Who Are the Enemies of the Poor?

Posted on January 14, 2014 by jackheidel

In his usual provocative fashion, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says that Republicans are “Enemies of the Poor” because “they’re deeply committed to the view that efforts to aid the poor are actually perpetuating poverty, by reducing incentives to work.”
But the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, “How the War on Poverty Was Lost”, that “the typical American living below the poverty line in 2013 lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair, equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. He has a car, multiple color TVs and a DVD player. The overwhelming majority of poor Americans are not undernourished and did not suffer from hunger for even one day of the previous year.” In fact we are now spending $600 billion a year of our $3.4 trillion federal budget and another $230 billion by the states to fight poverty. The poverty rate was 19% in 1964 and is 16% today (when government benefits are included).
Mr. Rector reminds us that “LBJ’s original aim (in initiating his antipoverty program) was to give poor Americans ‘opportunities, not doles’. It would attack not just the symptoms of poverty but, more important, remove the causes. By that standard, the war on poverty has been a catastrophe. The root ‘causes’ of poverty have not shrunk but expanded as family structure disintegrated and labor force participation among men dropped.”
So what should our poverty agenda look like going forward? We are already providing the basic necessities of life. Our future efforts should therefore be focused on improving the quality of life for the poor. This means more effective education and job training. It means more effort to keep families together by reducing marriage penalties. But most of all it means providing more opportunities for employment and job advancement. This requires faster economic growth. There are many ways to accomplish this. Back to square one!
The true enemies of the poor are those who refuse to accept the progress which has been made in the War on Poverty and the need to change our approach in order to make further progress.

How Do We Increase Economic Mobility?

Posted on January 12, 2014 by jackheidel

As the Wall Street Journal reported several days ago, “Economic Mobility Is the New Flashpoint”. “Both parties agree the opportunity gap is widening, but the proposed solutions are starkly different.” The Democrats want to increase the minimum wage, extend unemployment benefits, and expand access to college. The Republicans suggest a whole potpourri of approaches such as reforming welfare (including food stamps), extending school choice, cutting taxes, and relaxing regulations on new businesses.
A look at the latest jobs report from the Labor Department should provide the focus which Congress needs to figure out how to increase economic opportunity. Although the unemployment rate dropped substantially to 6.7% from 7.0% at the beginning of December, only 74,000 new jobs were created in December. The explanation is that 347,000 left the labor force last month. The labor force participation rate, the share of the U.S. working-age population employed, age 16 and over, has dropped from 64.5% in 2000, to just under 63% at the beginning of 2008 to near a post-recession low of 58.6% last month (see chart below).
In other words, Congress should be totally focused on speeding up economic growth in order to create more jobs. Since new businesses create the most new jobs, we should indeed relax as many regulations as possible which impede entrepreneurship. We should lower the corporate tax rate from its very high current value of 35% to get American multinational companies to bring their trillions of overseas profits back home for reinvestment in the U.S. Moving to a national consumption tax (see the Graetz Plan discussion in my January 7 post), could mean dropping the corporate tax rate to as low as 15%.
Isn’t is obvious that the best thing we can do to give low income people an opportunity to rise up the economic ladder is to just give them a job in the first place? If they’re ambitious they’ll take any opportunity they can get and run with it!

Oklahoma’s Senator Tom Coburn: We Need More like Him!

Posted on January 2, 2014 by jackheidel

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has an Op Ed column in the Wall Street Journal from two days ago “The Year Washington Fled Reality”, discussing many of the things that are wrong with our national government. Granted that all elected officials “play politics” to some extent or another, nevertheless Dr. Coburn, an obstetrician, is amazingly independent of the reigning political culture. He spent three consecutive terms in the House of Representatives, left Congress for four years, and now is back serving his second term in the Senate. He has announced that he will not run for re-election in 2016 when his present term ends.
Dr. Coburn is constantly drawing attention to, and attacking, the enormous amount of wasteful and inefficient spending approved by Congress. The Popular Romance Project, pictured above, is an example. His office has just published its fourth annual report on government waste, “Wastebook 2013”, detailing 100 different “examples of government mismanagement and stupidity. … Collectively these cost nearly $30 billion in a year when Washington would have you believe everything that could be done, has been done to control unnecessary spending.”
Dr. Coburn has prevailed upon the Government Accounting Office to issue annual reports called “Actions Needed to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial benefits.” Three of these reports have now been issued. Altogether they list almost 400 individual actions which could be taken to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of 162 different program areas.
In spite of all the good work he is doing, Dr. Coburn would be even more effective if he had more help. Fiscal conservatives should stop wasting their time on senseless gestures like trying to defund Obamacare. They need to get down in the trenches with serious deficit hawks like Tom Coburn and whittle away at wasteful programs one by one.

