The NYT had an article on different trade models that are being used to predict the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It reported on the projections from a model from the Peterson Institute which shows that the TPP would add 0.036 percentage points to the annual growth for the United States rate over the next 14 years. On the other hand, it reported the projections of a model from Tufts University which showed that the deal would lose economy 450,000 jobs (@0.3 percent of total employment) and slow growth.
It would have been helpful to add a bit of background to this dispute. The model from the Peterson Institute explicitly assumes that the trade deal cannot have an effect on the trade deficit and employment:
“The model assumes that the TPP will affect neither total employment nor the national savings (or equivalently trade balances) of countries.”
This was a conventional assumption in trade models prior to the Great Recession. The view was that if a trade deal led to a change in the trade deficit, currencies values would adjust so that the overall trade balance would not change. Furthermore, even if a rise in the trade deficit did lead to some fall in output and employment, this could be offset by fiscal and/or monetary policy. Therefore economists need not worry about trade’s impact on aggregate output and employment.
In the wake of the Great Recession many of the world’s most prominent economists (e.g. Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, Olivier Blanchard) no longer believe that the economy will automatically bounce back to full employment. They now accept the idea of “secular stagnation,” which means that economies can suffer from long periods of inadequate demand. If secular stagnation is a real problem, then there is no basis for assuming that the demand and jobs lost due to a larger trade deficit can be offset by other policies.
The NYT had an article on different trade models that are being used to predict the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It reported on the projections from a model from the Peterson Institute which shows that the TPP would add 0.036 percentage points to the annual growth for the United States rate over the next 14 years. On the other hand, it reported the projections of a model from Tufts University which showed that the deal would lose economy 450,000 jobs (@0.3 percent of total employment) and slow growth.
It would have been helpful to add a bit of background to this dispute. The model from the Peterson Institute explicitly assumes that the trade deal cannot have an effect on the trade deficit and employment:
“The model assumes that the TPP will affect neither total employment nor the national savings (or equivalently trade balances) of countries.”
This was a conventional assumption in trade models prior to the Great Recession. The view was that if a trade deal led to a change in the trade deficit, currencies values would adjust so that the overall trade balance would not change. Furthermore, even if a rise in the trade deficit did lead to some fall in output and employment, this could be offset by fiscal and/or monetary policy. Therefore economists need not worry about trade’s impact on aggregate output and employment.
In the wake of the Great Recession many of the world’s most prominent economists (e.g. Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, Olivier Blanchard) no longer believe that the economy will automatically bounce back to full employment. They now accept the idea of “secular stagnation,” which means that economies can suffer from long periods of inadequate demand. If secular stagnation is a real problem, then there is no basis for assuming that the demand and jobs lost due to a larger trade deficit can be offset by other policies.
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Margot Sanger-Katz had a NYT Upshot column arguing that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders plans to have Medicare negotiate drug prices ultimately won’t prove successful in lowering costs because Medicare can’t simply refuse to pay for a drug. There is much truth to this argument, but it is worth working through the dynamics a step further.
The reason why Medicare has to accept prices from a single drug company, as opposed to choosing among competing producers, is that the government gives drug companies patent monopolies on drugs. Under the rules of these monopolies, a pharmaceutical company can have competitors fined or even imprisoned, if they produce a drug over which the company has patent rights.
The granting of patent monopolies is a way that the government has chosen to finance research and development in pharmaceuticals. (It also spends more than $30 billion a year financing biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health.) It could opt for other methods of financing research.
For example, Bernie Sanders proposed a prize fund to buy the rights to useful drug patents, following a model developed by Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist. Under this proposal, pharmaceutical companies would be paid for their research, but the drug itself could then be sold in a free market like most other products.
In this situation, almost all drugs would be cheap. We wouldn’t have to debate whether it was worth paying $100,000 or $200,000 for a drug that could extend someone’s life by 2–3 years. The drugs would instead cost a few hundred dollars, making the decision a no-brainer.
There are other mechanisms for financing the research. We could simply have the government finance clinical trials, after buying up the rights for promising compounds. In this case also approved drugs could be sold at free market prices.
There are undoubtedly other schemes that can be devised that pay for research without giving drug companies monopolies over the distribution of the drug. Obviously we do have to pay for the research, but we don’t have to use the current patent system. It is like paying the firefighters when they show up at the burning house with our family inside. Of course we would pay them millions to save our family (if we had the money), but it is nutty to design a system that puts us in this situation.
Anyhow, if we are having a debate on drug prices, we shouldn’t just be talking about how to get lower prices under the current system. We should also be talking about changing the system.
