Tag: fiscal policy

Leverage

By James Kwak

One of Congress’s top priorities this week and next is to pass some kind of funding bill that will keep the federal government operating past December 11. There are basically two ways this could happen. Option A is that Congress could pass a continuing resolution that maintains funding at current levels until, say, the end of January—that is, when we’ll have a new Congress and a new administration. Option B is to pass an omnibus fiscal year 2021 spending bill that determines discretionary spending levels through September of next year when the federal government’s fiscal year ends.

The Democratic leadership apparently is pushing for Option B because—well, probably because they think it’s the responsible thing to do and will make them look good with that tiny but all-important segment of voters who know the difference between a continuing resolution and a proper appropriations bill. But, in doing so, they could be throwing away one of the few levers that Democrats will have to actually accomplish anything during the next congressional term.

The point is that government funding measures are must-pass bills. No one likes a government shutdown, and historically Democrats have been able to pin most of the blame for them on Republicans, dating back to 1995, when Bill Clinton successfully portrayed Newt Gingrich as a zealot who was out to slash Medicare (which he was). If Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock come through in Georgia on January 5, Democrats will have majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 2010—but such razor-thin minorities that Joe Manchin is already rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of becoming the most important person on Capitol Hill.

In this context, an omnibus budget reconciliation bill could represent one of the Biden administration’s few real chances to pass anything through Congress. Bills passed through reconciliation are not subject to the Senate filibuster (which isn’t going away, regardless of what you think about it), which means they only need a bare majority. The need to avert a government shutdown creates the pressure to bring people (the so-called moderates) to the table to come to a deal. Now, Joe Manchin isn’t suddenly going to become a sponsor of the Green New Deal because the Democrats have a majority in the Senate—he’s going to extract everything he can in exchange for his vote. But there is still a lot that Democrats could accomplish in an omnibus spending bill: money for the DOJ Civil Rights Division, money for the EPA, money for election protection, money for low-income housing, and so on. This is an opportunity to dictate discretionary spending priorities a full eight months earlier than we would otherwise be able to do. And would you rather negotiate with Manchin or with Mitch McConnell?

And yet the Democratic leadership in Congress seems inclined to give up the potential chance to write their own appropriations bill in January in exchange for a bill that they have to negotiate with McConnell and . . . Donald J. Trump. (The vague new COVID-19 stimulus bill that people are talking about is currently being positioned as a separate piece of legislation—which makes sense because it’s toxic to most Republicans.) It’s almost as if they don’t want the opportunity to govern. Sure, Ossoff and Warnock could lose in January, but we would still be in a stronger position than we are now, with Biden in the White House.

During the next two years, we are going to have precious few chances to pass any kind of meaningful legislation. Why are we throwing one of them away?

More Bad Excel

By James Kwak

In 1975, Isaac Ehrlich published an empirical study purporting to show that the death penalty saved lives, since each execution deterred eight murders. The next year, Solicitor General Robert Bork cited this study to the Supreme Court, which upheld the new versions of the death penalty that several states had written following the Court’s 1973 decision nullifying all existing death penalty statutes. Ehrlich’s results, it turned out, depended entirely on a seven-year period in the 1960s. More recently, a number of studies have attempted to show that the death penalty deters murder, leading such notables as Cass Sunstein and Richard Posner to argue for the maintenance of the death penalty.

In 2006, John Donohue and Justin Wolfers wrote a paper essentially demolishing the empirical studies that claimed to justify the death penalty on deterrence grounds. Donohue and Wolfers attempted to replicate the results of those studies and found that they were all fatally infected by some combination of incorrect controls, poorly specified variables, fragile specifications (i.e., if you change the model in minor ways that should make little difference, the results disappear), and dubious instrumental variables. In the end, they found little evidence either that the death penalty reduces or increases murders.

Now the macroeconomic world has its version of the death penalty debate, in the famous paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin released a paper earlier this week in which they tried to replicate Reinhart and Rogoff. They found two spreadsheet errors, a questionable choice about excluding data, and a dubious weighting methodology, which together undermine Reinhart and Rogoff’s most widely-cited claim: that national debt levels above 90 percent of GDP tend to reduce economic growth.

Continue reading “More Bad Excel” →

Mitt Romney And Extreme Fiscal Policy

By Simon Johnson

As the presumptive Republican vice presidential candidate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and his plans for the federal budget are drawing increasing interest. Mr. Ryan has been chairman of the House Budget Committee since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections and has articulated a vision for federal public finances that is quite different from what other prominent Republicans have been advocating – including Mitt Romney.

The contrast between Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan tells us a great deal about the competition among fiscal ideas within the Republican Party. It also highlights the challenge Mr. Romney will face in November, if he is shifting rightward toward Mr. Ryan’s approach to budget policy, away from independents in the center of the political spectrum. Continue reading “Mitt Romney And Extreme Fiscal Policy” →

Does Lindsey Graham Think Before He Opens His Mouth?

By James Kwak

“The debate on the debt is an opportunity to send the world a signal that we are going to remain the strongest military force in the world. We’re saying, ‘We’re going to keep it, and we’re going to make it the No. 1 priority of a broke nation.’ ”

That’s Lindsey Graham, as reported in the Times today (emphasis added).

Graham is trying to make the case that we should undo the automatic reductions in defense spending mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (last summer’s the debt ceiling compromise). But as a conservative Republican, he is also wedded to the notion that the United States is “broke.” (Which, of course, is nonsense. If you’re not sure why, see chapter 5 of White House Burning.) Graham has also signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, meaning that the federal government can only solve its fiscal problems by cutting spending, not increasing tax revenues.

