ID Cards Will Soon Be Passé

We have lots of ID cards in this country, but none of them are comprehensive, in the sense of really identifying you, universal and mandatory.  The reason is political opposition.  Every time someone suggests a system of universal identification, such as for voting or enforcing immigration laws, there is an uproar, and the idea is canned.

But now we are told that the FBI is moving to a biometric ID system that will almost certainly extend to all of us.  It can be used for surveillance and police work and also normal administrative functions.  As with every technology that has ever been developed, sooner or later it will do everything it can do.

But no uproar (yet).  Why?

Woodward "Corners" Obama, Only To Crash Into The Debt Ceiling

Top headline in Washington Post today reads, "A President Cornered," an extract from Bob Woodward's book due out Tuesday, _The Price of Politics_, from which leaks of various sorts have already been floating around.  Much as in a story in WaPo earlier this year, the focus seems to be that Obama blew the negotiations with Boehner and Congressional Republicans over last year's raising of the debt ceiling (although according to that report, the crucial blow came from the the "Gang of Six" who held a badly timed press conference, with Obama publicly praising them).  In this account, Woodward quotes Boehner that Obama was "moaning and groaning" at one crucial point, and new "hero" emerges, Harry Reid's Chief of Staff, David Krone,who gets much praise for lecturing Obama to his face about not having a "Plan B" besides his demand that there not be another round of raising the debt ceiling prior to the election, with Krone apparently responsible for the Plan A that did involve such a second round increase before the election.  In the end,Obama got his way on not having such second round, although we do face the idiotic "fiscal cliff" after the election as the price for the ceiling increase, but somehow he is nevertheless depicted as some hapless whining loser who does not know simple things that some Senatorial Chief of Staff knows.

Needless to say, Woodward is not an economist and specializes in these sorts of inside accounts from various players in big negotiations or situations who provide supposedly fascinating or devastating tidbits about presidents in particular, but in this case he seems to really miss several points about this, quite aside from trying to make Obama look stupid for insisting on his point about not wanting to have a second argument over this before the election, something that at this point looks to have been a very wise thing to insist on, given that the GOPsters are blaming him for all those public sector jobs being lost when they blocked his request last year to provide funds to state and local governments that would have largely stopped those layoffs from occurring.  The main point is that Woodward does not seem to understand how ridiculous the whole debate was to begin with.

This gets back to something I have pounded on here repeatedly: the US is the only nation in history to have had a nominal debt ceiling.  It should be abolished. We passed it in 1917 in the wake of the adoption of the income tax, and it has been raised over 70 times since with never anything more than a staged and nominal fuss, with everybody always knowing that it needed to be raised, given that Congress had passed a budget accepted by the president that entailed violating it.  So, there was always a constitutional conundrum that if a debt ceiling was smacked into of either violating the ceiling or violating the authority of Congress and the president to tax and spend as they voted and signed to do.  The thing has always been ridiculous and probably unconstitutional (14th Amendments says government must pay proper bills it owes).  Even conservative observers have noted this since the 80s, such as Bruce Bartlett.

 Woodward never mentions this issue, although there was much public discussion of it during the debate, with even Bill Clinton calling for Obama to simply declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional and proceed forward accepting whatever the judgment of the markets that happened, which quite likely would not have amounted to much.  There might have been a downgrade, but there was anyway due to the Republicans threatening to hold up raising the ceiling and triggering an outright default (with markets blithely ignoring that anyway, some US government securities rates going so low as to become negative in some cases recently).

What is depressing in the story, aside from such stupidities as the reporting of this whiner Krone lecturing Obama about not having a Plan B to back up his hard work on the worthless Plan A, is that there seems to have been no discussion at all by the insiders of this option to declare the ceiling unconstitutonal.  The heavyweight seems to have been Treasury Secretary Geithner, who pressured Obama to sign the Plan A if it passed Congress in order to avoid a default.  Woodward pompously quotes Geithner as saying this was a moral issue as well as just being a political and economic one, but if Geithner thought that, he should have taken seriously the option of declaring (with good reason) the ceiling unconstitutional.  Clearly he did not view that as an option, but why he did not is not reported in this account by Woodward.

