Everyone who pays even casual attention to energy prices know that they fluctuate dramatically. The price of a barrel of oil soared from around $40 in 2004 to a peak of $150 in 2008, then fell back under $40 briefly in the wake of the economic collapse later that year. While this run-up and crash was extraordinary, large fluctuations are not. This is why it is surprising to see the NYT tell us that many European manufacturers are planning to move their operations to the United States based on the lower cost of energy in the United States.
This claim is especially bizarre for two reasons. First, the large differences in prices will almost certainly not persist. The fracking boom in the United States has pushed gas prices down to a level that is roughly half of its level four years ago. At current prices much fracking is not profitable and producers have already slowed their rate of drilling.
In addition, producers have plans to export liquid natural gas. While it takes time to build facilities, it is likely that the U.S. will soon be exporting large amounts of natural gas. This will have the effect of equalizing prices between Europe and the United States in the same way that trade equalizes the price of oil in Norway, a huge oil exporter, and Italy, which imports almost all its oil. While there will still be differences in price due to transportation costs and also tax rates, most of the current gap in prices would be eliminated. Presumably the people who run major companies in Europe understand this fact and take it into consideration in their decision to locate factories that may be operating for 30-40 years.
The other strange aspect to this piece is that it implies that Europe can’t compete with the United States due to differences in energy costs. The Commerce Department would seem to strongly disagree with this view. It reports that the United States trade deficit with the European Union was $94.8 billion through the first eight months of 2012, an increase of almost 20 percent from the deficit in 2011.
This seems like a clear case of who are you going to believe, the NYT saying that energy costs have made Europe uncompetitive or the Commerce Department telling us that its trade surplus is growing.
Everyone who pays even casual attention to energy prices know that they fluctuate dramatically. The price of a barrel of oil soared from around $40 in 2004 to a peak of $150 in 2008, then fell back under $40 briefly in the wake of the economic collapse later that year. While this run-up and crash was extraordinary, large fluctuations are not. This is why it is surprising to see the NYT tell us that many European manufacturers are planning to move their operations to the United States based on the lower cost of energy in the United States.
This claim is especially bizarre for two reasons. First, the large differences in prices will almost certainly not persist. The fracking boom in the United States has pushed gas prices down to a level that is roughly half of its level four years ago. At current prices much fracking is not profitable and producers have already slowed their rate of drilling.
In addition, producers have plans to export liquid natural gas. While it takes time to build facilities, it is likely that the U.S. will soon be exporting large amounts of natural gas. This will have the effect of equalizing prices between Europe and the United States in the same way that trade equalizes the price of oil in Norway, a huge oil exporter, and Italy, which imports almost all its oil. While there will still be differences in price due to transportation costs and also tax rates, most of the current gap in prices would be eliminated. Presumably the people who run major companies in Europe understand this fact and take it into consideration in their decision to locate factories that may be operating for 30-40 years.
The other strange aspect to this piece is that it implies that Europe can’t compete with the United States due to differences in energy costs. The Commerce Department would seem to strongly disagree with this view. It reports that the United States trade deficit with the European Union was $94.8 billion through the first eight months of 2012, an increase of almost 20 percent from the deficit in 2011.
This seems like a clear case of who are you going to believe, the NYT saying that energy costs have made Europe uncompetitive or the Commerce Department telling us that its trade surplus is growing.
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That is the explicit argument in his NYT column today. What is more interesting than what he says is what he doesn’t say. There is no mention whatsoever of the possibility of taxing Wall Street, an idea that is now being pushed even by the International Monetary Fund. The U.K. raises between 0.2-0.3 percent of GDP on tax that only hits stock trade, leaving options, futures, and other derivative instruments unaffected. This would be roughly $500 billion over the course of a decade in the United States.
Japan had a tax that raised 1.0 percent of its GDP in the late 80s. That would be roughly $2 trillion over the course of a decade. Robert Pollin and I outlined a structure of taxes that could raise a comparable amount here. Anyhow, the middle class might be in Mankiw’s sights when it comes to taxes, Wall Street obviously is not.
