes on employees that go into effect over the next two years. Economic theory suggests that such taxes will contract the labor market in an amount commensurate with the amount of the new taxes.

The federal government and other advocates of Obamacare have dismissed concerns that the coming labor market contraction would be significant, or even noticeable, by pointing to Massachusetts’s experience with its so-called Romneycare system, also designed to expand insurance coverage. Because the Massachusetts labor market did not noticeably contract relative to the rest of the nation after its system went into effect, an official of the federal Department of Health and Human Services told The Washington Examiner that the experience in Massachusetts suggested “that the health care law will improve the affordability and accessibility of health care without significantly affecting the labor market.”

Prof. David Cutler of Harvard recently addressed, on this blog, concerns about possibly adverse tax effects, saying, “Additional data from Massachusetts, where a state law was the precursor to the Affordable Care Act, suggests that the fears are overblown” and “at this point the evidence overwhelmingly suggests no need for major worry.”

This position assumes that the Massachusetts system increased marginal labor income tax rates in the state by roughly the same magnitude that the Affordable Care Act will increase them in the United States (by marginal labor income tax rate, I mean the extra taxes paid, and subsidies forgone, as the result of working, expressed as a ratio to the total compensation from working). This assumption is no longer necessary, because the methods I have used to measure marginal tax rates from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, unemployment insurance expansions and the Affordable Care Act can also be applied to the Massachusetts health reform law. The results are shown in the chart below.

The left bar shows that the Massachusetts law did, on average, increase marginal tax rates and thereby reduce the reward to working. But the impact was well under one percentage point, and for that reason it’s probably not surprising that, relative to other states that were not experiencing health reform, the Massachusetts labor market did not change noticeably after the law went into effect.

The right bar shows the impact of the Affordable Care Act on nationwide marginal tax rates: it increases national rates about 12 times as much as the Massachusetts law increased rates. Earlier this year I explained why the Massachusetts law was so different from a tax perspective: among other things, its employer penalty is an order of magnitude less, the state’s population is not the same as the national population, and Massachusetts had already been helping unemployed people with health insurance.

It follows that the effect of the Affordable Care Act on employment and work hours would be roughly 12 times as great as the effect of the Massachusetts law. That doesn’t by itself tell us the exact impact of the national law because we don’t have a precise estimate of the impact in Massachusetts, except that it was small. For example, if the Massachusetts law reduced employment by 0.1 percent, the Affordable Care Act’s effect would be roughly 1.2 percent; not small. If the Massachusetts law’s effect were 0.25 percent (still small), the Affordable Care Act’s effect would be 3 percent: again, not small. The bottom line was that it was wrong to expect the two laws to have had the same effects.

Call me gloomy, but I’m one economist who thinks that adding, on average, five percentage points to marginal tax rates will noticeably depress the labor market, while adding a few tenths of a point in Massachusetts did not.

Testing a Premise on the Health Care Law and Part-Time Work

Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington and a former chief economist to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Since the Affordable Care Act requires businesses with at least 50 full-time workers to provide them with coverage (or it will, when the employer mandate kicks in a year from now), critics claim that it is prompting employers to shift to more part-time jobs. But as I have noted in various postings, there is no evidence to back up that claim â€" in fact, both involuntary and overall part-time work are declining as a share of all jobs.

That observation came back to me when I saw a clever post by the economist Dean Baker on restaurant jobs and unemployment by state (showing that states with weaker job markets were creating a larger share of lower-quality jobs).  It would be a neat test, I thought, to see if the share of involuntary part-time workers was also correlated to the unemployment rate by state.  I’d expect that correlation to be positive â€" that states with higher unemployment would have higher shares of involuntary part-timers â€" providing further evidence that it is the job market, not the health care law, at work. Conversely, if the incidence of involuntary part-time work was uncorrelated with state unemployment rates, then the Affordable Care Act would be a more plausible candidate to explain the variation.

Thanks to David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute, my computer was soon feasting on employment data for the first half of this year.  And as you see in the chart below, the data showed a positive relationship between unemployment rates and the involuntary part-timers’ share of employment.

Source: Economic Policy Institute analysis of Current Population Survey Public Use Microdata Series, first halves 2009-13

(For those who like the statistical weeds, the regression coefficient, or slope of that line, is 0.46, and highly significant, at t-stat=5.59.  That means that we would expect a state with, say, 8 percent unemployment to have a share of involuntary part-timers that was 0.46 percentage points higher than a state with 7 percent.)

