Redistribution, Inequality and Growth

Posted on May 22, 2014 by jackheidel

Most people agree that income inequality and wealth inequality are increasing in the U.S. Likewise anyone who’s paying attention is aware of our slow rate of GDP growth, averaging 2.2% per year, since the end of the recession five years ago. Is there a connection between inequality and slow growth? Maybe!
First of all, it is important to note that income inequality in the past 30 years has been greatly offset by federal taxes and transfer programs as shown in the October 2011 chart (above) from the Congressional Budget Office.
Secondly, the Economist discusses this situation in the article “Inequality v growth”. The economists Jonathan Ostry, Andrew Berg and Charalambos Tasangarides have shown (see above chart) that a large amount of redistribution affects growth more negatively than a smaller amount of redistribution.
Economists generally agree that the recovery has been slowed down by a lack of demand by consumers for more goods. So the recovery should speed up as less affluent consumers feel secure enough to spend more money. Two things, to start with, can make this happen. One is a restoration of the housing market so that homeowners have more equity (which can be borrowed and spent). Another way to accomplish this is with government redistribution programs, such as food stamps and Medicaid, for low income people.
But there is an even better way to put money in the hands of people who will spend it, and at no cost to the government. I am talking about broad based tax reform, whereby tax rates are lowered for everyone, offset by closing tax loopholes and shrinking deductions, which primarily benefit the wealthy. For the two-thirds of taxpayers who do not itemize deductions, and who tend to be the less affluent, such a tax rate cut will put money in their pockets, most of which they will spend.
Such a tax program as this would be a direct shift of resources from the wealthy to everyone else, thereby lessening inequality. It would stimulate the economy, creating millions of new and higher paying jobs, and thereby increasing tax revenue and lowering the deficit. Win, win, win, win!

What Is the Best Way to Boost the Economy and Create More Jobs?

Posted on May 20, 2014 by jackheidel

The publication of two new books is causing a reevaluation of the financial rescue and its aftermath, e.g. “The Case Against the Bernanke-Obama Financial Rescue”. The two books are “Stress Test” by Timothy Geithner, former Treasury Secretary, and “House of Debt” by the economists Atif Mian and Amir Sufi.
Mr. Mian and Mr. Sufi maintain that the government’s response to the financial crisis should have focused less on saving the banking system and more on the problem of excessive household debt. They discovered in their research that, during the housing bubble, less affluent people were spending as much as 25 – 30 cents for every dollar of increase in housing equity. When the bubble burst, and housing prices started to fall, these borrowers cut way back on spending which caused many businesses to lay off employees. The authors propose setting up a government program to help borrowers decrease what they owe in underwater mortgages.
Five years after the end of the Great Recession it would still be very helpful to speed up our lagging economy. Here are three different possible ways to do this:

The Keynesians say the best way to stimulate the economy is with more government (deficit) spending. For example, spending several hundred billion dollars a year on infra-structure would create hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new construction jobs. I think this is a good idea, but only if it’s paid for with a new tax (e.g. a carbon tax or a wealth tax).
The Mian/Sufi plan, as described above, would alleviate mortgage debt problems for millions of middle class homeowners who are still under water, encouraging them to spend more money which would in turn boost the economy. The problem is that the M/S plan creates a moral hazard for mortgage holders unless it’s paid for by mortgage insurance which would raise costs for borrowers.
Broad-based tax reform, with lower tax rates for everyone, paid for by closing loopholes and limiting tax deductions for the wealthy, would automatically put more income in the hands of the two-thirds of tax payers who do not itemize deductions. These middle class wage earners would tend to spend this extra money thereby boosting the economy.

The point is that there very definitely are ways to boost the economy, some better than others, and it should be a top priority of Congress and the President to get this done.

The Government We Deserve II. How Do We Make It Better?

