Former Bush Speechwriter "Advises" Obama To Cut Social Security Benefits

Indeed, on today's Washington Post editorial page, Michael Gerson advises Obama to do exactly this, even as he recognizes that there is little political support for it, particularly among Democrats. But repeating the long buzz in certain circles that it should be done because it is easier to do than dealing with rising medical care costs or raising taxes or cutting defense spending, he should do it, with the aid of supposedly willing Republicans, and even though the system is the least contributor to the deficit of any major part of the federal budget, although neither he nor anybody else notes that this does a big fat zero about the near term deficit. My my. Unfortunately, I fear that those around Obama may be getting to him, as there is this well-known group of Democrats tied to Wall Street that likes this sort of argument. Rumors keep surfacing that he will put some sort of variation of what came out of his Deficit Commission on this matter into his State of the Union speech next month.

Over a week ago on Angry Bear the estimable Bruce Webb argued that the 2% cut in payroll taxes was picked by insider Dems as part of an old plan to be offered to be put into private accounts, long the goal of the Wall Street gang. I fear he may be right on this, see http://www.angrybearblog.com/2010/12/2-non-solution-part-two.html. Bah, humbug!

Greece: A Political Economy

This remarkable analysis has appeared on Open Economy. If you have wondered how a country can get into such a deep, deep hole, take a look. Doxiadis discusses the rentier economy (a populist rentier economy), the breakdown of cooperation, the preference for a mix of income opportunities rather than specialization, and reason why unproductive small businesses dominate.

Just to give you a flavor, here is what he writes about populist rent-seeking:

[Rent] does not contribute to growth, it only shares in what is there. Therefore, it secured by militant claims, not by productive work. It breeds populism, whose fundamental strategy is to shift responsibility for the whole to the opposite pole, the enemy. In populist discourse citizens identify with the weakest groups, regardless of their actual position in society; so they feel entitled to demand more on grounds of fairness, or even on humanitarian grounds. They do not feel responsible about production of wealth, nor about setting priorities for redistribution to the truly weak. It is others who are responsible for the big picture. Populism differs radically in this from a socialist strategy which starts from the mode of production before the mode of distribution; as well as from a political program of solidarity towards the really poor and excluded.

Read the whole thing.

The Scrooge Who Forecloses On Homes Too Quickly

Today is Boxing Day, which in the UK is traditionally a day that those better off put things in boxes to give to the poor, particularly the homeless poor. In that regard it may be worth noting a story that appeared on the front page of the Christmas Eve Washington Post by David S. Hilzenrath, "Virginia puts homeowners on fast track to foreclosure." While many states allow those who are facing foreclosure on their homes due to falling behind on mortgage payments a "day in court" to contest it, with some adequate time to prepare for this, Virginia, along with an unnamed set of 28 other states, have "trustees" hired by lenders making the judgments. A VA banking official defends this as "hastening the day when banks can move delinquent loans off their books, it can dut their losses."

Now in many of these "nonjudicial" states there is some effort to make sure that those being foreclosed on have some time to respond to such an effort. However, in Virginia a notice of the foreclosure is sent 14 days in advance, which means the homeowner generally will not see it until even closer to the time the foreclosure is to happen. It is very difficult to overcome this with many barriers and restrictions put in place to challenge a questionable action, leading in one reported case to "a Catch 22: To obtain evidence that that might flesh out those suspicions, his lawyer needed to file a lawsuit and enter the court-supervised process known as discovery. To file the lawsuit, however, the lawyer needed evidence."

Scrooge, we knew you when, and apparently you have found a nice home in Virginia.

The Problem For Editors Of Plagiarism Accusations

On my way out as JEBO editor, I have written an essay to appear in a book of these by economics journal editors being edited by Michael Szenberg. Mine is entitled "From the Editors' Crypt: Accusations of Plagiarism True, Uncertain, and False." It can be accessed on my website at http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb, scroll all the way down. Aside from the various cases I discuss, a major theme is that false accusations can sometimes be more of a problem than true ones.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to everyone, along with any other holidays of this season you are of a mind to celebrate, or have recently finished celebrating.

