On the Economy

James May, left, carries out a share of food for Donna Davenport, before picking up his own, at the food pantry in Freedom, New Hampshire July 2, 2011. Davenport, a widow, said she has trouble juggling medical bills, household costs, gas and other expenses on her $998 a month Social Security check. How much will Social Security really cost the US in the long term? (Brian Snyder / Reuters )

Social Security and Medicare: What's the real cost?

By Jared Bernstein, Guest blogger / 07.07.11

Q: What with the much benighted Washington debate, what can the states do to improve the economy – or more specifically, fight unemployment?

A: The states can’t do much at all. To the contrary, because they have to balance their budgets, when their revenues come in under their spending in a given fiscal year, they have to close those gaps in that year. That means service cuts and/or tax increases, or in econo-jargon, their policy stance has to be procyclical when we need it be countercyclical.

My CBPP colleagues have tracked this problem throughout the recession (this is their most recent review). The figure shows the magnitude of the gaps summed across all the states, compared to the last downturn.

A few points are instructive:

–clearly, this downturn has been much tougher on state budgets (as well as the federal budget) than the last one.

–things are improving; the recovery in GDP that began in mid-2009 has begun to show up in higher state revenues, and states expect their 2013 shortfall to be half as large as their 2012 gap.

–but the hole is deep and the damage severe; over the past three years, state and local governments have shed over half-a-million jobs.

There’s a very important Keynesian punchline here: since states cannot offset their budget gaps with deficit spending, the only countercyclical game in town is the federal gov’t. The state fiscal relief in the Recovery Act was fast-acting, effective stimulus, helping to retain needed jobs in communities, like teachers, cops, firefighters, sanitation workers, etc. As the stimulus has faded, layoffs have accelerated.

Q: What’s wrong with the “unfunded liabilities” stories that conservatives tell about Social Security and Medicare? This is where they make the case that over some very long time horizon, these programs are supposed to pay out tens of trillions more than they’re scheduled to take in.

A: These are mostly scare tactics, designed to mislead. That said, there’s a useful point embedded in there: both programs need to undergo changes to meet their obligations. But at least some of the folks who make the “trillions in unfunded liabilities” argument do so to make it seem like we can’t afford social insurance, which is nonsense.

There are two misleading tactics the UL types make.

First, yelling “trillions” in a crowded theater. That is, failing to scale the liabilities by the size of the economy. The net present value of the Social Security and Medicare shortfalls over the 75-year horizon are in the trillions, but as the share of the economy, which also grows over all these years, they’re around one percent.

Take a look, for example, at the table on page 83 of this doc (it’s the trustees’ report on Medicare). It refers to the expected 75 year shortfall in the Hospital Insurance trust fund, which is $3.1 trillion! Oh no! But the next line shows that taxable payroll over this horizon is expected to be $400 trillion, so the shortfall is less than one percent.

The other thing the UL’ers do is calculate the shortfall over an infinite time horizon. That’s just bad policy analysis. Again, if you do the math relative to GDP or payrolls as you should, the shortfall amount is fractional, much like the 75-year results (see the tables a few page later in the trustees’ report). But a moment’s reflection should lead you to wholly discount forecasts out to infinity. Who knows what growth, productivity, and population trends will be that far out in the future?

We know that if we want these programs to last, we need to raise revenues or reduce benefits. The fixes for Social Security are known and not deeply burdensome. Lowering the growth rate of health costs is harder because we’re not sure how to do it. But we know we must, both in the private and public sector, or else health spending will eat up far too much of our national income in the future (from about 17% of GDP today to twice that twenty years hence). The ACA (health care reform) makes a strong stab at just that, though we won’t know how well it works until the Independent Payment Advisory Board—ACA’s main cost control mechanism—is up and running.

Most everything else is just noise.

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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.

House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor of Va. walks to a meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 9, 2011, on the debt ceiling. (Harry Hamburg / AP / File )

Debt ceiling and the high price of political theater

By Jared Bernstein, Guest blogger / 07.01.11

I ask myself: is it wise to write yet another post on the sheer craziness of the debt ceiling debate? Does underscoring the sense of urgency simply give strength to dark forces who are trying to leverage the threat of default for their political gains?

Perhaps so, but the other way lies madness. We’ve got to talk truth about the stakes here because they’re so high.

If that’s so, why do interest rates remain low? Why are investors in ten-year US treasury bonds accepting 2.93% interest today instead of insisting on a big rate premium the way bond investors in, oh, I don’t know…GREECE are??