The biggest item on the other side of the equation is health care. Our costs are hugely out of line with the rest of the world. We pay on average more than twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries with little to show for it in terms of outcomes. If our per person costs were comparable to those in other countries we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficit.
We could look to fix our health care system or failing that allow people to take advantage of the more efficient systems in other countries by promoting trade in health care services. But this is apparently also not on Mankiw’s agenda. These measures would likely be bad news for the drug companies, medical equipment industry, and highly paid medical specialists.
In short, if we assume a world where we can’t take any measures that would hurt the wealthy, then we will probably have to raise taxes on the middle class. However the rest of us may not want to accept Mankiw’s assumption here.
That is the explicit argument in his NYT column today. What is more interesting than what he says is what he doesn’t say. There is no mention whatsoever of the possibility of taxing Wall Street, an idea that is now being pushed even by the International Monetary Fund. The U.K. raises between 0.2-0.3 percent of GDP on tax that only hits stock trade, leaving options, futures, and other derivative instruments unaffected. This would be roughly $500 billion over the course of a decade in the United States.
Japan had a tax that raised 1.0 percent of its GDP in the late 80s. That would be roughly $2 trillion over the course of a decade. Robert Pollin and I outlined a structure of taxes that could raise a comparable amount here. Anyhow, the middle class might be in Mankiw’s sights when it comes to taxes, Wall Street obviously is not.
The biggest item on the other side of the equation is health care. Our costs are hugely out of line with the rest of the world. We pay on average more than twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries with little to show for it in terms of outcomes. If our per person costs were comparable to those in other countries we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficit.
We could look to fix our health care system or failing that allow people to take advantage of the more efficient systems in other countries by promoting trade in health care services. But this is apparently also not on Mankiw’s agenda. These measures would likely be bad news for the drug companies, medical equipment industry, and highly paid medical specialists.
In short, if we assume a world where we can’t take any measures that would hurt the wealthy, then we will probably have to raise taxes on the middle class. However the rest of us may not want to accept Mankiw’s assumption here.
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Let’s see, if Congress does nothing then the budget deficit will fall by around $600 billion to a bit more than 2 percent of GDP. How is this a “fiscal crisis?” Of course it’s not a fiscal crisis.
It is an austerity bomb. If the higher taxes and reduced pace of spending are left in place over the course of the year (not the first 2 weeks in January), then GDP growth will slow and the economy will likely fall back into recession.
Please explain why the NYT still doesn’t have this straight after covering the issue endlessly for the last three months?
Let’s see, if Congress does nothing then the budget deficit will fall by around $600 billion to a bit more than 2 percent of GDP. How is this a “fiscal crisis?” Of course it’s not a fiscal crisis.
It is an austerity bomb. If the higher taxes and reduced pace of spending are left in place over the course of the year (not the first 2 weeks in January), then GDP growth will slow and the economy will likely fall back into recession.
Please explain why the NYT still doesn’t have this straight after covering the issue endlessly for the last three months?
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That seems to be the view of the NYT editorial board which concluded a piece on the fiscal standoff by saying:
“But if Congress cannot approve a deal by New Year’s Day, the anticipated sell-off on Wall Street in early January would, one hopes, force House Republicans to budge.”
This view, if correct, is truly scary. First, the real impact of failing to come to a deal is the higher taxes and reduced spending which will soon slow growth and raise unemployment if Congress waits too long into 2013 to take action. One might hope that this would be of sufficient concern to get the Republicans in Congress to move.
As far as a sell-off on Wall Street, first it may not come and second, who gives a damn? The stock market has presumably priced in the risk of not seeing a deal by the end of the year. While prices will likely fall further if that risk is realized, those anticipating some sort of double-digit drop are likely to be disappointed.
On the flip side, it would be really scary if folks in Washington are making policy based on the ups and downs of the stock market. The stock market moves in erratic fashion in response to real news and to nothing. What were the events in the world that provided the basis for the 25 percent drop in prices in October of 1987? Was the economy headed for disaster?