Market Liberalism and the Grip of Sovereignty in Euroland

I’ve just had a look at this bracing commentary, originally posted at VoxEU and mirrored on Naked Capitalism, on the sickness at the heart of the Eurozone. It clarifies for me an issue that I have been thinking about for some time. Consider:

The Maastricht Treaty reinforced a reliance on market forces to provide discipline and stability. The only collective mechanism for dealing with crises was the Stability and Growth Pact that accompanied the treaty. This was essentially an agreement on sovereign debt burdens, less inflexible than many thought, but the overall framework implied that governments, not financial markets, were the problem – if the rules were properly applied, stability would prevail. The Treaty thus favoured price stability and the fight against inflation over growth, employment, and social policies.

The question for me was how to explain, from a political economic perspective, the intense liberalism on all matters financial imposed by the EU. What makes it a question is that this drive coexists with a parallel “Social Europe” of relatively aggressive environmental regulation, nondiscrimination, mandatory works councils, etc. Because all of this is embedded in a capitalist order, financial liberalism has tended to erode social protection, but why should there be this left hand/right hand problem?

This could be examined through the prisms of class and ideology, but here we see another dynamic stemming from nationalism. The problem of constructing an integrated economic area is one of coordination in core markets—labor, goods, capital. This can be accomplished directly through public and private institutions that explicitly regulate and standardize across the entire domain, which has been the story of the United States since the end of the Civil War. One reason this was possible was the war itself, which destroyed the ideological and political basis for states’ economic sovereignty. But Europe’s “wars between the states” in the last century were not about disunion but hegemony, and their outcome is a cooperative, non-hegemonic arrangement between sovereign nations. There is little political support for making Brussels the primary locus of economic rule-making.

The alternative to organized integration, however, is self-organized integration. By using capital market liberalization as a battering ram, the EU can hope to dismantle, over time, barriers to the single market in all dimensions without a direct assault on subsidiarity. The Eurozone addition, of course, is the Stability and Growth Pact, which is intended to limit the exercise of fiscal policy at the national level, now that monetary policy is safely tucked away in the ECB.

Liberalism presents itself as a strategy for integration in the absence of robust supranational authority. Of course, this aspect of the situation is not walled off from the class and ideological aspects. Financial liberalization became the dominant policy framework because of the political ascendancy of individuals who viewed their economic interests in financial terms, as I argued earlier.

The practical issue remains how to advance European integration on democratic lines, overcoming nationalism from below and across rather than outside (market liberalism). The current crisis should be an opportunity to construct a programmatic counter-vision, but I am not hearing much of this from where I sit.

Decoding Economic Ideology link is fixed

Sorry for any inconvenience

Decoding Economic Ideology

Molière’s 1670 play, The Bourgeois Gentleman, presented before the court of Louis XIV, mocked a foolish, social‑climbing merchant. In his effort to remake himself, the merchant takes lessons to help him pass as an aristocrat. In a basic lesson on language, he is both surprised and delighted to learn he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. Almost three and a half centuries later, much of the world finds itself speaking a different language ‑‑ economics ‑‑ also without full awareness.

more at
http://michaelperelman.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/decoding.pdf

David Carr vs. Waiting for Superman

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/business/media/20carr.html?ref=business


"... Which is odd when you think about it. If you are looking for an American institution that failed the public, made resources disappear without returning value and lacked accountability for its manifest sins, the Education Department would be in line well behind Wall Street. By now, the notion that business is a place built on accountability and performance should be as outdated as the one-room schoolhouse. Ask yourself, what would happen if American public schools were offered hundreds of billions in bailout money? One outcome is not in the cards: its leaders would not end up back at the trough so quickly, sucking up tens of millions in bonuses as Wall Street has."

Lecture for a Chinese Delegation

I am going to give a talk to a Chinese delegation. I have to write up the talk in advance for the participants to have a translation to read.

