Soaring Profits, Too Few Jobs and Low Interest Rates

Posted on April 3, 2014 by jackheidel

“Low interest rates aren’t working, but we need a debate about what will,” declares The Wall Street Journal’s William Galston yesterday in “Soaring Profits but Too Few Jobs”. “Corporate profits after taxes in the fourth quarter of 2013 rose to an annual level of $1.9 trillion – 11.1% of GDP, a postwar high. Meanwhile, total compensation – wages and benefits – fell to their lowest level of GDP in at least 50 years.”
“Businesses are sitting on tons of cash . . . and they’re choosing to invest their capital in hardware, rather than hiring. The reason: they believe that investing in technology is likely to have a better effect on sales than hiring more people.” Furthermore, “today’s (low) interest- rate regime lowers the cost of capital – and therefore of capital investment relative to labor.”
Meanwhile,” Republicans are banging away at the Affordable Care Act while Democrats are busy scheduling votes on a grab bag of subjects designed to boost turnout from the party’s base in the fall elections. The economic problems we face are getting lost in the partisan din.”
We are in a very tough situation. Raising interest rates might give a marginal boost to hiring more workers over capital investment but it will also greatly increase interest payments on our massive and rapidly increasing national debt. And meanwhile we have a stagnant economy with millions of people either unemployed or underemployed. What should we do? How about

Boosting the economy with lower individual and corporate tax rates, paid for by cutting back on tax preferences. This will especially help small businesses grow and hire more employees. It will also encourage multinational corporations to bring their foreign profits back home for reinvestment.
Addressing rising income and wealth inequality by establishing an annual 1% wealth tax on individual assets in excess of $10 million. This will raise about $200 billion per year and could be used to set up a huge infrastructure improvement program to put millions of people back to work.

Interest rates will eventually return to normal levels of 5% or so and this will create a big squeeze on the federal budget. So we also need to get federal spending under control as soon as possible. But this is a separate issue.
Just boosting the economy and putting people back to work while addressing inequality in a very visible way will get us started on a path to recovery.

Conservatives Need to Take Income Inequality More Seriously

Posted on April 1, 2014 by jackheidel

Americans are currently having a lengthy discussion about income and wealth inequality. A contribution by the Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth, “The Myth of Increasing Income Inequality”, points out, for example, that

The lowest 20% income quintile only has 1.7 persons per family unit while the highest quintile has 3.1 persons per family unit.
In 1970, 18% of households had only one person as compared with 27% of households in 2012.
In 1970 62% of women were married compared with 52% of women in 2012.

Clearly each of these factors will increase income disparities between households. Another recent study, from the National Bureau of Economic Research “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility”, concludes that, although the rungs of the income ladder have grown further apart, the chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs has not changed.
But from a public perception point of view the Pew Research Center’s recent report, “Most See Inequality Growing, but Partisans Differ over Solutions”, is much more significant. It points out that:

54% of all Americans say that taxes should be raised on the wealthy and corporations in order to expand programs for the poor.
Only 35% believe that lowering taxes on the wealthy to encourage investment and economic growth would be a better approach.
Unfavorable opinions of the Tea Party have increased from 25% in 2010 to 49% today.
The public has more confidence in Democrat’s handling of healthcare by a 45% to 37% margin.
Just 42% to 38% favor Republicans in handling the economy.

My conclusion from all of this data is that fiscal conservatives need to do a much better job of showing sympathy and concern for those who are struggling at the lower ends of the income scale. Success in implementing the sound policies which are needed to turn things around depends on accomplishing this!

Do We Need a New School of Economics?

