Three Decades of Economic Insanity

Yesterday, Steve Benen posted a timeline on his blog. I'm posting it below in its entirety:

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

1980: Ronald Reagan runs for president, promising a balanced budget

1981 - 1989: With support from congressional Republicans, Reagan runs enormous deficits, adds $2 trillion to the debt.

1993: Bill Clinton passes economic plan that lowers deficit, gets zero votes from congressional Republicans.

1998: U.S. deficit disappears for the first time in three decades. Debt clock is unplugged.

2000: George W. Bush runs for president, promising to maintain a balanced budget.

2001: CBO shows the United States is on track to pay off the entirety of its national debt within a decade.

2001 - 2009: With support from congressional Republicans, Bush runs enormous deficits, adds nearly $5 trillion to the debt.

2002: Dick Cheney declares, “Deficits don’t matter.” Congressional Republicans agree, approving tax cuts, two wars, and Medicare expansion without even trying to pay for them.

2009: Barack Obama inherits $1.3 trillion deficit from Bush; Republicans immediately condemn Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.

2009: Congressional Democrats unveil several domestic policy initiatives — including health care reform, cap and trade, DREAM Act — which would lower the deficit. GOP opposes all of them, while continuing to push for deficit reduction.

September 2010: In Obama’s first fiscal year, the deficit shrinks by $122 billion. Republicans again condemn Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.

October 2010: S&P endorses the nation’s AAA rating with a stable outlook, saying the United States looks to be in solid fiscal shape for the foreseeable future.

November 2010: Republicans win a U.S. House majority, citing the need for fiscal responsibility.

December 2010: Congressional Republicans demand extension of Bush tax cuts, relying entirely on deficit financing. GOP continues to accuse Obama of fiscal irresponsibility.

March 2011: Congressional Republicans declare intention to hold full faith and credit of the United States hostage — a move without precedent in American history — until massive debt-reduction plan is approved.

July 2011: Obama offers Republicans a $4 trillion debt-reduction deal. GOP refuses, pushes debt-ceiling standoff until the last possible day, rattling international markets.

August 2011: S&P downgrades U.S. debt, citing GOP refusal to consider new revenues. Republicans rejoice and blame Obama for fiscal irresponsibility.

There have been several instances since the mid 1990s in which I genuinely believed Republican politics couldn’t possibly get more blisteringly ridiculous. I was wrong; they just keep getting worse.

Kevin Drum's comments on the above:

Congratulations, modern Republican Party! That was spectacularly fast work. The Bush-era party needed seven years to drive the economy into a ditch.

We Had to Destroy the Economy in Order to Save It

According to Ezra Klein, the thinking behind the Obama administration's push for the biggest possible budget cutting deal they can get includes this:

The deficit stands in the way of any potential spending increases. And

if you finish the deficit conversation in a way that convinces the American people you’ve made sacrifices and forced government to live within its means, you have, at least in theory, more credibility when proposing new initiatives that would expand the size of government again.

President Obama confirmed the first point in his 7/15/11 news conference, saying:

...if you are a progressive, you should be concerned about debt and deficit just as much as if you're a conservative. And the reason is because if the only thing we're talking about over the next year, two years, five years, is debt and deficits, then it's very hard to start talking about how do we make investments in community colleges so that our kids are trained, how do we actually rebuild $2 trillion worth of crumbling infrastructure.

The implication is that there's a causal connection between the empirical situation and the narrative around it. Eliminate the deficit and GOP bloviating about it will supposedly subside. Greg Sargent is unsure about this; Jonathan Bernstein thinks Obama's position is reasonable but risky; but Joan Walsh sees Obama's assumption that elimination of the deficit will end the GOP assault on his presidency as misguided.

Walsh bases her argument on the record of GOP behavior during the Clinton administration. I don't think we have to look that far back--just consider what's happened over the past two years.