Any comments would be appreciated.


http://michaelperelman.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/china.doc

Douglas Holtz-Eakin Falls Into Lunatic Pandering

Once upon a time Douglas Holtz-Eakin was a reasonable professional economist, if of a conservative bent and clearly associated with the Republican Party. He served honorably during the period of GOP control of Congress when Bush, Jr. was president as Director of the Congressional Budget Office. There he resisted the relentless pressure from delusional supply-siding GOPster Congresspeople to declare that tax cuts pay for themselves with the proper "dynamic analysis." DH-E put this canard to sleep once and for all, at least in Congress, if not on Fox News and in the general Tea Party looney bin. Even though I did not support McCain in 08 (and by all accounts he knows little to nothing about economics), DH-E served respectably as one of his top economic advisers in the campaign, along with other such respectables as Ken Rogoff, who has managed to avoid making a fool of himself since then.

However, now Douglas Holtz-Eakin has fallen into lunatic pandering, I can only guess in the hopes of becoming an adviser to Sarah Palin or some other future GOP prez nominee who is equally out to lunch on economic matters. Accounts are given on Mark Thoma at http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/12/words-will-never-hurt-us-or-our-cronies-if-we-dont-allow-them-to-be-used.html a few days ago and today by Paul Krugman at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/opinion/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=1 .

As one of the four GOP members of the financial crisis commission he has joined with the others in voting to refuse to allow the words/phrases "Wall Street" or "shadow banking" or "interconnection" or "deregulation" to appear in its final report. While Dem commission member Brooksly Born (who had warned of the coming crisis ahead of time) has expressed sadness that some sort of reasonable compromise language to encompass competing viewpoints could not be arrived at, DH-E and company have absconded to issue their own report that blames it all on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. As Krugman points out, the F's did not even get into buying subprime mortgages until 2004 and other countries without them or the CRA have had worse housing bubbles than has the US. This is just fantasyland stuff that is only taken seriously by, well, Fox News and the Tea Party crowd. Douglas Holtz-Eakin: shame on you!

The Hidden Dagger In The Budget Deal

Most of the discussion about the recent budget deal has been about Obama caving on failing to push for returning the top marginal income tax rate from 35% to 39%. It is certainly poltically symbolic to point at the screaming hypocrisy of Senate Republicans to threaten to hold up all legislation on this, but it really does not matter much one way or the other. This difference in rates barely affects income distribution, and we have had such top rates vary from 28% to over 90% during the last 70 years, with little obvious effect of either on economic growth.

However, one part of the deal that has mostly received praise, although a few such as Mark Thoma have noticed that it might have some negative consequences, is the "temporary" cut in payroll taxes. Now, I grant that this is more stimulating than keeping the lower marginal rate on top income earners, but it constitutes a hidden dagger in our political-economic-social system.

First, if we did not know it before, we certainly should now that there is no such thing as a "temporary" tax cut. Anyone attempting to allow such a temporary cut to expire politically becomes a "tax raiser," ready to be excoriated by millions of dollars worth of negative TV ads.

Second, this was obviously slipped in by the enemies of Social Security, who know the first point. So, we have long been hearing hypochondriacal howling out of the bipartisan crowd that wants to gut Social Security benefits to fix our budget problems, because, eeeek, it is going bankrupt soon!!! Well, with lowered revenues from its dedicated revenue source, well, you won't have to wait for it too long, these screamers will be back in force with much scarier projections. The bankruptcy will be coming sooner!!!!! Cut benefits more and even sooner !!!!!!! Eeeeeeek!!!!!!!!!

Tragedy

The erstwhile Tea Party Senate candidate and dabbler in the black arts, Christine O'Donnell, has proclaimed, in the wake of Obama's deal with the Republicans, that "tragedy comes in threes: Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth Edward's passing and Barack Obama's announcemet to...extend unemployment benefits."

Easy to ridicule , of course, but how many people remember that Oedipus never would have left Corinth for Delphi and then, ultimately, Thebes - where, not to put too fine a point on it, all hell breaks loose- had he not been on extended unemployment benefits? Without those benefits, he would have been forced to find a job in Corinth, never knowing who his real father and mother were, and neither killing the one nor wedding the other. This is how tragedy occurs: the devil finds work for government- financed idle hands!