Because they assume we’ll get our act together and raise the debt ceiling well in advance of Aug 2. That’s the date when the Treasury will have exhausted their ability to move money around to cover their obligations while staying under the debt limit.

But what if that assumption should weaken? After all, it doesn’t take a default to spook bond investors. They can see stuff like Sen Jim DeMint the other day saying Sec’y Geithner’s bluffing on the Aug 2 deadline. They can see Rep Cantor and Sen Kyl leaving the building because the D’s insist that negotiation means that they can’t get everything they want and that revenues have to be part of the deal.

Suppose this thing drags on for another month. It’s entirely possible that the Treasury finds they have to offer a premium, maybe 50 basis points (half-a-percent), to sell T-bills. Big deal, right?

Right. That’s about $50 billion in increased annual debt service. That’s some pretty expensive political leverage.

That’s also about another year of extended unemployment benefits to help the millions of long-term unemployed, or half a year of another payroll tax cut for workers.

I know—the folks taking this position don’t really care about deficits and debt. Heck, the same House Republicans stonewalling on the debt ceiling all voted for the Rep Ryan’s budget which requires the debt ceiling to go up by trillions–that’s right: by supporting the Ryan budget, they’ve already implicitly voted to increase the ceiling!

I remain confident that the ceiling will go up before the deadline. It would be such a gross dereliction of duty to force default, that I still believe a majority of elected officials will achieve sanity before this is over.

But the theatrical posturing may not be costless. The longer this goes on, the closer we approach the possibility of wasting serious money on higher borrowing costs.

Update: A number of people have made the important point that the $50 billion in higher debt service should also be viewed as a transfer from taxpayers to bond holders, the rentiers Krugman recently wrote about.

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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah speaks to reporters about balancing the budget, Wednesday, June 29, 2011, on Capitol Hill in Washington. The US government could easily raise $1 trillion by cutting out some tax breaks, writes guest blogger Jared Bernstein. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP )

One easy way to raise $1 trillion

By Jared Bernstein, Guest blogger / 06.30.11

If revenues are to be in the budget package that the President and Congressional leadership are now negotiating—and be in there, they must—they will almost surely come from cutting tax expenditures. Those are the one trillion worth of tax revenues forgone each year due to tax breaks for various activities in the code.

Politicians of both parties recognize that many of these tax breaks are loopholes, as seen in the vote a few weeks ago to end the $6 billion annual tax subsidy for ethanol, which garnered 34 R’s in the Senate.

There’s even a little list going around town of tax expenditures that might get cut in the deal, including oil and gas subsidies, favorable tax treatment for inventories (why should the tax code favor inventories?…like I said, loopholes), and other cats and dogs (corporate jets!).

The thing is, back in April, when President Obama set out his budget guidelines for this aspect of the talks, he said he wanted a cool trillion in revenues, out of deal that reduced deficits over 12 years by $4 trillion.

So, connecting all these dots, it seemed like a good idea to think about various ways to get to a trillion in savings through cutting tax expenditures. Here’s a menu, with rough cuts of the savings over 10 years.

As noted, these are rough estimates from a variety of sources but they’re ballpark. You can’t tote up the whole list without double counting, because reducing itemized deductions covers all of the other individual components in the table. But the point is we could theoretically get to $1 trillion in savings over 10 years in lots of ways, and many of these are obviously dialable.

We could raise $1.2 trillion by only allowing people to itemize deductions at a 15% rate instead of the top rate they face. This would obviously be a big deal—most of this stuff would be a big deal—but as my CBPP colleague Chuck Marr points out, in terms of fairness, why should a wealthier person get bigger breaks for their deductions than a middle-class person. And don’t conservatives like flat taxes?

I’m not endorsing all of these. Economists legitimately worry that the mortgage interest deduction distorts prices in the housing market, but it remains a bedrock tax break to a lot of middle-class families (44% of the value of deductions goes to families with incomes less than $100K), and you actually couldn’t get rid of that distortion without whacking home prices, something you’d kinda want to avoid right now.

Others should be a slam dunk. The so-called “carried interest” loophole allows hedge fund managers to pay the capital gains rate (now 15%) on their earnings, so they end up paying a lower rate than a middle-income school teacher.

The point is we could stick to tax expenditures and hit the $1 trillion in revenue the President wisely laid out at the beginning of this process. I’m not saying we will. Just sayin’ we could.

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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.