To make this balancing act work, Graham makes the claim that a country that is “broke” (again, his word) should continue to make military spending its top priority—including military intervention in both Syria and Iran. Does he really think that, under that assumption, we should continue slashing domestic spending so we can continue paying for expensive overseas adventures? Yet this is the unavoidable, nonsensical conclusion of today’s Republican orthodoxy.

New “Debt for Beginners” Section

By James Kwak

I created a new “Debt for Beginners” page on the White House Burning website. It’s a collection of previous articles, mainly written for a general audience, on deficits, the national debt, government spending, taxes, and the politics thereof. It’s intended as a starting point for people who want to get up to speed on these issues.

Loyal readers are probably familiar with all the material already.

The Fetishization of Balance

By James Kwak

I generally don’t bother reading Thomas Friedman. A good friend gave me a copy of The World Is Flat, and I started reading it. Somewhere in the first one hundred pages Friedman has an extended discussion of workflow software (as a key enabler of globalization) and I realized that he knew absolutely nothing about workflow software, so I stopped reading it and gave it away.

Another friend pointed out Friedman’s op-ed in the Times earlier this week in which he argues for “grand bargains” and “balanced” solutions to, well, all of our problems. For example, he says, “We need a proper balance between government spending on nursing homes and nursery schools — on the last six months of life and the first six months of life.” Despite the nice ring, that’s about as empty a statement as you can make about public policy.

But this is the one that really confused me (and my friend):

“The first is a grand bargain to fix our long-term structural deficit by phasing in $1 in tax increases, via tax reform, for every $3 to $4 in cuts to entitlements and defense over the next decade.”

Continue reading “The Fetishization of Balance” →

Baseline Scenario Goes Glossy

By James Kwak

Simon and I wrote an article for the November issue of Vanity Fair about—well, about a lot of things. It’s about the eighteenth-century rivalry between Great Britain and France, the lessons of the American Revolutionary War, the Hamilton-Jefferson debates (again), and the War of 1812. It’s also about present-day fiscal policy and budgetary politics. The main question we take up is what the Founding Fathers (from the Constitutional Convention through their involvement in the War of 1812) thought about a strong central government, the national debt, and the taxes necessary to pay for them, and what that means for today. All that in less than 3,000 words, so there isn’t a lot of room for all the details.

You can read the article online here.

My Medicare Deficit Solution

By James Kwak

David Brooks, perhaps realizing that it was a bad idea to swallow a politician’s PR bullet points whole, is now backpedaling. The Ryan Plan, which he originally hailed as “the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” now has the principal virtue of existing: “Because he had the courage to take the initiative, Paul Ryan’s budget plan will be the starting point for future discussions.”

As I’ve discussed before, the Ryan Plan is just one bad idea dressed up with the false precision of lots of numbers: changing Medicare from a health insurance program to a cash redistribution program that gives up on managing health care costs. Here’s the key chart from the CBO report:

Continue reading “My Medicare Deficit Solution” →

Moment of Blather

By James Kwak

David Brooks’s commentary on Paul Ryan’s “budget proposal” is entitled “Moment of Truth.” Brooks falls over himself gushing about his new man-crush, calling it “the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes.” “Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity,” he continues.

Gag me.

Continue reading “Moment of Blather” →

How Dumb?

By James Kwak

In his latest column, “Dumbing Deficits Down,” Paul Krugman has harsh words for Republican nonsense about the budget deficit:

Today’s Republicans just aren’t into rationality. They claim to care deeply about deficits — but they’ve spent the past two years putting cynical, demagogic attacks on any attempt to actually deal with long-run deficits at the heart of their campaign strategy.

But he’s only slightly less harsh toward President Obama:

The president and his aides know that the G.O.P. approach to the budget is wrongheaded and destructive. But they’ve stopped making the case for an alternative approach; instead, they’ve positioned themselves as know-nothings lite, accepting the notion that spending must be slashed immediately — just not as much as Republicans want. . . .

the White House is aiding and abetting the dumbing down of our deficit debate.

In this context, this concluding passage from the book I just read seems appropriate:

U.S. political leaders now seem determined to follow Nero’s reputed example when setting budget policy. They dicker with trivial deficit reduction packages, and then on a regular basis stoke the fire by passing much larger tax cuts, while the long-term budget picture keeps getting worse. They know what is happening, as do the voters.

Continue reading “How Dumb?” →

There Are Still No Fiscal Conservatives In The United States

By Simon Johnson

Following President Obama’s State of the Union address, there is a great deal of discussion about whether we might now be edging our way towards fiscal responsibility.

Unfortunately, most of our political elite – both left and right – is still living in a land of illusions. They cannot even seriously discuss what would be required to bring our true fiscal position under control – remember that most of the recent damage to our collective balance sheet was done by big banks blowing themselves up. No one who refuses to confront the power of those banks can be taken seriously as a fiscal conservative.

Even those interest groups that prominently espouse fiscal responsibility refuse to confront this reality. There are no fiscal conservatives in the United States; at this stage it is all pretence.

Pretence is apparently all we are likely to get, as long as the money keeps rolling in (see Argentina for details).

What Is President Obama’s Fiscal Message?

By Simon Johnson

President Obama is finally attempting to cut through some of the disinformation and confusion that surrounds US fiscal policy in general and taxes in particular. His suggestion this week is: let’s (effectively) raise taxes on relatively high income people – by letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those people – while introducing temporary tax breaks that will more directly stimulate business investment and presumably hiring.

Any way you cut it, the numbers involved are not big enough to impact unemployment significantly by November, but these ideas – and the Republican rival suggestions currently on the table – are more about symbols, messages, and midterm votes than about accelerating the economic recovery. Seen in those terms, the president is still missing a key argument in both economic and political terms. Continue reading “What Is President Obama’s Fiscal Message?” →