Author Archive
Corporate Welfare: A Bipartisan Love Story
I have previously discussed how multiple levels of government work together to provide businesses with taxpayer money (see here and here). And while Republican policymakers have enjoyed making political hay out of the Obama’s administration’s Solyndra problem, the truth is that both parties are willing partners in the corporate welfare racket.
The state of Indiana continues to be a perfect example. In March 2010, NPR ran a piece on the Obama administration’s efforts to “stimulate” the city of Elkhart, which at one point during the recession had the nation’s highest unemployment rate. The story was hopefully titled, “Electric Vehicles May Energize Elkhart’s Future.” This week, the title of a new NPR piece on Elkhart is a little different: “As Elkhart’s Electric Dreams Fizzle, RVs Come Back.”
The new piece focuses on the failure of Think, an electric vehicle manufacturer, to deliver upon the promises made by the company and the politicians who gave them taxpayer handouts:
Backed by federal stimulus funding, state development grants, and tax credits, Think announced plans to produce thousands of electric cars in Elkhart annually.
Other companies lined up to make electric cars and trucks, and their parts, too, as Elkhart County, a place long known for producing gas-guzzling recreational vehicles, set out to jump-start its flat-lining economy with electric vehicles.
During his State of the State address in 2010, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said, “Our goal is to be the capital of this potentially massive industry of tomorrow.”
But two years later, Elkhart’s electric buzz has gone all but bust. Two local electric startup companies never got off the ground. Navistar is manufacturing short-range electric delivery trucks, but not yet at the level the company had hoped.
And the Think plant has delivered only about 200 electric cars, many of them to government fleets. The parent company, Think Global of Norway, filed for bankruptcy last summer.
That’s Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels – the allegedly above-the-political-fray politician who a lot of Republicans and conservatives continue to pine for as the would-be hero to deliver us from big-government Obama in November.
USDA Turning Taxpayer Money into Wine
Today’s example of how the federal government has become too darn big is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Value-Added Marketing Grant program. This (relatively) little slice of corporate welfare will hand out approximately $56 million in taxpayer dollars this year to “producers of agricultural commodities” who can use the money “for planning activities and for working capital for marketing value-added agricultural products.”
A big winner this year appears to be wine producers:
- $33K for the Outer Coastal Plain Vineyards Association in New Jersey.
- $50K for the Ozan Vineyard and Cellar in Alabama.
- $94K for the Wild Wines winery in Oregon, plus $23K for the Southern Oregon Winery Association.
- $50K for the Feather River Vineyards in Nebraska (the USDA kindly kicked in another $50K to Nebraska’s Knotted Wood Distillery to help them market their whiskey).
- Three wineries in New York received $300K combined. The wine grants were complimented quite nicely with a $120K grant given to a New York cheese maker.
The USDA, the politicians who take credit for the awarding of the grants, and the recipients all say that these subsidies are good because the wineries will produce job, economic growth, etc, etc. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But as I often stress – to the point that I become blue in the face – federal subsidies are not a free lunch. Every dollar that the federal government spends helping wineries is a dollar that is taxed or borrowed from the private economy. When the federal government subsidizes particular businesses it’s merely transferring economic resources from one entity to another – a.k.a. central planning.
The $56 million Value-Added Marketing Grant program is a pretty small outlay in a $3.8 trillion federal budget. However, it’s not so much the size of the program that’s the problem. Rather, the program symbolizes the problem with allowing the federal government to spend other people’s money on virtually anything that the politicians on Capitol Hill desire. Given the government’s rising debt load, that situation must be remedied before Washington sends the economy off the cliff.
Sigh…somebody pass me a bottle of wine.
‘Even Though Earmarks Are Gone, There Are Still Billions of Dollars Available’
That quote from a local government official in California sums up why banning earmarks won’t do much to rein in the size and scope of the federal government. The quote comes from a McClatchy Newspapers article on lobbying expeditions to Washington undertaken by local government officials who want federal taxpayers to pick up the tab for projects in their backyards.
From the article:
[Fresno County supervisor Henry] Perea has joined 19 other Fresno County business, academic and political leaders in this week’s three-and-a-half day lobbying venture on behalf of transportation and other projects. Separately, a four-member delegation from the Merced County city of Livingston also is on the prowl.
