Where There's a Will, There's a WPA: Stopping the Slow-Motion Jobs Disaster

Apr 8, 2013Richard Kirsch

We can create the political will to tackle the jobs crisis by advancing a progressive economic narrative.

The question we must ask today, as we remember the Works Progress Administration is: why isn’t there the political will to take dramatic steps to address today’s jobs emergency?

We can create the political will to tackle the jobs crisis by advancing a progressive economic narrative.

The question we must ask today, as we remember the Works Progress Administration is: why isn’t there the political will to take dramatic steps to address today’s jobs emergency?

Let’s start with the obvious; there was a far greater share of Americans unemployed in the Great Depression. In 1934, unemployment peaked at 24.9%.  One-out-of-four people officially out of work is much more of a crisis than one-out-of ten (9.6%), the peak in the current recession in 2010. The impact is even greater than two-and-a-half times, as such a huge drop in consumer spending means that marginal businesses able to survive 10% unemployment rates were swept away in the Depression. And during the Depression – much more than now – it was impossible not to know people whose lives had been devastated.

The other obvious difference is that we have cushioned the impact on the unemployed through the establishment of New Deal programs, notably unemployment insurance, which is providing income to half of the more than 12 million people who have been laid off, and Social Security, which has helped older workers unable to find a job. In a broader sense, the bailout of the financial sector in 2009 was a lesson learned from the New Deal, stopping the Great Recession from becoming a second Great Depression.

For most middle-class Americans, the Great Recession was not a sudden shock to a prosperous lifestyle. It was a deepening of a three-decade long trend of families seeing their incomes and lifestyles squeezed by stagnant wages and eroding benefits. Median household income increased in real terms by only 14% from 1972 to 2007.  During this period, the richest Americans captured most of the benefits of economic growth: their share of national pre-tax income of the top one-in-a thousand quadrupled from 3% to 12%. Much of the meager growth through 2007 was lost in the Great Recession; by 2011 median household income had dropped below 1996 levels.

Of course, the Great Recession did real harm to tens of millions of Americans, as Wall Street took away their retirement savings and banks took away their homes. The more than 20 million who are out of work or working less than they would like feel the pain every day. However, most people whose homes were foreclosed are not on the streets, and the long-term unemployed are scraping by and aren’t in bread lines. Additionally, the retirement crisis — another slow-moving crisis — represents a long-term crippling of prospects rather than an immediate disaster.

The New York Times coverage of Friday’s weak jobs report highlights the slow motion nature of today’s jobs crisis. The Times focused on a report by the National Employment Law Project, written by Roosevelt Institute Fellow Annette Bernhardt, that revealed most of the new jobs emerging from the Great Recession pay low wages. The Times article also highlighted the persistent growth in temporary jobs, and concluded with a quote from NELP Executive Director Christine Owens, underscoring the nature of today’s job crisis:

“This seems to be a long-term sleeper crisis too, as we think about long-term unemployed workers who are in midlife and older workers who are likely dipping into retirement savings in order to stay afloat. We’re setting ourselves up for somewhere, 10 years down the road, when a lot of retirees who didn’t expect to live in poverty are going to be in poverty.”

For those of us who understand that we do have a jobs emergency today — even if it is a slow-motion disaster — the question is, how do we create the political will to address the underlying crisis? The answer is to make jobs the central issue in the bigger story about the economy, so that the concerns of the unemployed are the same as the great majority of Americans who are employed.

The economy and jobs remains by far the top issue of concern to Americans. As a March Pew Research poll found, “Despite substantial public awareness of recent gains in the stock market and rebounding real-estate values, the percentage saying economic conditions will get worse over the next year has risen to its highest point in nearly eight years.”

We need to be consistently telling our story: the crushing of the middle class did not happen by accident. It is a result of decisions to cut taxes for the wealthy, stop investing in infrastructure, destroy the ability of unions to organize, saddle college students with huge debts, and deregulate Wall Street. We need to remind people that the stock market is at record levels because powerful corporations are making huge profits by cutting wages and benefits and shipping jobs overseas.

We need to champion our vision of an economy driven by working families and the middle class. We need to show how we can rebuild the middle class by deciding together to provide “good jobs for everyone in America.” We should put forth a bold program, which addresses all three aspects for our vision:

  • Good Jobs. We can assure that every job – private and public – pays enough to support a family, with decent wages, health and retirement benefits, and family-friendly leave policies. That will mean new wage standards, such as a higher minimum wage and paid sick days; social insurance programs for paid family leave and retirements; and modernization of labor laws so workers can effectively organize unions again.
  • Jobs for Everyone. We can create tens of millions of jobs for our future. Jobs for a green economy of energy independence. Jobs to rebuild our infrastructure and create a new infrastructure for the information age. Jobs to educate our children and take care of our seniors. Government must both make direct job investments and pave the way for businesses to create good jobs.
  • Good Jobs in America. We can create good jobs in America by enacting fair trade and currency policies, as well as government purchase of American-made goods and an end to tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

There are promising efforts already taking place to build a movement around these issues — efforts to innovate new approaches to organizing low-wage workers; campaigns to press for higher minimum wages and paid sick days; and local initiatives to create good paying green jobs. Progressives in Congress have put forth comprehensive jobs bills and President Obama is touring the country asking for investment in infrastructure.

