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Article Artículo

Latin America and the Caribbean

Friends for the Week: Members of Congress Critique the OAS

The Hill is reporting that “A House panel unanimously voted Wednesday to limit the U.S. share of the Organization of American States [OAS] regular budget to 50 percent or less.”  Does this mean that members of Congress have come to realize the OAS’s role in arbitrarily changing the result of Haiti’s 2010/2011 elections?   Do they want to limit the U.S.’s enormous influence over parts of the OAS? 

Nope.  Members of Congress have introduced this and other bills to limit U.S. support for the OAS precisely for the opposite reason:  they believe that the OAS is no longer an effective tool for “defending U.S. interests abroad,” and this is only the latest attempt to punish deviation from Washington’s objectives.  Here is an excerpt from research prepared for Congress that shows the limits of “bipartisan” debate on this topic:

U.S. policymakers have responded to the United States’ declining ability to advance its policy preferences within the OAS in a number of ways. Some Members of Congress allege that the OAS has allied itself with anti-U.S. regimes, and is weakening democracy in Latin America. Accordingly, they maintain that support for the OAS runs counter to U.S. objectives in the hemisphere, and that the United States should withhold funding from the organization. Others disagree, arguing that OAS actions continue to closely align with U.S. priorities in many cases, and that defunding the OAS would amount to the United States turning its back on the Western Hemisphere. They maintain that weakening the one multilateral forum that includes every democratic nation of the hemisphere would strengthen the hands of hostile governments while further weakening U.S. influence in the region.

In other words, the debate seems to be whether the goal of defeating our government’s official enemies would best be served by maintaining funding or reducing funding to the OAS.  Few in Congress question why we are making enemies with democratic countries in Latin America, or countries that pose no threat to the U.S., such as Cuba.

CEPR / July 25, 2013

Article Artículo

Affordable Care Act

Health and Social Programs

Workers

Is the Affordable Care Act a Hidden Jobs Killer?

Opponents of the ACA have labeled the health care bill a “jobs killer.” It is unlikely, however, that the bill could have much impact on employment except among the relatively small number of firms that are near the 50-worker cutoff.  In a post for the Roosevelt Institute's Econobytes, economists Helene Jorgensen and Dean Baker respond to the claim that firms will reduce the number of hours per week that employees work to below thirty so that they fall under the cutoff, thereby incurring  a penalty under the ACA:
 
An analysis of data from the Current Population Survey shows that only a small number (0.6 percent of the workforce) of workers report working just below the 30 hour cutoff in the range of 26-29 hours per week. Furthermore, the number of workers who fall in this category was actually lower in 2013 than in 2012, the year before the sanctions would have applied. This suggests that employers do not appear to be changing hours in large numbers in response to the sanctions in the ACA.
 
There have been numerous accounts of employers claiming to reduce employment or adjust hours in order to avoid the obligations of the ACA.

  • If this is the case, we should have first begun to see evidence of the impact of ACA in January of 2013, since under the original law employment in 2013 would serve as the basis for assessing penalties in 2014.
  • The Obama administration announced on July 2, 2013 that they would not enforce sanctions in 2014 based on 2013 employment, but employers would not have known that sanctions would not be enforced prior to this date. Therefore we can assume that they would have behaved as though they expect to be subject to the sanctions and acted accordingly.

Dean Baker and Helene Jorgensen / July 24, 2013