Furthermore, even large fluctuations in the market have only a limited impact on the economy. If the market rises (or falls) by 10 percent there will be a very limited impact on investment, as the small portion of firms that rely stock issuance for financing investment will find it easier (or harder) to do so, as well as a modest impact on consumption due to the wealth effect. But even a 10 percent movement hardly implies a boom or recession. If we see the market fall by 3 percent as a result of missing the deadline, which may subsequently reversed, the impact on the economy will be hard to detect.
It would be incredibly irresponsibly to make policy based on stock market fluctuations. If some members of Congress actually base their votes on stock market fluctuations then this would be a great news story. Voters should have this information so that they can replace the current members with more competent policymakers.
Thanks to Robert Salzberg for calling this to my attention.
That seems to be the view of the NYT editorial board which concluded a piece on the fiscal standoff by saying:
“But if Congress cannot approve a deal by New Year’s Day, the anticipated sell-off on Wall Street in early January would, one hopes, force House Republicans to budge.”
This view, if correct, is truly scary. First, the real impact of failing to come to a deal is the higher taxes and reduced spending which will soon slow growth and raise unemployment if Congress waits too long into 2013 to take action. One might hope that this would be of sufficient concern to get the Republicans in Congress to move.
As far as a sell-off on Wall Street, first it may not come and second, who gives a damn? The stock market has presumably priced in the risk of not seeing a deal by the end of the year. While prices will likely fall further if that risk is realized, those anticipating some sort of double-digit drop are likely to be disappointed.
On the flip side, it would be really scary if folks in Washington are making policy based on the ups and downs of the stock market. The stock market moves in erratic fashion in response to real news and to nothing. What were the events in the world that provided the basis for the 25 percent drop in prices in October of 1987? Was the economy headed for disaster?
Furthermore, even large fluctuations in the market have only a limited impact on the economy. If the market rises (or falls) by 10 percent there will be a very limited impact on investment, as the small portion of firms that rely stock issuance for financing investment will find it easier (or harder) to do so, as well as a modest impact on consumption due to the wealth effect. But even a 10 percent movement hardly implies a boom or recession. If we see the market fall by 3 percent as a result of missing the deadline, which may subsequently reversed, the impact on the economy will be hard to detect.
It would be incredibly irresponsibly to make policy based on stock market fluctuations. If some members of Congress actually base their votes on stock market fluctuations then this would be a great news story. Voters should have this information so that they can replace the current members with more competent policymakers.
Thanks to Robert Salzberg for calling this to my attention.
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Since several people in comments and e-mails raised questions on my earlier post on capital-biased technological change I will try to clarify my point. The original impetus was a Paul Krugman post in which he raised the possibility that changes in technology were causing a redistribution from labor to capital. (He has since written further on the topic.)
My point was to note that this sort of redistribution cannot just be a matter of technology, it also involves a very big role for the laws and norms that make such a redistribution possible. I referred in the earlier post to the Cambridge controversies in the theory of capital. Unfortunately, these debates were sidetracked into a narrow and largely irrelevant discussion of the possibility and likelihood of “re-switching,” a story where a production technique flips from being less capital intensive to more capital intensive as the interest rate rises or falls.
From my perspective the main takeaway from this debate is that there is no measure of capital that is independent of its price. How do we compare a steel mill, the latest supercomputer from IBM, the software produced by Google and the method for producing a lifesaving cancer drug whose patent is owned by Pfizer? Are we going to weigh each one, takes its volume? There is no measure of capital apart from its price.
This is in contrast to labor, the other part of the technology story. I would not want to minimize the problems of aggregating labor either (is an hour of a brain surgeon’s time the same thing as an hour of dishwasher’s time?), but at least there is something physically present that we can identify. What is the physical presence of a software or pharmaceutical patent? Yet, these items are hugely important in the modern return to capital story since a very large chunk of profits is earned by software companies, drug companies or other corporations that profit primarily based on their ownership of intellectual property.
Intellectual property serves a social purpose. It is a way to provide an incentive for innovation and creative work. However it is certainly not the only way. An enormous amount of research is funded publicly, as with the NIH, and also through universities and non-profits, and from private companies not seeking to profit from patent or copyright protection. It is far from clear that patents and copyrights are the most efficient mechanisms for supporting innovation and creative work. If our current intellectual property regime also has distributional consequences that we consider bad, then that would be a serious strike against it.