Is the American Middle Class in Decline?

Posted on December 26, 2013 by jackheidel

Many political commentators have been complaining recently about the financial difficulties of the American middle class. For example, a recent report from Bill Moyers and Company, “By the Numbers: The Incredibly Shrinking American Middle Class”, has a chart showing that the median middle class salary, adjusted for inflation, is now no better than it was in 1989 and not much higher than in 1979:
But there is another point of view, very well described by the two economists, Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry, in the Wall Street Journal just about a year ago, “The Myth of a Stagnant Middle Class”. They make several pertinent points:

The Consumer Price Index overestimates inflation by underestimating the value of improvements in product quality and variety.
Wage figures ignore the rise over the past few decades in the portion of worker pay taken as (nontaxable) fringe benefits. Health benefits, pensions, paid leave, etc. now amount to almost 31% of total compensation according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The average hourly wage has been held down by the great increase of women and immigrants into the workforce over the past three decades. Because the economy was (before the Great Recession) so strong, it created millions of jobs for the influx of often lesser skilled workers into the workforce.

Messrs. Boudreaux and Perry point out several other improvements in the quality of life which Americans enjoy:

Life expectancy has increased to 79 years for an American born today, five years longer than in 1980. And the gap in life expectancy between whites and blacks has narrowed.
Spending by households on the basics of food, housing, utilities, etc. has shrunk from 53% of income in 1950, to 44% in 1970 to 32% today.
Although income inequality is rising when measured in dollars, it is falling when measured in terms of our ability to consume. For another example, air travel is now as common as was bus travel in an earlier era. And another: the latest electronic products are available to even middle class teenagers.

Conclusion: We should stop complaining about inequality and thank our lucky stars for the free enterprise system which has been so successful in improving our quality of life.

More on Inequality: What Does the Data Mean?

Posted on December 24, 2013 by jackheidel

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the economist Robert Grady addresses “Obama’s Misguided Obsession With Inequality”. The basic problem is that an important Congressional Budget Office report in 2011, “ Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007”, is easy to misrepresent and misinterpret. Here are three basic pieces of data from the CBO report:
The first chart shows that yes, between 1979 and 2007 the rich did indeed get richer relative to the rest of the population. The second chart shows, however, that median household income increased by 62% during this same time period. And the third chart shows that all five income groups made substantial gains at the same time.
As Mr. Grady says, “Here is the bottom line. In periods of high economic growth, such as the 1980s and 1990s, the vast majority of Americans gain and have the opportunity to gain. In periods of slow growth, such as the past four and a half years since the recession officially ended, poor people and the middle class are hurt the most, and opportunity is curbed. … The point is this: If the goal is to deliver higher incomes and a better standard of living for the majority of Americans, then generating economic growth – not income inequality or the redistribution of wealth – is the defining challenge of our time.”
So then, what is the best way to address income inequality? Should we concentrate on raising taxes on the rich and increasing spending on social programs like we have done in the last five years? Or should we rather concentrate on speeding up economic growth, as Mr. Grady says, in order to create more jobs and more opportunities for advancement?
Compare the enormous growth in the period from 1979 to 2007 with the stagnation of the past five years. Isn’t it obvious which is the better way to proceed?

How Do We Fight Economic Inequality? By Restoring Growth!