Posted on May 18, 2014 by jackheidel

“When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.”
Edward Gibbon, 1737 – 1794, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

In my last blog, “The Government We Deserve,” I reported on a new book “Dead Men Ruling” by Eugene Steuerle, which shows how “Dead and retired policymakers have put America on a budget path in which spending will grow faster than any conceivable growth in revenues.”
Our country is clearly in a huge predicament. We can get out of this jam by:

Restoring Balance: our legislators should only appropriate spending for one year at a time.
Investing in our future: i) opportunity is a more optimistic goal than adequacy ii) policies to assure adequacy often reduce opportunity by creating negative incentives (e.g. food stamps, disability programs, housing vouchers) iii) means-tested programs are often anti-family (i.e. discourage marriage)
Building a Better Government: our main goal today should be to restore fiscal freedom by allowing future generations to create the government they need and want. i) constrain the automatic growth in big federal tax subsidy, health and retirement programs ii) reorient government towards investment, children, opportunity and leanness

“Both parties talk the talk about deficit reduction but fail to see that the deficit is but a symptom of a much broader disease – the extent to which both have tried to legislate far too much of what future government should look like.”
Here are the kinds of fixes which are needed:

Eschew Constitutional Fixes (i.e. a balanced budget amendment, term limits).
Require Presidents to propose budgets which balance over a business cycle.
A True Grand Compromise (end automatic growth of entitlements, generate revenues needed to pay current bills).

As Mr. Steuerle says, “If the obstacles to progress are considerable, the payoffs are enormous.”

The Government We Deserve

Posted on May 15, 2014 by jackheidel

“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 1900 – 1944

An important new book, “Dead Men Ruling,” by the Urban Institute’s C. Eugene Steuerle, has just been published. Here is the flavor of its message:
“Dead and retired policymakers have put America on a budget path in which spending will grow faster than any conceivable growth in revenues. … The same policy makers also cut taxes so much below spending that they created huge deficits, which have now compounded the problem with additional debt.”
“Both sides have largely achieved their central policy goals – liberals have expanded social welfare programs, conservatives have delivered lower taxes. Both now cling tenaciously to their victories.”
In short, “our central problem is the loss of fiscal freedom.” There are “four deadly economic consequences of this disease:

rising and unsustainable levels of debt,
shrinking ability of policymakers to fight recession or address other emergencies,
a budget that invests ever less in our future and is now a blueprint for a declining nation, and
a broken government, as reflected in antiquated tax and social welfare systems.”

In addition there are “three deadly political consequences:

a decline of ‘fiscal democracy’ depriving current and future voters of the right to control their own budget,
a classic ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ where both left and right leaning elected officials conclude that they will suffer politically if they lead efforts to impose either spending cuts or tax hikes, and
rising hurdles to changing our fiscal course because, to do anything new, requires reneging on past promises of rising benefits and low taxes, that voters have come to expect.”

In other words the U.S. is in a very difficult predicament. Mr. Steuerle thinks it will take a major “fiscal turning point” to escape from the present danger. Both sides will have to make big concessions in order for us to get out of this jam. But how is this possibly ever going to happen? More next time!

A Rescue That Worked But Left a Troubled Economy

Posted on May 13, 2014 by jackheidel

The occasion of the publication of Timothy Geithner’s book “Stress Test,” giving his version of the financial crisis, has led to a number of newspaper articles looking back at the Great Recession and its aftermath. The New York Times’ economics reporter David Leonhardt has such an analysis “A Rescue That Worked, But Left a Troubled Economy” in today’s NYT.
“The Great Depression created much of modern American government and reversed decades of rising inequality. Today, by contrast, incomes are rising at the top again, while still stagnant for most Americans. Wall Street is flourishing again.”
“The financial crisis offered an opportunity to change this dynamic. But the (Dodd-Frank) law seems unlikely to transform Wall Street, and the debate over finance’s huge role in today’s economy will now fall to others. Should the banks be broken up? Should the government tax wealth? Should the banks face higher taxes?”
In my opinion, the real problem is not our financial system but the strong headwinds which are slowing down the economy.

Globalization of markets which creates huge pressure for low operating costs.
Labor saving technology which also puts downward pressure on wages.
Women and immigrants having entered the labor market in huge numbers, and therefore greatly increasing the labor supply.

The loss of wealth in the Great Recession also means that even people with good jobs have less money to spend. What we sorely need is faster economic growth to create more jobs and higher paying jobs. How do we accomplish this?

The best way to boost the economy is with broad-based tax reform to achieve the lowest possible tax rates to put more money in the hands of the working people who are the most likely to spend it. Such lower rates can be offset by closing the myriad tax loopholes and at least shrinking, if not completely eliminating, tax deductions which primarily benefit the wealthy.
Lowering corporate tax rates, again offset by eliminating deductions, providing a huge incentive for American multinational companies to bring their profits back home for reinvestment or redistribution.

