Kevin Hassett Needs Remedial Arithmetic

Kevin DOW 36000 Hassett was sent out to the White House press to lie about real wage growth. Or maybe he just proved he seriously needs remedial math for another reason besides one that Brad DeLong notes:

Glassman and Hassett get the math of the Gordon equation for valuing the stock market simply wrong. It's not the earnings yield that shows up in the numerator, it's the dividend yield. The book should have been called Dow 22000.

I would put this in a slightly different way. We use the discounted cash flow model not some discounted profits model and anyone who knows anything about basic financial modeling realizes that cash flows equal profits minus the investment in new tangible assets required for growth. But Hassett did not appear to get this basic point back in 1999. Flash forward to today when he was echoing some disinformation written in this report. Credit goes to Jared Bernstein and Larry Mishel for a point by point take down of the intellectual garbage from the Council of Economic Advisers which included this gem:

The most commonly cited wage and compensation data come from the Employment Cost Index (ECI), and these data show, for example, that over the past two years, nominal wages (private sector workers) are up 5.4 percent while fringe benefits are up 5.1 percent. Thus, in these data, adding in benefits doesn’t change the wage growth story.

Hassett admitted inflation is up but argued real compensation growth is growing faster than real wages because of something to do with fringe benefits. Over the past 24 months, the consumer price index has increased by 4.7% so real fringe benefits are only marginally higher whereas real wages grew by a very modest 0.7%. So fringe benefits have actually fallen relative to wages but Hassett told the press that including fringe benefits makes compensation growth appear higher. OK – maybe Hassett was not intending to deceive the press but if he really does not get this simple point, I suspect a few first graders could explain this to him.