• According to the CBO, the GOP is responsible directly for about 70% of the deficit. This includes the Bush tax cuts, two wars fought without raising taxes to pay for them, and the Medicare Part D unfunded mandate. Obama is responsible for extending the Bush tax cuts and the two wars, 20% of the deficit. Obama's much maligned stimulus package, which the GOP has treated as fiscal suicide, accounts for about 7% of the deficit. All other Obama programs combined add up to 3% of the deficit. Yet the GOP has spent the past two years running around with their hair on fire, accusing Obama of irresponsible spending. Please tell me what relationship exists between GOP claims about the impact of Obama policies on the economy and the reality?
• Obama's health care reform package was, according to the GOP, a "socialist" scheme that would be risky, unaffordable, and would interject the government between patients and their doctors. There were also claims that the plan included "death panels." They neglected to mention that it was based heavily on a GOP plan put forth during the Clinton administration and on the system Mitt Romney set up in Massachusetts. Again, what was the relationship between GOP rhetoric and reality?
• Since 1980, the GOP has consistently expressed the view that cutting taxes spurs economic growth. Yet George W. Bush implemented enormous tax cuts and had the worst record for job creation and GDP growth since Herbert Hoover--and that was before the financial crisis and resulting economic collapse, both of which occurred during his term in office (yes, the GOP even lied about the timing of the economic collapse). Conversely, Bill Clinton implemented modest tax increases and presided over an enormous economic expansion. So much for the supposed stimulative effects of tax cuts and the alleged "job-killing" effects of tax increases. Did that stop the GOP from repeating robotically that tax cuts boost the economy while tax increases depress it?
• The GOP has become increasingly driven by the notion that by cutting taxes, they can shrink the government to a size small enough to "drown in a bathtub," as tax cutting fanatic Grover Norquist famously put it. Yet the only administration to shrink the size of government in the past 40 years was Bill Clinton's. So it seems there's no relationship between the level of taxation and the size of the government. Yet the GOP persists in pursuing this goal.
• Despite unanimous agreement among climate scientists that climate change is real and is in fact happening more rapidly than predicted, the GOP persists in claiming that climate change is a "hoax," as GOP Sen. James Inhofe puts it. Again, what is the relationship between rhetoric and reality?
• Repeatedly since 1980, the GOP has responded to criticism that their policies favor the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor with claims that such criticism amounts to "class warfare." Meanwhile, as a result of those policies, the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans increased 60% while that of the bottom 40% fell by 10%. What is the relationship between GOP statements and the reality?

Given the above examples (there are many more), what possible reason can there be for believing that giving the GOP what they want will have the slightest effect on their well-established record of lying about everything?

The Debt Ceiling Debate in Plain English

First off, what exactly is the debt ceiling? Most people seem to think it's a license for the federal government to take on deeper debt, but Bruce Bartlett has the clearest explanation I've read:

The debt ceiling is a cap on the amount of securities the Treasury can issue, something it does to raise money to pay for government expenses. These expenses, and the deficit they've wrought, are a result of past actions by Congress to create entitlement programs, make appropriations and cut taxes. In that sense, raising the debt limit is about paying for past expenses, not controlling future ones. For Congress to refuse to let Treasury raise the cash to pay the bills that Congress itself has run up simply makes no sense.

Failure to raise debt ceiling will mean:

• The US currency is no longer the world standard
• We'll have to pay much higher interest on everything we borrow as a country
• And after a short time juggling the books, government spending for everything will be instantly cut by 44%.

Despite this, the GOP has insisted that any vote to raise the debt ceiling be accompanied by huge cuts in federal spending and they are adamantly opposed to raising any taxes to increase federal revenues (this extends to ending any existing tax cuts as well). On June 23, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R, VA) walked out of the talks due to the inclusion of some revenue increases. There was then some talk about returning to the earlier plan involving $2 trillion in budget cuts, but again, the GOP was insistent that no new revenues be included in the package while Democrats were adamantly opposed to cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

On July 7, Obama changed the equation. According to the Washington Post,

Obama and Boehner have emerged as the most enthusiastic proponents of a big deal that would save as much as $4 trillion over the next decade by overhauling the tax code and tackling all the major drivers of federal spending, including the Pentagon and health and retirement programs.

However, resistance to revenue increases in the proposed package led to abandonment of the idea by the GOP.

Today, Obama announced that Social Security payments would be delayed if the debt ceiling was not raised, and 470 CEOs of many of America's largest corporations signed a statement urging Congress to end the impasse. This afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) announced a new plan to give the President authority to raise the debt ceiling himself. Congress would then be free to vote on a resolution of disapproval, which the President could then veto, after which President Obama would raise the debt ceiling in three increments over the next year. Essentially, this would pass responsibility for raising the debt ceiling to the President and would draw attention to the raise throughout 2012, an election year. As Kevin Drum put it, "This is possibly the most juvenile, most buck passing, most transparently mendacious proposal I can recall from any party leader in recent memory."

What’s behind the political battle over the debt ceiling?

Since most people’s eyes glaze over when the subject is economics, here’s a plain English explanation of the ideas and interests underlying the debt ceiling debate.