Building a movement that is big enough to address the jobs emergency will require tackling the basic tenants of our financialized, trickle-down economic paradigm. For everyday Americans, the stakes could not be higher. We have no choice but to build the political will to create a 21st century America that works for all of us. 

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a Senior Adviser to USAction, and the author of Fighting for Our Health. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

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The New Guard

Is the WPA Invisible to Millennials?

Apr 8, 2013Elizabeth Pearson

The products of the WPA are all around us, but their history has been erased.

The products of the WPA are all around us, but their history has been erased.

The fact that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) is today remembered as an exceptional moment in American economic policy is evidence of the serious blind spots Americans have developed in the way we think about government. Even Millennials, who have experienced perhaps the worst impacts of the current recession, have often celebrated entrepreneurship as a solution to their employment woes, rather than calling for the robust public action that has always been a part of effective responses to economic crisis.

But making the case that addressing the jobs crisis requires much stronger public investment will have to go beyond advocating for larger stimulus packages or revived public employment programs — we must also challenge myths of economic recovery, both past and present, that render activist government invisible.

The unfamiliarity of the WPA’s activist-government legacy is startling in light of its truly vast scope. In his history of New Deal public works projects, historian Jason Scott Smith notes that in addition to employing 8.5 million people, the WPA built over 480 airports, 78,000 bridges, and almost 40,000 public buildings. In my own town of Berkeley, California, the list of WPA projects is long: two city parks, several high-school buildings, post-office murals, the former University of California Press building (now being renovated to house the Berkeley Art Museum), a city library, and the planting of 15,000 trees.

With so many tangible reminders of the impacts of public investment right in front of our eyes and under our feet, why isn’t the memory of government economic intervention  more present? Part of the answer lies in a much broader erasure of government from our lives — from the mis-recognition of publicly-subsidized success as individual initiative to the deliberate concealing of government spending as private savings. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls this new type of social infrastructure “the submerged state”: invisible benefits delivered to citizens through the tax code or as subsidies to private companies rather than as more visible direct spending. The home mortgage interest deduction is a (very expensive) government spending program, but most Americans would be truly puzzled to hear that they live in publicly subsidized housing.

Given this context, it’s no wonder that many Millennials believe that entrepreneurship, creativity, and technological innovation will provide the foundation for economic recovery. But the start-up economy can no more build 78,000 bridges than it can create the close to 9 million jobs needed to match growth in the labor force since the start of the recession. Well-designed public policies alone will not convince young people — or Americans more generally — of the need for a progressive economic agenda modeled on the WPA. We must also literally map the interventions of the past. Only by making the legacy of public investment more visible can we push back against myths that mute the powerful role government has repeatedly played in leading economic recovery.

Elizabeth Pearson is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow and a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley.

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To Build a Nation and a People: FDR and the WPA

Apr 8, 2013David Woolner

Today's Congress needs to step up as it did in the 1930s to address high unemployment and crumbling infrastructure.

Today's Congress needs to step up as it did in the 1930s to address high unemployment and crumbling infrastructure.

To those who say that our expenditures for Public Works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order. Some people try to tell me that we must make up our minds that for the future we shall permanently have millions of unemployed… But…I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed. On the contrary, we must make it a national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of unemployed and that we will arrange our national economy to end our present unemployment as soon as we can and then to take wise measures against its return. I do not want to think that it is the destiny of any American to remain permanently on relief rolls.—Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 30, 1934

One of the most alarming statistics about America’s persistently high unemployment rate over the past four years is the large number of long-term unemployed. Current estimates by the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the total number of these largely forgotten workers at 4.8 million people—or roughly 40 percent of the total number of jobless Americans. Unlike previous recessions, where there was a good deal of movement in and out of the job market, loss of employment is much more serious in today’s Great Recession, as an individual’s chances of getting back to work are much lower. This leads to what one recent article terms a “loss of skills, loss of trust, and loss of networks,” all of which exacerbates the problem.

Worse still, there seems to be little political will to tackle this problem in Washington, as any serious effort to address the issue of the long-term unemployed has been sidelined by the endless budget debates in Congress and the sky-is-falling rhetoric of the extreme right, which remains ideologically opposed to government intervention in the economy. Perhaps the great symbol of this callous indifference can be found in the fact that while the recent sequester did not result in any loss of pay among the members of Congress, the long-term unemployed will see their benefits cut by 10 percent.

In the meantime, a recent report by the American Society for Civil Engineers notes that while there has been a slight improvement in the overall state of America’s infrastructure in the past four years, the current state of our nation’s roads, bridges, water systems, energy grid, and other transportation networks remains dismally low—receiving a grade of D+ as opposed to the nearly failing grade of D- four years ago. Thanks to this persistent neglect and Congress’s reluctance to appropriate the funds needed to fix our crumbling roads and other facilities, the U.S. now ranks 25th in the world in terms of infrastructure, far behind the rest of the industrialized world.

This juxtaposition of long-term unemployment and a failing infrastructure is not unlike the situation that Franklin Roosevelt faced in 1935 when, in a bold and unprecedented effort to alleviate the suffering of the long-term unemployed, FDR pushed Congress to pass the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act. It was through this piece of legislation passed 78 years ago today that Congress appropriated the funds FDR needed to launch the most ambitious public works program in American history—the Works Progress Administration, or WPA.

