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Article Artículo

Why Do the Media Provide Cover for Austerity Cranks, Like the Folks Running the EU?

(This post first appeared on my Patreon page.)

It’s not uncommon to read new stories that quite explicitly identify economic mismanagement. For example, news reports on the hyperinflation in Zimbabwe routinely (and correctly) attribute the cause to the poor economic management by its leaders. We will see similar attributions of mismanagement to a wide range of developing countries.

One place we will never see the term mismanagement, or any equivalent term, applied is in reference to the austerity imposed on the eurozone countries by the European Commission, acting largely at the direction of the German government. In fact, major news outlets, like The New York Times, seem to go out of their way to deny the incredible harm done to eurozone economies and to the lives of tens of millions of people in these countries, as a result of needless austerity.

A decade ago it would at least have been an arguable point as to whether austerity, meaning budget cuts, in the wake of the Great Recession, was reasonable policy. There was some research suggesting that the boost to confidence from lower budget deficits could spur enough investment and consumption to offset the impact on demand of reductions in government spending.

However, since then we have far more evidence on the impact of deficit reduction in the context of an economy coming out of recession. There have been numerous studies, most importantly several from the International Monetary Fund’s research department, which show that lower deficits in this context slow growth and raise unemployment.

Furthermore, they show that periods of high unemployment have a lasting impact as a result of workers losing skills and companies and governments foregoing investment in a downturn that they would have undertaken if the economy were closer to its potential level of output. This means that insistence on deficit reduction not only led to one-time drops in output and employment but could reduce potential output by trillions of dollars over subsequent years.

CEPR / February 22, 2019

Article Artículo

Government

Inequality

United States

Progressive Solutions to Reducing the Racial Wealth Gap

As America grows to be a more diverse society, in many ways, it has also become a far more unequal one. American inequality has fluidly adapted to prevailing federal, state, and local institutions and continues to expose a country that has repeatedly fallen short of amending the systemic disparities among race, class, gender and ethnicity. These disparities have become increasingly more pronounced in the US economy, creating even more inequality and insecurity.

In an economy in which the wealthy benefit and the rest of the country are dramatically left behind, many lower- and middle-class workers struggle to achieve upward economic mobility due in part to flat wages and the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and the overall cost of living. These obstacles limit access to higher incomes and in turn, wealth. As high earners save much more of their income than low-wage workers, they are able to acquire more assets and build wealth — a path that is especially obstructed for black Americans who often earn much less. This is compounded by the fact that for decades, people of color have lagged behind white people by almost every economic indicator due largely to the legacy of slavery, the manifestation of structural racism, and the institutionalized exclusion of people of color from social and economic progress. Black people often face gross, structural barriers in attaining economic prosperity and wealth by way of an ascendant American social structure that has historically worked against them. American society routinely benefits white Americans while also generating adverse outcomes for people of color in the aggregate.

CEPR and Adewale Maye / February 21, 2019

Article Artículo

Confusion on Investment at the Washington Post: Point Is to Displace Workers

The Washington Post had a rather confused piece that complained that investment encouraged by accelerated depreciation, which was a provision of the Trump tax cut (also the Obama stimulus), is "helping companies replace workers with machines." This is reported as though it is some sort of scandal, when it is in fact precisely the point of this provision.

The stated goal of the Trump tax cut was to promote investment. This was their rationale for having the bulk of the tax cut go to businesses. Their argument was that a lower tax rate would provide businesses with more incentive to invest. More investment would lead to more rapid productivity growth. If workers got their share of gains in productivity, then they would benefit from having higher wages.

The key question in this story is whether the tax cut actually led to more investment. The evidence to date is that it has had at most a minimal effect on investment, with investment running slightly higher in 2018 than before the tax cut in 2017. There certainly has been no boom. There also is zero evidence that it led to any uptick in productivity growth, as productivity growth remained very slow through the year. So, by their own standard, the tax cut seems to be failing badly.

However, if we did see more investment and productivity growth, it would mean displacing workers. Higher productivity means more output can be produced with the same number of work hours, or alternatively, the same output can be produced with fewer work hours. (Fewer work hours doesn't have to mean fewer workers. In other countries, much of the gain from higher productivity has been realized in the form of shorter work years. Workers have 5–6 weeks a year of vacation, paid family leave, paid sick days, and other forms of paid time off.)

CEPR / February 20, 2019

Article Artículo

Latin America and the Caribbean

Venezuela

World

Tracing the Threads in Venezuela: Humanitarian Aid

Last week, humanitarian aid was at the center of discussion of the Venezuela crisis in the US, and evidently at the center of Juan Guaidó’s plans to challenge the Maduro government’s hold on power in the country. The New York Times noted that:

The battle over the legitimate leadership of Venezuela — which has included rallies of thousands, international diplomacy and oil sanctions — is now focused on a single heavily guarded shipment of humanitarian aid.

Venezuela’s opposition, which has relished a month of victories in its effort to challenge President Nicolás Maduro and take over as the country’s legitimate government, brought the donated supplies of food and medical kits to the country’s border with Colombia.

Its goal was to bring the supplies into Venezuela, forcing a confrontation with Mr. Maduro, who has refused the help. This would cast Mr. Maduro in a bad light, opposition leaders said, and display their ability to set up a government-like relief system in a nation where the crumbling economy has left many starving, sick and without access to medicine.

CEPR and Alexander Campbell / February 19, 2019

Article Artículo

MMT and Taxing the Rich

(This post first appeared on my Patreon page.)

I don’t consider myself an MMTer, but there is a basic Keynesian concept which has been associated with MMT, which is both true and important. For the federal government, taxes are not about raising revenue, taxes are about reducing consumption to prevent inflation.