Does Deficit Reduction Stimulate the Economy?

1. Would it be safe to say that progressives believe that if the government spends money, the economy will be stimulated and grow, and more people will have jobs?

Well, not just that it spends money, but that it does so in targeted ways. According to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's, the most effective government spending to counteract a recession is food stamps & unemployment insurance (see chart below). Why? Because people who get that aid need it, so they spend the money right away & it starts circulating through the economy.

Zandi found that among the least effective government spending would be the Bush tax cuts (see chart below). Why? (i) The Bush tax cuts were never targeted to boost the economy. They were set up, quite literally, to reward Bush's biggest donors (i.e., fat cats). (ii) Nobody spends money they don't need to in a recession. Our natural tendency is to hunker down. Do rich people have to spend the money they get in tax cuts? No. Do they? No. Ergo, no additional money circulates through the economy, so it doesn't grow.

2. Government spends on people, people spend money, other people receive that money, the economy is stimulated. This is good.

Basically, yes. In economic terms, government spending in a recession starts the process. The rest of the process you mention is called the multiplier effect.

3. Republicans believe that we have to reduce the deficit by cutting government spending in order to reduce the deficit because we have to reduce the deficit because....you get the point.

Republicans SAY they believe that, but they're the ones who created 90% of the current deficit, directly or indirectly, in the first place. They held an extension of unemployment insurance hostage over their demand for continuation of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2010, further deepening the deficit. And they're now insisting that (a) no taxes be raised to reduce the deficit and (b) any increase in government revenues via elimination of tax loopholes be offset by additional spending cuts. So there's no reason to take seriously any statements they make about their supposed concern about the deficit. They love deficits. So if they're not concerned about the deficit, what are their ulterior motives for all the posturing?

Republicans believe several different things that underlie what they say they believe about the economy, all of them wrong:

a. The smaller the government, the greater the individual freedom. Conversely, the bigger the government, the greater the encroachments on individual freedom: This sounds straightforward. In fact, it has deep roots in American culture, having been expressed directly by Thoreau in the early 19th century. More recently, Friedrich Hayek enunciated it when he predicted that the development of Britain's National Health Service (universal health care to you & me) would turn the UK into another Soviet Union. His prediction obviously was wrong, but that didn't stop conservatives from continuing to believe it with their typical fervor. There are lots of other problems with this (what measure is used to determine the size of government? i..e, how do we know if a government is too big or too small?), but limits of space & time preclude further elaboration.

b. Tax cuts pay for themselves by increasing economic activity: Reagan tried it with huge tax cuts in 1981. The enormous resulting deficits led him to pass 8 consecutive tax increases (yes, increases), but nobody in the GOP seems to remember that part of the story. Bush, as we know, gave us the closest thing to a pure scientific test of this we're ever likely to have: With the GOP in control of all 3 branches of government, he passed enormous tax cuts & didn't subsequently offset them. He had the worst economic growth record of any president since Hoover. Conversely, Clinton raised taxes & had the biggest economic expansion in our country's history. So much for tax cuts stimulating growth. Again, the evidence has had no influence on GOP thinking.

c. Starve the beast: Grover Norquist famously said he wanted to shrink government to a size that would enable him to "drown it in a bathtub." Again, see Bush. He cut taxes, waged two wars without paying for them, & passed the Medicare Part D unfunded mandate. Money was drained from the Treasury, but did government shrink? No, it grew. The only president to preside over a shrinkage in the size of government was Clinton, who raised taxes, as previously noted. Again, no correlation backing up the claim, and no acknowledgment of the fact by the GOP.

Lastly, remember who funds their campaigns. The GOP always knows which side their bread is buttered on.

4. Obama believes that we have to reduce the deficit by cutting government spending because ________?

See my answer to #7 below.

5. Obama wants the economy to be stimulated because if more people have more money they will vote for him. Also theoretically he does actually want people to have more money.

One would think...

6. Does Obama think that cutting the deficit is going to stimulate the economy?

I guess he must, but I don't know.

7. Does deficit reduction stimulate the economy?

For an economy stuck in a severe recession? Hell, no. See #1 above. Just as there's a multiplier effect, there's also a negative multiplier effect. Think about it like this: As rain falls on crops, the water circulates into the soil, around the roots of plants, and the plants are fed, enabling them to grow. Imagine what happens when there's a drought. Water no longer circulates, plants are not fed, and they die.