As the generation that lived through the Great Depression passes away, fewer and fewer Americans may be aware of what a great debt this nation owes to this remarkable government program. Indeed, the WPA not only employed 8.5 million people, it also built much of the infrastructure we still use today. How many New Yorkers, for example, are aware that the WPA is responsible for the construction of the Lincoln Tunnel, Tri-borough Bridge, the Belt, Grand Central, and Henry Hudson Parkways, the East River (FDR) Drive, or LaGuardia Airport? How many Chicagoans know that Midway Airport and much of Lake Shore Drive were built by the WPA? What about the fabled “river walk” of San Antonio, Texas? Do the residents of this community know that this critical piece and driver of much of their local economy was conceived and constructed by WPA architects and engineers? Are the people of New Jersey aware that they owe the Palisades Parkway to the WPA? What about those of us who have enjoyed the beauty of a drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina – are we aware that it too was built by the WPA? And what about Los Angeles International Airport or the Glendale Viaduct and countless other public works projects in California? Or the many WPA constructed buildings, parks, and other facilities constructed in New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest?

This list could go on and on, for before it was through the WPA would construct nearly 600,000 miles of rural roads, 67,000 miles of urban streets, 122,000 bridges, 1,000 tunnels, 1,050 airfields, 500 water treatment plants, 1,500 sewage treatment plants, 36,900 schools, 2,552 hospitals, 2,700 firehouses, and nearly 20,000 other state, county, and local government buildings. Most importantly, it would also give meaningful employment to millions of skilled and unskilled workers, providing our nation with the infrastructure it needed to become the most efficient and productive economy in the world and the long-term unemployed with the one thing they needed above all else—a job.

Seventy-eight years ago, our leaders in Congress had the courage and vision to engage in what FDR called “bold, persistent, experimentation.” In the face of the worst economic crisis in our history, they came to recognize that there are times when government itself must step in to provide employment if the free market fails to do so. They had no plans “to take the country down the path to socialism” as some critics charged, or to make the WPA into a permanent institution. What they did see was a need—a critical need to provide employment and to secure the skills of an entire generation of workers, juxtaposed with an equally important need to bring America’s rickety 19th century infrastructure into the modern world. They understood that this would cost money, but they also understood that in the long run this investment—even if it required deficit spending—would pay off.

They were right. Just ask any member of the “greatest generation” who lived through the seemingly massive federal investments and spending of the 1930s and 40s and then went on to enjoy the largest expansion of the American middle class in our nation’s history. Or ask yourself, the next time you land at LaGuardia Airport or enjoy an evening out among the many shops, cafes, and restaurants that cluster around San Antonio’s River Walk.

If today’s Congress had the same vision and courage that existed in Washington in 1935, it would see that with nearly 5 million people suffering the ill effects of long-term unemployment, and with an infrastructure that is now ranked 25th in the world, the least it could do is get behind President Obama’s nearly forgotten call for a modest $50 billion in spending for infrastructure. But unfortunately it does not appear that today’s Congress—particularly the conservative membership of the House—possesses anything like the vision of its counterparts in 1935. This is very bad news, for as FDR remarked about the “generation of self-seekers” that brought the country to ruin in 1933, “they have no vision, and when there is no vision, the people perish.”

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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Rediscovering Government

Defeating Laissez Faire Thinking in the Name of the WPA

Apr 8, 2013Jeff Madrick

Winning the war of ideas will be vital if we ever hope to implement such a successful program again.

Winning the war of ideas will be vital if we ever hope to implement such a successful program again.

Many thinking people are surprised that the lessons of the Great Depression have been so easily forgotten as the rich world struggles to get economies back on track after the worst recession since the 1930s. Keynes himself would have been surprised, because he thought the end of laissez-faire economics was well on its way even before the Great Depression. He wrote an essay in 1930 to that end called "The End of Laissez Faire," nicely summarized in a new book by Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, which predated his magnum opus, The General Theory, by six years.

But laissez-faire rose again with a vengeance under the articulate, if simplistic, preachings of Milton Friedman. It remains a guiding principle today partly because of the very allure of its simple core principle. For those of us who believe government is needed not merely to tame capitalism but to make it work, as well as to provide for a decent society that rewards all fairly and promotes social cohesion and optimism, we should remind ourselves how profoundly appealing laissez-faire is and what a battle we face. It is a set of elegant principles, while the correct critiques of it are ugly by comparison. Also, it was in the 1920s, and is today, the philosophy of the rich and powerful, not a small matter.

The rise, momentary fall in 2008, and rise again of laissez faire is therefore not really a stunning historical event. Fiscal stimulus, the main legacy of John Maynard Keynes, was derided when President Obama got an $800 billion stimulus passed. Then it was said by many that it didn’t either save or create new jobs. Meanwhile, Europe is overwhelmed by the disease of austerity economics. Only Germany stays above water based on exports made cheap by the low value of the euro -- something it would not be able to enjoy if it were independent of the Eurozone and had its own currency. Austerity economics has spread to the U.S. in the form of allegedly sensible budget balancing commissions that are not sensible at all. They helped foment the pressure to balance the budget as soon as possible, even with unemployment at nearly 8 percent.

It is not only fiscal stimulus that is derided. Programs to spur job growth have been limited to relatively modest infrastructure investments and tax cuts, especially payroll tax cuts. Less obvious, the push by mainstream economists to explain income inequality almost solely in terms of inadequate education is deeply misleading. Such an expalantion neglects the low minimu wage, persistently high unemployment rates, the failure to implement labor organization laws, and on.