With millions of unemployed and underemployed workers, reviving our economy with a faster rate of growth should be one of the very top priorities of Congress and the President. Survey after survey show that this is what voters want. Why isn’t it happening?

Do Programs for the Poor Become Poor Programs?

Posted on May 11, 2014 by jackheidel

Most Americans agree that achieving better educational outcomes is one of the key ingredients to providing better opportunities for moving up the economic ladder. As one way to accomplish this, more and more attention is being given to early childhood education. The preeminent early childhood program in the U.S. is Head Start, which was begun in the 1960s as part of LBJ’s war on poverty. But a 2012 federal evaluation of Head Start showed that children who have participated in Head Start have been no more successful in elementary school than those who haven’t.
In today’s New York Times, UC Berkeley Professor David Kirp addresses this problem, “The Benefits of Mixing Rich and Poor”. Mr. Kirp reminds us that only low-income children are eligible to participate in Head Start. He then goes on to describe several pre-K programs around the country which serve kids from both low-income and middle class families together. These programs achieve much better success for low-income kids without sacrificing the interests of the well-off kids.
A similar phenomenon has been observed in the Learning Community of Omaha Nebraska. The LC is a six year old experiment created by the State to close the achievement gap between children from low income and middle class families. The Open Enrollment facet of the LC enables low income kids to receive free transportation to transfer to other schools within the 11 individual school districts which comprise the LC. The above chart shows that resident FRL (free and reduced price lunch) students in low poverty schools perform substantially better than resident FRL students in high poverty schools. In other words, low-income students benefit academically from associating with middle class students.
The question is how to design efficient public policy around this widely noted and common sense observation. It would be too expensive, in today’s tight budget climate, to provide universal pre-K education for all three and four year olds in the U.S. But the Rosemount Center, in Washington D.C., one of the pre-K programs described by Mr. Kirp., admits children from middle class families on a paying basis.
This could become an affordable and effective national model for providing pre-K education for rich and poor together!

Why We Need a Carbon Tax II. The Scientific Evidence Is Very Strong

Posted on May 8, 2014 by jackheidel

A few days ago I made the argument that “we need a carbon tax” because global warming is real and our response to it should not be defaulted to regulatory action by the EPA and individual states acting on their own. Just two days ago the U.S. Global Change Research Program released a voluminous new report, the “Third National Climate Assessment”, giving many examples of how dramatically global warming is already affecting life in the United States as well as all over the world.
Perhaps the most direct effect in the U.S. is an increase in average temperatures of almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. This means that summers are longer and hotter and that winters are shorter and warmer, on average. Hotter temperatures mean that there is more moisture in the atmosphere and rain comes in heavier downpours.
It is going to be harder and harder for doubters to deny the accumulating evidence. Global average temperatures have also increased by almost 2 degrees F in the past century. The most dramatic, and visible, evidence worldwide for climate change is the shrinking of the artic polar icecap measured each year in September. Although the ice extent fluctuates from one year to another, the pattern of decline, as shown below, is clearly evident.
A worldwide response is urgently needed and the wealthiest country in the world should step up to the plate and lead the way. A carbon tax does not mean an end to using to using fossil fuels but simply provides a strong incentive, without government picking winners and losers, to cut back on carbon emissions. We can be confident that, with a strong economic incentive, American technology will figure out how to remove carbon from fossil fuels during combustion.
The sooner we begin a program along these lines, the better off we will all be in the very near future as the world continues to get warmer.

An Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families

Posted on May 6, 2014 by jackheidel

It is generally agreed that income inequality in the U.S. is bad and getting worse. Before we can address it effectively, we have to understand what is causing it. In this regard the Wall Street Journal had an article recently, “Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families”, by two scholars, Robert Maranto and Michael Crouch, from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
Mr. Maranto and Mr. Crouch call attention to what they call “the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single parent families during the past half century. … In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. … This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.” In addition, “more than 20% of children in single-parent families live in poverty long-term, compared with 2% of those raised in two parent families.” It is estimated “that 41% of the economic inequality created between 1976-2000 was the result of changed family structure.”
The authors wonder why there is not more public attention given to this depressing state of affairs and conclude that

Intellectual and cultural elites lean to the left and it is primarily social conservatives who promote traditional family structure.
Family breakup has hit minority communities the hardest. Therefore public discussion can be characterized as being racist.
This is a very hard problem to solve. Marriage and childrearing involve highly personal choices which cannot be dictated by society.