You want to hate on Obamacare, I can’t stop you.  And the incentive to reduce workers’ hours may someday be found in the data, though according to the administration, fewer than 1 percent of employees have weekly hours slightly above the 30-hour cutoff, are employed by businesses affected by the employer mandate and do not already have health insurance.

But the fact is that for now, there’s nothing to see here, folks.  Move along, please.

Paid Vacation’s Decline

Americans working in the private sector are less likely to have paid vacation days than was the case 20 years ago, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In 1992-93, 82 percent of American workers reported receiving paid vacation days. Today the share is down to 77 percent. The biggest declines occurred for people working part time and for people working at establishments with fewer than 100 employees.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data for 2012 come from National Compensation Survey: Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2012. Earlier data for 1992-1993 come from the predecessor survey, the Employee Benefits Survey.

For most other kinds of paid leave, though, employees’ access has increased.

For example, while the United States still remains one of just a handful of countries worldwide that don’t require paid maternity leave, the share of American private sector workers who do have access to paid family leave has risen. It is still very rarely offered, though. As of 2012, 11 percent of private sector workers said they had paid family leave (which includes leave to care for family members). In 1992-93, when the survey question was worded more narrowly,  2 percent of workers said they received paid maternity benefits and 1 percent paid paternity benefits.

Sick leave has also become more common, although it is also still not universal. As of last year, 61 percent of private sector employees had access to paid sick leave, compared with 50 percent two decades ago.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data for 2012 come from National Compensation Survey: Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2012. Earlier data for 1992-1993 come from the predecessor survey, the Employee Benefits Survey.

Vacation time, while less common among private sector workers over all, appears to have become somewhat more generous for those full-timers who do have access to it. The average private sector, full-time worker got eight days of vacation after a year of service in 1992-93, versus 10 days for his counterpart in 2012.

Average number of vacation days by length of service, full-time private industry workers
	1 year	5 years	10 years	20 years
1992-1993	8	13	15	18
2012	10	14	17	20

Ten days is better than eight, but still pales in comparison to what employees in other developed countries enjoy, by law. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research organization, the typical developed country mandates at least 20 paid vacation days.

Taxing Homeowners as if They Were Landlords

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform - Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

Continuing my series on tax expenditures, I want to discuss an obscure one: the imputed rent that homeowners get from living in their own homes.

At first glance, the idea that this constitutes any form of income probably strikes most people as bizarre. But a little thought shows that there are many forms of income that don’t take the form of monetary payments. I discussed one previously, the exclusion for employer-provided health insurance. Clearly, it is a form of income that workers value but do not pay taxes on because a specific exception has been made in the tax law.

The exclusion for imputed rent is of a different nature. It is untaxed simply because of long practice, not because Congress or the Internal Revenue Service ever said so, although a 1934 Supreme Court case, Helvering v. Independent Life Insurance Co., suggested that a tax on imputed rent might be considered a “direct tax” requiring apportionment.

To see why imputed rent is a real form of income, consider two homeowners living in identical houses. Suppose they trade houses, each living in the other’s. They now pay rent to each other because the other is now the other’s landlord. If they pay identical rent, it would appear that it all cancels out, except that each now has rental income to report on her taxes.

In principle, that rental income is there even when one lives in one’s own home. Homeowners simply pay it to themselves though in this case, it does not give rise to taxable income.

In effect, homeowners wear two hats - consumers and investors. As consumers, they pay rent just as those who live in rental apartments do. As investors, they are landlords who receive that rent from themselves.

Of course, a key difference is that those who are pure investors get certain deductions denied to homeowners. They can depreciate or write off a portion of the value of a dwelling for wear and tear and obsolescence, as well as routine maintenance.

There is no reason why this treatment could not be extended to homeowners to equalize the tax treatment between different types of housing. In return for paying taxes on imputed rent, it would be perfectly reasonable for homeowners to get depreciation and a write-off for reasonable upkeep - painting, repairs and other necessary costs to maintain livability and structural integrity. And, of course, mortgage interest and property taxes would remain deductible. New appliances, additions and improvements would be considered investments that would also be depreciable.

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis calculates imputed rent on an annual basis and includes it in personal income, which is a major component of the gross domestic product. The data is typically found in Table 7.12 of the national income and product accounts, which have not yet been updated for 2012. Last year, the B.E.A. calculated that net imputed rental income was $284 billion for 2011. That includes depreciation or capital consumption, but does not include an adjustment for routine maintenance, mortgage interest or property taxes, which should be deductible.

It’s important to note that this $284 billion figure for imputed rent represents the bulk of rental income attributed to people in the aggregate data for personal income. In 2011, total rental income, net of depreciation, was $409 billion, of which $126 billion was received in monetary form. The rest was imputed rent.