But the basic point is that if we are concerned that the economy is leading to a situation where an ever large share of the gains from growth are going to capital, we should not imagine that this is just the result of technological change. It was the result of conscious policy choices. As we say here at CEPR, money does not fall up.
Since several people in comments and e-mails raised questions on my earlier post on capital-biased technological change I will try to clarify my point. The original impetus was a Paul Krugman post in which he raised the possibility that changes in technology were causing a redistribution from labor to capital. (He has since written further on the topic.)
My point was to note that this sort of redistribution cannot just be a matter of technology, it also involves a very big role for the laws and norms that make such a redistribution possible. I referred in the earlier post to the Cambridge controversies in the theory of capital. Unfortunately, these debates were sidetracked into a narrow and largely irrelevant discussion of the possibility and likelihood of “re-switching,” a story where a production technique flips from being less capital intensive to more capital intensive as the interest rate rises or falls.
From my perspective the main takeaway from this debate is that there is no measure of capital that is independent of its price. How do we compare a steel mill, the latest supercomputer from IBM, the software produced by Google and the method for producing a lifesaving cancer drug whose patent is owned by Pfizer? Are we going to weigh each one, takes its volume? There is no measure of capital apart from its price.
This is in contrast to labor, the other part of the technology story. I would not want to minimize the problems of aggregating labor either (is an hour of a brain surgeon’s time the same thing as an hour of dishwasher’s time?), but at least there is something physically present that we can identify. What is the physical presence of a software or pharmaceutical patent? Yet, these items are hugely important in the modern return to capital story since a very large chunk of profits is earned by software companies, drug companies or other corporations that profit primarily based on their ownership of intellectual property.
Intellectual property serves a social purpose. It is a way to provide an incentive for innovation and creative work. However it is certainly not the only way. An enormous amount of research is funded publicly, as with the NIH, and also through universities and non-profits, and from private companies not seeking to profit from patent or copyright protection. It is far from clear that patents and copyrights are the most efficient mechanisms for supporting innovation and creative work. If our current intellectual property regime also has distributional consequences that we consider bad, then that would be a serious strike against it.
But the basic point is that if we are concerned that the economy is leading to a situation where an ever large share of the gains from growth are going to capital, we should not imagine that this is just the result of technological change. It was the result of conscious policy choices. As we say here at CEPR, money does not fall up.
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Perhaps we should be glad that the NYT gives their regular editors vacations over the holidays, but there still should have been someone to stop or qualify these lines:
“For months, President Obama, members of Congress of both parties and top economists have warned that the nation’s fragile economy could be swept back into recession if the two parties did not come to a post-election compromise on January’s combination of tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts.
“Yet with days left before the fiscal punch lands, both sides are exhibiting little sense of urgency, and new public statements Wednesday appeared to be designed more to ensure the other side is blamed rather than to foster progress toward a deal.”
Nope, there are no economists who have warned that we have a serious risk of recession if there is no deal by January 1, 2013. The risk of recession comes if we go several months into 2013 without a deal. Those are very different scenarios, someone at the NYT must be able to understand this fact.
Perhaps we should be glad that the NYT gives their regular editors vacations over the holidays, but there still should have been someone to stop or qualify these lines:
“For months, President Obama, members of Congress of both parties and top economists have warned that the nation’s fragile economy could be swept back into recession if the two parties did not come to a post-election compromise on January’s combination of tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts.
“Yet with days left before the fiscal punch lands, both sides are exhibiting little sense of urgency, and new public statements Wednesday appeared to be designed more to ensure the other side is blamed rather than to foster progress toward a deal.”
Nope, there are no economists who have warned that we have a serious risk of recession if there is no deal by January 1, 2013. The risk of recession comes if we go several months into 2013 without a deal. Those are very different scenarios, someone at the NYT must be able to understand this fact.
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Yes, the Washington Post is getting very worried that it will have egg all over its face if January 1 comes with no budget deal and we don’t get its promised recession. The paper pushed this line yet again, telling readers:
“Unless the House and the Senate can agree on a way to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” more than $500 billion in tax increases and spending cuts will take effect next year, potentially sparking a new recession.”