The point is that the federal government does not need taxes for revenue since it can just print money. It instead taxes to create the room in the economy for government spending. This view is sometimes wrongly taken as a “get out of jail free” card, where the government can spend whatever it wants without worrying about raising revenue.

That could be true in a deep downturn. However, if the economy is near its full employment level of output, where additional demand will lead to rising inflation, we are pretty much back in the world where we need taxes to offset spending. Any major increase in government spending will lead to higher inflation unless we have higher taxes or have some other mechanism to reduce demand in the economy.

We can, of course, argue about how close the economy is to its full employment level of output. This is not easy to determine and the mainstream of the economics profession has badly erred on the high side in arguing that we were near full employment, when in fact the unemployment rate could (and did) go much lower.

But leaving the argument about where we hit full employment aside, we still have the basic truth that when we are near full employment, we do need higher taxes to offset additional spending. A small qualifier is worth adding here. We have a $20 trillion economy. We don’t have to worry about inflation because we spend another $2 billion or $5 billion a year on some program we think is important. (That would be 0.01 percent to 0.0025 percent of GDP.) We do have to worry about inflation if we want to spend another $200 billion a year on a big education or health care program.

CEPR / February 15, 2019

Article Artículo

New York Times Is Badly Confused on European Data: Growth Is a Problem

The New York Times ran a piece headlined "Europe's middle class is shrinking. Spain bears much of the pain." The gist of the piece is that the middle class in Europe, and especially Spain is disappearing as the result of some mysterious process.

It tells readers:

"Spain’s economy, like the rest of Europe’s, is growing faster than before the 2008 financial crisis and creating jobs. But the work they could find pays a fraction of the combined 80,000-euro annual income they once earned. By summer, they figure they will no longer be able to pay their mortgage." [The "they" refers to a formerly middle class couple who lost jobs in the downturn and had to find new jobs at far lower pay."

The piece continues:

"It is a precarious situation felt by millions of Europeans.

"Since the recession of the late 2000s, the middle class has shrunk in over two-thirds of the European Union, echoing a similar decline in the United States and reversing two decades of expansion. While middle-class households are more prevalent in Europe than in the United States — around 60 percent, compared with just over 50 percent in America — they face unprecedented levels of vulnerability. ...

"The hurdles to keeping their status, or recovering lost ground, are higher given post-recession labor dynamics. The loss of middle-income jobs, weakened social protections and skill mismatches have reduced economic mobility and widened income inequality. Automation and globalization are deepening the divides."

Just about every part of this story is wrong, as a quick look at the data would show. To start with, Spain and most other European countries are not growing faster than before the recession. According to the IMF, Spain's economy grew at a 2.7 percent rate in 2018 and is projected to grow 2.2 percent this year. By comparison, it grew at an average rate of more than 3.9 percent in 2006 and 2007, the last two years before the recession.

Spain's per capita GDP was just 3.0 percent higher in 2018 than it was in 2007. By comparison, coming out of the Great Depression in the United States, per capita income in 1940 was more than 8.0 percent higher than in 1929.

CEPR / February 14, 2019

Article Artículo

Health and Social Programs

United States

Time to Increase Social Security Benefits for Low and Moderate Wage Earners

As the percentage of workers who can count on a traditional defined-benefit pension is falling rapidly, we have been lowering the Social Security benefits relative to their earnings. This reduction in benefits has not been widely noted because it takes the form of an increase in the age at which workers can receive their full benefits. This had been age 65 for workers who reached age 62 before 2003.

The age for full benefits then rose gradually to age 66 for workers who reached age 62 after 2008. It remained at this age until 2017, at which point it again began to increase, reaching 67 for workers who turn 62 after 2022. This increase in the age for full benefits amounts to roughly a 12 percent reduction in the value of a worker’s Social Security.

There was a further reduction in the 1990s that received little attention because of its technical nature. Benefits are indexed after retirement to the rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Dean Baker / February 11, 2019

Article Artículo

It's Monday and Robert Samuelson Wants to Cut Social Security!

I guess we can always count on The Washington Post to print misleading pieces calling for cuts in Social Security. After all, what are newspapers for? Anyhow, Robert Samuelson gives us one of his usual tirades, misrepresenting most of the key items in the debate.

The basis of his outrage is a bill proposed by Representative John Larson to increase Social Security. The proposal is for a modest overall increase in benefits with a larger increase for the poor. The proposal also calls for indexing benefits to a cost of living index designed to monitor the expenses faced by seniors, instead of the population as a whole. Samuelson complains that this could lead to higher benefits.

The gist of Samuelson's argument is that seniors are doing very well right now. He cites a recently done study by C. Adam Bee and Joshua Mitchell, two economists who were at the Census Bureau at the time, that found, based on tax filings that seniors had higher incomes than we had realized.

While the study did show seniors were doing better than earlier survey data, the picture is not altogether positive. For example, the average income for seniors in the bottom decile is just $7,500, for the second decile it's $13,000. It probably would not seem too outrageous to most people to want to give these people somewhat higher benefits. Even for the 5th decile, the average income was only $32,500. (These figures are all in 2012 dollars, so add about 15 percent to put them in today's dollars.)

But perhaps more importantly, the main reason Bee and Mitchell found higher income levels than previous data is under-reported pension income. Samuelson misleading reports the issue by saying that most of the "underreporting involve income from IRAs, 401(k) plans and traditional pensions." Actually, for middle-income households under-reporting of 401(k) income was pretty much irrelevant. The problem was missed pension income.

CEPR / February 11, 2019