Posted on December 17, 2013 by jackheidel

The liberal economist Paul Krugman returns to one of his favorite topics in yesterday’s New York Times, “Why Inequality Matters”. “On average, Americans remain a lot poorer today than they were before the economic crisis. For the bottom 90 percent of families, this impoverishment reflects both a shrinking economic pie and a declining share of that pie.” The problem with Mr. Krugman’s analysis is that he offers no solution beyond more fiscal stimulus: “the premature return to fiscal austerity has done more than anything to hobble the recovery.”
But there is another route to recovery and it is propounded in today’s Wall Street Journal by George Osborne, the United Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, “How Britain Returned to Growth”. “We cut spending and top tax rates, and now deficits are down and jobs are being created at a healthy clip … at the rate of 60,000 per month, roughly equivalent to 300,000 in the U.S. … The corporate tax rate is being cut to 20% from 28%. … As a result, more international firms are moving their headquarters to Britain and investment is flowing into our country.”
Yes, as Mr. Krugman says, economic inequality in the U.S. is bad and getting worse. The question is what to do about it. Shall we try to improve the situation with artificial stimulation, increasing government debt, already very high, for future generations? Or shall we address this inequality by encouraging businesses to grow and expand and thereby raise wages and hire more people.
The good news is that America is the success story of the 20^th century. The bad news is that everyone else in the world has figured this out and is now copying our own best methods. Either we can compete, innovate, stay on top and thrive, or else we can get lazy, stagnate and sink down in the pack.
Will it be more inequality or more growth? The choice is up to us!

Is a Bad Deal Better Than No Deal At All?

Posted on December 12, 2013 by jackheidel

Beltway insiders are praising the just announced budget deal between the Democrats and the Republicans. For example, a news analysis in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Accord Is Departure for Capitol”, suggests that budget politics may be changing, getting any deal is very hard, that perhaps bipartisanship isn’t dead in Washington but that there is still unfinished business. This is a purely euphemistic assessment. All this deal really does is to let the big spenders off the hook.
What it does is to relax the sequester by $63 billion for the next two years for very little in return. The $84 billion in new fees over ten years “officially” reduces the deficit by $21 billion but two year’s worth of new fees is just $16.8 billion. This means that the deficit will actually increase by $46 billion over the next two years.
But the real problem is that the leverage represented by the sequester is being thrown away for the next two years and this sets a bad precedent for the future. For example, we can now assume that the debt limit will also be raised for two more years in February 2014 because there will no longer be any leverage for bargaining for any other changes.
This in turn means that entitlement reform is for all practical purposes dead for the next two years. This is the really hard problem to solve. Big spenders will do anything to avoid dealing with it. Responsible fiscal conservatives know it must be addressed and need all the help they can muster to get something done.
What happens if the budget deal is not passed by Congress? It simply means that the sequester remains in effect and that discretionary spending will be $43 billion lower this current budget year than otherwise. The value of the sequester is to force action on the really thorny issue of reducing entitlement spending. Let’s preserve it for this purpose and not throw it away for nothing significant in return.
Leaders are supposed to address issues, not walk away from them!

How to Create a More Just and Equal Society

Posted on November 24, 2013 by jackheidel

In a recent Washington Post column, “Government is Not Beholden to the Rich”, the economics writer Robert Samuelson shows that the federal government is actually “beholden to the poor and middle class. It redistributes from the young, well-off and wealthy to the old, needy and unlucky.”
For example, in 2006 “53% of non-interest federal spending represented individual benefits and healthcare. Of these transfers (nearly $1.3 trillion), almost 60% went to the elderly. Of the non-elderly’s $550 billion of benefits and healthcare, the poorest fifth of households received half. The non-elderly paid about 85% of the taxes, with the richest fifth covering two-thirds of that. If government taxes and transfers – what people pay and get – are lumped together, the average elderly household received a net payment of $13,900 in 2006; the poorest fifth of non-elderly households received $12,600. By contrast, the net tax payment for the richest fifth of non-elderly households averaged $66,000.”
A couple of months ago a Wall Street Journal Op Ed “Obama’s Economy Hits His Voters Hardest” by the economist Stephen Moore, points out that during the time period 1981 – 2008, the Great Moderation, income for black women was up by 81%, followed by white women up 67%, black men up 31% and, finally, white men up only 8%. Of course, all of these groups have lost income in the last four years, during the very weak recovery from the Great Recession.
The answer is clear. The best way to help low income people lift themselves up is not to redistribute even more government resources to them but rather to boost the economy to create more and better jobs. There are tried and true methods to get this done: tax reform (to encourage more risk taking and entrepreneurship), immigration reform (to provide more willing workers) and true healthcare reform (to get healthcare spending under control).
We need national leaders who understand how to make the economy grow faster and are able to stay focused on this urgent task.