So, as this will come up again, I think Obama and whomever he replaces Geithner with, assuming he is reelected, will seriously reconsider the constitutional option.  Obama himself is reported as having provided crucial arguments for doing so, that the political opposition has become so irresponsible that they are willing to play blackmail for their demands by threatening to engineer an actual default.  This irresponsibility must be confronted fully and brought to an end. Only declaring and enforcing the abolition of the debt ceiling on constitutional grounds will achieve this, which almost certainly would involve an eventual trip to SCOTUS.

BTW, I hope the rest of Woodward's book is not as biased and stupid as this selection put into WaPo today, but I suspect it will be.

Are Lower Gasoline Prices Worth More Pollution?

Apparently Paul Ryan thinks so:

She asked him how he was going to "improve the situation" of sky high gas prices. "This is not just something that squeezes family budgets, it squeezes businesses," Ryan answered. "It also gives us a bad foreign policy in that we are so dependent on other countries for our oil imports, it's the biggest part of our trade deficit and so what's frustrating about the Obama administration's policies are they've gone to great lengths to make oil and gas more expensive." ... The House Budget Chairman told the questioner not to "forget" that President Obama "tried to grant, jam through congress, a national energy tax designed to make energy more expensive." "Don't forget the fact that he has tried lots of things to try and prevent drilling for natural gas and oil on public lands," Ryan said. "Lets not forget the fact that the regulations coming out of the EPA are making it harder for us to harness home grown American energy." A national energy tax is another term for cap-and-trade legislation that is usually used by opponents of the measure. Supporters say the legislation forces companies that pollute to pay, but opponents like Ryan say it is simply another tax on businesses and makes energy pricier for the average American. Ryan then moved on to how he would lower gas prices in a Romney/Ryan administration, but stayed away from specifics, instead saying domestic production of energy should be increased, something he mentions on the stump daily.

In other words, Ryan’s only answer to the woman’s question was basically “drill, baby, drill”. This article did not we are domestically producing more oil and importing less – consistent with what President Obama has been saying and contrary to the spin from Paul Ryan. Given that Romney economic advisor Greg Mankiw has often called for a Pigou Club tax on carbon emissions, I’m wondering if he will comment on this Ryan spin?

Robert J. Gordon is STILL a Buffoon!

"By definition, whenever hours per capita decline, then output per capita must grow more slowly than productivity." -- Robert J. Gordon, "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds."

At the Globe and Mail Report on Business, Ian McGugan discusses Gordon's NBER Working Paper in "A heretic's view of the growth dogma." The Sandwichman responds:

Dear Mr. McGugan,

I was very interested to read your column today about Robert Gordon's NBER Working Paper, "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?" and downloaded Professor Gordon's paper from the NBER site. Although I would agree with Professor Gordon that the expectations -- based on past experience -- of future growth may be questionable, I must note a critical flaw in his analysis. On page 16 of the paper, Gordon states, "By definition, whenever hours per capita decline, then output per capita must grow more slowly than productivity." The problem with this "definition" is that it is a tautology that conceals the distinction between two potential feedback loops in the ratio between hours per capita and productivity.

Arithmetically, total hours is both the numerator in "hours per capita" and the denominator in "productivity." Output is the numerator in both "productivity" and "output per hour" and thus can be factored out by multiplying both sides of the equation by the reciprocal of output (1/output). So, yes, by definition output per capita MUST grow more slowly than productivity. So what? This is a tautology that obscures more than it explains. By such ultra-Malthusian logic, any increase in productivity, given a stable or growing population, must be a "bad thing" because the increase in output per capita will always be slower!

What Professor Gordon overlooks is that reductions in the hours of work per person can lead to gains in total output when current work-time arrangements are not optimal. Those work-time arrangements can include overwork of some people combined with unemployment and underemployment of others. Such disparities are not well captured in such indicators as "hours per capita", which are averages based on dividing one aggregate by another. Even so, even if large reductions in hours per capita led to massive increases in output per capita, the tautology expressed by Gordon would still be trivially "true". That is, it would be arithmetically correct but irrelevant and misleading for all practical purposes.