There have been new programs. A modest investment in infrastructure and tax cuts. We do have a healthcare bill, which we should applaud on balance. But none of this compares to the adventure of the New Deal, and in particular the Works Progress Administration, whose anniversary we are celebrating today. The WPA went out and hired Americas to do jobs, including building infrastructure. By some estimates, some 8 million jobs were created.

We need a wide range of New Deal ideas made contemporary: higher minimum wages, living wages, aggressive public investment, green investments, and on. Government will be the generator of these jobs. Some, but very few, argue we need outright public employment programs, just like the WPA.

What made that happen then? A more severe recession than now, for one thing. A far bolder president, for another.   

But the ideology of laissez faire still had to be defeated. Laissez faire was not mentioned by Smith, Ricardo, or Mathus, Keynes wrote. “Even the idea is not present in any form in these authors,” he said in “The End of Laissez Faire.” He went on, the public had “come to regard the simplified hypothesis as health and the further complications as disease.”

Keynes blindly believed reason would prevail. The many over-simplifcations of laissez faire would become obvious, he optimistically thought. Sane criticism would prevail over simple ideology. For a while, he was right—a pretty long while. Arguably a version of Keynesian progressivism, which even included fixed exchange rates and plenty of social programs, especially in Europe, prevailed until the 1970s. Then it turned to over-simplifications and scapegoats, mainly driven by the painful inflationary economy of the 1970s.

Many are enamored of the idea that a revitalized right wing of effective think tanks, lobbying, and media disinformation ended progresssivm in the U.S. But that misreads history. Margaret Thatcher introduced stern anti-Keynesian policies well before the U.S. did at the start of the 1980s. Germany was anti-Keynesian throughout the 1970s. Ideas matter, and the acceptance of the idea of laissez faire regained the upper hand.

As we battle in memory of the marvelous WPA, we should keep in mind how intensely compelling laissez faire ideology is. It has captured, without their really noticing, the hearts and minds of most orthodox economists. As usual, it has the rich mostly on its side. If we recognize it is a tough, ongoing battle to defeat the simple version of it, we will fight it better. In the meantime, we can rejoice in how well we once did. That is the proof that we can win. American history can be repeated.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Rediscovering Government initiative and author of Age of Greed. 

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Banks Are Reluctant to Give Women Home Loans

Mar 14, 2013

It's no secret to anyone that lending has been tight after the bubble popped. But it turns out the impact of that problem hasn't been felt equally. A new fact sheet from the Woodstock Institute reports that women are having a harder time getting home loans than men and that the picture is even worse for women of color.

It's no secret to anyone that lending has been tight after the bubble popped. But it turns out the impact of that problem hasn't been felt equally. A new fact sheet from the Woodstock Institute reports that women are having a harder time getting home loans than men and that the picture is even worse for women of color. The institute looked at people living in the Chicago area and found that joint home purchase mortgage applications headed by women were 24 percent less likely to actually get a loan than male counterparts. For African American women, that number jumps to 34 percent. Worse, women are far less likely to be able to refinance their current mortgages. Female-headed joint refinance applications were 39 percent less likely to succeed, and that number is 44 percent for African-American women.

We might think that the days when women can't get a loan without their husband's signature is far behind us, but clearly the legacy lives on. Read more of the fact sheet here.

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Putting a Check on Using Credit Reports Against Job Seekers

Mar 12, 2013

The economy plummets. You lose your job. Soon, you start to find it hard to make ends meet. You start putting things on your credit card. Then you fall behind in your card payments. All the while you’ve been desperately looking for a new job. Little do you know that being behind on credit card payments may stand between you and a job – the very thing that could get you back on the road to financial health.

The economy plummets. You lose your job. Soon, you start to find it hard to make ends meet. You start putting things on your credit card. Then you fall behind in your card payments. All the while you’ve been desperately looking for a new job. Little do you know that being behind on credit card payments may stand between you and a job – the very thing that could get you back on the road to financial health.

If it sounds like a Catch-22, well, it is. Yet running a credit check on a potential employee is not only legal – it’s common practice, as a new survey and report from our friends at Demos found out. Demos spoke with nearly 1,000 low and middle-income households who carry credit card debt and found that one in four had a prospective employer run a credit check on them. One in ten had been told they wouldn’t be hired because of what the employer found there.

So what’s to be done? The report urges city and state governments to pass bans on using credit checks for hiring purposes, following in the footsteps of eight states that have done just that. Our government should also stop using this practice itself to set a good example. The report also urges regulators at the CFPB, FTC, and EEOC to crack down on credit reporting agencies and better protect consumers.

Read the full report here.

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Rortybomb

It's Alberto Alesina's World and We're All Just Unemployed in It

Mar 5, 2013Mike Konczal

In March 2011, the new Tea Party had taken over the House, and it needed a plan for what it would do about the deficit. It proposed that the effects of imposing austerity, even when the economy is weak, "may be strong enough to make fiscal consolidation programs expansionary in the short term." How did it propose we cut the budget? We can look at Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Republican report, "Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy," for the answer:

In March 2011, the new Tea Party had taken over the House, and it needed a plan for what it would do about the deficit. It proposed that the effects of imposing austerity, even when the economy is weak, "may be strong enough to make fiscal consolidation programs expansionary in the short term." How did it propose we cut the budget? We can look at Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Republican report, "Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy," for the answer:

The Tea Party's study called for 85 percent spending cuts and 15 percent revenue increases. This was based largely off a 2009 study by Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna of Harvard titled "Large changes in fiscal policy: taxes versus spending." This is the ur-text of expansionary austerity, which made the case, for example, "On the demand side, a fiscal adjustment may be expansionary if agents believe that the fiscal tightening generates a change in regime that 'eliminates the need for larger, maybe much more disruptive adjustments in the future.'"