The Treasury Department calculates that the tax expenditure for imputed rent - the revenue that would be raised if it were taxable - will be $75 billion next year and $437 billion from 2014 to 2018. That makes it the fourth-largest tax expenditure (see Page 254 in the “Federal Receipts” section of the federal budget).

For some homeowners, everything would cancel out. Their imputed rental income would be offset by depreciation and maintenance expenses. Because mortgage interest and property taxes are deductible, they will not enter into the calculation. But many would be worse off.

The economists James Poterba and Todd Sinai have calculated the impact of treating homeowners as landlords. First, they calculated the user cost of housing under 2003 tax law. They estimated that homeowners paid 6 percent of their income for housing after taxes. But this figure varied a great deal depending on the age and income of the homeowner.

Treating homeowners as landlords unambiguously would have made everyone worse off on average, with the net user cost of housing rising 10 percent to 6.6 percent over all.

That is probably enough to kill the idea forever, but it is still worth thinking about because it would equalize the tax treatment of all investments, including in one’s own home, which would yield efficiency gains for the economy and improve fairness between owners and renters. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recommends that its member countries tax imputed rent (see Page 16, “Housing and the Economy: Policies for Renovation”) for these reasons.

Calculating imputed rent on an individual basis would, of course, be complicated. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates a “rental equivalent” cost of housing for homeowners in order to determine changes in the price of housing, putting owners and renters on the same footing.

Some formula based on this calculation might be extended to taxpayers. Or the law could simply assume some reasonable rate of return. According to the O.E.C.D., five of its member countries presently tax imputed rent (see Page 39, “Housing Markets and Structural Policies in OE.C.D. Countries“) - Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Switzerland. We could perhaps adapt one of their methods.

The point of this discussion is not to recommend the taxation of imputed rent, which Congress is extremely unlikely ever to adopt. It is to show that the most complicated question in terms of tax reform has nothing to do with deductions and credits, as is commonly believed, but rather what is “income.”

For individuals with only wage income, the issue is simple. But as soon as investments enter the equation, the question becomes more complicated, and that includes investing in housing by buying a home to live in. I will have more to say about defining income for tax purposes in future posts.

The Young Developer\'s Guide to Debugging JavaScript

We recently completed our internship program here at The Times, and it's made me wonder what I would have liked to have known when I was a young developer. The answer: I wish I'd known more about debugging.

There is no shortage of resources on how to use the various browser dev tools, and new tools are added daily. They are amazing. As someone who learned JavaScript years ago, I envy new developers for these tools. To set a breakpoint in a browser, inspect all values in the environment and walk up the call stack has been transformative.

I would have loved to have had such magical toys while learning: breakpoints, CoffeeScript, source maps, network inspector, reliable ubiquitous console.

That said, your strongest debugging tool is the one between your ears. All the arcane debugging knowledge in the world is no substitute for understanding what you're coding.

To Develop Is to Err

To write code is to make mistakes. The best developers you've ever met have been responsible for bugs. They have sat at their computers, scratched their heads and wondered, “Well why is it doing that?”

Developers often think of programming as problem solving, but writing code is more like cooking. As with cooking, code is never perfect, only better and worse. You can try different spices. You can use turkey instead of chicken. You can apply more or less heat. But there is no complete, only done enough. Dinner is done when you eat it.

To master debugging, you must expect to find bugs. If somebody reports a bug, you should accept it. The natural state of code is to have bugs.

Where Bugs Come From

If you are new to writing code, the most likely cause of a bug is your nascent understanding of the platform. If you don't have a precise knowledge of how an array works, you are likely to misuse arrays, and that will cause bugs. Only experience can correct this.

This guide assumes you have reached a point of sufficient expertise that your bug is not because you don't understand how a given feature works. Don't worry: You will still create bugs.

You're likely to encounter two kinds of tricky bugs:

1. Subtle Typos
2. Wrong Object Types

Whenever you say the phrase “I don't understand why x,” stop yourself and try to remember that if x is doing something, it is because that thing makes absolute sense to x. X's behavior just seems puzzling to you.

From the perspective of the computer and the program, all behaviors are as expected, given the rotten input provided. If you don't understand why your program is doing what it is doing, the problem is your lack of understanding.

The computer is always right. The computer is always right. The computer is always right. Take it from someone who has programmed for over ten years: not once has the computational mechanism of the machine malfunctioned.

