Audacity, Audacity, Always Audacity: Why Obama and Baucus Should Push for a Carbon Tax

Apr 29, 2013Bo Cutter

A carbon tax would bring long-term rewards, but it will take leaders willing to make short-term sacrifices.

We are at an unacknowledged turning point for the economy and the environment. We could, right now, substantially reduce our debt and deficit projections, take a major step toward a better environment, create a simpler and fairer tax system, make job creation easier, and raise economic growth a bit. For all of these reasons, we could and should adopt a carbon tax.

A carbon tax would bring long-term rewards, but it will take leaders willing to make short-term sacrifices.

We are at an unacknowledged turning point for the economy and the environment. We could, right now, substantially reduce our debt and deficit projections, take a major step toward a better environment, create a simpler and fairer tax system, make job creation easier, and raise economic growth a bit. For all of these reasons, we could and should adopt a carbon tax.

Taking this step depends on two men: President Obama and Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Both men want to leave an important legacy, and both are in a unique political position: they still possess real political power, but neither will ever face another election. (Obama, of course, is limited to two terms, and Baucus has just announced that he will retire.) Acting together, the two of them could completely change the odds of enacting a carbon tax this year.

Right now, if you ask around, as I have, there are many across the ideological spectrum who agree that a carbon tax would help us solve a lot of problems, but they won't take a public step because they see no leadership support. My own gut feeling is that there would even be energy industry support for a carbon tax. President Obama and Senator Baucus could change this picture by making a carbon tax a priority and building bipartisan support for the project.

Why should we care? Let's look at four issues: federal revenues, the tax system, jobs, and – oh, yeah – the environment.

First, a carbon tax of $20 a ton would raise about $120 billion a year, or $1.2 trillion over a decade. Right now, everyone anywhere near the budget debates is in a convenient and delusional state of mind about revenues. The conventional wisdom is that we either do not need more revenues or they are easy to find. So here are some counter-assertions: (1) despite the right’s imaginations, we are not going to cope with the retirement of the boomers, the doubling of folks on Medicare, and our need for fundamental infrastructure investment without new revenues; (2) despite the speeches the left makes to itself, the problem won't be solved by taxing whomever the left decides is rich; (3) we aren't going to end the home mortgage and charitable deductions. There will come a point when $1 trillion in new revenue over the next decade that actually makes the economy and the world a little better will look pretty interesting, so why not try for it now?

Second, the tax system is a mess and more caught in a state of political gridlock than even the rest of the federal budget. The system is far too complicated, and it probably lowers economic growth and job creation. More practically, raising new revenues from this structure is next to impossible; the 40-year strategy of broadening the base and lowering rates (a strategy I agree with) has played itself out. With the carbon tax's $1 trillion, you could exempt low-income families, reduce the payroll tax, lower overall tax rates, and still bring down the debt and deficit. Sure, there would be fights about how to use the extra revenue, but those are fights the political system is supposed to have.

Third, jobs. We rely way too much on payroll taxes. They are very, very inefficient, and they directly and visibly add to the costs of job creation. Back when the U.S. economy was an unstoppable job machine, these taxes looked as though they were cost-free. Not anymore. I am optimistic about our long-term economic prospects, but I also think the jobs of the future will require much more education and training content than the jobs of the past, and therefore employers will be much more sensitive to other costs, i.e., taxes. Anything sensible we can do to make job creation easier and less costly is a step we should take.

Finally, the environment. A lot has been published recently about climate change and its sensitivity to greenhouse gases. Cutting through all of the models and the uncertainties, the net conclusion is that warming is probably a small bit less sensitive to greenhouse gases than we have thought. Climate change deniers have used this for the obvious purposes. But the actual end conclusions haven't changed much. At current rates, we will put half a trillion more tons of carbon into the atmosphere by 2045 and 1 trillion more by 2080. Because of this the Earth's temperature will probably warm about three-quarters of a degree in the next 30 years and 1.5 degrees over the next 50. (30 years may seem a long time to some of you; from my perspective, it's a blink of an eye away.) And the math keeps suggesting that the earth's sensitivity to extreme events is increasing more rapidly than global warming. So the future may be less hot but more dangerous.

Isn't it worth a small amount of political difficulty and a fairly small tax now to slow down these trends? Everyone in politics talks a lot about political courage – mostly their own. As far as I can tell, political courage normally consists of doing something your supporters love and your opponents hate and then bragging about it. But maybe the two leaders I mentioned at the start will realize that they can afford to change that definition and leave a real legacy.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

 

Melting Earth image via Shutterstock.com

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The Budget Wars: An Outbreak of Sanity or the Foundations for a New Offensive?

Mar 18, 2013Bo Cutter

The partisan divide over the budget may seem unbridgeable, but there's a deal to be had if both sides want it.

I'll open by acknowledging a considerable difference between my budget/fiscal policy hopes and my actual predictions. My hopes for the emergence of a doable centrist budget strategy from the Obama administration have never come close to reality. My predictions that nothing much will happen have mostly been correct. So where are we now?

The partisan divide over the budget may seem unbridgeable, but there's a deal to be had if both sides want it.

I'll open by acknowledging a considerable difference between my budget/fiscal policy hopes and my actual predictions. My hopes for the emergence of a doable centrist budget strategy from the Obama administration have never come close to reality. My predictions that nothing much will happen have mostly been correct. So where are we now?