What? Nobody remembers the Chorus calling out to the King of Corinth at the beginning of the play, "READ OUR LIPS: DO NOT EXTEND UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS! DO NOT!"

Supply-side Economics: Tea Party Style

Andrew Leonard covers the opposition to the Obama-McConnell tax deal coming from Tea Party star Michele Bachman. I’m tempted to say that her comments make me feel 30 years younger (with the hesitation that this is the 30-year anniversary of when some twit named Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon). After all, 30 years ago we were mocking supply-siders and their Laugher Curve. Andrew notes:

And as for what the country can afford? The total cost of the tax cut package unveiled yesterday, counting the extension of all the Bush tax cuts, the new payroll tax cut, the unemployment benefit extension and the reinstated (at a historically low level) estate tax comes to around $800 billion-$900 billion over the next two years. The cost of extending unemployment benefits for 13 months is about $60 billion. If your worry is "massive spending" then there are more appropriate places to direct your ire than unemployment benefits ... we should looking very closely at which tax cuts or social welfare policies are most likely to give us the biggest bang for the buck, in terms of encouraging economic growth. And on that score, spending money on unemployment benefits gets a very high rating. Extending unemployment benefits is a sensible move for a government when it is stretched for funds when economic growth is slow and the goal is to increase demand.

In Michele Bachman’s world – is $60 billion much larger than $800 billion? Or does she really believe reducing taxes does not add to the deficit? The latter seems to be the world Art Laffer lives in. Of course, Laffer might argue that fiscal stimulus ala tax cuts will increase real GDP. The endorsement of the Obama-McConnell tax deal from the National Review certainly sounded very Keynesian:

But the deal is still worth taking: If it won’t do much good for the economy, it will avert a serious blow to it.

Of course, a temporary tax cut on the very well to do likely is not going to generate much in the way of additional consumption demand, which is why increase government spending has a bigger bang for the buck. While Tea Party types say they’d like to reduce unemployment, they oppose even modest increases in government spending. And while they say they abhor deficits, they want large tax cuts with little bang for the buck. Go figure!

Jared Bernstein Defends the Tax Deal as Jobs Creating

Out of respect for Jared Bernstein, let me open with the case that his boss (Vice President Biden) wants him to make:

As this plan takes shape -- and I'll be the first to admit there's stuff to like and dislike about it -- one thing is clear: it's a much stronger plan on our number one priority -- JOBS -- than anyone expected.

Jared does criticize those low “bang for the buck” things that Mitch McConnell wanted in the deal. And getting an extension of unemployment insurance and a reduction in payroll taxes will help stimulate the economy a little. But let’s be realistic – the amount of stimulus relative to the output gap is very low. And we see nothing in the way of public investment or using Federal revenue sharing to make sure that state and local governments stop laying off their employees. Jared can argue that this is stronger than we expected but then our expectations of what DC politicians will do is far below what we economists could envision as good macroeconomic policy.

Chinese Students' Grim Employment Prospects

I am saddened by the employment prospects for my students, but the problems for Chinese students seem even more severe. I met no university students who expected any desirable jobs. Here is an article that suggests that my own observation of Chinese students was too rosy.

"China's college graduates on average make only 300 yuan, or roughly $44, more per month than the average Chinese migrant worker, according to statistics cited over the weekend by a top Chinese labor researcher and reported today by the Beijing Times."

""It's the first time China has faced such a situation," the paper quoted Cai Fang, head of the Chinese Academy of Social Science's Institute of Population and Labor Economics, as saying Saturday at a conference on Chinese youth. "It's hard to say how long this situation will last." By Mr. Cai's calculations, college graduates have consistently earned around 1,500 yuan a month since 2003. Migrant workers, meanwhile, have seen their monthly wages rise from an average of 700 yuan to 1,200 yuan over roughly the same time period, Mr. Cai said, according to the Beijing Times."

Chin, Josh. 2010. "Value of a Chinese College Degree: $44?" Wall Street Journal China Realtime Report (22 November).

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/11/22/value-of-a-chinese-college-degree-44/#