Right now, not enough money is circulating through the economy--at least, not to ordinary people (the banks have oodles of the stuff--much of it from the bailouts--but they're not issuing much credit, businesses are not expanding & hiring, unemployed people are not making ends meet, so they're not spending, so there's little demand, so businesses aren't expanding & hiring, rinse & repeat). Since interest rates are near zero, the Fed can't lower interest rates any more to stimulate the economy. And the consensus in Washington is that we don't dare--no, no, no--do further stimulus spending to boost the economy. So we're stuck.

All deficit reduction will do in this context is remove more money from an economy that already has too little circulating through it. Take a look at what's happening to public service employees. State employees are being laid off right & left. All of them have families, most have houses, cars, bills to pay, etc. but there's no money to be had. All this is creating enormous strain on state budgets because the demand for Medicaid is going through the roof due to all these people becoming unemployed. So what are the GOP & now Obama talking about? Making enormous cuts to the federal budget (including aid to the states, which is already failing to meet the exploding need). But all the Very Serious People to whom Obama seems to be listening in DC make 6- or 7-figure salaries. None of them know anybody who's unemployed, I'd venture to guess. Economists have declared the recession over (that's the recession defined in technical terms, not in terms of what's actually happening to ordinary people). So I guess Obama thinks that if the technocrats say it's over, it's over, & it's time to start reducing the deficit. Now that I think of it, this brings to mind a recent thread about epistemic closure among conservatives that appeared in blog posts by Henry Farrell, Julian Sanchez & some other smart people. But obviously, conservatives are not the only ones susceptible to that dynamic (of course, reasonable people may disagree about whether Obama is a liberal, a conservative or something else).

One Final Note

As Kevin Drum and others have remarked tonight after Mitch McConnell's plan was announced, it seems that the GOP may have boxed themselves in with their insistence on drastic budget cuts with no revenue increases under any circumstances. Speaker of the House John Boehner himself told fellow House Republicans earlier today that they were going to lose leverage steadily as the August 2 deadline drew nearer. Judging by McConnell's announcement, that leverage may be ebbing more quickly than they'd anticipated. It's always a stretch to try to read the minds of others, and some of my comments above may go further in that direction than the evidence supports. Whether Obama is a fool or a genius (or both) is probably best evaluated with greater temporal and emotional detachment than I possess. My own perceptions of him are susceptible to changes in the political winds so I'm probably well advised to restrict my analyses to the economics and politics of the issues at hand. That said, I do think that allowing the entire debate over the budget to take place on GOP terms--i.e., with a focus on the deficit rather than on job creation--is a huge unforced error on Obama's part. We still don't know how the whole debt ceiling debate will play out; nor do we know what will happen vis a vis the deficit. But it's hard to see how we get from our current situation of high unemployment and low job growth to one that returns our economy to health. This short-term deficit obsession is a detour that doesn't help us get where we need to go, and may actually make the situation far worse.

An earlier version of this was cross posted at http://www.greaternycforchange.org/?p=676.

Links to Aid for Japanese Disaster Victims

Here's a great collection of links, courtesy of the NY Times.

At this point the tally is one earthquake, one tsunami, and three explosions plus a fire at a nuclear power plant. Millions of people have been displaced, many people have died or been injured.

Please do what you can to help.

A Message from Daily Kos on the Wisconsin Vote

The following message was sent to a friend of mine. It has taken on particular urgency given the Wisconsin Senate's vote tonight to end collective bargaining in that state, which is why I'm taking the liberty of re-posting excerpts from it:

You can support the recall [against Republican state Senators, ed.] by contributing to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which is the central organizing hub for the campaign. The DPW has already gathered 15% of the petition signatures required to force a recall election.

Please, contribute $5 to the recall.

...

The outcome of these recall campaigns will largely determine whether those who make policy decisions believe there is any political price to pay for gutting the middle class. So even beyond the rights of tens of thousands of public workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere, the stakes in the Wisconsin recall campaign are very high.

Please contribute $5 to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. If we do not complete even this first crucial step in winning the recall elections, then all of our efforts over these past three weeks will largely be for naught.

What's Ron Paul's Beef with the Federal Reserve?

[LENGTH WARNING]

My, it has been quite a while, hasn't it.



A friend posed the following question:

...And I am truly trying to wrap my brain around the Federal Reserve information I want so much to understand, but I can't get any 'good' out of it, only criminal mischief. And I never trusted Ron Paul, but a lot of people I know are ready to put him in the White House. Why do I mistrust him? Can you tell me, because I don't know exactly why, BUT I KNOW...