In this regard, my March 11, 2014 post “A balanced and Sensible Antipoverty Program”, emphasizes the need to at least remove marriage penalties from government welfare policy.
As the authors conclude, “The first step is to acknowledge the problem.”

Why We Need a Carbon Tax

Posted on May 4, 2014 by jackheidel

The Los Angeles Times recently ran the article “U.S. electricity prices may be going up for good” (reprinted in today’s Omaha World Herald), stating that “Experts warn of a growing fragility as coal-fired plants are shut down, nuclear power is reduced and consumers switch to renewable energy.”
The article goes on to say that “the problems confronting the electrical system are the result of a wide range of forces: new federal regulations on toxic emissions, rules on greenhouse gases, state mandates for renewable power, technical problems at nuclear power plants and unpredictable price trends for natural gas.”
“New emissions rules on mercury, acid gases and other toxics by the Environmental Protection Agency are expected to result in significant losses of the nation’s coal generated power, historically the largest and cheapest source of electricity. Already two dozen coal generating units are scheduled for decommissioning.”
“At the same time, 30 states have mandates for renewable energy that will require the use of more expensive wind and solar energy. Since these sources depend on the weather, they require backup generation – a hidden factor that can add significantly to the overall cost to consumers.”
Here is what we should do instead:

First, we agree that global warming is for real. For me, the clearest and most irrefutable evidence is the rapidly diminishing extent of the artic polar icecap each summer. There is much evidence that cause of global warming is the use of fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Secondly, even though the problem is worldwide, and China emits more CO₂ than the U.S., nevertheless the U.S. has a responsibility to provide the leadership of which only it is capable.
The problem is, as the LA Times article makes very clear, our disorganized and inefficient response to the problem. Separate and haphazard responses by individual states are not nearly enough, rather we need a coherent national response.
A national carbon tax of perhaps $20 per ton of CO₂ emitted would provide a uniform market mechanism to encourage the reduction of carbon emissions from fossil fuels or their replacement by alternate sources of energy. Coal power plants, for example, would not be forced to shut down but would have to figure out how to emit less carbon in order to remain economically viable.

This would be a big improvement over our current situation!

The Growth Deficit

Posted on May 1, 2014 by jackheidel

I am a fiscal conservative, as well as a social moderate, which means that I don’t fit very easily into a standard mold. I am non-doctrinaire, non-ideological and mostly nonpartisan. I vote for candidates from both major parties as well as independents. I prefer a balanced government with neither party in complete control.
My most direct sources of information on fiscal and economic issues are the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, both of which I read assiduously on a daily basis. When these two newspapers disagree on a particular issue, then I usually decide that the truth lies somewhere in between.
Our biggest national problem right now, in my opinion, is the stagnant economy. In today’s WSJ, the lead editorial, “The Growth Deficit”, clearly describes how bad the situation is. Since the Great Recession ended in June 2009, our rate of GDP growth has averaged 2.2% per year. This compares with a 4.1% annual rate of growth for all post-1960 recovery periods.
Such a slow rate of growth causes all sorts of problems. First of all, it explains why our unemployment rate is still so high at 6.7% after five years of recovery. This means that between 15 and 20 million people are still unemployed or underemployed. Such a large human toll means a huge increase in government welfare expenses for food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc. Higher unemployment also means less tax revenue collected by the federal government. This translates into much larger deficit spending, adding to the already massive national debt.
There are lots of things which can be done to increase growth, for example:

Lowering tax rates on individuals to put more money in the hands of the 2/3 of Americans who do not itemize deductions on their tax returns. They’ll spend this extra income and create more demand! Pay for this by closing loopholes and deductions, which are used primarily by the wealthy. Besides stimulating the economy, this will simultaneously address increasing income inequality.
Lowering tax rates on corporations to encourage multinationals to bring their foreign profits back home for reinvestment or paying dividends. Again, balanced by eliminating deductions enjoyed by privileged corporations.
Relax regulatory burdens on small businesses where most new jobs are created.
Reform immigration procedures by boosting the number of H1-B visas to attract more highly skilled, and entrepreneurial, foreign workers.
Grant trade promotion authority to the President to speed up new trade agreements.

We should be clamoring for our national leaders to be acting on these fronts. A strong economy is the very backbone of our success as a nation!

It Does Not Add Up

Jack Heidel's blog on fiscal responsibility