Subtle Typos

Most typos are spectacular, resulting in names that don't exist, which throws an undefined variable error. This will spew red pixels all over your toolset and is usually easy to catch. The pernicious bug results from typing a name or value that is defined, but is not what you intended. You can add a linter to your toolset, but you can't rely on that to catch everything.

For instance, you might have a hash of values. In JavaScript, a variable inside a hash that has no value returns null. If the value is an object with methods, calling a nonexistent method should error out meaningfully. Helpful red pixels everywhere. But if you are merely accessing a value which happens to be null, you may get incorrect math values that aren't as easy to track. My console informs me that null - 3 == -3.

Wrong Object Type

In this age of Gmail and Facebook, client applications can be thousands and thousands of lines of code, with complex object hierarchies. Template engines render data models delivered by transport objects controlled by framework controllers controlling view controllers.

Modern applications have many object types, and if you happen to use the wrong type - particularly if the types are similar, or perhaps parent or child classes of the one you intended - most things will work correctly, but some will not. It is important to check that the object producing bugs is always the type you expect and that all variables you use in that object are the type you expect.

As an example, suppose you have an important set of data in a hash. Note: The examples that follow are in CoffeeScript, but are illustrative. Think of them as pseudocode that happens to execute.

Animals =       “Fido”: DogObject(“Fido”)      “Samantha”: CatObject(“Samantha”)      ...  

Sometimes your code will expect the key and sometimes the actual object. A common trap is to expect one and get the other.

# Is this the object or the string Fido?  addAgeToAnimal: (animal, age) -> animal.setAge(age)   

Or suppose DogObject extends AnimalObject, and you are pulling from a database. You create AnimalObjects and automatically fill them in with data. When calling the method, sometimes the method will get an actual DogObject, and sometimes it will get an AnimalObject that you've filled with dog data. But then you change DogObject, and your manual AnimalObjects are missing a now-required piece of information. This can be tricky to figure out. (Consider an alternate approach, by the way. Try to minimize divergent code paths.)

# AnimalObject doesn't have a buyBone method.  buyDogNewBone: (dog) -> dog.buyBone()  

Next Steps: Problem Areas

Once you determine what the problem area is, you must determine why the value is incorrect.

1. Async

Your brain probably does a poor job understanding asynchronous operations. It's hard enough tracking vast application state trees even when you're not adding time as a variable. Yet asynchronous operations are the rule in JavaScript applications. If an object is the wrong type or the wrong value, the odds are good that you have a race condition caused by an asynchronous operation (via an AJAX call, an asynchronous database or worker call). Or you could just be using Node.

# What does a equal? Depends when you ask.    @a = “Default”    jQuery.getJSON destinationUrl, (data) =>      @a = data.people[0].firstName    @a = “Bob”  

When a bug surfaces, you will need to use breakpoints in your debugger to pause execution and inspect application state at various times. If the problem does not emerge, you'll probably need to check many iterations of a piece of code through time. The place to start is with any asynchronously delivered data.

2. Counting Problems and Off By One

This is so common it's a programmer joke. When looping through an object, make sure the object is the type you expect, contains all the properties you expect and is consistent. If components are sharing state, as in the async scenario above, a loop could be compromised between loop runs. If you cached a count value and used it to run a loop without checking that it's still valid, loop errors become more likely. If you are counting in one-based systems and zero-based arrays simultaneously, the odds of a bug rise even more quickly.

jQuery.getJSON remoteUrl, (data) =>      ###      # Data is of form: [      #    {      #       “id”: 1,      #       “first”: “Bob”,      #       “last”: “Smith”      # }...      #]      ###      names = []      data.forEach (item) => names[item.id] = item.first + ‘ ‘ + item.last  ###  # Uh oh. Depended on the id being zero based, but it's one   # based, and arrays aren't.  # for (var i=0, len=... will render unexpected results.  ###  

3. Scope

Scope is a problem in many environments, but the problem is particularly nasty in JavaScript. One of the easiest ways for a variable to have an unexpected value is for the scope to be different than expected. If you define a local variable without using var, the value leaks up to enclosing scopes. The JavaScript keyword this doesn't always mean what you expect it to mean. When pausing on a breakpoint, make sure this is the object you expected. The easiest mistake is in an event handler or a setTimeout. By default, this in either scenario will be the global window object. (My solution is to use CoffeeScript and the fat arrow. There are other solutions. And ES6, the next version of JavaScript, will also have solutions.)