I'll try to give something like an answer; hopefully, it'll be coherent.

Ron Paul (like his son, Rand) is intensely devoted to libertarianism. I don't know if you're familiar with that particular ism. Basically, the underlying idea of libertarianism is that the only frame of reference for analyzing society is that of the individual. Collective behavior of any kind is inherently suspected. Culture, history, sociology, psychology--forget it. There's only the individual & the only question worth asking is whether any social program, idea or phenomenon increases individual freedom. For a number of libertarians, this dovetails neatly with the writings of Ayn Rand, the creator of a "philosophy" called objectivism. Rand posited in Atlas Shrugged that the smartest, most individualistic people in society are carrying a vast majority of sheeplike wastrels on their backs, giving more to society through the results of their hard work & taxes than they receive from the masses of shirkers. Her hero, John Galt, and other producers decide to withhold their labor in protest, thereby bringing society to its knees. You can see that same sense of indispensibility & entitlement among today's hedge fund managers & bond traders as they howl along with Rick Santelli on MSNBC about how they're paying the mortgages of all those lazy people who sit around expecting handouts, blah blah.

You can see how this almost hysterical exaltation of the individual is a very attractive notion. After all, we're products of the most extremely individualistic culture on earth. But the problem is that by essentially ruling out every other way of looking at society except the individual & his/her freedom, libertarians exclude the vast majority of evidence available to our sense organs (not to mention research libraries). That denial of context leads to weird positions such as Rand Paul's statement that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 & 1965 as encroachments on the individual rights of segregationists (OK, in Rand's case there's clearly something else at work here. He certainly doesn't consider infringements on the individual rights of black people caused by discrimination, for example). To be fair, some libertarians are very good on first amendment rights issues (after all, individual rights is their sole obsession), but on everything else, you get this weird prezel logic based on denial of everything beyond the individual & his or her rights. In their denial of the importance of power differentials in society, libertarians, whether intentionally or not, open the door to Social Darwinism.

The libertarian obsession with the individual leads to economic ideas hostile to government & to collective activity of any kind. Thus libertarians like Ron Paul find congenial economic theories that rationalize the elimination of government action & programs. Paul is an adherent of what's known as the Austrian School of economics, an approach that's rejected by mainstream economists, both liberal & conservative. Essentially, the Austrian School argues for laissez-faire economics with government involvement in & oversight of the economy reduced to the barest minimum. Austrian School adherents also argue that mathematical modeling, statistics & testing are basically useless in the study of economics & argue instead for the use of logical deduction based on first principles instead. And ouija boards (just kidding).

One of the heroes of economic libertarians, Friedrich Hayek, was a member of the Austrian School. Hayek argued that Britain was going to become another Soviet Union due to the creation of its National Health Service. (Hayek is often cited for saying that the bigger the government, the greater the encroachment on human freedom. What exactly is meant by "big" & "small" in this context has always confused me. Does this mean that the US, for example, is less free than Chile under Augusto Pinochet?) Needless to say, Hayek's prediction didn't work out very well, but that hasn't dulled the ardor of his adherents. (After all, who needs evidence when you've got first principles?)

Paul is also extremely hostile to the Federal Reserve, which he wants to eliminate (Paul Ryan, another libertarian, shares this view). Another big institution, and therefore threatening to human freedom. Have I told you how oppressed I feel when I hear that the Fed has lowered interest rates? The irony is that the Federal Reserve was set up in 1913 in response to the extreme concentration of economic power, lack of regulation of banking activities, and the absence of a central bank to bolster the economy in the case of a crisis, all of which was exposed in the aftermath of the Panic of 1907. The Fed provided the latter, but it was far too weak to deal with the other two problems, as was illustrated by the Great Depression. Now, you may be wondering, in the aftermath of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, with extreme concentrations of economic power in a highly unregulated financial system, why Ron Paul wants to do away with the institution that provides the bulwark for that system. Why, you might ask, does he not instead focus his efforts on strengthening regulation of the financial sector (creating an institution that would provide training & advancement to successively higher levels of regulatory complexity & responsibility, a la the training program at the State Department, for example, and working to make the salaries of regulators comparable to those of their counterparts at banks, thereby removing the incentive of regulators to go to work for the firms they regulate)? Why, in short, does Paul not work to prevent a recurrence of the crisis we’ve just experienced, rather than weaken one of the institutions responsible for minimizing the damage when such crises occur? That question applies to the GOP in Congress, almost across the board. It’s one of the questions of the age.