Robert Samuelson's Comments On Debt Panel Besmirch His Name Yet Again

In today's Washington Post in "What the Debt Panel Missed," Robert Samuelson embarrasses all the high quality economists who have or have shared his last name with more inane remarks. So, according to him, the "debt panel" missed defining what is our national interest in various programs, saying that just arguing to "give our children and grandchildren a better life" does not cut it. For him, our national interest involves no cuts in defense spending, as some were suggested by the panel, but "It's not in the national interest to subsidize Americans, through Social Security and Medicare for the last 20 to 25 years of their lives because healthier people and the huge costs make the budget unmanageable."

Regarding defense (and intelligence) spending, it strikes me there are many candidates for cutting or even eliminating. Do we really need 16 intelligence agencies? Given that there is the CIA on the one hand and intel agencies for the Army, Navy, and Air Force (this latter reputedly run by total maniacs) on the other, what on earth do we need the DIA for? Eliminate some of them, heck, a bunch of them. By many accounts the most capable of the lot is State Department I&R, which spends less than practically any of the others.

Then we have all the spending on privatized defense for the successor to Blackwell and its cronies. Instead of using military personnel for guarding diplomats and many other things, we pay about five times more per person for these privatized services that have had a simply awful track record in Iraq and elsewhere.

As for Social Security and Medicare, given that the vast majority of people live to use these, how is providing them not in the national interest? OK, medical care costs are rising, but the deficit commission offered nothing on this, and unfortunately the recent health care reform only nibbled at the problem. Social Security is not in financial trouble, and raising retirement ages, what Samuelson and the commission both support, does nothing about the near term deficit problem, while putting manual workers at risk in the future. And, life expectancy of poor white women in the US has actually been declining recently, so some of his assumptions about the future are not justified. In any case, as argued by Dean Baker and others, if a financial problem for Social Security arises, it can easily be fixed in a decade or so with minor tweaking. Doing anything now is stupid.

I do agree with Samuelson on one thing. The proposal to raise tax revenues by eliminating a variety of tax loopholes and deductions or "tax expenditures" is a worthy proposal. I have long supported tax simplification and did so back in 1986 when we had our last round of it. Bush, Jr. should have imitated Reagan and focused on that in his second term rather than running around the country for 60 days bashing Social Security. This might be passable and is fully deserving of support. However, the failure of the commission to get 14 votes means the pieces of its proposals will be chopped up and fed separately to the Congress, with the likelihood that very little of it will get passed in the current vituperous environment.

Bang for the Buck – Economic Policy Institute versus DC Politicians

Even the Senate Republicans would tell you that they want to reduce unemployment in the short-run and the deficit in the long-run. High bang for the buck fiscal stimulus is something we should all support. A great is example is this proposal from Lawrence Mishel, which has gathered the signatures of 33 prominent economists. Senate Republicans, however, don’t like this idea preferring to lobby hard for a budget busting extension of tax cuts for the well to do. Our President is on board with Mishel’s call for extending unemployment compensation but the Senate Republicans will not agree to this unless they get a concession on their hope for tax cuts from the well to do. Well, it seems our President is willing to bargain by letting there be a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts. So let’s see – a temporary tax break for households who are not borrowing constrained. In other words – no bang for a lot of bucks! This is leadership?

Inadvertent Insights from the Wall Street Journal

Hook, Janet 2010. "Tax-Cut Vote Shows Democratic Divide: House Passes Extension Excluding Higher Incomes, a Largely Symbolic Effort Reflecting Unhappiness With White House." Wall Street Journal (3 December): p. A 5
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703377504575650901731419966.html?mod=ITP_pageone_1

Are we to believe that giving tax breaks to the super-rich will do wonders for the economy or that the people are clamoring to give aid to those worthies.

What about this Democratic divide? That only a few right-wing Democrats remain in the House; that the remaining Democrats generally oppose Obama and yet get elected. Their vote was largely symbolic because most of them know that Obama will cave and they can get credit for supporting the little guys who make less than a quarter million dollars a year. Then they can go about cutting benefits for the real little guys.

Question of the day: What is the most courageous decision that any politician today has been willing to take?

Republicans Who Think the FED Should Forego Fiscal Stimulus

If this reporting by CNNMoney is correct, then Mike Pence (Republican Congreesman from Indiana) is clueless as to the role of the Federal Reserve in at least a couple of respects:

But some critics are sick and tired of the Fed prioritizing job creation at the risk of rising prices. They say the juggling act of promoting economic growth while staving off inflation has proven ineffective, and has led to a policy of too much cheap money with dangerous consequences for the economy. "The American people have been witness to an era of unprecedented borrowing and spending by the national government," Rep. Mike Pence, a Republican from Indiana, told CNNMoney Thursday. "I know that the Fed can't spend us back to prosperity." … "The Fed can print money, but they can't print jobs," he said. "Printing money is no substitute for sound fiscal policy and we ought to be looking to the Congress to embrace the kind of policies that will get this economy moving again."