Posted on March 25, 2014 by jackheidel

“Consider the following scenario. You are an airline pilot charged with flying a planeload of passengers across the Atlantic. You are offered the choice of two different aircraft. The first aircraft has been prepared by chief engineer Keynes and the second by chief engineer Hayek.
You have to choose which plane to use, so naturally you ask the advice of the two engineers. Keynes urges you to use his aircraft, offering a convincing explanation of why Hayek’s plane will crash on take-off. Hayek urges you to use his aircraft, offering an equally convincing explanation of why Keynes’s plane will crash on landing.
At loss as to which plane to choose, you seek the advice of two leading independent experts – Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Marx assures you that it does not matter which aircraft you choose as both will inevitably suffer catastrophic failure. Similarly, Smith also reassures you that it does not matter which aircraft you choose, as long as you allow your chosen craft to fly itself.”
Thus begins a fascinating new book, “Money, Blood and Revolution: How Darwin and the doctor of King Charles I could turn economics into a true science,” by the fund manager and economist, George Cooper.
Mr. Cooper sets up a circulatory model of democratic capitalism whereby rent, interest payments and profits flow from low income people at the bottom of the pyramid to the wealthy at the top. And then tax revenue (collected mostly from the wealthy) is redistributed downward in the form of government programs.
According to Mr. Cooper, the financial crisis was caused by a combination of lax regulation and excessive credit and monetary stimulus. The question is what to do about it. Mr. Cooper says:

Stop adding to the problem. High student debt and high mortgage debt are still being supported by government programs.
Change the course of the monetary river. Quantitative easing does not work because it just puts money into the hands of the wealthy and they have no incentive to spend it.
Change the course of the fiscal river. Instead put money into the hands of the people at the bottom of the pyramid with expanded government spending on infrastructure (paid for by taxing the wealthy).

Without endorsing all of Mr. Cooper’s suggestions, he nevertheless has many good ones and expresses them in a highly entertaining style!

Do We Really Need a Wealth Tax?

Posted on March 20, 2014 by jackheidel

Our dire fiscal and economic problems are crying out for a bold solution. We need to simultaneously stimulate our economy to grow faster and create more jobs, raise sufficient tax revenue to pay for our growing spending commitments, and address a widening inequality gap which threatens to undermine the basic principles of a free and just society. How are we going to accomplish all of these tasks at the same time?
It seems to me that the best way is to thoroughly reform our income tax system based on the following principles:

Lower tax rates on marginal income to encourage more investment and entrepreneurship. Such changes can be made revenue neutral by eliminating deductions, loopholes and other tax preferences. This would apply to corporations as well as individuals.
Establish a new low percentage (1% – 2%) wealth tax with a relatively high personal exemption ($5 million – $10 million). This would bring in approximately $200 billion per year to be used for reducing the deficit. Equally as important it would be a visible sign that the wealthy are making a significant contribution towards solving our fiscal problem. This will make it more acceptable to lower marginal tax rates on income in order to boost economic growth.

Fiscal conservatives often oppose any increase in tax revenue because, they think, it is likely to be used for new spending rather than for lowering the deficit. One way to overcome this concern is to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. This would make it much harder to increase spending. The problem is that it will be very hard for Congress to pass such an amendment and have it ratified by ¾ of the states.
But something has to be done. The longer we wait and the more debt we build up, the more painful it will be to extract ourselves when the next crisis occurs as it surely will.

Wealth and Taxation

Posted on March 16, 2014 by jackheidel

As I reported in my last blog post a few days ago, wealth inequality in the United States and the rest of the developed world is growing rapidly and is likely to get much worse in the foreseeable future. This is happening because income from wealth, i.e. the return on investment, typically grows faster than wages and GDP. As income inequality also grows, and top wage earners have more and more money to invest, then the gap between investment income and wage income will become even wider. There is nothing wrong with this and the more money that is reinvested in our economy, the faster it will grow and the more jobs that will be created.
At the same time that huge new wealth is being created we have an archaic tax system in the U.S. which is not only incredibly complicated and inefficient, but also discourages investment because the top individual and corporate rates are so high. And it doesn’t collect enough tax to pay our bills. We have huge deficits already and the CBO says that they’ll just keep getting worse.
Making government operate more efficiently with less spending is highly desirable but will only go so far. Every government program has a constituency of supporters who complain when their own program is targeted for cuts. And the biggest and most expensive, the entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare, have the largest constituency of all, over 50 million retirees at the present time and growing rapidly as the baby boomers retire at the rate of 10,000 per day.
This huge crunch can only be resolved by fundamental tax reform. Several different ways have been proposed to do this:

Reform the current income tax system by broadening the base, lowering rates and eliminating deductions and loopholes to pay for it. The problem with this approach is that no one wants to give up their own deductions (for mortgage interest, charitable contributions, employer provided healthcare, state and municipal taxes, etc.)
Introduce a consumption tax such as the Graetz Plan which I described in my January 7, 2014 post. It would establish a 14% Value Added Tax on consumption, supplemented by a lower but still progressive tax on incomes over $100,000. It would avoid being regressive on low wage workers by using an Earned Income Tax Credit to offset the Payroll Tax.
Introduce a wealth tax.