Flash forward two years from that report to March 2013. President Obama and Congress have overseen $4 trillion dollars in deficit reduction set for the next ten years. What do the percentages look like? Here's a graphic from a recent New York Times blog post by Steve Rattner on the deficit deals:

Rattner points out that less than 20 percent has come from tax increases, just like Alesina called for. James Pethokoukis also noted these numbers and their connection to Alesina's work and referred to them as the "right" kind of austerity. But what does "right" mean here? There's a technical definition on changes to debt-to-GDP from the paper, but there's also the argument that the "right" kind of austerity would be "be less recessionary or even have a positive impact on growth."

That hasn't happened. In fact, the exact opposite is in play. Instead of expanding the economy, or even having little or no short-term effect, economists generally agree that this austerity (e.g. the sequestration) is cutting growth and reducing the number of jobs created. Suzy Khimm collects some numbers here, including Barclay's estimate, "In 2013, the fiscal drag from government austerity is expected to be between 1.5 and 2.0 percentage points." Where's the expansion? Where's the short-term confidence? This has been a complete failure.

Paul Krugman recently pointed out some choice quotes on who was right and who was wrong about Europe. To give you a sense of the mindset that created this line of reasoning, a set of arguments we are now trying out in the United States, let's look at how Alesina approached initial criticism of his work. In "The Boom Not The Slump: The Right Time For Austerity," my colleague Arjun Jayadev and I found that in virtually all the cases the adjustments were made when the economy was healthy, and in the few cases where it was not there was export-driven growth or interest rates were lowered (see also this Jared Bernstein summary of CRS' critique).

In a September 2010 paper for the Mercatus Center, here is how Alesina responded (my bold):

A recent paper by Jayadem and Konzcal [sic] (2010) argues that Alesina and Ardagna’s results do not apply to the current situation because fiscal adjustments on the spending side are expansionary only when they occur when the economy is already expanding. The criticisms of that paper are at best overstated... In addition, what is unfolding currently in Europe directly contradicts Jayadev and Konczal. Several European countries have started drastic plans of fiscal adjustment in the middle of a fragile recovery. At the time of this writing, it appears that European speed of recovery is sustained, faster than that of  the U.S., and the ECB has recently significantly raised growth forecasts for the Euro area.

I wonder how that ever turned out, even for just their debt-to-GDP ratios? Graph is from 2011-2012:

You can laugh, and you should, but do keep in mind all that needless suffering and the fact that this assessment of Europe's situation is what is now driving our fiscal policy.

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Price Point

Sequestration: A Totally Avoidable Disaster That Was Bound to Happen

Feb 28, 2013Tim Price

Republicans have issued so many absurd economic threats that one of them was eventually going to come true.

Republicans have issued so many absurd economic threats that one of them was eventually going to come true.

Fingers are pointing in every direction as politicians and pundits assign blame for the automatic spending cuts that are scheduled to kick in tomorrow night. But in truth, it was a real team effort. And something this stupid didn’t just happen overnight; it took a few years of hard work and dedication. These high-stakes games of chicken have become a fixture of American politics during the Obama presidency. In the past, one side or the other has always blinked at the last minute. But the latest iteration looks like it will end in a head-on collision, and while the resulting wreck will be grisly, it might provide the shock to the system we need to steer our political debate back on course.

In this year’s State of the Union address, President Obama declared, “The greatest nation on Earth cannot keep conducting its business by drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next.” The key word there is “manufactured.” Facing mass unemployment, widening inequality, rising health care costs, the threat of climate change, and instability in the Middle East, just to name a few concerns, one would think our lawmakers had more than enough legitimate problems to worry about. But congressional Republicans have proven themselves to be entrepreneurial problem-makers since the night of Obama’s first inauguration, when they gathered to plot his downfall.

From the beginning, the Republican strategy has been one of total opposition, but that backfired once they regained control of the House of Representatives and were actually expected to govern. As a result, writes E.J. Dionne, “The country has been put through a series of destructive showdowns over budget issues we once resolved through the normal give-and-take of negotiations.” The situation reached a boiling point in summer 2011, when Republicans threatened to let the federal government hit the debt ceiling. (No, not that time. The time before that.) Although there’s been a lot of back and forth about whether the White House deserves some or all of the blame for creating the sequester in the first place, it’s worth remembering that the debt ceiling debacle basically forced Obama’s hand. The result was the Budget Control Act, which established a bipartisan and famously useless “Super Committee” to hammer out a long-term deficit reduction plan. The Sword of Damocles hanging over the committee’s heads was sequestration, a mixture of automatic budget cuts designed to be so unpalatable to both parties that they would be forced to find an alternative solution – until they didn’t. Whoops.