Addendum:
For those who want more background on the Sanders Bill, here are a few pieces from James Love at Knowledge Ecology International, who worked with Sanders’ staff in drafting the bill.
Margot Sanger-Katz had a NYT Upshot column arguing that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders plans to have Medicare negotiate drug prices ultimately won’t prove successful in lowering costs because Medicare can’t simply refuse to pay for a drug. There is much truth to this argument, but it is worth working through the dynamics a step further.
The reason why Medicare has to accept prices from a single drug company, as opposed to choosing among competing producers, is that the government gives drug companies patent monopolies on drugs. Under the rules of these monopolies, a pharmaceutical company can have competitors fined or even imprisoned, if they produce a drug over which the company has patent rights.
The granting of patent monopolies is a way that the government has chosen to finance research and development in pharmaceuticals. (It also spends more than $30 billion a year financing biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health.) It could opt for other methods of financing research.
For example, Bernie Sanders proposed a prize fund to buy the rights to useful drug patents, following a model developed by Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist. Under this proposal, pharmaceutical companies would be paid for their research, but the drug itself could then be sold in a free market like most other products.
In this situation, almost all drugs would be cheap. We wouldn’t have to debate whether it was worth paying $100,000 or $200,000 for a drug that could extend someone’s life by 2–3 years. The drugs would instead cost a few hundred dollars, making the decision a no-brainer.
There are other mechanisms for financing the research. We could simply have the government finance clinical trials, after buying up the rights for promising compounds. In this case also approved drugs could be sold at free market prices.
There are undoubtedly other schemes that can be devised that pay for research without giving drug companies monopolies over the distribution of the drug. Obviously we do have to pay for the research, but we don’t have to use the current patent system. It is like paying the firefighters when they show up at the burning house with our family inside. Of course we would pay them millions to save our family (if we had the money), but it is nutty to design a system that puts us in this situation.
Anyhow, if we are having a debate on drug prices, we shouldn’t just be talking about how to get lower prices under the current system. We should also be talking about changing the system.
Addendum:
For those who want more background on the Sanders Bill, here are a few pieces from James Love at Knowledge Ecology International, who worked with Sanders’ staff in drafting the bill.
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In today’s column he makes a pitch for Republican tax reform telling readers:
“If there is going to be growth-igniting tax reform — and if there isn’t, American politics will sink deeper into distributional strife — Brady [Representative Kevin Brady, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee] will begin it. Fortunately, the Houston congressman is focused on this simple arithmetic: Three percent growth is not 1 percent better than 2 percent growth, it is 50 percent better.
“If the Obama era’s average annual growth of 2.2 percent becomes the “new normal,” over the next 50 years real gross domestic product will grow from today’s $16.3 trillion (in 2009 dollars) to $48.3 trillion. If, however, growth averages 3.2 percent, real GDP in 2065 will be $78.6 trillion. At 2.2 percent growth, the cumulative lost wealth would be $521 trillion.”
Of course 3.2 percent growth would lead to much more output than 2.2 percent growth. The problem is that there is no way on earth that any tax reform plan will add a full percentage point to growth. It would be an enormous success if a tax reform plan added 0.2–0.3 percentage points to growth.
While it is nice that Mr. Will can do compounding of growth rates, but we don’t have tax policies that will raise the growth rate by this amount even if we managed to over-ride every interest group that benefits from their special tax breaks.
So it’s nice that Republicans still want to believe in fairy tales, but those who are old enough to remember the Reagan tax cuts and the George W. Bush tax cuts or are slightly familiar with economics know better than to buy Mr. Will’s wild fables.
In today’s column he makes a pitch for Republican tax reform telling readers:
“If there is going to be growth-igniting tax reform — and if there isn’t, American politics will sink deeper into distributional strife — Brady [Representative Kevin Brady, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee] will begin it. Fortunately, the Houston congressman is focused on this simple arithmetic: Three percent growth is not 1 percent better than 2 percent growth, it is 50 percent better.
“If the Obama era’s average annual growth of 2.2 percent becomes the “new normal,” over the next 50 years real gross domestic product will grow from today’s $16.3 trillion (in 2009 dollars) to $48.3 trillion. If, however, growth averages 3.2 percent, real GDP in 2065 will be $78.6 trillion. At 2.2 percent growth, the cumulative lost wealth would be $521 trillion.”
Of course 3.2 percent growth would lead to much more output than 2.2 percent growth. The problem is that there is no way on earth that any tax reform plan will add a full percentage point to growth. It would be an enormous success if a tax reform plan added 0.2–0.3 percentage points to growth.