A similar confusion between arithmetical results and practical outcomes leads Gordon to prescribe immigration as the panacea to the growth dilemma he purports to uncover. And what could be more logical than a purely arithmetical solution to a purely arithmetical problem? Professor Gordon overlooks the possibility that the number of immigrants that could be productively absorbed by a given economy might be constrained by such other factors as fixed capital investment (including infrastructure), natural resources and social and cultural factors. Treating immigration as "numbers" that can be increased or decreased at will like turning on a water tap is an exercise in academic wool gathering.

Traditionally, economists, including Professor Gordon, have routinely dismissed proposals for work-time reduction as being based on a "lump-of-labor" assumption that allegedly presumes an arithmetical solution to unemployment without considering the practical constraints. They make the perennial claim even where no such fallacious assumption can be demonstrated. It is therefore a delicious irony to see Professor Gordon himself plucking both his "problem" and his "solutions" out of the arid arithmetical void. To be blunt, Professor Gordon here commits precisely the "lump-of-labor fallacy" that he elsewhere glibly (and unjustifiably) accuses others of!

Cheers,

Tom Walker

P.S.: In answer to Gordon's question, would I rather have an Ipad or a flush toilet, I would much rather have a flush toilet with the capability of disposing of the "heretical orthodoxy" of pedantic scribblers like Professor Robert J. Gordon.

Tax Cuts Are Not Revenue Neutral By Assumption – What May Be Missing with Rosen’s Analysis

Greg Mankiw reads Harvey Rosen and emphasizes this:

I analyze the Romney proposal taking into account the additional income that might be generated by economic growth. The main conclusion is that under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on high-income individuals about the same. That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral.

Brad DeLong reads the same paper and notes:

If raising the net-of-tax rate for the upper class from 65% to 72%--an increase of 10% in the natural log--raises national income by between 3 and 7 percent, then wouldn't… • Reagan's ERTA raising the net-of-tax rate for the upper class from 30% to 50%--an increase of 51% in the natural log--have raised national income by between 15 and 35%? • Reagan's raising in 1986 of the net-of-tax rate for the upper class from 50% to 72%--an increase of 36% in the natural log--have raised national income by between 11 and 25%? • Clinton's lowering in 1993 of the net-of-tax rate for the upper class from 72% to 60%--a decrease of 18% in the natural log--have lowered national income by between 5 and 12%? • Bush's raising in 2001 of the net-of-tax rate for the upper class from 60% to 65%--an increase of 8% in the natural log--have raised national income by between 2 and 5%? We simply do not see such supply responses in the historical record, do we? To propose that they exist is wholly inconsistent with the fact that American growth 1938-81 was faster than since 1981, right? What am I missing here?

Maybe what is missing is something Harvey wrote that Greg forgot to mention:

Another important issue seems to have gotten short shrift in the debate over the proposal. To assess the effects of moving from tax system X to tax system Y, one needs to know what X and Y are. In this case, X is the status quo, and Y is the Romney proposal. Much of the current controversy has arisen because the Romney proposal is not fully articulated, and therefore analysts can disagree about what kinds of tax preferences would be eliminated.

I submit that Harvey was really modeling something we should call tax system Z – especially if he wants to follow in the tradition of the 2001 AER paper written by David Altig et al. That paper was the kind of supply-side experiment reasonable conservatives such as Bruce Bartlett advocate, which include not only reductions in marginal tax rates but base broadening changes in the tax code so as to effectively pay for revenue losses from the reductions in those marginal tax rates, that is, a fiscal policy change that is deficit neutral even before we worry about any alleged supply-side benefits. The tax system Z clearly differs from the Romney proposal (Y) as Romney has not proposed any offsets either in the form of elimination of tax preferences or spending reductions. In fact, Romney rejects the Medicare savings that used to be discussed by Paul Ryan so as to criticize Barack Obama for wanting to implement Medicare savings. Romney would also spend more on defense that would a President Obama. Greg Mankiw used to get why this mattered:

I used the phrase "charlatans and cranks" in the first edition of my principles textbook to describe some of the economic advisers to Ronald Reagan, who told him that broad-based income tax cuts would have such large supply-side effects that the tax cuts would raise tax revenue. I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don't.