In this file photo June 14, 2011, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R) of Virginia (right) joins Speaker of the House John Boehner (R) of Ohio in criticizing President Obama on jobs creation, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Mr. Cantor, who has been participating in bipartisan budget talks headed by Vice President Joe Biden, has pulled out citing an impasse over taxes. But the GOP has signaled it would be amenable to close tax loopholes, which would raise government revenues. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File)

Republican economics and other fanciful thoughts

By Jared Bernstein, Guest blogger / 06.26.11

Rep Cantor’s irresponsible canter notwithstanding, it’s worth clarifying a point he and other Republicans have recently raised. They’ve signaled that they could actually live with raising more revenue through closing loopholes associated with tax expenditures, that $1 trillion or so we forego every year by giving tax breaks for things like mortgage interest and ethanol production.

So what’s the big difference between tax expenditures and “raising taxes” such that the former might be OK and the latter is the stuff of hissy fits?

Well, put aside for a second the strategic posturing and political theater and imagine, just for fun, that there’s actually some economics in play here.

Economists generally believe that higher marginal tax rates “distort” economic behavior. They lower after-tax earnings, for example, and thus lower the price of an hour of leisure (non-work) relative to an hour of work, so the thinking is that if you raise taxes, people will work less.

At least that’s what you mostly hear these days. Even in the theory, there’s an offsetting effect: if you lower my after-tax hourly wage, I might just want to work more hours to make up for the loss. But that’s a less convenient argument to the anti-tax crowd so you don’t hear it a lot.

Put aside for another second whether these effects are even real. My read is that the empirical literature doesn’t support either effect from small changes in the code of the type we’re contemplating, like raising the top marginal rate back to where it was in the Clinton years—35% to 39.6%–when working people apparently ignored the memo re “substitution effects” (the labor/leisure trade off noted above) and did all kinds of work.

My only point here is that we can have a budget plan that taps both spending cuts and more revenue without raising tax rates. It would take the closing of some loopholes, not unlike the ethanol one that a bunch of R’s supported the closure of just last week!

To do so would actually be consistent with Republican economics, if there actually were such a thing.

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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.

A financing available by Fannie Mae sign is posted on a foreclosed property offered for sale May 31, 2011, in Los Angeles. With more than 1 million distressed and foreclosed homes, Fannie Mae and other related agencies would send prices down if they tried to sell them. But they could rent them. (Damian Dovarganes/AP/File)

Government holds too many distressed, foreclosed homes. Rent 'em!

By Jared Bernstein, Guest blogger / 06.26.11

Point #1: The housing market is still glutted with excess inventory and thus remains a fat, hairy albatross around the economy’s neck (i.e., if birds can be hairy).

#2: The government, through the GSEs (Fannie and Freddie) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) hold a lot of mortgages.

#3: As shown in a research note today from Goldman Sachs (from the nice economists, not the nasty traders), these federally held or backed mortgages now comprise the majority of bad loans—the ones either in or heading for the foreclosure process. The first quarter of this year “marked the first quarter since 2009 that the GSEs and FHA were a combined net supplier of foreclosed properties to the market.”

#4: So, given #1, once these properties foreclose (or even when they’re headed in that direction), can’t the gov’t do something better than dump these on the housing market!?!

Yes, and here’s what it is: RENT THEM.

The rental market is far from glutted (rents are rising even while home prices are falling). Sure, there are weeds here—FHA and the GSEs may view this type of restructuring as not being a good conservator of the taxpayers’ investment, implying that they could recover the losses on the debt by reselling the property. But as the GS folks say, “this [rental idea] could make sense from a financial perspective, given that recovery rates on distressed properties are low, rents are rising, and the rest of the GSE book of business would benefit from stabilization in home prices.”

I’m tellin’ you—I’ve got a good feeling about this idea. We should try it…quickly!

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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.

Productivity and income growth were much more correlated for the first three decades after World War II than the next three decades. (Click on the chart for an enlarged view.) (US Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Middle-class squeeze: Productivity slowdown doesn't explain it

By Jared Bernstein, Guest blogger / 06.23.11

I’ve been crunching all day on a paper on the middle-class squeeze. Here are two figures from the work that tell a lot about the story.

First, there’s the well-known split between the growth in real middle-class family income (here, the median income) and productivity growth. People used to say: “well, you’d expect family incomes to grow more slowly since productivity growth slowed.” But the deceleration in median income has been so much greater than the slowdown in productivity.

Clearly, growth has been doing an end run around the middle class for a while.