While it is nice that Mr. Will can do compounding of growth rates, but we don’t have tax policies that will raise the growth rate by this amount even if we managed to over-ride every interest group that benefits from their special tax breaks.
So it’s nice that Republicans still want to believe in fairy tales, but those who are old enough to remember the Reagan tax cuts and the George W. Bush tax cuts or are slightly familiar with economics know better than to buy Mr. Will’s wild fables.
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What else is new? Yep, the deficit is exploding and it will devastate our children and no one will listen:
“Based on the campaign so far, this important conversation seems unlikely. The leading candidates are playing Russian roulette with the nation’s future, assuming that deficits can be ignored because most Americans (or so it seems) would prefer it that way.”
Folks who pay attention to the economy might notice that the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is now under 2.0 percent. Apparently it’s not just the politicians, the financial markets are not too concerned about the deficit either.
As far as the burden on our kids, interest on the debt (net of transfers from the Federal Reserve Board) comes to less than 0.8 percent of GDP. By comparison, interest payments were over 3.0 percent of GDP in the early 1990s condemning us to a decade of stagnation. (Oh wait, doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.)
If we are concerned about helping our kids, how about running larger deficits to employ their parents? More spending on infrastructure, education, health care and other needs would help to make the labor market tight enough so that workers have the bargaining power they need to get higher wages. It would also make the economy more productive in the future.
The risk to our children from having parents without the ability to care for them dwarfs any risk they face from higher interest payments on the debt. But hey, without Robert Samuelson they might not even have someone to tell them about the debt.
What else is new? Yep, the deficit is exploding and it will devastate our children and no one will listen:
“Based on the campaign so far, this important conversation seems unlikely. The leading candidates are playing Russian roulette with the nation’s future, assuming that deficits can be ignored because most Americans (or so it seems) would prefer it that way.”
Folks who pay attention to the economy might notice that the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is now under 2.0 percent. Apparently it’s not just the politicians, the financial markets are not too concerned about the deficit either.
As far as the burden on our kids, interest on the debt (net of transfers from the Federal Reserve Board) comes to less than 0.8 percent of GDP. By comparison, interest payments were over 3.0 percent of GDP in the early 1990s condemning us to a decade of stagnation. (Oh wait, doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.)
If we are concerned about helping our kids, how about running larger deficits to employ their parents? More spending on infrastructure, education, health care and other needs would help to make the labor market tight enough so that workers have the bargaining power they need to get higher wages. It would also make the economy more productive in the future.
The risk to our children from having parents without the ability to care for them dwarfs any risk they face from higher interest payments on the debt. But hey, without Robert Samuelson they might not even have someone to tell them about the debt.
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The Washington Post again went after Senator Bernie Sanders in its lead editorial, telling readers that the Senator’s proposals were “facile.” It might be advisable for a paper that described President Bush’s case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as “irrefutable” to be cautious about going ad hominem, but this is the Washington Post.
Getting to the substance, the Post is unhappy with Sanders proposal for single payer health insurance which it argues will cost far more or deliver much less than promised. While the Post is correct that Sanders has put forward a campaign proposal rather than a fully worked out health reform bill, it is not unreasonable to think that we can get considerably more coverage at a lower cost than we pay now. After all, there is nothing in our national psyche that should condemn us to forever pay twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries. (I have written more about this issue here.)
On financial reform the Post seems to want everyone to think that after Dodd-Frank things are just fine on Wall Street. It apparently has not noticed that the big banks are even bigger than ever and that the financial sector continues to grow as a share of the economy, imposing an ever larger drag on growth. For these reasons, Sanders proposal to break up the big banks makes good sense, as does his plan for a financial transactions tax. The latter would both raise a huge amount of money and downsize the industry. (I have some more comments here.)
Finally, it is worth applying some Econ 101 to the Post’s never-ending complaints about Sanders and other politicians not having a plan to deal with its imagined long-term budget crisis. First, much of the projected shortfall stems from the projected growth in health care costs. (The rate of projected health care cost growth has plummeted in the last five years, but this has not affected the Post’s complaints.)
First if Sanders succeeds in reining in health care then most of the projected budget gap disappears. However there is still the issue of rising costs due to an aging population. Of course this is not new. We have had a rising ratio of retirees to workers for the last half century. For some reason the Post seems to view it as an end of the world scenario if somewhere in the next two decades we were to raise payroll taxes to cover the costs of longer retirements, just like we did in the decades of the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties.