Sorry, I’m over my (self-imposed) word limit already. I’ll describe a possible wealth tax in my next post!

Where Have All the Raises Gone?

Posted on March 4, 2014 by jackheidel

In yesterday’s New York Times an editorial asks the question “Where Have All the Raises Gone?”, pointing out that wages for college graduates have been stagnant since 2001 (see the chart below.) A report referred to in the NYT editorial suggests that as the information technology revolution has matured, employer demand for cognitive skills has waned and so some college graduates have had to take lower paying jobs, displacing less educated lower skilled workers in the process. This makes sense and, of course, new hiring has slowed down even more as a result of the recession.
The question then becomes, what, if anything can government do to counteract and overcome this trend? According to the NYT, “what’s needed to raise pay are policies like a higher minimum wage, trade pacts that foster high labor and regulatory standards, and more support for union organizing.”
Of course there is another point of view and it is expressed very well in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal by Mortimer Zuckerman, the Chairman and Editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, “Fight Inequality With Better Paying Jobs”. Mr. Zuckerman declares that “income inequality isn’t so much the problem as income inadequacy. A more robust economy, stoked by growth-oriented policies from Washington, would help produce the jobs and opportunities that millions of Americans need to climb the economic ladder.” He suggests that what is needed is:

Lower corporate tax rates so that American multinational companies will bring their foreign earnings back home.
Get healthcare costs under control (Obama Care doesn’t do this).
Cut back on unnecessary regulations to encourage more business investment.
Train more skilled workers. The National Federation of Independent Businesses reports that 38% of its members have job openings they can’t fill.
Restore H1-B visa levels to the higher levels of earlier years – 195,000 per year compared to only 65,000 today. Skilled immigrants start many new businesses and this is the biggest source of new job creation.

In other words there are lots of things the federal government can do to boost the economy. As Mr. Zuckerman says, “The political system is failing us. Washington doesn’t seem to be listening as our political parties are focused more on ideological conflict than the good of the country.”

Truth and Myth about Inequality

Posted on February 25, 2014 by jackheidel

Two of my favorite columnists are the Brooking Institution’s William Galston, a social economist who has a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal and the economics journalist Robert Samuelson who writes for the Washington Post.
Most people agree that income inequality in the U.S. is steadily getting worse. Mr. Galston make a good case (see my last post) that it is primarily caused by the large gap between the rising productivity of American workers and the stagnant level of their pay which has developed since 1973. He thinks that we need a fundamentally new social contract which links worker compensation to productivity. This, of course, is a tall order and it is not at all clear how such a new order would be achieved.
Mr. Samuelson has a different perspective: “Myth-making about Economic Inequality”. For example:

The poor are not poor because the rich are rich
Most of the poor will not benefit from an increase in the minimum wage because only 6% of the 46 million poor people have full time jobs
All income groups have gained in the past three decades, even though the top 1% has gained the most (see the above chart from the CBO, December 2013)
Widening economic inequality did not cause the Great Recession

These two perspectives on inequality are quite different but not contradictory. Basically what Mr. Samuelson is saying is that we have to be careful in how we address this problem or we’ll just make it worse. Raising taxes on the rich is unlikely to help and might hurt if it slows down the economy. Raising the minimum wage will only raise a fairly small number of people out of poverty and may cause a lot of unemployment along the way.
My solution: focus on boosting the economy to create more jobs in the short run (tax reform, immigration reform, trade expansion) and improved educational outcomes for the long run (early childhood education, increasing high school graduation rates, better career education).
But I agree with Mr. Galston that it is imperative to lessen income inequality, one way or another. Otherwise as a society we’ll have big trouble on our hands.