We're in the middle of the clash of ideology, reality, what Edward Luttwag calls "the autism of great powers" applied to domestic politics, and an organizational-bureaucratic brain freeze. Both the left and right are deeply mired in the ideologies of another time and another universe. Reality has played out contrary to all expectations. The "great powers" keep saying the same things because that's what they said yesterday. And the various bureaucracies are all essentially impermeable to new strategies and have no idea what steps to take now.

There are some parallels here to Bill Clinton and the spring of 1995. (Just to be clear, I was an enthusiastic part of that administration.) In the 1994 congressional elections, the Clinton administration had been clobbered. For the first time in 40 years, the Republicans won both houses of Congress, gaining eight seats in the Senate and 54 seats in the House. It was a grim time in the White House, made grimmer by the standoff over 1994-95 spending and the government shutdown that then ensued. Bill Clinton won the public relations battle around the shutdown but, in retrospect, clearly began to be uneasy over how dug-in over budget/deficit issues his own White House was. And it was Bill Clinton, acting on his own, who moved his administration toward a balanced budget as a goal, toward the political center, and toward a huge victory in 1996.

Is something similar happening now?

The circumstances are obviously not exactly the same today. President Obama has won his second term and is now trying to establish the basis for a successful second term and a legacy for the ages.

Just a few weeks ago, the second-term strategy, clearly signaled by the White House, was to run against the Republican House and focus almost completely on turning the House in the 2014 elections. Not that anyone asked, but I thought this was a terrible strategy. (And no, the Truman 1948 "Do-Nothing Congress" campaign is not even remotely an analogue.) Winning the House in 2014 is an uphill fight with the odds very much against the president. If you as the president try and then lose, you can be certain that you will get nothing in your last two years -- because you invested your first two in depicting your political opponents as the nation's enemies. If you try and actually win, you won't win much because your power ebbs so rapidly in those last two years. All those House seats you won will be filled by moderates who are looking to a future when you won't be there.

I saw this as the common problem of poker players who don't understand the central issue of money odds versus card odds. It's okay to draw to inside straights if the pot is giving you money odds that are more in your favor than the card odds are against you. Which is to say low-probability strategies are fine if you really know the odds and the payoff is big enough. The problem in this specific case is that the odds are worse and the payoff for success less than the enthusiasts believe.

But suddenly we're in the middle of a charm fest, filled with dinners and meetings and discussions, all about the budget, that were never anticipated. What happened? Reality happened.

I think there is at least a chance that President Obama noticed developments out there in the real world, saw that his own White House was dug in on a low probability/low return strategy and unlikely to change, and moved on his own.

What, possibly, did the president see?

The end-of-the-year tax increases on upper-income families did not lead to the uprising Republicans expected. But they also did not spark the public expressions of devotion that the White House wanted.

Then sequestration happened, which no one expected, and it was a political non-event. The public did not turn against Republicans because of the budget cuts. But it also became obvious to everyone that sequestration makes all of government a bit worse, and is more than anything else a sign of an utter absence of political leadership or comity.

Then the picture of the economy became a bit clearer. Here's my view: enjoy this nice employment bump we've had and the decent first quarter (which is basically over), because it's the last of the good news. The rest of the year will probably be pretty slow, and the sequester will probably cost us about 500,000 jobs, mostly in the private sector. If you're President Obama, you know one thing for certain: any chance you have of building a great second-term legacy will be sunk if the economy stays mediocre and you're spending your time entrenched in the budget wars.

Finally, the polls began to tell a story. In the most recent Washington Post - ABC News poll, President Obama's approval ratings have dropped 5 points to about 50 percent since his reelection. And the 18-point advantage the president had over the Congress regarding whom the public trusted more to handle the economy has fallen to 4 points. 50 percent of independents now have a negative view of the president's performance compared to 44 percent with a positive view. Since the end of World War II, only two second-term presidents, Obama and George W. Bush, have had approval ratings this low this early. (This is not good company.)

Meanwhile, of course, the ongoing public debate involves all of the normal agita. Representative Paul Ryan and the Republican House have put out a House budget that progressives hate. And Senator Patty Murray and the Senate Democrats have offered a counter-budget that conservatives hate. The two, of course, have nothing to do with each other, and cannot possibly be used as the basis for a true compromise or "deal." I think they are like the cans of sardines in the joke: they're there for trading, not eating. Judging by the mail I keep getting telling me breathlessly there is a desperate need for me to give money to save us from Paul Ryan (I'd bet the conservative side is raising money to save us from Patty Murray), I sometimes suspect that the left and right got together and agreed to put out two undoable budgets as organizing and fundraising mechanisms. Thankfully, we really do not have to spend a dime to defend ourselves against either Ryan or Murray. Both of their efforts are basically sideshows.

What I hope is happening -- and a few friends in various places think is happening -- is that both sides are looking at all this and concluding they can't be at all confident they have winning hands, and maybe it's better to see if there's a deal to be had. It will be hard to do anything else of real importance until this issue is settled; it will just sit there offering opportunities for completely unproductive fights several times every year. President Obama has a much lower chance of building a real legacy unless the issue is settled. And the hell of it is that if you decide to solve the problem over a decade, it actually isn't that hard.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

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The Fork in the Road Already Facing Obama's Second-Term Agenda

Feb 25, 2013Bo Cutter

President Obama has a limited amount of time to accomplish his second-term goals, so there's no time like the present to go big.

Admittedly it is absurdly early to be suggesting that President Obama's second term is at a crucial fork in the road. But I think that's where we are and here's why.

President Obama has a limited amount of time to accomplish his second-term goals, so there's no time like the present to go big.