Fans of basic economics know that it matters hugely more to workers if their before-tax wages keep pace with productivity growth, implying wage gains of 15–20 percent over the course of a decade, than if their payroll taxes are increased by 1–2 percentage points. However, the paper endlessly obsesses on the latter, while almost completely ignoring the former.
The Post almost never discusses the negative impact that unnecessarily restrictive Fed policy has had on wage growth. It also does its best to ignore the impact on the typical workers’ pay of the policy of selective protectionism that we apply in trade (protected doctors and lawyers, exposed manufacturing workers).
The Post gets very upset when political figures like Bernie Sanders raise issues about before tax wage. Instead, it wants workers to fixate on the possibility that they may at some point face a tax increase. And when politicians diverge from the Post’s chosen path, it calls them names.
The Washington Post again went after Senator Bernie Sanders in its lead editorial, telling readers that the Senator’s proposals were “facile.” It might be advisable for a paper that described President Bush’s case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as “irrefutable” to be cautious about going ad hominem, but this is the Washington Post.
Getting to the substance, the Post is unhappy with Sanders proposal for single payer health insurance which it argues will cost far more or deliver much less than promised. While the Post is correct that Sanders has put forward a campaign proposal rather than a fully worked out health reform bill, it is not unreasonable to think that we can get considerably more coverage at a lower cost than we pay now. After all, there is nothing in our national psyche that should condemn us to forever pay twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries. (I have written more about this issue here.)
On financial reform the Post seems to want everyone to think that after Dodd-Frank things are just fine on Wall Street. It apparently has not noticed that the big banks are even bigger than ever and that the financial sector continues to grow as a share of the economy, imposing an ever larger drag on growth. For these reasons, Sanders proposal to break up the big banks makes good sense, as does his plan for a financial transactions tax. The latter would both raise a huge amount of money and downsize the industry. (I have some more comments here.)
Finally, it is worth applying some Econ 101 to the Post’s never-ending complaints about Sanders and other politicians not having a plan to deal with its imagined long-term budget crisis. First, much of the projected shortfall stems from the projected growth in health care costs. (The rate of projected health care cost growth has plummeted in the last five years, but this has not affected the Post’s complaints.)
First if Sanders succeeds in reining in health care then most of the projected budget gap disappears. However there is still the issue of rising costs due to an aging population. Of course this is not new. We have had a rising ratio of retirees to workers for the last half century. For some reason the Post seems to view it as an end of the world scenario if somewhere in the next two decades we were to raise payroll taxes to cover the costs of longer retirements, just like we did in the decades of the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties.
Fans of basic economics know that it matters hugely more to workers if their before-tax wages keep pace with productivity growth, implying wage gains of 15–20 percent over the course of a decade, than if their payroll taxes are increased by 1–2 percentage points. However, the paper endlessly obsesses on the latter, while almost completely ignoring the former.
The Post almost never discusses the negative impact that unnecessarily restrictive Fed policy has had on wage growth. It also does its best to ignore the impact on the typical workers’ pay of the policy of selective protectionism that we apply in trade (protected doctors and lawyers, exposed manufacturing workers).
The Post gets very upset when political figures like Bernie Sanders raise issues about before tax wage. Instead, it wants workers to fixate on the possibility that they may at some point face a tax increase. And when politicians diverge from the Post’s chosen path, it calls them names.
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The Washington Post is unhappy that support of the TARP appears to be a liability on the campaign trail. After all, it tells readers:
“Then-Federal Reserve Chair Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson declared it indispensable to prevent another Great Depression.”
Yep, that would be Henry M. Paulson, who was CEO at Goldman Sachs before taking the job as Treasury Secretary. As far as Chair Bernanke’s assessment, it would be interesting to hear why he didn’t explain that the Fed single-handedly had the ability to keep the commercial paper market operating, until the weekend after TARP passed.
While the initial downturn almost certainly would have been steeper had Congress not passed the TARP and we allowed the magic of the market to sink Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street banks, it is absurd to claim that this would have led to another Great Depression. We know the trick to get out of a Great Depression: it’s called “spending money.”
It took the massive spending associated with World War II to finally lift the U.S. economy out of the last Great Depression, but if we had massive spending on infrastructure, education, health care and other domestic needs in 1931 rather than 1941, we would not have had a decade of double-digit unemployment. Without the TARP and the Fed’s bailouts, we could have instantly reformed Wall Street and recreated a new banking system out of the wreckage which would be focused on serving the real economy.