# In setTimeout, this will translate to window.removeFlag  unflag = -> @removeFlag()   setTimeout(unflag, 500)  

Talk to Somebody

Finally, and perhaps more importantly, you should talk to somebody about your bugs. I've heard it called many things, but for me, it will always be “duck debugging.” The premise is to put a rubber duck next to your computer, and whenever you encounter a bug, explain it to the duck. Better yet, talk to another developer.

You'll often find that by verbally expressing the problem, your brain will solve it before the person listening even needs to speak.

Bugs are a fundamental aspect of programming. You will continue to make them for the rest of your career. Fixing them is the most important thing we do as developers. The quicker you can resolve bugs, the quicker you can return to features and fancy code designs.

Bugs are a signal that your understanding of a problem is incomplete or mistaken. Reality is the final arbiter. There will be moments, after staring at your screen all day. You want to throw your computer out the window. And then, somehow, through effort, duck debugging, or maybe just dumb luck (I strongly advise taking the occasional walk), you break through. This is the reward. Knowledge, hard won, will burst in your mind, and you will understand the world around you that much better. I can't emphasize how wonderful that feeling is. You are one step closer to unattainable perfection.

Congratulations. You are now a debugger.

Not Really Labor’s Day

Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives New York’s first Labor Day parade, Union Square, 1882.

Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The annual holiday supposedly celebrating labor has long lacked much celebratory feel. Over the last 30 years, employment has become more precarious and real wages for most workers have stagnated. Since 2008, in particular, the corrosive impact of persistent unemployment and declining wages on American workers has been felt at holiday picnics and parades.

The seasonally adjusted July unemployment rate of 7.4 percent showed a slight decline from last year’s 8.2 percent, but the gains came largely as a result of declining labor force participation rather than job creation.

The larger measure of underemployment (known as U-6) that includes people working part time because they cannot find full-time work, and those who want a job and have looked for one in the last 12 months but have given up currently looking, was a seasonally adjusted 14 percent in July, compared with 14.9 percent a year earlier.

Public policies could help. As Jared Bernstein explained in an earlier Economix post, the federal government could become an employer of last resort. A new report from the Urban Institute outlines several specific strategies to lower long-term unemployment in particular.

Why is there so little political will to put such policies in place?

Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to staunchly oppose public efforts to reduce unemployment, repeating their assertion that government policies themselves are the primary cause of the problem. Earlier this summer 30 of them even co-sponsored a bill that would strike the goal of encouraging “maximum employment” from the mission of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

It may not seem like a winning strategy for a party that hopes to gain the votes of the white working-class voters who have registered increased dissatisfaction with the Obama administration. Less-educated workers have been particularly hard hit by persistently high unemployment and declining wages. The hands-off approach should also concern many businesses hurt by the slow growth of consumer demand, a direct result of unemployment and wage stagnation.

But Republicans seem to have immunized themselves against political pressure to reduce unemployment in a variety of ways. They have used concern about a rise in government debt largely caused by conservative economic policies as a bludgeon to pursue their longstanding goal of drastically reducing government social spending. They have perfected a partisan strategy of political stalemate to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of legislative dysfunction. They have deployed a divide-and-conquer strategy aimed at portraying both unionized and public sector workers as enemies of all other wage earners. They have blamed the unemployed for their own joblessness.

They may also have benefited from an unemployment rate high enough to cause tremendous, concentrated pain but not quite high enough to anger a significant share of the electorate. With increased economic vulnerability, voters become anxious, frustrated and defensive, more worried that taxpayer money spent to help reduce unemployment will simply reduce their own disposable income.

Most important, however, major campaign contributors for both Republicans and Democrats have benefited from a sharp increase in profits as a share of corporate income, which is partly a result of high unemployment rates.

In the classical terminology of Marx, a large reserve army of labor reduces both the individual and the collective bargaining power of workers, enabling capital to take a bigger piece of the economic pie. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that between 2007 and 2012, wages fell for the lowest 70 percent of all wage earners, despite productivity growth of 7.7 percent.

Those at the top of the income distribution have captured the gains of so-called economic recovery. In an article published in the latest Journal of Economic Perspectives, Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel assert persuasively that this shift reflects the successful “rent-seeking” or economic bargaining power of corporate executives and financial professionals.

The lack of any fiscal stimulus aimed at lowering unemployment has contributed to this trend. Ironically, the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing to stimulate the economy and lower unemployment - which some Republicans tried unsuccessfully to outlaw â€" has probably also benefited those at the top more than those at the bottom. Lower interest rates have driven up the price of stocks, but left those dependent on less risky sources of investment income (such as savings accounts and bonds) stranded with low returns.

Today is officially Labor Day. But all the days in the year are now, unofficially, Capital Days.