Admittedly it is absurdly early to be suggesting that President Obama's second term is at a crucial fork in the road. But I think that's where we are and here's why.

Second presidential terms are two years, not four years. Second terms have rarely been resounding successes. Sometimes the reason is too specific to be generalized. More often, the reasons have included scar tissue, fatigue, and a dwindling bench. The American people get sick of the same faces, the old players are exhausted and have spent whatever intellectual capital they came with, and the new players aren't as good as the old players. But, always, the underlying direction is declining political capital. Senior American politicians, regardless of party, are as a class or caste the most self-referential, self-reverential, and self-regarding group our species has known in its roughly 100,000 years on the planet. They have an uncanny capacity to sniff out the exact nano-second that power begins to ebb, no matter how slightly, and then act to accelerate that ebbing. 

So President Obama has two years, not four, to get anything big accomplished, and that means he has to say what it is -- now.

There are three obvious mega strategies. Whether the president's political advisors know it or not, the choice between these three is the big decision they are making right now.

1. Beat up the Republican party with the hope of fracturing it completely or simply clobbering it in the 2014 Congressional elections. This seems to be the preferred direction right now.

2. Accomplish a series of individual policy wins -- pick among immigration reform, preschool education, a small infrastructure plan, or even a carbon tax.

3. Change the political/policy game in America and give the country a new story.

That first goal is an emotionally satisfying choice and no group deserves clobbering more than this era's Republicans right wing. But it may not be possible and it may not help achieve real policy goals as much as one might think. The Democratic left is nowhere near as unpleasant as the Republican right, but it is just as mired in a 60-year-old, outdated ideology. And this strategy doesn't constitute much of a legacy for President Obama.

The second goal is highly worthwhile and may be all anyone can accomplish in today's dysfunctional Washington. If President Obama achieved significant legislation in each of the four areas I named above, he would have achieved more than any of the last three, maybe four, second-term presidents going back at least 50 years.

The third goal -- a new vision or story of America -- sounds so over-reaching as to be preposterous. But I believe we are at a moment when this is possible: a time of immense global change, an improving economy with better prospects than any other developed economy in the world, a gridlocked political environment locked into interminable debate over the wrong issues, a high level of American citizen dissatisfaction with our politics, and a popular second term president with room to maneuver. We are unlikely to see this confluence of circumstances again for another 50 years. 

Two points about these mega strategies: They are in part mutually exclusive and path dependent. And only a president can outline them and carry them out. Certainly strategy 1, on the one side, and strategies 2 or 3 are mutually exclusive. In terms of how politics and human beings work, the president cannot decide to beat the Republicans up for a time and then change gears and directions. But strategies 2 and 3 are not mutually exclusive. President Obama could present a new American story and then move to a set of specific policies. In fact, this might be the best course for accomplishing anything. 

I believe that right now, the president could do two big things that, if successful, would make his second term successful, have high odds of being successful, and would have low costs if they aren't successful. First, he could offer a real deal to stop sequestration and, second, he could define the next era.

Lets start with sequestration. This is a manufactured crisis -- a set of automatic budget cuts that will make our defense, international, and domestic programs worse (in fact, the set was designed to make everything worse) but on the other hand will do next to nothing about our long-run debt and deficit problem. It was a last-ditch, desperate effort 18 months ago to look as though something was being accomplished. Its big flaw -- other than being completely irresponsible -- was that if it were going to force a real resolution, it always depended on the president defining a deal. Congress is not capable of doing that. All Congress can ever really do is the short-term, kick it down the road for three months efforts being thrown out today. These are worthless.

Now is the moment for the president to put forward a real deal, with real entitlement reform. This means reductions in the long-term rate of growth in entitlement spending, some further defense cuts (I don't think we should cut normal regular domestic spending, but it should certainly be rearranged), income tax reform where possible (but not much is possible), and a new source of revenues -- a new tax. We cannot solve our debt/deficit problem and pay for the government we all know we are going to have without new revenues. I've always been a proponent of a highly defined, progressive value added tax (a VAT), and still am. But I think that a carbon tax would be the better choice right now. Why not raise $1 trillion over the next decade and simultaneously begin to solve our most pressing environmental problems?

But the president should define such a deal not as the be-all-and-end-all of his administration, but rather as a necessary step toward an era of safer, higher, more sustainable, more equitable growth. He could explain how achieving this growth is possible and why it requires both fiscal reform and investments in the future. He could demonstrate easily how the specific policies he stressed in his State of the Union fit into this long-run direction. He could show a deeper understanding of the real private sector. And he could emphasize that we have time to adjust to change if we start now. As an example, a real and credible 10-year debt/deficit plan is what we need, not an economy-breaking one or two year slash and burn plan.

I believe that a deal is there, waiting to be made. The adults in the Republican party know they are in a trap. Americans would support a deal (all the polls show that the American people are far less polarized on these issues than Washington is). Most Democrats would rather be talking about solutions and growth than waging these interminable budget wars. The president could get 1) a deal, 2) an agreement to stop the incessant budget warfare (by permanently canceling the sequestration and ending the constant debt ceiling threats), 3) the chance to create the coalitions necessary to accomplish his policies without constantly fighting the budget battles, and (4) an actual shot at defining the contours of America's next era. 

But the president has to decide and act. What strategy is he pursuing? What does the country need? What are second terms for? 

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

 

Obama image via mistydawnphoto / Shutterstock.com.

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The State of the Union: A Good Speech, But a Lost Opportunity

Feb 14, 2013Bo Cutter

President Obama offered up a good list of policies, but there was no clear vision of the future to go with it.

