Tag Archives: Wall Street Journal

Surprise! It Is Progressives Who Drive Income Inequality

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The economist Lawrence Lindsey has an Op Ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal  analyzing Census Bureau data here, and here showing that income inequality rose more under Bill Clinton than under Ronald Reagan.  It also has risen much more under Barack Obama than under George W. Bush.
Capture6Here is the explanation for this:

  • Cheap money is a boon to those who have access to it.
  • Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all presided over bubble economies fueled by easy monetary policy. But the effects of the Bush housing bubble were more evenly distributed than for the Clinton stock market bubble or the Obama credit bubble.
  • In 1968 government transfer payments totaled $53 billion or roughly 7% of personal income. By 2014, these had climbed to $2.5 trillion or 17% of personal income. Despite the redistribution of a sixth of all income, inequality is far higher today than in 1968.
  • Two earner households have become the backbone of the American middle class.
  • When families with children making between $20,000 and $50,000 attempt to have a second earner go back to work, the effective tax rate on the extra earnings, including lost government benefits, is between 50% and 80%. This “working class trap” is increasing income inequality and keeping the income of these households lower than they would otherwise be.
  • During the first six years of the Obama presidency, the number of two-earner households declined, while the number of single-earner households rose by 2.6 million and the number of no-earner households rose by 5 million. In other words, two-thirds of the increase in the number of households under Obama is accounted for by households with no one working. This is the reason the middle class has shrunk and that inequality is increasing.
  • A recent Brookings Institution study shows that boosting the top tax rate from 39.6% today to 50%, and redistributing the additional $95 billion in tax revenue to the bottom 20% of wage earners would reverse only 20% of the increase in income inequality under Obama.

As Mr. Lindsey concludes, “Attacking the rich and running against inequality may be a sensible political strategy. But in the end the programs to implement this strategy make the problem worse.”

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Is the U.S. Economy Really in Good Shape?

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The noted Harvard economist, Martin Feldstein, says in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, that “The U.S. Economy Is in Good Shape.”
Capture0The reasons are that:

  • We are essentially at full employment with an overall unemployment rate of 4.9% and 2.5% among college graduates.
  • Real income (after government transfers and federal taxes) is up 49% between 1979 and 2010 for households in the lowest income quintile. Real income is up 40% between 1979 and 2010 for households in the middle three income quintiles.
  • The 70% decline in the price of oil since early 2015 will eventually have a positive impact on U.S. economic growth. The fall in gasoline prices alone has increased annual household spending power by more than $1000 per household. When consumers start spending this money, it will have a large impact.
  • The Fed’s quantitative easing program has led to artificially high stock prices which now are coming down as the Fed begins to raise short-term interest rates. The U.S. economy is strong enough to withstand this shock. It would be a mistake for the Fed to abandon its December forecast of four rate increases in 2016.

I would refer to Mr.Feldstein’s analysis as a somewhat rosy scenario. It ignores our low labor participation rate, our high (U-6) underemployment rate of 9.8% and the historically slow 2.2% growth of our economy since the end of the recession almost seven years ago.
Mr. Feldstein goes on to say that “the American economy does face long term problems.  High on the list is the large and growing national debt, rising from less than 40% of GDP before the recession to 75% now and heading to more than 80% in ten years.  But the big uncertainties which now hang over our economy are political, with presidential candidates threatening to raise taxes, increase fiscal deficits and pursue antibusiness policies.”
Conclusion. What Mr. Feldstein is really saying is that our economy is in satisfactory shape right now but that we must attend to its long term threats to make sure that things do not turn sour.  What the presidential candidates are saying in this respect is not encouraging.