If you read what Mankiw’s first edition said about the initial Reagan tax cuts, you will see a very traditional description of classical crowding-out. The fiscal stimulus from Reagan’s tax cuts sine any substantive reductions in government spending (domestic cuts yes but offset by increases in defense spending) lowered national savings which increased real interest rates and lowered investment demand. So whatever small favorable supply-side benefits we may have received were overwhelmed by crowding-out effects. Is there any reason fiscal policy will be different under Romney? I don’t see it. One might argue that having Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard as economic advisors would change everything but recall they were also advisors to George W. Bush. How did that work out?

The Worst Misrepresentation

I am reacting to watching Bill O'Reilly's coverage last night of the Dem convention.  He was bloviating loudly in his inimitable way about four supposed reasons why nobody in their right mind should vote for Obama because they indicate how terribly worse off people are than we were four years ago, the question du jour.  The facts in all of these are on their face undeniable, but for most of them there is the simple matter that on Jan. 20, 2009 the trends on them were awful, whereas now they are improving, if not in all cases as fast as we would all like.  The four are unemployment, gasoline prices, per capita income, and national debt.  However, the one that appeared to have the biggest gap between then and now was gasoline prices, and O'Reilly was particularly bloviatory about it.  How could any sane person vote for Obama when gasoline prices have risen from $1.82 per gallon to $3.87 per gallon!?!?!?

Well, that is easy.  Prices were $4.11 per gallon on July 7, 2008, higher than now or at any time since or before then (at least in nominal terms; over a century ago they were as a high as the equivalent of $10 per gallon).  But then a funny thing happened.  Not only was there probably a speculative bubble in oil going on at that time that was peaking out, but we were heading into this massive financial collapse that led to the massive real economic collapse that we were in the middle of when Obama took over.  The price of crude oil peaked about then at $147 per barrel, higher than anytime since, and then crashed hard to nearly $30 per barrel by about the end of the year, with an accompanying decline in prices at the pump. Indeed, ironically, the bottom had passed and those prices were going back up again on January 20.

In any case, nobody should take remotely seriously any commentator getting all huffy and puffy about that particular datum in the tale of supposed woe regarding this four year comparison.

Drill, Baby, Drill as Fiscal Stimulus

Digby quotes the part of Romney’s Thursday speech where he laid out his five point plan to create 12 million new jobs and provides this summary:

So, they are going to create jobs by opening up drilling, privatizing schools, off-shoring business, slashing government, cutting taxes and cutting regulations. In other words, the same exact agenda they always have. Well except for the war-as-stimulus he might have to start.

The traditional fiscal part might be confusing to those who think standard arithmetic applies to the Republican promise to balance the budget as Romney want to cut taxes – and as Paul Krugman notes increase defense spending:

OK, so deficit spending hurts the economy — unless it’s spending on the military (or on the medical-industrial complex), in which case cutting spending destroys jobs. Leave on one side the fact that those possible defense cuts are the result of a Republican ultimatum, not Obama policy. And where exactly is deficit reduction supposed to come from? The GOP wants massive tax cuts; but spending on defense must rise, as must health care spending.

Wait – I thought Paul Ryan wanted to slash Federal health care spending but I guess Romney wants to restore the Medicare spending growth that President Obama hs strived to curb. So how to score the Romney plan on the traditional fiscal side strikes me as something on the order of impossible. I’m also confused on whether President Romney would increase our commitment to education or continue the path of less resources for public education. I’m sure all of us wish he’d stop contradicting himself on these various fiscal issues. There have been several claims as to the wonders of the drill, baby, drill aspect of the Romney plan including a White Paper from Mark P. Mills of the Manhattan Institute:

An affirmative policy to expand extraction and export capabilities for all hydrocarbons over the next two decades could yield as much as $7 trillion of value to the North American economy, with $5 trillion of that accruing to the United States, including generating $1–$2 trillion in tax receipts to federal and local governments. Such a policy would also create millions of jobs rippling throughout the economy. While it would require substantial capital investment, essentially all of that would come from the private sector.

