Tuesday, November 25, 2008

The Return of Rubinomics

As the President-elect announced the appointment of Peter Orszag as head of OMB, he said something that might cheer up those deficit hawks:

In these challenging times, when we are facing both rising deficits and a sinking economy, budget reform is not an option. It is an imperative," Obama said in the statement. "We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness, or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist, or interest group," he said. Obama said he would ask his economic team to "think anew and act anew" to meet new challenges. "We will go through our federal budget -- page by page, line by line -- eliminating those programs we don't need, and insisting that those we do operate in a sensible cost-effective way," Obama said.


Rubinomics – at least as I understood it – meant that we accelerate Federal spending in the midst of a recession but tell Wall Street over the long-term, we are serious about long-term fiscal restraint. We might also give tax cuts to liquidity constrained people such as the working poor but raise taxes on those who are not liquidity constrained – such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. In other words, short-term fiscal restraint to actually REDUCE national savings with some assurance to Wall Street that once this recession is over, we restore a commitment to increasing savings and investment.

While John Taylor seems confused about this one, Paul Krugman gets it:

Thus, John Taylor — a very good economist, when he wants to be — insists that we must respond to the economy’s temporary weakness with a permanent tax cut. Let us reason together. Does it make sense to let one recession dictate tax policy in perpetuity? What happens if there’s a boom; can we increase taxes (no, because then the cut wouldn’t have been permanent.) What if there’s another recession? Do we permanently cut taxes again? Is there a tax-cut ratchet (or maybe racket)? Think this through, and it makes no sense at all. And Taylor’s argument against the obvious answer — government spending as stimulus — is pure gobbledygook


In just a few weeks, we will finally have a President who also gets it even if that lame duck never did.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness, or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist, or interest group," he said."

For emphasis: "or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist, or interest group,"

How does one assess the current run on the Treasury by the financial services industry in light of the second part of the statement? What's a few hundred billion, a couple of trillion, more or less when we're sacraficing the entire budget for the sake of a hallowed sector of the economy? Or should that be hollowed sector? Hollowed of any semblance of fiduciary responsibility.

ProGrowthLiberal said...

Jack - the numbers for the financial services rescue plan can be misleading as they represent the values of traded assets and NOT government expenditures. So let's say we give $25 billion to Citigroup in exchange for $25 billion (some odd book valuation figure) in their troubled loans. The increase in the government debt is NOT $25 billion. Rather it is the difference between this $25 billion and the market value of the troubled loan. While this market value may be less than $25 billion, it is certainly not zero.

Anonymous said...

pgl,
What, if any, due diligence has been done to evaluate the probable real market value of the toxic sludge that Citibank is likely to unload? I might feel a bit more comfortable about the enormous expenditure, call it investment if you like, if a real investor with a track record for determining market value were at the Treasury till. Say Buffet rather than Paulson.

TheTrucker said...

This use of tax liabilities to mitigate or remove a financial sludge is to me a great travesty and a mystery. The Fed can and has purchased such "assets" with funds conjured from the ether.

There is no tax liability created from a Fed purchase (a sludge disposal). The result of such a purchase is to throw lots of money into the system at the point of failure. The purchase of these "assets" using "appropriated" ($700B) money creates a future tax obligation. The recipients of the money being the same in either case it is a mystery as to why the American people would allow themselves to become indebted when this indebtedness is obviously avoidable.

I would appreciate a response to this query from the learned and esteemed economists that typically create blogs here on "econospeak". It will be an educational experience for me as I am quite bemused. What I am seeing seems to contradict my understanding of the economic universe.