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What the Republican Presidential Candidates Should Be Saying

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Thanks largely to Donald Trump the Republican presidential candidates are not taking the best approach to winning the White House in November. Instead of arguing with each other about who is the toughest on immigration or who is the most anti-establishment, they should be focusing on one issue where Republicans could have a big advantage: how to speed up our slow economic growth.
Capture9The Stanford economist, John Cochrane, makes very clear the value of doing this on his blog, The Grumpy Economist.  Says Mr. Cochrane:

  • From 1950 to 2000 the U.S. Economy grew at an average rate of 3.5% per year. Since 2000, it has grown at only half that rate, 1.7%.
  • The average American is more than three times better off than his or her counterpart in 1950. Real GDP per person has risen from $16,000 in 1952 to over $50,000 today, both measured in 2009 dollars.
  • If the U.S. economy had grown at 2% rather than 3.5% since 1950, income per person by 2000 would have been $23,000 not $50,000.
  • Even these large numbers understate reality. GDP per capita growth does not capture the increase in life span – nearly ten years – or other improvements in the quality of life such as health and environmental gains which we have experienced.

Says Mr. Cochrane, “Next to this increase in the standard of living, nothing the candidates are talking about – monetary policy, Fed, fiscal stimulus, minimum wage hikes, pay equity, and so on, even comes close to what growth can bring ordinary Americans.” The important question then is how to speed up economic growth.  Even though there are strong headwinds slowing down our modern economy, Mr. Cochrane has many excellent ideas on measures which can be taken to accomplish this.  This will be the subject of my next post.

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Why the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative Is So Important

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North Korea recently launched another long-range rocket as reported by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post The editorial boards of all three newspapers deplore this development but differ in suggesting how the U.S. should respond.

  • The NYT says that sanctions should be imposed to limit North Korea’s ability to finance warheads and missiles. Such sanctions would most acutely be felt by the Chinese companies doing business with North Korea.
  • The WP supports economic sanctions as well as deploying an advanced missile defense system in South Korea as quickly as possible.
  • The WSJ is concerned about the “rogue state” ICBM threat in general. North Korean missiles can now reach Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago. Iran recently conducted two ballistic missile launches in violation of the recent nuclear deal.

Ronald Reagan’s launch of the SDI in the 1980s helped win the cold war. The Bush Administration is responsible for the missile defenses which exist today, including long-range missile interceptors in Alaska and California and Aegis systems aboard Navy warships.  The Obama Administration has cut its missile defense budget request from $9.8 billion in 2016 to $9.1 billion for 2017.
Capture6Admiral Bill Gortney, Commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, says that “We’re ready 24 hours a day if he’s (Kim Jong Un) dumb enough to throw something at us.”  But any miss would be catastrophic and a 100% interception rate won’t happen without engineering advances and presidential leadership.
SDI should be a very high priority within the overall military budget.  Our national security depends on it!

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The Appeal of Donald Trump

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Donald Trump is having a huge impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential race and lots of people are trying to understand why. In a previous post I wrote that the Republican Party needs to figure out where all of the Trump supporters are coming from and then try to keep these people under a perhaps larger Republican tent.
Capture1
A very good explanation of the Trump phenomenon comes from the AEI social scientist, Charles Murray, writing in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Says Mr. Murray:

  • The long time American Creed of egalitarianism, liberty and individualism is losing its authority and its substance. One of the most widely acknowledged aspects of American exceptionalism is the lack of class consciousness.
  • This lack of class consciousness has now been replaced by the emergence of a new upper class, a new lower class and the plight of the working class caught in between.
  • The new upper class is characterized by its condescension toward ordinary Americans. Mainstream America is fully aware of this condescension and contempt and is irritated by it. It may mean that American egalitarianism is coming to an end.
  • In the 1960s, white working class men in their 30s and 40s were almost all working and almost all married. But, as shown in the chart, these high labor participation and marriage rates have dropped dramatically in the past 50 years.
  • The success of the civil rights and feminist movements, both classic invocations of the American Creed, have led to a large scale ideological defection from the pillars of liberty and individualism. The problem is that affirmative action demands that people be treated as groups. Equality of outcome trumps equality before the law.
  • By the 1980s Democratic elites largely subscribed to an ideology in conflict with liberty and individualism. This produced the Reagan Democrats.
  • During the past half-century, American corporations exported millions of high-paying jobs while the federal government allowed the immigration, legal and illegal, of tens of millions of competitors for the remaining working class jobs.

As Mr. Murray says, “if you are dismayed by Trumpism don’t kid yourself that it will go away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course the country has taken.”

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The Big Picture on America’s Fiscal Crisis II. How Urgent?