Where Are the Jobs? III. The Real Inequality Gap

Posted on November 12, 2013 by jackheidel

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story “Job Gap Widens in Uneven Recovery”, which shows how unbalanced the economic recovery is. For workers aged 25 and older, unemployment is only 6%, compared to the overall unemployment rate of 7.3%. But for the young, ages 16 – 24, unemployment is 15%. Since the end of the recession in June 2009, wages have risen by 12% for the highest paid 25% of all workers. For the lowest paid 25%, wages have only risen by 6% over this time period.
“Households earning $50,000 or more have become steadily more confident over the past year and a half. Among lower income households, confidence has stagnated. The gap in confidence between the two groups is near its widest ever. That isn’t only bad for those being left behind. It’s also hurting the broader recovery, because it means families are able to spend only on essential items. Consumer spending rose just .1% in September 2013, after adjusting for inflation.”
Unfortunately, this data is entirely consistent with other gloomy economic trends which I have been reporting on recently such as the threat of technology to the middle class, the increased competition from globalization, and the shrinking size of the labor pool because of baby boomer retirements.
The New York Times has a running series of articles on “The Great Divide” and how to address it. Here is a clear cut example of this divide: how older, better trained and more affluent Americans are recovering from the recent recession more quickly than the less well off. This evident unfairness is damaging to the health of our society. The question is how do we address it in an effective manner?
The basic problem is the overall slow growth of the economy, about 2% of GDP per year, since the recession ended in June 2009. There are many things that policy makers can do to speed up this growth if they were only able to set aside ideological differences. The best single action by far is tax reform, for both individuals and corporations, lowering overall rates in exchange for reducing deductions and loopholes which primarily benefit the wealthy.
Here is yet another reason why it is so important to speed up the growth of our economy. How exasperating that our national leaders cannot figure out a way to come to together and get this done!

Are Deficit Fears Overblown?

Posted on November 1, 2013 by jackheidel

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal columnist David Wessel responds too mildly in “Why It’s Wrong to Dismiss the Deficit” to Larry Summers’ view that we should not worry about the deficit. Mr. Summers says, “Let me be clear. I am not saying that fiscal discipline and economic growth are twin priorities. I am saying that our priority must be on increasing demand.” According to Mr. Wessel, here is the essence of Mr. Summers’ argument:

The deficit isn’t an immediate problem; growth is.
We’ve done enough (about the deficit) already.
The future is so uncertain that acting now is unwise.

Granted that the deficit for fiscal year 2013 is “only” $680 billion after four years in a row of deficits over a trillion dollars each and that interest rates are at an historically low level at the present time. The problem is that the public debt is now at the very high level of 73% of GDP and is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to continue climbing indefinitely. Interest on the debt was $415 billion for fiscal year 2013 which represents 2.5% of GDP of $16.8 trillion. With GDP growth increasing at about 2% per year since the end of the recession in June 2009, this means that interest on the debt is already slowing down the economy and it’s just going to keep getting worse as interest rates inevitably return to higher historical levels.
Growth is very definitely an immediate problem. But increased government spending is the wrong way to address it. The right way to address it is with broad based tax reform (lowering tax rates in return for closing loopholes) to stimulate investment and risk taking by businesses and entrepreneurs. Significant relaxing of the regulatory burden would also help, especially for the small businesses which are responsible for much of the growth of new jobs. So would immigration reform to boost the number of legal workers.
As uncertain as the future is, we can be quite sure that entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) will be going up fast in the very near future as more and more baby boomers retire and the ratio of workers to retirees continues to decline. It would be very risky indeed to assume that economic growth will increase fast enough to pay for increased entitlement spending.
Conclusion: large deficits are a very urgent and immediate problem which we ignore at our peril! Furthermore the best ways of boosting the economy don’t require increased government spending.

It Does Not Add Up

Jack Heidel's blog on fiscal responsibility

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