While this all sounds wonderful – one has to ask why the private sector has not embarked on a drill, baby, drill strategy. Investing now for the future would normally require the private sector to weigh future benefits against the cost of capital today but that cost of capital is currently near zero. The Republican claim is that environmentally friendly regulation increases the cost of a drill, baby, drill approach, but then it is standard economics that the social marginal cost of exploring for oil likely does exceed the private costs. I guess the Republicans want us to just ignore the possibility of another Gulf oil disaster. But I would suspect the main reason we don’t see drilling in everyone’s backyards right now is the uncertainty of whether that drilling will produce a gusher versus a dry oil. Then again – leave it to Mr. Romney to propose all sorts of subsidies for such drilling, which of course, would have no effect on the deficit per his new fangled arithmetic. Actually, I think Keynes said it best:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing. The analogy between this expedient and the goldmines of the real world is complete. At periods when gold is available at suitable depths experience shows that the real wealth of the world increases rapidly; and when but little of it is so available, our wealth suffers stagnation or decline. Thus gold-mines are of the greatest value and importance to civilisation. just as wars have been the only form of large-scale loan expenditure which statesmen have thought justifiable, so gold-mining is the only pretext for digging holes in the ground which has recommended itself to bankers as sound finance; and each of these activities has played its part in progress-failing something better. To mention a detail, the tendency in slumps for the price of gold to rise in terms of labour and materials aids eventual recovery, because it increases the depth at which gold-digging pays and lowers the minimum grade of ore which is payable.

Drilling for oil whether it is really there or not has become the replacement for digging for gold. Who knew Mitt Romney was such a Keyensian? Of course, Keynes also noted that building houses and the like (such as new schools and other useful infrastructure) would be more sensible.

The Matrix: The Intersection of War, Economic Theory, and the Economy

Vincent Portillo and I are working on a new book, The Matrix: The Intersection of War, Economic Theory, and the Economy.  So far it is still remains an exploration rather than a finished research project.  We intend to post our progress from time to time, hoping to initiate some comments and conversation.

Thank you in advance.

Here is the link.

http://michaelperelman.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/matrix2.pdf

Romney-Ryan v. Obama Long-term Fiscal Policy – More Mankiw Endorsed Spin

Greg Mankiw plays for Team Romney by sending us to Keith Hennessey:

Here is your tax levels cheat sheet. • Over the past 50 years federal taxes have averaged 18% of GDP. • Governor Romney proposes taxes “between 18 and 19 percent” of GDP. • The House-passed (“Ryan”) budget proposes long-term taxes of 19% of GDP. • President Obama’s budget proposes long-term taxes at 20% of GDP.* • The Bowles-Simpson plan proposes long-term taxes at 21% of GDP. I put an asterisk after the Obama line. The Ryan and Bowles-Simpson plans would stabilize debt/GDP in the long run, while President Obama’s would not. Since President Obama has not proposed a long-term fiscal policy solution, we don’t know whether his long-term fiscal solution, if he had one, would raise taxes above 20% of GDP.

Maybe it is fair to put an asterisk after the Obama line but to claim that Paul Ryan’s “budget” would eventually stabilizes the debt/GDP ratio strikes me as a very ill informed statement. The spending path that Ryan asked CBO to simulate pretended we could reduce everything the Federal government spends outside of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to less than what Mitt Romney wants to spend on defense spending along. And we have all seen lots of discussions on how both Obama and Ryan want to curb the growth of Medicare spending in ways Romney has rejected. In other words, we need magic asterisks to make Ryan’s spending path come to something that can be financed with taxes = 19% of GDP. As far as either Romney or Ryan getting taxes to be anything close to 19% of GDP requires an exercise in high order fuzzy math as they are proposing substantial tax cuts without specifying the tax offset spelled out in Bowles-Simpson. I know Chris Christie said something last night about shared sacrifices and tough choices in terms of “respect”, which to me says that Romney-Ryan is not respecting American voters. But to just flat out lie about Romney-Ryan being fiscally responsibly is the height of disrespect.

Governor Romney’s Employment Record

Team Romney is boosting that as governor of Massachusetts (January 2003 to January 2007), he lowered the state’s unemployment rate to 4.7%. He fails to put this in perspective in several ways. When he became governor, the state unemployment rate was only 5.6% as compared to the national unemployment rate, which was 5.8%. And when he was leaving office, the national unemployment rate had declined to 4.6%. In other words, he presided during a period when the overall economy was finally recovering from the 2001 recession.