Aiding and abetting Republicans throughout this misadventure were the deficit hawks, who grew tired of hearing about the economic crisis almost as soon as it began. They wanted to get back to more serious topics of discussion, like why the Obama administration was suddenly spending so much money. (Could it be… the economic crisis?) Twelve million people unemployed? Meh. One in five children living below the poverty line? Boring. Debt-to-GDP ratio approaching 90 percent? Sweet Rogoff, it’s time to declare a state of emergency! This relentless elite-level concern trolling drove the political debate to the far right while supposedly giving voice to the moderate middle, enabling the GOP’s worst policy instincts.

Now that things are once again down to the wire, Congress is scrambling to find a last-minute fix, but this time it looks like they’ll come up short. A Republican proposal that would have given President Obama more discretion over how to implement the cuts failed after Obama rightly dismissed it as an attempt to keep all the cuts in place while shifting all the blame onto him. A Democratic proposal to replace the sequester with a more balanced package of cuts and revenue was dead on arrival. And no one seems willing or able to simply cancel the cuts and call the whole thing off. As Adam West once said, some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.

The consequences of sequestration will almost certainly be dire. In a survey of top economists conducted by The New Republic, most predicted that it would slow our already anemic economic growth, while even the most positive assessment cast it as some sort of punishment that America has had coming for a long time due to our failure to don the hair shirt of austerity along with our European allies. The indiscriminate cuts will take a heavy toll on the poor, women and children in general, domestic violence victims in particular, people who eat food… you get the picture. And the fact that this pain is being inflicted by fiat only makes the sting worse.

On the other hand, while sequestration was entirely unnecessary and unwise, something like this was bound to happen once Republicans chose to throw caution and responsibility to the wind. You can win a game of Russian Roulette once, but you’re not likely to have a long reign as champion. Likewise, if you keep inventing fake crises to help you get your way, one of them is eventually going to become real. It’s tempting to hope that this is what it looks like when Congress hits bottom, although it seems to break through to previously unexplored depths each time. But if this is what it takes to wake more Americans up to how distorted our policy debate has become so that we can start rethinking our national priorities, the pain may just barely be worth it after all.

Tim Price is Deputy Editor of Next New Deal. Follow him on Twitter @txprice.

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Why the U.S. Could Use a Financial Transaction Tax

Feb 11, 2013Greg Noth

Taxing speculation would raise revenue and make markets safer for everyone.

Taxing speculation would raise revenue and make markets safer for everyone.

In January, 11 European countries implemented a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT), which places a small tax on stocks, bonds, and other products traded in financial markets. They expect to raise billions of dollars in revenue, and there are signs the idea for a similar tax may be gaining traction in the United States. Senator Tom Harkin and Rep. Peter DeFazio are reviving their Wall Street Trading and Speculators Tax Act, which includes an FTT but died in committee in 2011.

The purpose of a Financial Transaction Tax is to raise revenue by requiring buyers and sellers to pay a very small fee for each trade they make. The FTT proposed by Harkin and DeFazio, for example, places a three-basis-point charge on most stock, bond, and derivative trades. (In comparison, the European FTT taxes stock and bond trades at 0.1 percent of their value.) A basis point is one-hundredth of one percent, meaning a tax of just 3 cents would be paid for every $100 traded, $3 for every $10,000 traded, and so on. It would apply to any trade in the U.S. and by any U.S. individual or company, so corporations’ offshore subsidiaries would not be able to get around it.

The bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation projects a three-basis-point FTT could raise as much as $352 billion over the course of 10 years – an average of $43 billion a year. This is a significant amount of money. With it, many of the harsh across-the-board cuts put in place by the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) (also known as sequestration) could be alleviated. For example, the $38 billion scheduled to be cut from non-defense discretionary spending – for things like housing assistance and community development – could be avoided entirely.

The FTT is a very low-risk bet, and, as mentioned, the returns could be huge. Most Americans are not trading derivatives or credit-default swaps, and thus would have nothing to worry about. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) examined Europe’s FTT and said it was “quite progressive.” According to the European Tax Commissioner, banks and other financial institutions, such as hedge funds, carry out as much as 85 percent of taxable transactions. In practice, the FTT would function in a similar way to the capital gains tax, which affects a very small number of people, most of whom are already wealthy. It would not be like the sales tax, which is regressive and falls disproportionately on the poor.

A Financial Transaction Tax would create a less volatile and speculative stock market, something few Americans would have a problem with. Because trades would be taxed (albeit at a very low rate), investors and financial managers would have an incentive to think long-term when making investments. This would discourage high-frequency trading (HFT), which offers very little to normal investors and has exploded in recent years, making the market more volatile  and dangerous. If HFT did not decline, however, it would simply result in more revenue.

Opponents of the FTT say it would harm financial markets and companies looking to raise money. However, smart legislation can avoid that problem rather easily. For example, the Harkin-DeFazio FTT would exempt the initial issuance of stocks, bonds, and other debts. Loans from financial institutions, companies’ initial public offerings (IPOs), and a city’s sale of municipal bonds, for example, would all be exempt from the FTT the first time they are sold. If a financial institution decided to trade a company’s debt after issuing it a loan, however, the FTT would come into effect.

Those arguing against the FTT also say the costs incurred by the tax would be passed on to retail investors -- through increased ATM fees, for example. But this is entirely avoidable with the right legislative language. The law could simply ban the practice, but even without an explicit ban, it is unlikely banks would take that course. Since some banks’ activities would fall under the FTT more than others’, not every bank would have the same incentives to raise fees on customers. As a result, if only a select few banks did so while others did not, marketplace competition would drive consumers to institutions without FTT-related fees.