Of course the potential for a new recession does not refer to missing the January 1 deadline. It is the risk the country faces if we continue well into 2013 paying higher tax rates and with large cuts in spending. This is an enormously important distinction.
This is not the only important distinction missed in this piece. It told readers that President Obama and Speaker Boehner were very close to a deal:
“Boehner offered to raise $1 trillion in fresh revenue, and he wanted spending cuts of equal size. By that measure, Obama’s tax offer was $300 billion too high and his cuts $150 billion too low, for a net difference between the two men of about $450 billion — less than 1 percent of projected federal spending over the next decade.
In the end, however, the gap proved to be much wider politically than it was numerically.”
Actually, Boehner never specified the tax increases that raised $1 trillion in fresh revenue. ( If he did, the Post did not bother to report them.) So it is not clear how far apart they were. It is also likely that one of Boehner’s big revenue raisers would have been a cap on deductions, including the deduction for state and local taxes. This would make it far more difficult for states like New York and California to maintain their current level of taxation. President Obama would find considerable resistance among Democrats to this sort of deal.
The piece also refered to Senator Lindsey Graham’s warnings that the country could end up like Greece. It should have pointed out that Graham is either ignorant of economics or was trying to needlessly scare his audience since there is no way the United States can end up like Greece.
The United States borrows in its own currency, which means that it will always be able to pay its debt. Its worst risk would be inflation, which is a very remote risk at the moment. Greece, on the other hand is like Ohio. It cannot borrow in its own currency. The Post should have pointed out this distinction to its readers since some might have taken Lindsey’s scare story seriously.
The piece also tells readers that Starbucks decision to make employees write “come together” on cups is a “‘sign of mounting anxiety over Washington gridlock.” While anxiety may explain the motivation of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, he may also just want to curry favor of the powerful executives in the Campaign to Fix the Debt and win praise from their allies in elite media outlets like the Washington Post. Since Schultz’s motives are not known, a serious newspaper would just report his actions without implying that it knew his motives.
Yes, the Washington Post is getting very worried that it will have egg all over its face if January 1 comes with no budget deal and we don’t get its promised recession. The paper pushed this line yet again, telling readers:
“Unless the House and the Senate can agree on a way to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” more than $500 billion in tax increases and spending cuts will take effect next year, potentially sparking a new recession.”
Of course the potential for a new recession does not refer to missing the January 1 deadline. It is the risk the country faces if we continue well into 2013 paying higher tax rates and with large cuts in spending. This is an enormously important distinction.
This is not the only important distinction missed in this piece. It told readers that President Obama and Speaker Boehner were very close to a deal:
“Boehner offered to raise $1 trillion in fresh revenue, and he wanted spending cuts of equal size. By that measure, Obama’s tax offer was $300 billion too high and his cuts $150 billion too low, for a net difference between the two men of about $450 billion — less than 1 percent of projected federal spending over the next decade.
In the end, however, the gap proved to be much wider politically than it was numerically.”
Actually, Boehner never specified the tax increases that raised $1 trillion in fresh revenue. ( If he did, the Post did not bother to report them.) So it is not clear how far apart they were. It is also likely that one of Boehner’s big revenue raisers would have been a cap on deductions, including the deduction for state and local taxes. This would make it far more difficult for states like New York and California to maintain their current level of taxation. President Obama would find considerable resistance among Democrats to this sort of deal.
The piece also refered to Senator Lindsey Graham’s warnings that the country could end up like Greece. It should have pointed out that Graham is either ignorant of economics or was trying to needlessly scare his audience since there is no way the United States can end up like Greece.
The United States borrows in its own currency, which means that it will always be able to pay its debt. Its worst risk would be inflation, which is a very remote risk at the moment. Greece, on the other hand is like Ohio. It cannot borrow in its own currency. The Post should have pointed out this distinction to its readers since some might have taken Lindsey’s scare story seriously.
The piece also tells readers that Starbucks decision to make employees write “come together” on cups is a “‘sign of mounting anxiety over Washington gridlock.” While anxiety may explain the motivation of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, he may also just want to curry favor of the powerful executives in the Campaign to Fix the Debt and win praise from their allies in elite media outlets like the Washington Post. Since Schultz’s motives are not known, a serious newspaper would just report his actions without implying that it knew his motives.