Maybe QE2 has confused the Senator but the Federal Reserve is not practicing fiscal policy in the sense of increasing the Federal deficit. On this claim that expansionary aggregate demand policy cannot reduce the output gap, Paul Krugman today reminded us of something he wrote last summer:

What’s odd, though, is how little talk there is about the way the 70s ended — which I viewed at the time, and still do, as a huge vindication of Keynesianism. Here’s what happened: the Fed decided to squeeze inflation out of the system through a monetary contraction.

Paul continues by nothing that the new classical theory that apparently Pence believes it predicted we would not have a prolonged recession during the early 1980’s. We did. This same theory would hold that our current Great Recession is not happening at all. I hate to say this – but this Congressman is clueless on a couple of macroeconomic fronts.

Inequality on the Diamond

At the time that we are about to preserve the tax cuts for the very rich, a New York Times article shine a nice light on the extent of inequality.

"At its high point, six decades ago, DiMaggio's salary came to $100,000. That was a lot of money in 1950, equivalent to about $900,000 today. DiMaggio earned about 30 times the median family income back then. Mr. Jeter, however, earns roughly 300 times as much as today's median family income -- assuming that the family has any income at all. With unemployment stubbornly stuck at 9 percent -- plus, many people are watching this battle of the millionaires with very cold noses pressed against the window."

Haberman, Clyde. 2010. "Fewer Millions for Jeter? Say It Ain't So!" New York Times (30 November): p. A 23.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30nyc.html?ref=clydehaberman

A WikiLeaks Middle Game

Here are the elements: Julian Assange, by all appearances the linchpin of WikiLeaks, is being charged with a personal crime in Sweden which, whether he committed it or not, is likely unprovable in court. Interpol has a warrant out for Assange, ostensibly to deliver him to the Swedes. The US government, meanwhile, has moved into high gear: it has pressured Amazon to deny WikiLeaks web-hosting services, and it is reported to be exploring its own criminal charges against Assange and his collaborators.

Everything else is speculation—but why not? So here is my attempt to connect the dots.

1. The Swedes initially wavered on prosecuting Assange. First it was yes, then no, then yes again. Given the stakes, it would be naive to think that there was no communication between the US and Swedish governments during this process. The cable I would like to see is the one where Hilary, or one of her underlings, pressures Sweden to reopen the case. I’ll bet Assange would like to have this one too. It is not out of the realm of possibility that he actually has it and will use it if he needs to.

2. If Assange is taken into custody, he will soon find himself in a US court. My guess is that he will not be charged under the Espionage Act, but rather a lesser but sufficient felony associated with theft of government property. Meanwhile, the charges in Sweden will be dropped; after all, they were never provable.

3. While Assange is in custody in the US, WikiLeaks will face a full-court press. There will certainly be a range of attempts, public and private, to eliminate its web presence. Assange will be denied any opportunity to communicate with his colleagues, and anyone who meets with him will be meticulously searched for data storage media. Of course, bail is out of the question.

4. Actual prosecution of Assange will be delayed for years. The defense will be forced to be party to this strategem, since the government will invoke various justifications for withholding evidence. Procedural challenges will lumber slowly from one courthouse to the next. The government’s game plan is that, during this time, WikiLeaks will disintegrate and Assange will be broken. If so, he will be released under a plea bargain that is little different from dropping the charges altogether. Incidentally, this preventive detention strategy will require coordination across administrations if Obama is not reelected in 2012, but I doubt this will be a problem.

As for myself, I admire WikiLeaks for its exposure of diplomatic deceit, and I am looking forward to its rumored release of documents from Bank of America. I abhor the actions being taken to shut it down. The only positive side I can see is that Assange is not a Muslim, and we are not yet talking about Predator drones.

Stepping Down

This may not be an appropriate place for this, but I think that I should make a more public announcement about this matter. I have been serving as Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO) since August 15, 2001 (officially since 1/1/02). I sent a message several hours ago to the journal's board of editors informing them that I shall step down from this as of 1/1/11, one month from today, to be replaced by Bill Neilson of the University of Tennessee, who has edited Economic Inquiry in the past. That I would do this at this time was decided back in March, 2009, although it is only now that it is being publicly announced (to minimize "lame duckism"). The journal's publisher, Elsevier, has a policy of editors at most of their journals serving at most two terms, which in my case would have been 8 years. I was informed of this in Jan. 2009, and after discussion it was decided in March of that year that I would serve an additional year, which is now coming to an end.