A couple of days ago I wrote an essay in anticipation of President Obama's State of the Union speech. Assuming a "pivot" back to the economy, I defined two kinds of economic speeches he could give: the plain vanilla, commodity speech every president gives, or one that very much anticipated the future. I underlined my own hopes for the second kind of speech.

President Obama offered up a good list of policies, but there was no clear vision of the future to go with it.

A couple of days ago I wrote an essay in anticipation of President Obama's State of the Union speech. Assuming a "pivot" back to the economy, I defined two kinds of economic speeches he could give: the plain vanilla, commodity speech every president gives, or one that very much anticipated the future. I underlined my own hopes for the second kind of speech.

However, Tuesday night's speech was, I would argue, an extremely high-level version of the first type of economic speech. Of course, it was good -- on his worst day ever, President Obama is not capable of giving a bad speech. The specific policies and proposals he put forward were mostly right. He gave important prominence to critical areas such as climate change.

It also has to be said that, once again, President Obama was incredibly lucky in his competition. Senator Rubio, the most recent Republican savior, gave a pedestrian response accompanied by a now-famous swig of water. Senator Rubio comes off as an admirable man, and I had no problem with the water thing, but he's not in the president's league, and you continue to wonder when the Republican Party will come up with a narrative that actually has anything to do with American life. I think our system badly needs a viable Republican "story."

However, classy as the president was, he did not provide that narrative either. This speech did not give a coherent, passionate vision of America today, a vision that would impel movement in the directions he wants.

A few thoughts about the actual policies the president stressed: middle class jobs, the minimum wage, preschool education, infrastructure, manufacturing technology institutes, a market-based climate initiative, and a European Free Trade deal. It's a perfectly good list, and a pragmatic, straightforward case can be made for all of them. Some may actually happen. My sense is that a substantial trade deal with Europe is within reach, and if Europe ever recovers, a deal would add a couple of tenths to our growth rate. Some probably won't happen. I doubt that the national minimum wage will be raised, although I think it would be good for the country if it were. And we aren't going to see the miraculous reemergence of a bipartisan market-based climate approach.

But in the end, it's just a list. The following did not happen with respect to these policies: there were no priorities, there was no sense that we have to make choices, and there was no overall story that makes this set of policies seem to be something we have to do.

This is my core problem with the speech and why it's a lost opportunity. I refer everyone to David Brooks's recent column, "Carpe Diem Nation." His core point is this: "Instead of sacrificing the present for the sake of the future, Americans now sacrifice the future for the sake of the present." He's right, and this should have been the frame of the president's State of the Union speech.

We are confronting enormous change. We have to figure out how to cope with it. We know that this "coping" will cost a lot. But we are spending every marginal dollar on our entitlements. We can and should raise more revenues, but anyone who thinks much more will come out of the income tax by whacking the wealthy again is dreaming. So we have to make choices, but, even more important, some core of America needs to be united around a commonly held story about America and its future.

The hell of it is this isn't that hard. The story is completely obvious and would be bought into by a large number of Americans. The future of our economy is quite positive -- more so than any other developed region of the world. And for us the choices really aren't excruciating. It's just important in our polarized politics for the right and the left to pretend they are. I believe that President Obama could both have begun to build the foundation of a really big legacy and raised the probabilities of his policies becoming real if he had chosen to take the risk of telling the story of America's next chapter.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

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A Forecast for the 2013 State of the Union Speech

Feb 11, 2013Bo Cutter

This is not the moment to give the same economic speech, but to be bold and long-term.

This is not the moment to give the same economic speech, but to be bold and long-term.

Inaugural addresses are about poetry and vision; State of the Union speeches are about prose and governing. (I acknowledge the inaccurate theft from Governor Mario Cuomo.) But they can and should be about more than a simple listing of policy and budgetary goodies, which is more often what they have become, or the inevitable, and politically necessary, announcement that the state of the union is "good." President Obama should raise the level of the genre and his own game in Tuesday night's speech. Because second term presidencies are two real years rather than the constitutional four years, the president has a lot at stake in making this his best State of the Union.

The president's advisors have told the media that this speech will reflect a "pivot" back to the economy after the Inaugural Address's focus, largely, on inequality. That would be very welcome. But he still has a choice.

He can give the standard, dull, plain-vanilla generic presidential speech about the economy. This would have three major themes: (1) the economy is not in good enough shape, but it's getting better; (2) everything my administration has done to date is the reason why the economy is getting better; and (3) here is my list of actions we intend to take that will immediately make the economy even better. That last point invariably emphasizes job creation, immediate job creation, immediate American job creation, and immediate American good job creation. The generic speech always has a number of good things to say about infrastructure spending. This is all always said with the implicit assumption that the economy of tomorrow will be much the same as the economy of yesterday and today and that no one need worry too much about change. You have to remember that State of the Union speeches are drafted by political advisors and consultants who, across all political parties and all times, share two views about the American people: they go into catatonic states at the prospect of any change and their time horizon is at most a couple of weeks. This speech would disappear without a trace.

Or he could decide to give a far better economic speech. It would have the following themes:

First, a discussion of long-run economic growth, not the next six months - which matter, but not as much as the long term. 

Second, a focus on a particular kind of growth: long-term, equitable, and sustainable. I mention the "sustainable" point in particular because it is always part of any rhetorical flourish but mostly disregarded when the time comes to do anything. 