Billed under the unifying ‘One Voice’ banner, the Fresno County wish list ranges from a transportation bill that might help improve State Route 99 to assistance with controlling air pollution and streamlining environmental reviews for roadwork…
Underscoring the potential regional competition, four representatives from Livingston are separately making the rounds this week in their own search for federal assistance.
‘We want to hit up some congressmen,’ Livingston Mayor Rodrigo Espinoza said Monday.
Federal grants, too, are part of the Livingston delegation’s agenda, with city officials targeting a variety of potential opportunities, including funding, to help nurture a downtown cultural arts district.
If local officials in Livingston want funds for a cultural arts district, then they should be traveling around Livingston “hitting up” local taxpayers to pay for it. But with “billions of dollars” available in Washington, why would Livingston officials take the politically unpleasant route of asking their voters to foot the bill? Of course, federal policymakers are typically only too happy to oblige because they’ll get to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony and brag about their ability to bring home the bacon. Meanwhile, the federal taxpayer continues to get soaked, the government’s debt mounts, and the Beltway Neros fiddle.
Bring home the bacon? But isn’t there an earmark ban? There is, but the programs that policymakers were earmarking money from still exist. That means that the federal dollars continue to flow; the only thing that changed is the course of the river. An earmark ban is good, but as I’ve repeatedly discussed, earmarks are only a symptom of the problem.
So let me make a suggestion to reporters: the next time you’re interviewing a federal policymaker who supports keeping the ban on earmarks, ask them if their staffers are helping the folks back home obtain federal grants, loans, etc. When they respond in the affirmative but argue that they’re merely making sure that their constituents receive their “fair share” of the loot, ask them how the federal government is supposed to get its finances in order if policymakers won’t stop putting parochial concerns ahead of the national interest. You might have to keep pressing, but eventually the hypocrisy will expose itself.
See this Cato essay for more on federal subsidies to state and local government.
Franken to Chu: Doggone It, Like My State’s Company
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing last week on the Department of Energy’s budget request for fiscal 2013. Chris Edwards tipped me off to a particularly galling exchange between Energy secretary Steven Chu and Sen. Al Franken (D-MN). Sen. Franken uses his allotted time to badger Chu about a federal loan that Energy conditionally committed to a Minnesota company in 2010 that apparently has yet to be approved.
The exchange begins around the 61 minute mark here. Our trusty interns, Devon Sanchez and Stephen Wooten, transcribed the exchange, which I’ll share a portion of:
Sen. Franken:
One such project is from a company in Minnesota called SAGE Electrochromics. I know you are aware of that. Sage has developed energy efficient windows that are cutting edge, better than anything in the world and uses photo-voltaic cells to control the window how dark it gets during the summer to block out UV light and lower air conditioning costs and to let it all in, lower heating costs in the summer. And it’s really…I’ve been there and it’s just an amazing tech. In the Spring of 2010, the DoE promised the company it would receive a $72 million loan guarantee under the 1703 Program to build a new manufacturing facility that would create 160 manufacturing jobs and 200 construction jobs in southern Minnesota. It’s now been two years since SAGE has been notified that it will receive a loan guarantee and the deal has not yet been closed. While the Department of Energy prolongs closing the deal, time and money are running out for SAGE. There are high-tech manufacturing construction jobs at stake here. It’s been going forward with the project assuming they get this loan guarantee but they’re running out of time and they may have to sell themselves to a French company. My first question is that the SAGE loan guarantee was going to be submitted to the credit committee on August 23rd, but it was stopped. Why is the Department of Energy continuing to delay closing and executing the SAGE loan guarantee?
Secretary Chu tells Sen. Franken that he can’t discuss the details and advises the senator to speak with SAGE. A frustrated Sen. Franken takes another crack at getting Chu to explain the holdup, but doesn’t get anywhere and his speaking time runs out. Anyhow, the exchange is sad commentary on the state of affairs in Washington. Sen. Franken sitting there singing the virtues of handing out other people’s money to commercial interests in general would have been problem enough. That he instead used his time to grovel for a handout to a company in his state just goes to show that too many policymakers see the federal government as a favor dispenser.