I shall repeat here something that I said in my first message to the board back in August 2001 and that I shall close my final message to them after I step down next month with. It is that when I would stop being editor, if anyone were to criticize how I had performed as editor, I would much prefer that they charge me with having been too wild and heterodox rather than having turned the journal into a boring outlet for mainstream orthodoxy. I believe that I have achieved that goal, given that on another blog someone recently charged me with exactly that, making the journal too heterodox (although for anyone who has known of it from before I became editor, it has always had the reputation of being "heterodox but respectable").

Mitch McConnell – Keynesian?

Mark Thoma comments on yesterday’s Senate Republican letter to Harry Reid:

If they are so worried about the "a job-killing tax hike" discussed in their letter (a distinctly Keynesian perspective by the way), then use the money gained from allowing the tax cuts to expire for the wealthy to fund an extension of the Making Work Pay tax cuts in the stimulus package that went to middle and lower class households. The GOP is refusing to extend the Making Work Pay tax cuts, apparently the jobs lost when taxes go up for the non-wealthy don't count. Since these tax cuts are likely to result in more spending than tax cuts for the wealthy, this would increase rather than decrease jobs.

Mark is basically noting that the marginal propensity to consume for lower income groups is likely to be higher than the marginal propensity to consume for higher income groups. But as long as the marginal propensity to consume is less than one, increases in government purchases have a larger bang for the buck than do tax cuts. Yet – most Senate Republicans oppose any increase in government spending on the grounds that it might increase the deficit. It might be a refreshing change if McConnell actually adopted the perspective of a Keynesian economist – but to date, his tone seems to be one of a Machiavellian whose quest of power is motivated so that he and his ilk can shift more income towards the very rich.

Barack Hoover?

CNNMoney reports:

President Obama on Monday called for a two-year freeze in the wages of federal employees. The freeze, which would need congressional approval and save $60 billion over 10 years, would make a small dent in the nation's debt problem. The accumulated deficits are currently forecast to exceed $9 trillion over the next decade.

This strikes me as short-term fiscal restraint but not a really serious attempt to getting the long-term fiscal house in order. In other words precisely the opposite of what we should be doing while in a very depressed economy. So why would this President make such a recommendation:

On Capitol Hill, Obama's proposal is likely to pick up support on the other side of the aisle. Republicans have argued in favor of a freeze in recent weeks, and the co-chairmen of Obama's bipartisan deficit commission made a similar recommendation earlier this month. "It's a great start. I'll applaud when he [Obama] does the right thing, and he did in this case," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican and the presumptive chairman of the House subcommittee on federal workers. "I'd like to see things go further. Personally, I would like to see the overall payroll cut by 10%."

The President has decided to go with what Republicans want to do. Fortunately, congressional Democrats are already speaking out against this proposal.

Update: Larry Mishel gets it right:

In the context of the deficit, Obama will get chump change from freezing federal pay, and will only enlarge the degree to which federal pay lags that of the private sector ... This is another example of the administration’s tendency to bargain with itself rather than Republicans, and in the process reinforces conservative myths, in this case the myth that federal workers are overpaid. Such a policy also ignores the fact that deficit reduction and loss of pay at a time when the unemployment rate remains above 9% will only weaken a too-weak recovery.

The Impoverished, and Impoverishing, Debate about Fiscal Deficits

It is like living in a dream—a very bad dream. Everything seems at once real and imaginary, serious and deliriously impossible. The language is familiar and incomprehensible. And it seems there is no waking up, ever.

I’m talking about the “debate” over America’s fiscal deficits, which is what I stumbled into after a night of much happier visions. Now, according to this morning’s New York Times, the left has weighed in with its own plans to achieve deficit stability. Of course, it is more reasonable than the pronunciamenti of the Simpson-Bowles cabal, with a wiser assortment of cuts and more progressive tax adjustments. Still, it is part of the same bizarre trance, disconnected from the basic laws of income accounting.

All you need to know is the fundamental identity. In its financial balance form, it appears as

Private Deficits + Public Deficits ≡ Current Account Balance

If the US runs, say, a 4% CA deficit, the sum of its net public and private deficits must equal 4%. You can’t alter this no matter how you juggle budgets.

Add to this one more piece of wisdom, which we should have learned from the past three years, even if we were blind to everything else: private debts matter as much as public ones. The indebtedness of households, corporations and financial entities can bring down the economy as readily as the profligacy of the public sector. In fact, in the grip of a crisis (which we have not yet escaped), private deficits are far harder to finance because of their greater default risk. That’s why governments slathered themselves with red ink: they borrowed to assume the debts that private parties could no longer bear.

