July 29, 2015
Paul Krugman rightly mocks Jeb Bush for taking credit for the strong growth in Florida during his tenure as governor. As Krugman points out, the reason for the strong growth was that Florida had one of the worst housing bubbles in the country. Its collapse gave Florida one of the worst downturns in the country. (I had made the same point a couple weeks earlier to a reporter fact-checking Bush’s claim on growth.) The weak banking regulation that facilitated the bubble is not the sort of thing you would think the Bush campaign wants to boast about.
But it is not just Governor Bush who is prone to boasting about bubble driven growth. The boom in the last four years of the Clinton presidency was largely driven by the stock bubble that developed in these years, with price to earning ratio rising to levels not seen since the 1920s. The collapse of this bubble gave us the recession in 2001. While this downturn was very mild if measured by GDP, from the standpoint of the labor market it was quite severe. We did not get back the jobs lost in the downturn until January of 2005. Until the more recent recession this was the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression.
The interesting lesson from the 1990s boom was that the economy could sustain much lower rates of unemployment than had been previously believed. The unemployment rate hit 4.0 percent as a year-round average in 2000, most economists had previously argued that the unemployment rate could not fall much below 6.0 percent without causing spiraling inflation. This indicated that as a supply side matter, the economy could support the high levels of employment/low levels of unemployment of the late 1990s.
However, the problem is the demand side. The channels to create the demand needed to get to low rates of unemployment — either larger budget deficits or lower trade deficits caused by a lower valued dollar — are blocked politically. (We could also look to reduce work hours through work-sharing, more vacation, paid family leave, etc.) This means that we may not see a strong labor market, like the one of the late 1990s, for some time.
But the key point here is that both parties are happy to take credit for bubble driven growth. Maybe there can be a quid pro quo where Jeb Bush will stop taking credit for the growth generated by the Florida housing bubble and the Democrats stop taken credit for the bubble driven growth of the Clinton years.
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