Third, a conversation about change. As is obvious to anyone, and as is detailed by the fascinating ebook by McAfee and Brynjolfsson, The Race Against the Machine, we are in the middle of a huge, long-term period of enormous dislocating technological change, and that's only one aspect of the change we are going to see. The American people need this president to tell them this and to say clearly this change will fundamentally alter many of the givens of jobs, work, companies, education, etc.

Fourth, an outline of a practical vision. The impending change is real, but so is America's immense capacity for innovation and reinvention. The president can show how down-to-earth, sensible policies will put the country on the right side of this change.

I haven't mentioned the omnipresent issues of budgets, deficits, and debt. These issues have to be resolved if we want to establish a strong basis for the economy of the future and if we want to make this economy safer. These issues should be put in this economic context. Resolving them will require movement from both Democrats and Republicans. There is no movement today. In this speech, President Obama should make a thoughtful and genuine proposal to break today's complete deadlock. 

The probability of this second speech being given is well below 10 percent. But the president would be better off if he gave it and if he established a different kind of context for that portion of his second term that really matters. This is a use-it-or lose it moment; this is what second terms are about.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

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The Fiscal Cliff Deal: Useless Little Battles and a Worse Government

Feb 7, 2013Bo Cutter

The year ahead will be full of petty budget battles that solve nothing and distract from the real issues.

On the one hand, the last minute December 2012 fiscal cliff deal was in no respects a policy breakthrough, but on the other hand, it didn't solve any process issues either. There will be no grand resolution, which pleases the ideologues on both sides. God forbid that we come to any workable compromises. And there is no framework. So the 2013 stage is set for a series of useless little budget/deficit/debt wars.

The year ahead will be full of petty budget battles that solve nothing and distract from the real issues.

On the one hand, the last minute December 2012 fiscal cliff deal was in no respects a policy breakthrough, but on the other hand, it didn't solve any process issues either. There will be no grand resolution, which pleases the ideologues on both sides. God forbid that we come to any workable compromises. And there is no framework. So the 2013 stage is set for a series of useless little budget/deficit/debt wars.

We face, in turn, (1) the sequestration battles starting in March (over irresponsible cuts we agreed to 15 months ago as a way of avoiding doing anything then), (2) continuing resolution battles starting in April (a series of confrontations over spending this year because Congress couldn't pass spending bills), (3) 2014 budget battles starting in May (but then we haven't actually agreed on a budget for years), and (4) the return of the debt limit debacle sometime around August. (You thought this was over because Congress has declared that the debt limit has been suspended, but it's coming back.)

These little battles will not -- either singly or together -- lead to a resolution of the deficit/debt/budget debacle. No actual problems will be solved. Everything will be kicked down the proverbial road. My bet is that each of the impending possible battles will wind up the same. There will be high drama moving toward farce, forecasts of doom, tense last-minute negotiations in which various congressional and executive leaders will try to act as though something important is happening. Each time the Republican House will back down, because if your approval rating is lower than cockroaches, you have surprisingly little political leverage.

We are seeing this whole drama playing out now in the run up to the sequester. To remind everyone, these are cuts (roughly $85 billion in 2013 divided between domestic and defense programs) Congress and the president agreed to because they were thought to be so awful that the same two parties would agree to solving the whole budget problem to keep these cuts from happening. So now they are likely to happen and we've decided we hate them.

I hated them a year ago and said so at the time, but predicted that we would in the end make the domestic cuts and finesse the defense cuts. To be clear, I believe we must, over a 10 year period, slow down the growth of public debt, and this has to mean budget cuts. But these reductions will occur at the wrong time, they are done in the wrong way, they hit the wrong part of the budget, and they do nothing whatsoever to alter the 10 year picture of debt growth that impends. They are a wholly symbolic and harmful ritual dance.

We should not make these cuts now. We should, if necessary, make smaller cuts so Congress can say it got a "down payment." Then Congress and the president should agree there will be no debt ceiling fight this year and should publicly and together commit to a process that might work.

In my dreams.

We seem intent on having these useless little battles. They will not actually lead to disasters. On the other hand, they won't make anything better. But they will take up time, consume political capital, raise the level of distrust in government, maintain a high level of economic uncertainty, lower our economy's growth rate, and impede the administration's and the Congress's focus on the real issues of our future. Both parties will look worse after all of this.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

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The Inaugural Address and a Vision of America

Jan 28, 2013Bo Cutter

President Obama's second inaugural had soaring language but fell short of a transformational vision of the future.

President Obama's second inaugural had soaring language but fell short of a transformational vision of the future.

Inaugural addresses are poetry and vision. They are not about governing and programs. Judged this way, President Obama's second inaugural speech was wonderful poetry. The president excels at these big set pieces and he delivers them magnificently. In these moments he is magnetic, and it would take a very crabbed spirit not to acknowledge this. To quote Newt Gingrich, it was a good speech. But the vision of America in the speech is disappointing -- not because it is wrong, but because it isn't sufficiently penetrating and insightful. It is far too incomplete. It does not rise to the quality of his mind or of his poetry.

Some thoughts about the president's speech itself before expanding on my concerns about the president's vision:

The headline instant analysis of the speech all said this was a defiantly progressive statement. Maybe history will see it that way, but I doubt it. This was a very, very conventional restatement of progressive thought and values. It can only be thought of as some sort of signature statement because of how far toward the right debate in Washington shifted after the arrival of the Tea Party.  