In the wake of the 2008 financial disaster, which banks and financial institutions played a large role in creating, it makes sense to have policies designed to incentivize responsible trading practices and reign in reckless behavior. A Financial Transaction Tax would result in a more stable and less volatile stock market. It would also raise billions of dollars that could help avoid the harsh cuts set to begin March 1 – and it would do it all without touching the vast majority of Americans’ wallets.

Greg Noth is an intern in the House of Representatives and has formerly worked with the Center for American Progress and Iowa Senate Democrats. He is a graduate of Knox College in Galesburg, IL.

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Can We Stabilize the Debt with Just $670 Billion in Deficit Reduction?

Feb 11, 2013Mike Konczal

During a radio debate in 1933, the British economist John Maynard Keynes said, “You will never balance the Budget through measures which reduce the national income.” In an attempt to forget this lesson and repeat the mistakes of 1937, the United States is set to put the sequestration into motion in a few weeks. This package of quickly enacted cuts will try to balance the budget by destroying a million jobs in the next two years and taking a chunk of GDP off growth.

President Obama is likely to call for replacing this sequestration with a deficit reduction plan of $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years in his State of the Union tomorrow night. This is as the deficit is falling quickly, from 7 percent of GDP in 2012 to a projected 5.3 percent this year. Obama's target number would build off the $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction already in place through the Budget Control Act and fiscal cliff deal for a total of nearly $4 trillion.

But what if we needed significantly less than $1.5 trillion at this point? What number would be necessary, under what conditions? Richard Kogan of the Center on Budget and Policy Priority (CBPP) has called for $1.4 trillion. There’s been an interesting pushback against this argument from Ethan Pollack of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), who argues that CBPP’s numbers are far too high, and that the debt-to-GDP, or debt ratio, can be stabilized with less than half of that. Let's summarize this debate here.

If stabilizing the debt is the goal, everything depends on what we mean by stabilization. CBPP wants to stabilize the debt ratio with two conditions. The first is that it will be at the current rate of 73 percent, and the second is that it will occur by 2022, or within a 10-year window. Here is EPI's chart showing the current trajectory and the numbers proposed by CBPP and President Obama:

What Pollack notes is that if you relax either assumption, you can still have stabilization but at a significantly lower level of deficit reduction. If we relax the 73 percent requirement, and we target a debt-to-GDP level that is lower in 2022 than it was in 2018, we’d only need $670 billion dollars in deficit reduction, with $580 coming from policy savings (and the rest from interest). That's a lot less in brutal cuts while the economy is still weak. This would still stabilize the debt, as the debt-to-GDP ratio starts to decline. It would just stabilize it at a higher level.
 
What if we want a debt ratio of 73 percent, but we relax the time constraint? What if we worry less about an arbitrary 10-year limit and look at the long run? If we want to stabilize the debt outside the 10-year window at the current rate, we’d need a long-run deficit of 3 percent. That would only require $500 billion in cuts, of which $430 billion is policy savings. This is still long-run stabilization, which is what we'd want, rather than stabilization while the economy is still weak.
 
So we can have stabilization with significantly less upfront costs. But why focus on a number like this at all? Pollack also argues that this magic number approach is dangerous in two additional ways. A single number losses all the stuff that is important about the actual cuts. Are they phased in only after unemployment is low? Are they from reductions in spending on the automatic stabilizers keeping the economy afloat, like food stamps? Do they include measures that are good for the long-term, like a carbon tax? Like trying to figure out your health by only looking at your weight, using a single number to try and capture a large phenomenon confuses all the things that we know are important.
 
Also having a single number presented this way gives the impression that additional stimulus deployed in the next few years would add to the number. If we need $1.4 trillion in cuts to stabilize the debt over 10 years but want to do an additional $500 billion dollar stimulus in the next two, we don't need $1.9 trillion all of a sudden. Stabilization still takes place, just at a higher level.
 
Jared Bernstein of CBPP responds, arguing that "a) stabilizing at a lower level leaves us less exposed to higher interest payments when rates finally start to rise, and b) it will be a heavier political lift to argue for a cyclical deficits next time we hit a rough patch if we’re starting at 85% versus 73%. "
 
I would note a few things. The first is, for all the theorizing, economists are deeply conflicted about whether or not a higher versus a lower debt-to-GDP level matters. Right now, rather than just crowding out private investments, there will be a strong pull to crowd in actual economic activity. Or, to put it another way, when there’s a fiscal multiplier, increases in debt can help offset themselves; we could end up with a higher debt but a lower debt-to-GDP ratio.
 
Beyond that though, it isn’t clear that the level of debt would impact interest rates or if they would make us richer or poorer, even at full employment. A larger pool of debt at full employment might just increase savings, through a mechanism economists call Ricardian equivalence, which will lower interest rates. There are many different ways of understanding how these relationships could happen. Economists are divided on this; it’s not for nothing that Glenn Hubbard, in 2011, wrote that when it comes to the relationship between government debt and interest rates, "Despite the volume of work, no universal consensus has emerged."
 