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The Serious People who are hyping the importance of a deal on the budget standoff before January 1 have various scare stories that are supposed to make us believe that missing the deadline will lead to an economic catastrophe. Part of the story is that consumers will freak out and stop buying things.
This part does not appear to be supported by the data, as the Conference Board Index of consumer confidence showed a sharp increase in December. Actually, that’s not entirely right. The index fell sharply in December, from 71.5 in November to 65. However, this drop was entirely due to a drop in the future expectations index. This index has almost no relationship to current consumption.
On the other hand, the current conditions index, which tracks consumption reasonably well, rose to 62.8 in December from 57.4 in November. This is the index that tells us what people are actually doing.
The future expectations index reflects the nonsense reported in the media, which these days means lots of end of the world prophecies over missing the December 31st deadline.
Addendum: The NYT committed the same sin.
The Serious People who are hyping the importance of a deal on the budget standoff before January 1 have various scare stories that are supposed to make us believe that missing the deadline will lead to an economic catastrophe. Part of the story is that consumers will freak out and stop buying things.
This part does not appear to be supported by the data, as the Conference Board Index of consumer confidence showed a sharp increase in December. Actually, that’s not entirely right. The index fell sharply in December, from 71.5 in November to 65. However, this drop was entirely due to a drop in the future expectations index. This index has almost no relationship to current consumption.
On the other hand, the current conditions index, which tracks consumption reasonably well, rose to 62.8 in December from 57.4 in November. This is the index that tells us what people are actually doing.
The future expectations index reflects the nonsense reported in the media, which these days means lots of end of the world prophecies over missing the December 31st deadline.
Addendum: The NYT committed the same sin.
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A Washington Post article on how most Democrats have come to support the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent of the population, after originally opposing them, told readers:
“The Democrats were also correct in warning about the effect on the government’s debt. The tax cuts did more to fuel ballooning federal deficits over the past decade than any other Bush administration action — including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the creation of a prescription drug benefit for seniors, according to the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. And in coming years, the Bush-era tax cuts are projected to expand the deficit by trillions more.”
Actually the deficits were not ballooning until the collapse of the housing bubble crashed the economy in 2008. The budget deficit in 2007 was 1.2 percent of GDP and the debt to GDP ratio was falling. The Congressional Budget Office projected that it would stay in this neighborhood for another decade or so even if the Bush tax cuts did not expire. The reason that the deficit became large and the debt to GDP ratio started to rise was that the collapse of the economy cost the government hundreds of billions in tax revenue annually and led to hundreds of billions of additional expenditures for unemployment benefits and other programs to counteract the impact of the downturn.
While the Bush tax cuts may have been bad policy, in fact they were affordable in the context of an economy that was near full employment. If the collapse of the housing bubble had not sank the economy, there would be little issue about the sustainability of the debt.
A Washington Post article on how most Democrats have come to support the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent of the population, after originally opposing them, told readers:
“The Democrats were also correct in warning about the effect on the government’s debt. The tax cuts did more to fuel ballooning federal deficits over the past decade than any other Bush administration action — including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the creation of a prescription drug benefit for seniors, according to the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. And in coming years, the Bush-era tax cuts are projected to expand the deficit by trillions more.”
Actually the deficits were not ballooning until the collapse of the housing bubble crashed the economy in 2008. The budget deficit in 2007 was 1.2 percent of GDP and the debt to GDP ratio was falling. The Congressional Budget Office projected that it would stay in this neighborhood for another decade or so even if the Bush tax cuts did not expire. The reason that the deficit became large and the debt to GDP ratio started to rise was that the collapse of the economy cost the government hundreds of billions in tax revenue annually and led to hundreds of billions of additional expenditures for unemployment benefits and other programs to counteract the impact of the downturn.
While the Bush tax cuts may have been bad policy, in fact they were affordable in the context of an economy that was near full employment. If the collapse of the housing bubble had not sank the economy, there would be little issue about the sustainability of the debt.
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