I'm not a "progressive" in today's terms, but nevertheless I'd argue that the values the president emphasized have become conventional because they are right. And after a completely unedifying and at times ugly presidential campaign, and then a really dispiriting congressional lame duck session, some of these values needed to be reasserted. We do face problems requiring government and collective action, as the president discussed. The nation is not divided neatly into givers and takers as Governor Romney believes. Equal opportunity for every American ought not to be a question we debate. And even in the middle of a bitter immigration dispute about who are or can become Americans, we have to act decently. We ought to be able to resolve our immigration problem without seemingly taking delight in making good and decent men and women miserable, even if they are here "illegally."

I even found the president's statement of support for Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security completely traditional and unexceptional. The statement that "The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us" is hardly a call to the barricades. Who out there expected the president, after winning a second term, to say anything differently? Who put the odds very high above zero that the president would suddenly acknowledge that Paul Ryan was right after all?

And I'm delighted that the president finally returned to climate change -- although it is very, very late. I'll acknowledge a high degree of self-interest here. I chair Resources for the Future, a 65-year-old economic think tank that is one of the world's leading centers of thought on climate, energy, and the environment. I believe there are more and less effective ways to approach climate and environmental issues, but I think the problems are real and have to be addressed. It is depressing that much of the Republican Party -- once again never missing a chance to miss a chance -- has decided, immediately after the president's speech, that the whole climate issue is a ruse, part of a deviously clever plot by the president to expand the regulatory state. I guess I'm glad for the human species that there are climate deniers like Holman Jenkins and George Will who are so awesomely smart that with 1,000 words and a few anecdotes they can disprove a quarter century of climate science. But I don't take a word of any of this as serious commentary. Since we are, right now, trashing the planet, I hope forging a long-term creative approach to this central question is how the president chooses to be transformational.

But this brings me to the incompleteness of the president's vision. America is a great deal more -- and is entering times more challenging -- than today's conventional progressive vision suggests or the president said in his speech. I'd underline three subjects the president left out: change, business and economic growth, and our decentralized society.

To start with, we are facing immense simultaneous changes in our economy, the world economy, technology, the diversity of our population, the nature of work, and our environment. Any vision you choose to have about America has to be put in the context of these changes.

But we are experiencing a very low rate of economic growth, and we cannot cope with these big changes unless our economic growth rate rises. The only way that can really happen is through business and the private sector. We have the most dynamic and innovative private sector in the world. Unless it stays that way, as a nation we won't be able to afford all of that collective action the president wants. However, the president never mentions the private sector and it seems conspicuously excluded from his insistence that we have to work together. To have the only mention of the private sector focus exclusively on rules and regulations just isn't remotely appropriate.

More broadly, we have the richest and most diverse civil society in the world, strong state and local governments, and an ethos that is insistently individualistic and decentralized. These are mostly strengths. Big government and big companies really do have a strong tendency to take all of the air out of the room, to homogenize everything, and to relentlessly oppose innovation and change. It is our decentralization and diversity that makes us a uniquely dynamic nation.

We are a very complicated mosaic and much more of it should be celebrated than the president chose to in his speech. I wish he had put his insistence on the timeless quality of the values he underlined in the context both of the need to retain the dynamism of American society and the American economy and in the context of the immense changes we are facing. How to keep these values fresh in the midst of the changes we have to navigate -- that's a topic made for a second inaugural.

Finally, a brief specific point. The president said, "[W]e reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future." Great. But that's exactly the choice we are making now, and there is no sign we are changing. Our national government is already mostly about defense, transfer payments to the elderly, and the cost of our (growing) debt. On current trends we will spend all of our tax revenues on those three functions in the year 2020. And the president's speech was decidedly lukewarm about resolving the state of our fiscal health. If I were in the generation that "will build America's future," I'd be gratified by the sentiment and all, but I'd worry a lot more about the numbers.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

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The Path to the Next American Economy: The Cult of Scale

Jan 22, 2013Bo Cutter

An obsession with the largest economic players distracts us from the smaller companies that should drive our future economy.

An obsession with the largest economic players distracts us from the smaller companies that should drive our future economy.

Both Richard Fisher, the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, and Alan Blinder, arch-economist and former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve Board, had fascinating commentaries last week on "too big to fail," the big banks, and financial stability. Fisher's was a reform proposal; Blinder's a set of lessons to remember. Both dealt explicitly or implicitly with our cult of scale. 

The business, popular, political, think tank, and NGO cultures of America are all infatuated with big enterprise and its leaders. As a society, we pay ritual and theoretical attention to small business and entrepreneurs, but with a very few exceptions we court big company CEOs almost exclusively. Every presidential economic statement or study has its requisite CEO centerpiece. When presidents (of all political persuasions) want to show that they are really, really serious about the economy, they have pictures taken of themselves with big company CEOs. The most frequently quoted business organization, the one whose policy pronouncements are taken as the last word in economic wisdom, is the Business Roundtable -- the insiders club for big business CEOs. The big news talk shows always have big business CEOs as their private sector representatives. The lobbyists whom congresses and governments pay attention to are from the biggest businesses. The same set of CEOs are always invited to presidential state dinners for visiting heads of state. The board development committees of think tanks, NGOs, and foundations covet the same set of CEOs. 

Why? 

Certainly not because big businesses play an actual dominant and dynamic role in our economy. Essentially 100 percent of all new jobs in America are created by new medium and small businesses. Even though large companies dominate R&D spending, revolutionary breakthroughs come almost exclusively from small entrepreneurial companies. If you look back just at the business history of the last 20 years, the pathbreaking innovations were always driven by small and medium companies -- never by the giant incumbents of an industry. 