So what does this mean for US fiscal deficits? Isn’t it obvious? Public deficits can be brought down only to the extent that the private willingness and capacity to borrow increases and current account (mostly trade) deficits shrink. There is still an important discussion to be had over the size and composition of revenues and expenditures, of course, but this is only about how, not how much. To put it differently, if private deficits and the external position of the US economy remain as they are, planned deficit reduction by the government cannot be realized. Revenues will fall along with spending, the economy will take a dive, and actual fiscal deficits will be unmoved. This is guaranteed by the laws of arithmetic, and you can see such a process happening in real time in the peripheral Eurozone countries.

What can break this fall? The current account constraint can be relaxed as falling incomes drive falling imports, but this entails an economic catastrophe unless devaluation can do the job instead. Or the borrowing capacity of the private sector can rise, but this is inconceivable in a collapsing economy. Or, facing the abyss, those who run the show can dispense with all the nonsense about fiscal prudence in isolation from surrounding economic conditions, and open the spigots once again.

My prediction: if there is deficit-cutting in the US of any sort before the private sector is prepared to take on more debt and, especially, approximate trade balance is restored, we will see exactly this third scenario. The economy will take a dive, political leaders (whether of the latté or tea persuasion) will spend like crazy, and fiscal deficits will be larger than ever. The deficit-cutting debate is delusional.

The Irrelevance Of Krauthammer and WaPo On START

Yesterday's Washington Post contained a column by ardently neoconner Charles Krauthammer on "The Irrelevance of START" (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which follows similar columns by the main editorial writer (usually Fred Hiatt) and Jacskon Diehl. Krauthammer whined that Obama should be focusing on tax and jobs policies rather than the long-negotiated renewal of the START, which expired last December and was first put in place under George H.W. Bush in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, even though he does not support any of Obama's proposals on taxes or jobs, along with nearly all Republicans in the lame duck Congress.

He and WaPo and Diehl effectively support the opposition by Senator Kyl (AZ-R) who wants more funding for nuclear weapons in the face of pressure for cutting deficits, with Obama offering $84 billion, but this was not enough for him, and if it does not pass in the lame duck, it will almost surely not pass in the next Congress. This treaty is supported by virtually all of the military, including 7 of the last 8 commanders of US Strategic Nuclear Forces and nearly all past Republican Secretaries of State, Defense, and National Security Advisers, including such figures as Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, with none of these figures expressing any public opposition. Most say that this is a no-brainer that should be beyond partisan politics, with the absence of US observers in Russian nuclear facilities since the old treaty expired last December supposedly making it so (and certainly making it look so to me).

Besides the economy, Krauthammer says we should focus on Iran and North Korea instead, not on such an irrelevant place as Russia. Of course, official US intel reports say Iran is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons, although presumably Krauthammer would like the US to do the bidding of Israel and bomb a few nuclear facilities in Iran, just to keep them in line. North Korea certainly has some nukes and is acting very dangerously right now, with it leading to those 3 AM phone calls for Obama. But it is unclear that anything the lame duck Congress could do would do anything to help about that situation, which got out of hand back when GW Bush was in and dumped the older agreement on pressure from Cheney and Rumsfeld early in his administration, leading the North Koreans to withdraw from the NNPT and to restart their plutonium bomb production plants that had been shut in 1994, leading to the production and testing of actual nuclear weapons now in their possession.

Quite aside from all that, there are at least three other reasons why Obama is right to push START ratification and why it is massively irresponsible of all these commentators and politicians to play politics and make stupid comments about this.

1) If one is really worried about Iran and North Korea, Russia is an important player in dealing with both of them, and having cooperation from Russia will help, which ratifying START will help in getting (and rejecting ratification will damage).

2) Unmentioned by all these supposedly sage commentators is that the greatest nuclear danger to the US is none of the above, but rather terrorists getting their hands on loose nukes. The major possible source of those is the still huge stockpile in Russia. Having US inspectors on the ground there should help in the securing of those stockpiles against terrorists or rogue Russian generals messing with them. Saying that Russia is not going to attack is silly in light of the real threat from these weapons.

3) And beyond that,leadership in Russia might change or a rogue general might get at them, and even these glb commentators realize that the only really serious danger from a nuclear confrontation in terms of major world destruction would be an exchange betweeen the US and Russia, which could happen even by accident with no ill intentions. So, reducing those stockpiles somewhat further from their ridiculously overly large levels would improve world security against the damage that might arise from a US-Russian nuclear exchange, however unlikely that may seem.