Our graph shows another important qualification to Romney’s boost. The state’s labor force (LF) grew by a meager 0.4% during his tenure so employment (EM) only had to rise by 1.5% to lower the unemployment rate. Nationwide, employment growth (per the payroll survey) grew by 5.25%. In other words, there is not much to really brag about as far as employment in Massachusetts during Mitt Romney’s tenure as governor.

Sinnlos

One of the more painful spillovers from the Eurozone crisis is that, from time to time, I have to try to make sense of the writings of Hans-Werner Sinn.  Since he is the creator of a questionnaire that asks managers about their business outlook, he is regarded as an oracle by much of the German press.  Unfortunately, his writing, which is ostensibly about economics, only randomly and sporadically intersects normal economic reasoning.

He has been on a rampage for over a year regarding the Target2 system, under which national central banks in the euro area are credited and debited for transfers between them.  Because of the large surplus run up by the Bundesbank, which corresponds to deficits at the Banks of Greece, Spain and other southern realms, Sinn thinks that hardworking Germans are financing a “stealth bailout” of nearly a trillion euros.  The fact that all euros are claims against the European Central Bank, and not against individual CB’s of eurozone countries, seems lost on him.  Somehow, allowing euro transactions to clear despite capital flight from Madrid and Athens to Frankfurt or Munich constitutes a raid on German wealth (rather than the economies of the countries from which capital is fleeing).

But I digress.  In his latest screed on the topic, Sinn writes

Germany agreed to relinquish the Deutsche Mark on the condition that the new currency area would not lead to direct or indirect socialization of its members’ debt, thus precluding any financial assistance from EU funds for states facing bankruptcy. Indeed, the new currency was conceived as a unit of account for economic exchange that would not have any wealth implications at all.

Take a look at this second sentence, which I’ve bolded for emphasis.  It seems to say that, in some magical way, the euro was designed to facilitate exchange without ever serving as an asset.  A money that is not an asset.  This is coming to you from the most influential “economist” in the German-speaking world.  Am I missing some other way to assign a meaning to this sentence that is remotely compatible with elementary economics?

Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane’s New Blog – For Team Romney

Greg Mankiw calls this competition. So why do I suspect there is more coordination to put forth the Republican view that we need less taxes? Not only did Greg post this:

Adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of output losses than tax-based ones. Spending-based adjustments have been associated with mild and short-lived recessions, in many cases with no recession at all. Tax-based adjustments have been associated with prolonged and deep recessions.

But Glenn’s new blog starts by touting this argument:

Our view of balanced fiscal policy is more in line with Christina Romer, the first chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. In 2010, she published a study in the American Economic Review that said, “Tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained, and highly significant negative impact on output.” Romer found that, on average, every tax increase of one percent of GDP is linked to a three percent drop in real GDP over the next 10 quarters. A tax increase is the false mother to prosperity.

Where to begin? Of course, we should note that Glenn is misrepresenting the views of Christina Romer – a foul that Brad DeLong called on Greg Mankiw earlier. Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane also love to use the term “balance” when they describe their views on fiscal policy. Sort of like Fox News call itself “fair and balanced”. I guess as we watch the Republican convention, we should now enjoy the fact that Team Romney now has two economist blogs.

David Brooks on the Romney-Ryan Medicare Plan

Can David read Mitt Romney’s mind?

When you look at Mitt Romney through this prism, you see surprising passion. By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has put Medicare at the center of the national debate. Possibly for the first time, he has done something politically perilous. He has made it clear that restructuring Medicare will be a high priority. This is impressive. If you believe entitlement reform is essential for national solvency, then Romney-Ryan is the only train leaving the station. Moreover, when you look at the Medicare reform package Romney and Ryan have proposed, you find yourself a little surprised. You think of them of as free-market purists, but this proposal features heavy government activism, flexibility and rampant pragmatism. The federal government would define a package of mandatory health benefits. Private insurers and an agency akin to the current public Medicare system would submit bids to provide coverage for those benefits. The government would give senior citizens a payment equal to the second lowest bid in each region to buy insurance. This system would provide a basic health safety net. It would also unleash a process of discovery. If the current Medicare structure proves most efficient, then it would dominate the market. If private insurers proved more efficient, they would dominate. Either way, we would find the best way to control Medicare costs. Either way, the burden for paying for basic health care would fall on the government, not on older Americans. (Much of the Democratic criticism on this point is based on an earlier, obsolete version of the proposal.)