It’s not, btw, from lack of trying. While middle income husbands generally worked full-time, full-year over this period, hours worked in the paid labor market by middle-income wives grew steeply, by over 400 hours.

Since middle-income men’s wages were stagnant and wives’ were rising, this dynamic helped to keep middle-class incomes from falling, but it also gave deepened the challenge of balancing work and family. (Note large hours losses for both husbands and wives over the great recession.)

I also look at single moms in the paper, and they too work a lot more over this period—clearly as the sole breadwinner, their work/life balance challenge is a lot harder.

More to come on this.

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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.

In this June 16, 2011, photo, Robert Dawson picks cucumbers on a farm in Leslie, Ga. Just weeks after Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed one of the toughest laws in the country cracking down on illegal immigration, the Republican conservative said probation workers could take the jobs of illegal immigrants whom farmers say are no longer showing up for work for fear they could be deported. (John Bazemore/AP)

Is immigration behind wage, income inequality? Not so much.

By Jared Bernstein, Guest blogger / 06.23.11

In an earlier post today, I listed the factors that I believe are most widely agreed to be behind the increase in wage and income inequality. Here they are again: Globalization, “labor-saving” technology, much diminished union power, declining minimum wages, “financialization” of growth, tax incentives favoring capital (though these numbers are all pretax, the incentives still play a role), and what Harold Meyerson the other day called shareholder vs. stakeholder capitalism.

You will note, perhaps to your dismay, that immigration is not on the list. That’s not because I think it doesn’t matter. It’s because its impact on the growth of inequality is small, maybe 5% according to one careful study by David Card, a very highly regarded researcher in this field. That’s not nothing, but it’s probably a lot less than you thought.

How can this be? In fact, there’s an important lesson here: start with supply and demand analysis, but don’t stop with it.

The intuition behind the notion that immigration explains the growth of wage inequality is that if immigration increases the relative supply of low-skilled workers without a commensurate increase in relative demand (employers suddenly need a bunch of new low-skilled workers), the pay of low wage workers will fall relative to that of high wage workers, i.e., increased inequality.

Makes sense. Just like it makes sense that increases in the minimum wage will lead to widespread unemployment or that federal stimulus will crowd out private investment and lead to higher interest rates. Yet evidence solidly tilts against these results too. It’s actually what makes empirical economics interesting. The dictates of supply and demand will often rule, except when they don’t.

So why doesn’t the simple model work in this case?

The answer, as Card and others have shown, is that, in the words of economics, immigrants and native born workers are “imperfect substitutes.” That means they don’t compete with each other in the job market as much as, say, immigrants compete with other immigrants and natives with natives.

According to this research, if you want to see immigrant competition driving down wages, don’t look at competition between immigrants and natives; look at competition between immigrants. This study provides a pretty intuitive explanation of this finding and why it’s so important.

I don’t want to claim this is a slamdunk case. There’s research that finds larger effects (pinning maybe as much as 20% of the increase in inequality on immigration; see the work of economist George Borjas). But the Card findings are more widely accepted.

I know…they certainly aren’t intuitive and this is a very tough case to make. A lot of people know jobs are getting harder to find, paychecks are shrinking, and there are more immigrants around, so they make the obvious supply/demand connection. And yes, there are lots of native born Americans who know for a fact that they lost their job to an immigrant worker.

But that’s all the more reason to take a close look at this research. The obvious answer doesn’t appear to be the right one here.

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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.

Kathleen Cramm winces as she tries to remember the spelling of a word during the AARP National Spelling Bee, June 18, 2011, at the Little America in Cheyenne, Wyo. News reports suggest that the organization representing seniors may have changed its position on benefits cuts for Social Security. (James Brosher/Wyoming Tribune-Eagle/AP)

AARP agrees to benefit cuts!?

By Jared Bernstein, Guest blogger / 06.19.11

This is a big story, for obvious reasons. Seniors have been a powerful lobby against benefit cuts to Social Security and if their main representative organization here in DC is OK with cutting benefits to close the funding gap, then such cuts are a lot more likely today than they were yesterday.

But before you get the scissors out, a few things to keep in mind.

First, you might get the impression from this debate that Soc Sec benefits are chump change to seniors. But in fact:

“…for recipients age 65 and up on, Social Security is about two-thirds of their income and that share grows with age—for the old-elderly, it’s closer to 70% of their income. Other data show that for a third of those over 65, Social Security accounts for at least 90% of their income.”