So what benefits does scale bring us? Richard Fisher raises this question dramatically in the case of banking. Banks with less than $10 billion in assets -- 98 percent of all banks -- held only 12 percent of total bank assets in America but they made 51 percent of all small and medium business loans. Banks with less than $10 billion in assets continued lending to these businesses during the financial debacle; the big banks stopped. Lending, I'll remind you, is basically what banks are supposed to do.

And of course big banks are the riskiest and most costly part of the banking sector. Their failures or near failures nearly cratered our economy, they received the vast bulk of the bailout money, and they continue to hold the riskiest assets. The five largest banks in America hold $4 trillion in non-deposit liabilities, 26 percent of U.S. GDP. Among other problems posed by these liabilities -- for example, that virtually no one understands them -- they are the reason for the excess leverage of the big banks.

Blinder usefully underlines 10 commandments for avoiding the next financial crisis. They all make sense. But when you look closely at his commandments, at least eight out of 10 are directly linked to unavoidable problems of scale and complexity. Consider this: the five biggest banks operated through over 19,000 subsidiaries in a minimum of 50 countries each. The simple fact is that Blinder's very intelligent commandments can't work in this world. I begin with a prejudice: compared to the directors of the five giants (and these are highly sought after and highly compensated directorships), directors of America's smaller community banks are every bit as smart,  know more about the banks they direct, hold the CEOs of their banks in far less awe, are much more likely to discipline their management effectively, and are closer to the customers. None of this is just a role of the dice. According to Richard Fisher, J.P.Morgan Chase has about 5,000 subsidiaries. I'll grant that many of these are meaningless. But no set of directors on earth can really understand or guide well an entity with thousands of subsidiaries. In these circumstances, the amount of arbitrary, mostly unchecked authority given to senior management and the CEO is enormous. A single director is rarely going to risk either losing his or her directorship or simply being humiliated in the club by challenging the CEO on anything.

Which gets me back to the general problems of mega scale in business. While the biggest banks pose particular problems and the biggest dangers, all the evidence seems to say that as businesses get very, very big, four developments are inevitable. The businesses become sclerotic and bureaucratic. The businesses lose the creativity and dynamism that initially drove them. The businesses become extraordinarily complex. The businesses become less market-driven and more dominated by CEOs with a fair amount of arbitrary power. Some businesses and some extraordinary leaders -- Steve Jobs -- delay all of this, but the trends are inevitable. 

So once again, why the fascination with big companies and their chiefs? Awe, power, and money. The heads of the biggest companies are the real masters of our universe. They are treated like heads of sovereign states. A lot of them think of themselves that way and, in fact, a heck of a lot of big company CEOs have more actual power than the heads of government of all but 30 to 50 countries. And within a range the power is fairly arbitrary. The biggest companies have the widest range of  choices about products, locations, suppliers, public and community relations money, and foundation money. There is lots of economic "rent" buried among all those choices and everyone wants a little bit of it. I think the resources most big companies allocate through these choices mostly do an enormous amount of good and have a significant function in our strange society, but that's not the same thing as believing these companies are the future of our economy.

To be clear, big companies play big, real, valuable roles in our economy. We need a mix. But the balance has gone too far in our infatuation with bigness. The true path to the Next American Economy does not go in that direction. We will not grow as fast as we must with an increasingly big company economy. Equity and social mobility won't increase that way. We will need more breakthrough innovation, more new companies creating good jobs, more highly specialized value-added products and services, and more diversity and localization of businesses. The dream should be an economy driven by thousands of companies growing from dozens of very different urban platforms, not by a few dozen giants. But achieving that dream will be much harder if our political and intellectual culture is perpetually fascinated and seduced by the non-economic glamor of the wrong part of the private sector. 

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

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We Could Use More Public Servants Like Jack Lew

Jan 16, 2013Bo Cutter

Despite criticism from the left, Jack Lew has a commitment to public service and a deep understanding of public finance.

I've already been fairly widely quoted in support of Jack Lew's nomination as Treasury Secretary. And for full disclosure, I supported his appointment as head of OMB and Chief of Staff of the White House, and he's been a longtime friend.

Despite criticism from the left, Jack Lew has a commitment to public service and a deep understanding of public finance.

I've already been fairly widely quoted in support of Jack Lew's nomination as Treasury Secretary. And for full disclosure, I supported his appointment as head of OMB and Chief of Staff of the White House, and he's been a longtime friend.

I don't much care what the hard right thinks about Jack Lew, but it is irritating to see the left instantly take up again its incessant twin rituals of circular firing squads and endogenous cannibalism -- dining on one's allies. Thus, Jack Lew is a dangerous budget hawk, responsible for Clinton administration financial regulatory mistakes, a "gofer" rather than an idea man, and nowhere near as good as the people on some other list someone can dredge up.

So just to restate the points, Jack Lew has spent essentially his entire career in public life -- on the Hill, in the executive branch, and with universities --  though he did spend about 18 months with Citigroup, which I suspect he'll never live down. He has succeeded in every role he has taken on. He is not spectacular -- from my fairly close observations, as they used to say in my high school, he brings his lunch and does an all-day job. He believes deeply in the value of the public sector, and as deeply in the importance of a high-quality public sector, in the importance of getting it right. 

He hasn't spent a lifetime in the financial private sector -- I'm personally delighted President Obama did not go that way -- but there is no one who knows and understands the complexities of our public finance better than Jack Lew. People always dismiss that as a green eye shade, low order kind of quality. Understanding budgets and public finance is for people who wear breast pocket pen protectors, not for the higher order idea men and women.  