We could use more cost-benefit analysis on this matter. Assuming a worst-case scenario that we are currently at full employment, so additional deficits are crowding out private investment, how different would interest rates be if we have an 80 percent debt ratio versus a 73 percent debt ratio? Again this evidence is mixed, but Eric Engen and R. Glenn Hubbard found that a one percent increase in debt-to-GDP increases government interest rates two basis points. So we are talking about the bad case scenario having an 0.16 percent increase in government interest rates. That's not trivial, but it also isn't a doomsday scenario. And this bad case scenario is going to be avoided by prioritizing cuts that could put a serious hamper on both demand and long-term investments? Is this really an exercise worth taking?
 
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During a radio debate in 1933, the British economist John Maynard Keynes said, “You will never balance the Budget through measures which reduce the national income.” In an attempt to forget this lesson and repeat the mistakes of 1937, the United States is set to put the sequestration into motion in a few weeks. This package of quickly enacted cuts will try to balance the budget by destroying a million jobs in the next two years and taking a chunk of GDP off growth.

President Obama is likely to call for replacing this sequestration with a deficit reduction plan of $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years in his State of the Union tomorrow night. This is as the deficit is falling quickly, from 7 percent of GDP in 2012 to a projected 5.3 percent this year. Obama's target number would build off the $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction already in place through the Budget Control Act and fiscal cliff deal for a total of nearly $4 trillion.

But what if we needed significantly less than $1.5 trillion at this point? What number would be necessary, under what conditions? Richard Kogan of the Center on Budget and Policy Priority (CBPP) has called for $1.4 trillion. There’s been an interesting pushback against this argument from Ethan Pollack of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), who argues that CBPP’s numbers are far too high, and that the debt-to-GDP, or debt ratio, can be stabilized with less than half of that. Let's summarize this debate here.

If stabilizing the debt is the goal, everything depends on what we mean by stabilization. CBPP wants to stabilize the debt ratio with two conditions. The first is that it will be at the current rate of 73 percent, and the second is that it will occur by 2022, or within a 10-year window. Here is EPI's chart showing the current trajectory and the numbers proposed by CBPP and President Obama:

What Pollack notes is that if you relax either assumption, you can still have stabilization but at a significantly lower level of deficit reduction. If we relax the 73 percent requirement, and we target a debt-to-GDP level that is lower in 2022 than it was in 2018, we’d only need $670 billion dollars in deficit reduction, with $580 coming from policy savings (and the rest from interest). That's a lot less in brutal cuts while the economy is still weak. This would still stabilize the debt, as the debt-to-GDP ratio starts to decline. It would just stabilize it at a higher level.
 
What if we want a debt ratio of 73 percent, but we relax the time constraint? What if we worry less about an arbitrary 10-year limit and look at the long run? If we want to stabilize the debt outside the 10-year window at the current rate, we’d need a long-run deficit of 3 percent. That would only require $500 billion in cuts, of which $430 billion is policy savings. This is still long-run stabilization, which is what we'd want, rather than stabilization while the economy is still weak.
 
So we can have stabilization with significantly less upfront costs. But why focus on a number like this at all? Pollack also argues that this magic number approach is dangerous in two additional ways. A single number losses all the stuff that is important about the actual cuts. Are they phased in only after unemployment is low? Are they from reductions in spending on the automatic stabilizers keeping the economy afloat, like food stamps? Do they include measures that are good for the long-term, like a carbon tax? Like trying to figure out your health by only looking at your weight, using a single number to try and capture a large phenomenon confuses all the things that we know are important.
 
Also having a single number presented this way gives the impression that additional stimulus deployed in the next few years would add to the number. If we need $1.4 trillion in cuts to stabilize the debt over 10 years but want to do an additional $500 billion dollar stimulus in the next two, we don't need $1.9 trillion all of a sudden. Stabilization still takes place, just at a higher level.
 
Jared Bernstein of CBPP responds, arguing that "a) stabilizing at a lower level leaves us less exposed to higher interest payments when rates finally start to rise, and b) it will be a heavier political lift to argue for a cyclical deficits next time we hit a rough patch if we’re starting at 85% versus 73%. "
 
I would note a few things. The first is, for all the theorizing, economists are deeply conflicted about whether or not a higher versus a lower debt-to-GDP level matters. Right now, rather than just crowding out private investments, there will be a strong pull to crowd in actual economic activity. Or, to put it another way, when there’s a fiscal multiplier, increases in debt can help offset themselves; we could end up with a higher debt but a lower debt-to-GDP ratio.
 
Beyond that though, it isn’t clear that the level of debt would impact interest rates or if they would make us richer or poorer, even at full employment. A larger pool of debt at full employment might just increase savings, through a mechanism economists call Ricardian equivalence, which will lower interest rates. There are many different ways of understanding how these relationships could happen. Economists are divided on this; it’s not for nothing that Glenn Hubbard, in 2011, wrote that when it comes to the relationship between government debt and interest rates, "Despite the volume of work, no universal consensus has emerged."
 
We could use more cost-benefit analysis on this matter. Assuming a worst-case scenario that we are currently at full employment, so additional deficits are crowding out private investment, how different would interest rates be if we have an 80 percent debt ratio versus a 73 percent debt ratio? Again this evidence is mixed, but Eric Engen and R. Glenn Hubbard found that a one percent increase in debt-to-GDP increases government interest rates two basis points. So we are talking about the bad case scenario having an 0.16 percent increase in government interest rates. That's not trivial, but it also isn't a doomsday scenario. And this bad case scenario is going to be avoided by prioritizing cuts that could put a serious hamper on both demand and long-term investments? Is this really an exercise worth taking?
 
Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:
  

 

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