Ratifying this treaty really is a no-brainer and Obama is completely correct to make it a top priority for passage by the lame duck Congress, far ahead of pretty much anything else. The decline of intelligent public discourse on such matters is one of the most disturbing trends I can think of going on right now.

Why is homeland security enforcing the nation against music downloads?

"In what appears to be the latest phase of a far-reaching federal crackdown on online piracy of music and movies, a number of sites that facilitate illegal file-sharing were shut down this week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security."

Sisario, Ben. 2010. "U.S. Shuts Down Web Sites in Piracy Crackdown." New York Times (27 November).
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/technology/27torrent.html?hp

Ecological Headstand -- Sandwichman's web log

Sandwichman has his own web log. It's called Ecological Headstand because it stands William Rees's "Ecological Footprint" metaphor on its head. Currently, the focus is more on bibliography than commentary. For example, yesterday the Sandwichman posted a set of key references for a discussion of the politics of social accounting.

Social accounting is what statistics agencies do when they compile the Gross Domestic Product. It's also what employers and unions do, at least implicitly, in collective bargaining. The controversy over "growth" is not new. In fact, it began with the first release of GNP estimates by the U.S. Commerce Department back in 1947 and that first salvo is documented in an exchange between Simon Kuznets and the team from Commerce. What grows? That depends on the objectives of the people who have designed the measurement of national product. Sandwichman will soon be posting a brief summary of the main issues to Ecological Headstand but in the meanwhile,  here's a brain teaser.

The Eichengreen Paradox

This does not refer to an observation about international political economy but Barry Eichengreen himself. He seems like a very nice guy and also very smart. He is well-read and has an unusually broad understanding of history and politics. His views on any topic other than economics are insightful and valuable. But when the subject turns to economics proper, he displays a hidebound, and perplexing, orthodoxy.

This paradox is on full view in a short interview with him posted on Five Books. He really understands the politics of the euro, how it is rooted in the reaction to two world wars and the shaped by the national cultures of its leading players. He recognizes that countries like France and Germany have institutions that are superior in many ways to those in the US. I can’t think of anyone I would trust more to take the pulse of decision-makers in the Eurozone. And his economic advice is woefully insufficient.

Read the interview for its many virtues, but, in the meantime, consider where Eichengreen ends up. He makes three proposals going forward: less populist national fiscal policy institutions (quasi-autonomy for fiscal policy the way autonomous central banks are supposed to do monetary policy), stronger euro-wide financial regulation, and a permanent resolution authority along the lines advocated by Germany. Numbers two and three on this list are OK, number one is misguided, and package as a whole is not remotely up to the job.

Without getting into an argument over Keynesian versus deficit hawk fiscal priorities, it should be clear that national budget profligacy was not a factor in most of the countries now facing financial distress. Ireland and Spain in particular had the most orthodox of fiscal policies, but here they are, sinking into the morass of fiscal insolvency. Nor is the failure of financial regulation the factor that separates the objects and subjects of bailouts. Germany too has had its share of banker rule-bending and incompetence (Hypo anyone?), but it has been spared the pity of its neighbors.

The truth is, the countries facing disaster are those that ran large, persistent current account deficits during the past decade. They accumulated enormous private debt, and fiscal freefall is the response to the souring and freezing of this debt: the public sector is leveraging so that the private sector can deleverage. Because of the euro, currency adjustment is unavailable.

Why, you might ask, doesn’t the US face the same dilemmas at the state level? As Paul Krugman has asked, what’s the difference between Ireland and Texas (other than about 30 inches of rain)? There are two answers. First, if a region within the US has a significant trade deficit with other regions—if its industries languish while others forge ahead—its incomes fall and people and jobs relocate. This is difficult in Europe because of linguistic and cultural differences. Second, we have a common fiscal authority which, as a matter of routine, transfers income between regions with domestic surpluses and deficits. The absence of this in Europe, the fact that there is a single central bank but no common Treasury, has crippled its response to the crisis.

With other avenues closed—large-scale migration, fiscal integration, exchange rate adjustment—there is only one remaining degree of freedom. Deficit countries within the Eurozone must either rebalance through austerity or sustain their growth through public and private borrowing. But restoring balance, much less paying down past debts, is nearly impossible through austerity alone. The arithmetic, which tells us that the amount by which national income must fall equals the deficit reduction target divided by the marginal propensity to import, is frightening. But that’s where peripheral Europe is headed unless there is a much more aggressive program than Eichengreen is willing to contemplate.

invisible handcuffs to finally appear

Amazon is listing the cost for a pre-order at $12.78.