But this is a very good nomination, and the odds are high that Jack Lew will be a very good Treasury Secretary. Much more importantly, Jack Lew is the kind of person we all would like to see in public life. 

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

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The Fiscal Cliff Post-Mortem, Part 1: Putting the Deal in Context

Jan 15, 2013Bo Cutter

The weakness of the fiscal cliff deal reflects the lack of direction coming from the White House.

The weakness of the fiscal cliff deal reflects the lack of direction coming from the White House.

I haven't written for a month largely because I thought it was one of those times when everything possible had been said about the fiscal cliff but not everyone had said it. Moreover, absolutely no one actually knew anything. Negotiations like this are "unknown unknowns" to everyone, including the participants. But with the fiscal cliff deal now done, I intend to write three brief pieces: The context of the deal, the deal and its immediate results, then the deal and its long-term results.

I'll get to the deal later. For now, suffice to say that -- even granting its one big positive, a more progressive income tax system -- the deal represents something close to a new standard for the smallest amount above nothing it is possible for intelligent people to accomplish in a negotiation.

But the most surprising and disappointing aspect of the post-election lame duck period was not this deal itself but the absence of a framework for any deal. This was a point on which I was simply wrong. I wrote in a number of places that I hoped a newly re-elected President Obama would quickly endorse Simpson-Bowles-Rivlin-Domenici. While I never predicted or expected this endorsement (I continue to believe the president has missed a huge opportunity here), I very clearly expected that he would create a framework, a road-map for where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do during his second term.

He didn't. As a result, we do not have, and the president doesn't have, anything close to such a framework right now.

The campaign and the election did not provide a framework. I've never really believed that campaigns were learning opportunities, and as I've come over decades to understand campaign consultants, I've realized that the last thing campaign managers want to do is have "teaching moments." And this particular campaign was even less of such a moment. Democrats wanted to tax whomever they defined as wealthy, but had no other ideas. And they faced a deeply flawed opposition candidate who was incapable of pushing them to develop any ideas. The Republican campaign from beginning to end was so completely incoherent that it is impossible, at least for me, to distill any organizing ideas or philosophy.

So we entered the post-election period absent any overall sense of direction. And I find it impossible to understand why the White House did not then provide such a sense of direction -- call it a governing philosophy -- immediately after the election.

What would such a philosophy be? I think it's obvious.

The second term of President Obama has to be focused on what is required to build the foundations for higher, more equitable, more sustainable economic growth. The difference between being caught for a long time in a two percent growth environment, as many predict, as opposed to a three percent to three-and-a-half percent growth rate -- which I think is possible -- is profound in terms of the health of American society.

Clearly a necessary but completely insufficient condition of the path toward higher sustainable growth of this kind has to be a long-term solution to the debt/deficit trap in which we are caught. But there is much more we must do, and the debt issue cannot be the whole of President Obama's second-term governing philosophy. But only President Obama can say what that governing philosophy is -- and he hasn't.

In the absence of such a philosophy or framework, it was completely inevitable that any fiscal deal would be the paltry, lowest common denominator result we ended up with.

There seem to be three theories as to how we reached this dismal point. They are not mutually exclusive.

First, the Obama covert socialist conspiracy, as promulgated by any number of conservative columnists: President Obama wants to make America into a new version of socialist Europe and this deal is step one. I give this about a 1 percent weight -- President Obama clearly did and does want a more progressive income tax system. But that's as far as it goes.

Second, the we are doomed hypothesis. America has become hopelessly polarized and ungovernable, and none of those poor members of the House or Senate could do anything of any scale or scope because they would be "primaried" and lose their jobs. There is considerable truth to this. The left and the right have mutually exclusive views of America and the Republican House in particular has lurched its way into an impossible corner. This polarization clearly limited the freedom of movement President Obama or anyone else had to reach an agreement. I give this a 45 percent weight.

But I think the third theory, the "if you don't known where you're going you'll get there" hypothesis, is at least as big a factor. This deal is the most a lame duck Congress -- indeed any Congress -- could conceivably ever come up with on its own. As we have learned time and time again, Congress does not make big policy, or establish major directions, or make trade-offs. It wasn't built to do any of this and it can't. The only possible source of intentional energy in our system is the presidency. If there is to be any sense of direction whatsoever, a president has to provide it. In this case, the president did not provide a sense of direction, Congress spun its wheels uselessly for a while, and inevitably the range of possible deals rapidly diminished until we reached this deal.

This cliff deal has one substantial positive feature: it creates a more progressive tax system. In fact, it creates the most progressive tax code since 1979. In my view, given the increase in earnings inequality the country has experienced, this is an unqualified good direction.

But it probably is very close to the last drop of new revenues that can be squeezed from this source. It is easy to be in favor of taxing someone else, which is why I never found it particularly interesting that the polling showed majorities in favor of taxing the wealthy. The next revenue increases will be much harder.

Beyond this achievement, the deal solves no known problems. It does not raise enough revenues. It does not cut or even reduce the growth of any expenditures. It leaves an immense long-term debt problem. It does not resolve the sequestration problem that last year's Super Committee left us. It does not solve the debt limit problem. It leaves the nation's public finances in a state of high uncertainty. It reduces the 2013 rate of economic growth by about one-half of a percentage point. And it almost guarantees a series of completely unproductive fights throughout this coming year.

If this is what you get when you try really hard, then a possible total closure of government in a few months looks pretty good.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

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