Inequality, Productivity and Compensation

Posted on February 13, 2014 by jackheidel

The Brookings Institution social economist, William Galston, has an interesting column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “The U.S. Needs a New Social Contract”, deploring the fact that worker compensation (i.e. wages + benefits) has not kept up with gains in worker productivity since the 1970s. Here is a chart published by the Economic Policy Institute showing the divergence between productivity and compensation for a “typical” ( i.e. in the middle) worker beginning in the 1970s:
The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk has addressed this same question in a recent report “Productivity and Compensation: Growing Together” and shows that the “average” compensation of an American worker does track productivity very closely as shown in the chart below:
What is the explanation for this apparent discrepancy? In fact, it is the difference between the average earnings of U.S. workers and the earnings of the median or middle worker. The very high earnings of the top 10% and the even higher earnings of the top 1% raise average worker compensation way above the income level of the median worker. In other words it is the result of the skewed and unequal distribution of incomes which is heavily weighted toward those at the top of the scale. The typical or median worker is falling behind and is not benefitting from the steady rise in the overall productivity of the American economy. This is what income inequality is all about.
The question is what to do about it. Faster economic growth will create more opportunity by creating more jobs and better paying jobs. Raising high school graduation rates as well as creating high quality technical training programs will also help.
Mr. Galston insists that this is not enough. Too many workers will continue to lag farther and farther behind. We could raise the Earned Income Tax Credit for low income workers but this would be very expensive in our currently tight fiscal situation which is likely to continue indefinitely.
Do we need a new social contract? If so, what form will it take? How will we pay for it? These are indeed very difficult questions to answer!

Does Free Trade Increase Inequality?

Posted on February 2, 2014 by jackheidel

Several days ago, David Bonior, a former Congressman from Michigan, wrote in the New York Times about “Obama’s Free-Trade Conundrum”. “The President cannot both open markets and close the wage gap.” There is an “academic consensus that trade flows contribute to between 10 and 40 percent of inequality increases.” This happens because “there is downward pressure on middle-class wages as manufacturing workers are forced to compete with imports made by poorly paid workers from abroad.”
But there is another point of view, provided, for example, by the report “NAFTA at 20: Overview and Trade Effects”, prepared by the Congressional Research Service about a year ago. “U.S. trade with its NAFTA partners has more than tripled since the agreement took effect (in 1993). (Canada and Mexico) accounted for 32% of U.S. exports in 2012. 40% of the content of U.S. imports from Mexico and 25% of U.S. exports from Canada are of U.S. origin. In comparison, U.S. imports from China are said to have only 4% U.S. content.” In other words, NAFTA at least has been a huge success.
Being able to trade with others is the foundation of private enterprise. Foreign trade is simply an extension of domestic trade. To limit trading opportunities with other countries would be a huge barrier to economic growth and therefore to future prosperity as well.
But at the same time we do want a more equal society as well as well as a more prosperous one. The key to resolving this “conundrum”, as Mr. Bonior puts it, is to address “opportunity inequality” as well as “income inequality.”
It is estimated that each billion dollars in U.S. exports provides employment for about 5000 workers. Nebraska, for example, exported $12.6 billion worth of goods and services in 2012 which translates into 63,000 jobs.
More jobs and better jobs are what create economic opportunity. One way to create more jobs and better jobs is to promote foreign trade by removing as many trade barriers as possible. Hopefully Congress and the President can work together to get this done!

Harnessing Market Forces versus Offsetting Market Forces

Posted on January 21, 2014 by jackheidel

The economist Matthew Slaughter writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that ’High Trade’ Jobs Pay Higher Wages. He points out that the 22.9 million Americans who work for U.S. headquartered multinational companies made an average of $73,338 in 2011 compared with the overall average wage of about $55,000 that year. “Workers in multinational firms earn more, as global engagement fosters innovation and productivity growth.”
“There is a growing concern about stagnant or falling incomes, yet most of the measures proposed to deal with the issue – raising the minimum wage and reinstating unemployment benefits – purport to help workers by offsetting market forces. Less attention is given to harnessing market forces.”
This can be done by “liberalizing U.S. trade, investment, immigration and tax policies.” In other words, we need more trade agreements like NAFTA, which has been so successful in increasing trade in North America. We need more high skilled workers, both domestic and foreign. We need lower corporate tax rates to encourage multinational corporations to bring their trillions of dollars in overseas profits back home.
We should always strive for a more equal society with less income inequality. But the best single way to do this is to create more opportunity by growing the economy, i.e. by harnessing market forces.

It Does Not Add Up

Jack Heidel's blog on fiscal responsibility

Tag Archives: Economic inequality