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My last post, “The Big Picture on America’s Fiscal Crisis” explains, according to the political scientist James Piereson, why three very difficult contemporary problems:

  • Very high public debt (74% of GDP, highest since WWII)
  • Unfavorable demographics (a rapidly increasing number of retirees)
  • Slowing economic growth (for fundamental reasons)

will inexorably lead to a breakdown of the Democratic-welfare regime which has lasted from 1932 until the present. The reasoning is very simple and direct.  We already have huge debt.  Rapidly increasing entitlement spending on our rapidly increasing number of retirees will keep driving our debt higher and higher.  We won’t be able to grow our way out from under this debt because we have run out of industrial revolutions to spur new growth.
Capture1A new study co-written by Doug Elmendorf, CBO Director from 2009-2015,  makes the case that our fiscal crisis, although real, is less urgent than often believed for the following reasons:

  • Lower than expected health-care inflation
  • The persistence of low interest rates

The above chart shows, for example, that the public debt may not reach 100% of GDP until 2032 instead of the earlier CBO prediction of 2030. I believe that this Elmendorf projection should be viewed as false comfort.
Both health-care inflation and low interest rates are a direct result of very low overall inflation in the U.S. and this will not last forever.  Low interest rates mean that interest payments on the debt are also very low.  This is a very poor reason to increase current borrowing.  When interest rates do go up, whether it is sooner or later, interest payments on the debt will increase by hundreds of billions of dollars a year over a likely relatively short time period.
This is the severe crisis, or Fourth Revolution, which Mr. Piereson is predicting.  We don’t know when it will occur because we don’t know when inflation will rear its ugly head.
Wouldn’t it be much better to put our debt on a downward path, as a percentage of GDP, and avoid the otherwise very unpleasant consequences?

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Why the GOP Should Reconcile with Donald Trump II. How to Do It.

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As I have stated over and over again on this blog, It Does Not Add Up, my greatest concern for our country is the lack of fiscal responsibility amongst our national leaders.  The public debt (on which we pay interest) is $13 trillion, which is 74% of GDP.  This is way too high for peacetime and, furthermore, it is very likely to just keep getting worse until serious steps are taken to shrink it (as a percentage of GDP).
CaptureIt is my opinion that the Republicans are more serious than the Democrats about fixing this problem.  Therefore I want the Republicans to nominate a presidential candidate who has a good chance of being elected in November.  I don’t know if Donald Trump is that candidate but he is attracting a whole new group of people to the Republican cause.  They are working class whites who have fallen away from the Democratic Party.
Republicans can reach these voters, as Trump is doing, with suitable policies such as:

  • Immigration. Rather than “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” which would put most of our current illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, we should adopt the principle, “All the immigrants we need but only the immigrants we need.”  A tightly constrained Guest Worker program, enforced with border control and eVerify, would accomplish this.
  • Free Trade. Trade agreements are still possible but need to include provisions like Trade Adjustment Assistance or other programs to help retrain laid-off workers for the millions of well paying, high skill jobs in the U.S. which are hard to fill.
  • Tax Policy. Rather than skewing tax cuts mainly for the wealthy, as most of the Republican candidates propose, they should be applied equally to all income levels, and fully paid for by shrinking deductions which mostly benefit the wealthy. This would put more money in the pockets of all middle income workers and create more and better jobs at the same time by speeding up economic growth.

Conclusion. Donald Trump has lots of negatives as a presidential candidate but Republicans can, and hopefully will, learn a lot from his very successful campaign so far.

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Why the GOP Should Reconcile with Donald Trump