Uh David – Romney has made everything Ryan has said on Medicare obsolete. The truth is that Ryan and Obama have the same basic goal of capping the growth of Medicare over the next 10 years but Romney has decided that he doesn’t want any such reductions. Which by the way makes David’s close another lie:

The priority in this election is to get a leader who can get Medicare costs under control. Then we can argue about everything else. Right now, Romney’s more likely to do this. All of which causes you to look over to the Democrats and wonder: Why don’t they have an alternative? Silently, a voice in your head is pleading with them: Put up or shut up. If Democrats can’t come up with an alternative on this most crucial issue, how can they promise to lead a dynamic growing nation?

Again David – Obamacare strives to curb Medicare spending growth over the next 10 years by as much as the Ryan proposal wanted to do AND Romney said no! Now there is a big difference in the out years as Ryan proposes an underfunded voucher system that would lead to rising total health care cost rising for seniors but with less help from the government. So to say “we would find the best way to control Medicare costs. Either way, the burden for paying for basic health care would fall on the government, not on older Americans” makes two lies in just two sentences. David Warsh writes:

Brooks is a prestidigitator, that wonderful word borrowed from the French, descended from the Latin, meaning juggler, deceiver.

Me thinks Mr. Warsh is being way too kind to Mr. Brooks.

Some Frank Talk About Carbon Taxes

Good that Robert Frank wants to put climate change back on the agenda and points to the necessity of pricing carbon.  No matter which way the political winds are blowing, this problem is too important to ignore.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t help that mainstream economists keep getting this issue wrong.  They reinforce assumptions that dealing with carbon will dramatically lower the living standards of ordinary people, and they play into the kinds of political stereotypes that have stymied progress for two decades.

The good news is that we could insulate ourselves from catastrophic risk at relatively modest cost by enacting a steep carbon tax.

Presenting the necessary policy as a carbon tax makes the job nearly impossible right from the start.  Why lead with the promise/threat to tax people?  Pricing carbon is only a means, not an end.  The logical way to begin is to call for a system of carbon permits, just like we have hunting and fishing permits so that elk and trout aren’t harvested to extinction.  Auction off the permits and you put a price on carbon, but the means-end distinction remains transparent.  For one thing, you discuss tightening or loosening a permit system in terms of how many permits you want to issue, not on cost.  Our carbon policy should be calibrated in terms of the atmospheric carbon concentration we are targeting, not on how much revenue should be collected from a carbon tax.

Aside from its political virtues, a permit system has technical advantages that I discussed in a previous post.

A carbon tax would also serve....other goals. First, it would help balance future budgets. Tens of millions of Americans are set to retire in the next decades, and, as a result, many budget experts agree that federal budgets simply can’t be balanced with spending cuts alone. We’ll also need substantial additional revenue, most of which could be generated by a carbon tax.

Using carbon revenues to reduce income taxes is a terrible idea that hammers low and middle income people.  A price on carbon functions like a consumption tax and is regressive.  Using it to offset even mildly progressive income taxes is just one more way to bring about upward redistribution.  We’ve got enough of that already.  If you return the money as an equal rebate to all citizens, you’ve got downward redistribution.  What is most interesting from my point of view is that the issue of distribution doesn’t seem to matter to Frank at all; at least he never brings it up in this op-ed piece.

Incidentally, because a carbon tax is a consumption tax imposed on a very small subset of goods (essentially fossil fuels as consumed directly and indirectly), it is highly volatile compared to revenue from a tax on all the income we receive, regardless of how we spend or don’t spend it.

High unemployment persists in part because businesses, sitting on mountains of cash, aren’t investing it because their current capacity already lets them produce more than people want to buy. News that a carbon tax was coming would create a stampede to develop energy-saving technologies. Hundreds of billions of dollars of private investment might be unleashed without adding a cent to the budget deficit.