It is also worth pointing out the absurdity of the claim that “we made money on the TARP.” We lent the banks money at way below the interest rate they would have been forced to pay in the market at the time. Since the rate was higher than the interest rate on government debt, supporters can say we made money, but it’s not clear why anyone should care. It was nonetheless an enormous subsidy to the Wall Street banks.
We could have also lent money at the same interest rate to Dean Baker’s Excellent Hedge Fund, which would have invested in the S&P 500. Dean Baker’s Excellent Hedge Fund would then have made an enormous amount of money at the taxpayer’s expense, but the editorial board at the Washington Post would undoubtedly tell critics to shut up, since the government made money on the deal. Makes good sense, right?
There is one final irony worth noting. This editorial appears right under the one denouncing Bernie Sanders’ “facile” proposals. The original TARP proposal was 3 pages, with most of the ink devoted to saying that no one could sue Treasury over how it spent the money. The package that was eventually approved was more than 700 pages. Furthermore, the initial proposal was for buying devalued mortgage backed securities (MBS) (“troubled assets”) from banks.
In fact, Treasury never bought any of these MBS from the banks. It instead gave relief in the form of purchases of preferred shares of stock. Given how far removed the original proposal was from what actually happened, it seems that Mr. Paulsen’s initial plan certainly would merit the Post’s “facile” award. For some reason that term was never used on the Post’s opinion page.
The Washington Post is unhappy that support of the TARP appears to be a liability on the campaign trail. After all, it tells readers:
“Then-Federal Reserve Chair Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson declared it indispensable to prevent another Great Depression.”
Yep, that would be Henry M. Paulson, who was CEO at Goldman Sachs before taking the job as Treasury Secretary. As far as Chair Bernanke’s assessment, it would be interesting to hear why he didn’t explain that the Fed single-handedly had the ability to keep the commercial paper market operating, until the weekend after TARP passed.
While the initial downturn almost certainly would have been steeper had Congress not passed the TARP and we allowed the magic of the market to sink Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street banks, it is absurd to claim that this would have led to another Great Depression. We know the trick to get out of a Great Depression: it’s called “spending money.”
It took the massive spending associated with World War II to finally lift the U.S. economy out of the last Great Depression, but if we had massive spending on infrastructure, education, health care and other domestic needs in 1931 rather than 1941, we would not have had a decade of double-digit unemployment. Without the TARP and the Fed’s bailouts, we could have instantly reformed Wall Street and recreated a new banking system out of the wreckage which would be focused on serving the real economy.
It is also worth pointing out the absurdity of the claim that “we made money on the TARP.” We lent the banks money at way below the interest rate they would have been forced to pay in the market at the time. Since the rate was higher than the interest rate on government debt, supporters can say we made money, but it’s not clear why anyone should care. It was nonetheless an enormous subsidy to the Wall Street banks.
We could have also lent money at the same interest rate to Dean Baker’s Excellent Hedge Fund, which would have invested in the S&P 500. Dean Baker’s Excellent Hedge Fund would then have made an enormous amount of money at the taxpayer’s expense, but the editorial board at the Washington Post would undoubtedly tell critics to shut up, since the government made money on the deal. Makes good sense, right?
There is one final irony worth noting. This editorial appears right under the one denouncing Bernie Sanders’ “facile” proposals. The original TARP proposal was 3 pages, with most of the ink devoted to saying that no one could sue Treasury over how it spent the money. The package that was eventually approved was more than 700 pages. Furthermore, the initial proposal was for buying devalued mortgage backed securities (MBS) (“troubled assets”) from banks.
In fact, Treasury never bought any of these MBS from the banks. It instead gave relief in the form of purchases of preferred shares of stock. Given how far removed the original proposal was from what actually happened, it seems that Mr. Paulsen’s initial plan certainly would merit the Post’s “facile” award. For some reason that term was never used on the Post’s opinion page.
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It looks like the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton is really heating up. Yesterday, Paul Krugman told readers:
“As far as I can tell, every serious progressive policy expert on either health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary.”
Oh well, so much for those of us backing or leaning towards Sanders. I guess we just have to turn to that old Washington saying, “better right than expert.” In other words, it’s better to rely on people who have a track record of being right than the people who have the best credentials.
It looks like the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton is really heating up. Yesterday, Paul Krugman told readers:
“As far as I can tell, every serious progressive policy expert on either health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary.”
Oh well, so much for those of us backing or leaning towards Sanders. I guess we just have to turn to that old Washington saying, “better right than expert.” In other words, it’s better to rely on people who have a track record of being right than the people who have the best credentials.
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