So if you must cut, you’ve got to go to the top of the income scale, and here, from Dean Baker and Hye Jin Rho, the fact is:

“The percentage of benefits that go to affluent seniors is too small to make very much difference to the program’s finances.”

Note that Baker and Rho are critical of means-testing Social Security (tying your benefit levels to your income at retirement). There are other ways to cut benefits but means testing is the worst, IMHO, as it undermines the universal nature of the program, is administratively complex, and breaks the link between what you earned and what you get back. But any plan to cut benefits must deal with this problem that you’d have to cut pretty deep into much needed benefits to close much of the gap.

Finally, I very much object to the way this point is made in the NYT article:

“The most recent estimates from the Social Security Administration, issued last month, indicate that under currrent law the program’s trust funds will be exhausted by 2036, and that $6.5 trillion in additional money will be needed over a 75-year period to pay all scheduled benefits.”

That shortfall number sounds impossibly high, doesn’t it? It leads the reader to think, “Hey, I hate to sign on to this, but that’s a huge shortfall.”

But it’s not! Not if you put it in the correct context, which factors in 75 years of economic growth. In fact, it’s less than 1% of GDP. Back over to Baker:

“The best way to make the size of the projected Social Security shortfall understandable is to put it in context. Relative to the size of the economy, the projected Social Security shortfall is equal to 0.7 percent of GDP. By comparison, annual spending on the military increased by more than 1.6 percentage points of GDP between 2000 and 2011. So the burden imposed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are almost 2.5 times larger than the money that would be needed to eliminate the Social Security shortfall.”

The reason it’s so important to get the context right here is that the real magnitude of this shortfall–0.7% of GDP–is probably manageable without benefit cuts. Taking them off the table won’t be easy, because it means you have to get the revenue elsewhere, but it could be done. I’d vote for closing two-thirds of the shortfall by raising the tax cap on earnings to once again cover 90% of earners, shifting to the chained CPI (which also shaves benefits), and including state/local workers. Believe me, closing two-thirds of a 75-year gap–who knows what’s going to happen between now and then (maybe the wars will end!)–would be an excellent day’s work.

I’m sure AARP knows all of the above. I’d like to learn more about why they changed their position on this. But for now, if we must go to the benefit-cut place, let’s tread very, very carefully.

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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.

Newly appointed Finance minister Evangelos Venizelos addresses the audience during a handover ceremony in Athens June 17, 2011. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou picked outgoing Defense Minister Venizelos as the new finance minister, jettisoning George Papaconstantiou, architect of a belt-tightening programme that has stoked violent unrest and a revolt in his socialist party. The Greek financial crisis won't be solved by trying to improve its liquidity situation. (John Kolesidis/Reuters)

Greek financial crisis: It's not like the US

By Jared Bernstein, Guest blogger / 06.18.11

The more I read about the Greek debt crisis, the more convinced I become that policy makers are looking at an insolvency problem but seeing a liquidity problem. Getting this wrong is a great way to make a bad situation both worse and more protracted.

In a liquidity crunch, your banks are sitting on bad loans and are too undercapitalized to do much about it. Your credit markets freeze and your economy tanks. But your government and central bank are able to leap into the lurch and become the banking system for awhile, reflating the private system until it can run on its own again. That’s pretty much what the TARP did.

For something like that to work—and I’m not saying it was the best or only way for us to have gone—a few things need to be in place. Your government must be able to reliably borrow at favorable rates (and lenders must believe you can later pay them back), your banking system must be able to get back into borrowing and lending markets once their balance sheets recover, and if your currency can adjust to help boost external growth, that’s nice too.

If none of those things are in place, misdiagnosing insolvency as illiquidity can prolong a disaster and waste a lot of money along the way. I would argue that these conditions were, in fact, present in the US case. They are not in the Greek case.

I don’t mean to downplay the stakes of recognizing Greek insolvency. It’s one thing to whack shareholders—they made a bet and they lost…not pretty, but it happens. But creditors are different, and once you start defaulting on sovereign debt, you’re telling the world that blood transfusions (liquidity injections) to your financial system will not work. It’s time to call in the surgeons and amputate. (Note to U.S. Congress: is that the message you want to send to the world?!? If not, please raise the debt ceiling!)

But you know what? Defaults happen too, even among sovereign nations. The longer policy makers misdiagnose insolvency for illiquidity, the longer this crisis will fester, ever deepening the human costs and far-reaching economic disruption.

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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.