Yes, making fossil fuels more expensive will spur new investment in energy-saving technology.  But arguing that a radical change in relative prices is economically stimulative makes as much sense as saying that a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina is an economic blessing.  Destroy capital and there is demand for new capital, but common sense suggests that there is also a cost involved, perhaps much greater.  In the case of carbon, if large parts of the capital stock become uneconomic, the livelihoods of millions of people will be at stake.  When Bill McKibben points out that 80% of the fossil fuels now known to be recoverable under the ground has to stay there, it is clear that enormous, wrenching price adjustments are required.

Take the case of cars.  Getting to adequate carbon targets will mean not only much more efficient cars, but a lot less driving as well.  It will also mean less replacement of older cars, since as much of the carbon impact comes from production as operation.  This will be bad news for auto workers, auto-dependent communities and economies propped up by the employment and profits of the auto industry.  (Germany take note.)  Everyone knows this.  That is why there is great political resistance to taking the sort of forceful action we would need to limit global temperature increases to 2º C or so.

Pretending the problem doesn’t exist doesn’t help.  The only way to make progress politically is to recognize the issue and link action against climate change to other measures that can make the transition bearable.  Make economic commitments to workers and regions at risk.  Propose infusions of public investment sufficient to absorb those displaced by high fossil fuel prices.  Discuss these issues openly and forge alliances with unions and other organizations that represent those at risk.  Happy talk like Frank’s goes nowhere.

Economists have (or should have) expertise that helps address these issues.  The starting point is knowing that they exist.

The Romney-Ryan Energy Plan and Jed Clampett

Take a listen to this Earl Scruggs tune as we read the Romney-Ryan Energy Plan. They are promising energy independence on a platform that is essentially “drill baby drill” - as they cite some claim from the Institute for Energy Research that we have 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil, which they claim would satisfy U.S. energy needs for the next two centuries. The Institute also notes a speech by Thomas Donohue of the Chamber of Commerce:

Our nation is on the cusp of an energy boom that is already creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, revitalizing entire communities, and reinvigorating American manufacturing. Unconventional oil and natural gas development is on pace to create more than 300,000 jobs by 2015 in Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia alone. Take a look at what’s happening in North Dakota. The state is booming. Unemployment is at 3.4%. Oil production just surpassed that of Ecuador—one of the members of OPEC. Energy is a game changer for the United States. It is, as the saying goes, “the next big thing.” With the right policies, the oil and natural gas industry could create more than 1 million jobs by 2018. Not only can we create jobs, but we can cut our dependence on overseas imports while adding hundreds of billions of dollars to government coffers in the coming years.

Yep – in 8 years, we will all be like Jed Clampett loading up our trucks and moving to Beverly:

Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed / A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed / Then one day he was shootin at some food / And up through the ground came a bubblin crude. / Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.

Oil bubbling up in everyone’s backyard does sound like a stretch and what the Institute is claiming differs sharply from what this Congressional Research Service report notes:

U.S. proved reserves of oil total 19.1 billion barrels, reserves of natural gas total 244.7 trillion cubic feet, and natural gas liquids reserves of 9.3 billion barrels. Undiscovered technically recoverable oil in the United States is 145.5 billion barrels, and undiscovered technically recoverable natural gas is 1,162.7 trillion cubic feet. The demonstrated reserve base for coal is 488 billion short tons, of which 261 billion short tons are considered technically recoverable.

But what does “undiscovered technically recoverable” even mean. This document puts this in perspective:

Excluding the United States, the world holds an estimated 565 billion barrels (bbo) of undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional oil; 5,606 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional natural gas; and 167 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas liquids (NGL), according to a new assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) released today ... All of these numbers represent technically recoverable oil and gas resources, which are those quantities of oil and gas producible using currently available technology and industry practices, regardless of economic or accessibility considerations. This assessment does not include reserves – accumulations of oil or gas that have been discovered, are well-defined, and are considered economically viable.

So we have 20 percent of the undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional oil reserves in the world that may not be economically viable. I’m not sure that Romney-Ryan quite grasp the figures that they are touting. The private sector would certainly have to consider the private marginal cost of discovering and extracting any such oil, which likely would seriously understate the social marginal cost of producing oil. I wonder if Romney-Ryan has forgotten about the BP Gulf Oil Spill?