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I am a non-ideological fiscal conservative. I don’t judge government as being either too large or too small.  I just want to pay for however much government we do have without going into debt.  Such an approach normally leads to political compromise whereby Congress tries to operate efficiently and hold costs down, only raising taxes as a last resort when it is impossible to squeeze any more low priority programs out of the system.
Such common sense used to be a fundamental operating principle, adhered to by both political parties.  Unfortunately in recent years we have moved away from this model.  In fact our public debt (on which we pay interest) has rapidly accumulated to $13 trillion, 74% of GDP, and will continue to grow much higher unless we strongly change our ways.
In some ways our current presidential campaign is following a conventional path.  Both of the major Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, want to expand federal programs and raise taxes to pay for the new spending.  The Republican Tea Party candidate, Ted Cruz, is a constitutional and social conservative and wants to cut back on government programs.  The leading Republican establishment candidate, Marco Rubio, supports modest new programs, such as expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and also modest tax reform to stimulate the economy.
Capture0The wild card in the presidential race is Donald Trump.  He is a secular populist with unconventional and even contradictory policy views.  He not only leads the Republican field in most polls, he is steadily pulling ahead.  He is doing all this by attracting huge support from working class white voters who have fallen away from the Democratic Party.  In other words, he is potentially expanding the Republican base and therefore should be taken very seriously.
Question. Can a fiscal conservative (who just wants to balance the budget!) but who also wants to address the very serious social problems in American society, support a Donald Trump candidacy for president?  I am struggling with this question.  Stay tuned!

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Health Care Spending is Driving Budget Deficits

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In my last post, “Annual Deficits are Starting to go Back Up,” I refer to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office to show that it is the large annual increases in federal healthcare spending (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and Obamacare) which is the main driver of our annual deficit spending which is going to start increasing again unless we do something serious about it.
CaptureThe basic problem is, as shown by the above chart, that Americans, in general, don’t have enough skin in the healthcare game, i.e. we don’t pay enough of our health care expenses out of our own pockets, and therefore we don’t directly feel the pain of high and rapidly increasing health care costs.
A group of policy experts from the American Enterprise Institute have come up with a practical plan to address this problem.  Its elements are:

  • Retain employer provided coverage. This is how half of Americans get health insurance. The only change would be an upper limit on the tax preference for employer-paid premiums so that only the most expensive plans would exceed it.
  • Tax Credits. Individuals without employer coverage would get a tax credit with no strings attached to pick any state-approved plan that meets their needs.
  • Continuous coverage protection. As long as people stay insured, they cannot be denied enrollment based on health status.
  • Medicaid reform. The federal government would give states fixed, per-person payments based on historical spending patterns. Able bodied adult and their children could combine Medicaid and the (refundable) federal tax credit to enroll in a private insurance option.
  • Medicare reform. Medicare would provide a fixed level of assistance which seniors would use to purchase a health plan of their own choosing.
  • Expanded Health Savings Accounts. These are intended to be used with catastrophic insurance with a high deductible. HSAs could be established with a one-time $1000 tax credit and unused funds rolled over from one year to the next.

Such a system does not repeal, but rather improves the Affordable Care Act. It keeps the ACA exchanges and introduces cost controls in a flexible manner, i.e. without mandates.  It is the type of system the U.S. needs to get health care costs, and therefore overall deficit spending, under control.

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After Two Years of Steady Job Growth, It’s Time to Bite the Bullet and Balance the Budget!

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For the past two weeks I have been I have been complaining about Congress’s irresponsible budget for 2016 and that we should now be pushing hard for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.  In my last post I make the case that a flexible BBA is compatible with economic growth and will, in fact, contribute to it once it goes into effect.
CaptureFriday’s job report for December strengthens this argument:

  • In 2015 there was an increase of 2.65 million new jobs only slightly less than 2014’s 3.15 million new jobs, the two best years for job growth since 2000.
  • The current unemployment rate of 5.0% is the best since the end of 2006.
  • Although wage growth at 2.4% for 2015 is not as strong as the early 2000’s, wages have now been climbing 2% faster than price inflation for the past three years.
  • The offsetting negatives are a still slow GDP growth estimated at 2.2% for 2015 and a still very low labor participation rate of 62.6%.

Conclusion:  At some point in the very near future the government needs to stop spending far in excess of tax revenue.  The sooner we recognize this the easier it will be to make the necessary correction.  Our economy is the strongest it has been since the end of the Great Recession in June of 2009.  Getting government spending in better sync with tax collections will be a big challenge and will not happen overnight.  In fact, if a BBA is required to get the job done it will take several years to implement this route to fiscal responsibility.
For all of these reasons now is the time to start moving on this gigantic and festering problem!