If this company is producing such “amazing tech,” then perhaps Sen. Franken should lend SAGE some of his money? (Maybe he could use the royalties he receives from DVD sales of “Stuart Saves His Family” to help the company.) Wisecracks aside, a quick Google search shows that SAGE has already received private capital. If this company is so great then it should have no trouble finding additional investors to lend it the money it needs. Then again, Franken says that it’s running out of money so perhaps it isn’t so great. But that’s the way Washington works: taxpayers get the losses while private companies get the profits…and arrogant senators get to pat themselves on the back for “creating jobs.”
See here for more on downsizing the Department of Energy.
USPS: Stuck With the Government Business Model
The U.S. Postal Service has released a new five-year plan for congressional consideration that it says would get the beleaguered government mail monopoly on sounder financial footing and thus avoid a taxpayer bailout. The plan repeats previous suggestions (i.e., workforce reductions, postal network consolidations, elimination of Saturday delivery, elimination of the retiree healthcare benefit funding requirement) and proposes an increase in the price of a first-class stamp from forty-five to fifty cents.
Whether or not it would achieve what the USPS hopes, it probably doesn’t matter given that asking Congress for greater operational flexibility is like asking a two year old to stop playing with their food. That’s why the focus should be on completely transitioning the USPS from a government-run business to a privately-run business (or perhaps businesses).
Over at the Courier Express and Postal Observer blog, Alan Robinson says that “just like all plans that came before, [the new USPS plan] started with the assumption that the Postal Service remains a quasi-governmental entity.” As a result, Robinson notes that the plan is missing two key ingredients for success that foreign posts have utilized: private capital and an expanded range of products and services.
In an essay on the U.S. Postal Service, I discuss how liberalization in other countries has enabled foreign mailers to diversify into non-postal activities:
Consultants at Accenture have found that diversification not only has a measurable impact on the performance of international posts, but that it is what ultimately distinguishes high performers from low performers. America’s relatively dynamic economy is particularly suited for the diversification opportunities that would arise under postal liberalization.
Germany’s former postal monopoly, Deutsche Post, illustrates the type of transformation possible by liberalization. Today, the private Deutsche Post World Net has changed its compensation structure, imported managers from other industries, modernized the mail and parcels network within Germany, and developed new products such as hybrid mail and e-commerce. The company now has interests in not only the traditional mail and parcels business but also express mail logistics, banking, and more.
Given that the USPS’s plan is going to be unpopular with various postal stakeholders (i.e., special interests), Alan says that they should consider the advantages of privatization:
It is clear that the business plan that the Postal Service has chosen is not the one that has worked in other countries. The plan avoids talking about either private capital or expanding the breadth of service offerings as neither is on the legislative table. Introducing thinking about how private capital could be introduced and the product offerings could be expanded forces stakeholders to think about privatization, an idea that is nearly as unpopular as the changes that the proposed business model introduced. However, as this brief post notes, privatization offers significant financial advantages that could reduce the operating and price changes envisions by the Postal Service’s business plan. Therefore, those who see the greatest harm from this plan need to see if the advantages of privatization could benefit their interests sufficiently to overcome long-held objections to the idea.
I think Robinson is right, but I suspect that the “stakeholders” believe there’s a good chance that Congress will ultimately come to their aid with some sort of taxpayer bailout. Therefore, it’s possible that they believe that it is in their best interest to continue fighting for the status quo. Unfortunately, the recent bipartisan federal bailouts of the financial industry and the automakers suggest that they could be correct.
Obama’s Proposed Cuts and the Scope of Government
The president’s fiscal 2013 budget includes a 213 page document that contains 210 proposed cuts, consolidations, and other savings. That sounds like a lot until one finds out that the alleged savings would only amount to $24 billion in a $3.8 trillion budget. Not only would the cuts do little to reduce the size of government, they would do nothing to reign in the scope of government.
The following are a few examples of what I’m talking about:
- The administration proposes to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Automotive Technology program for savings of $16 million. However, the proposed cut doesn’t reflect a sudden desire to end federal “green” subsidies to car manufacturers. Instead, the administration says “other Federal programs are better positioned to research, develop, demonstrate, and deploy a broad suite of advanced vehicle technologies.”
- The administration proposes to cut funding for the Department of Health and Human Service’s Community Services Block Grant program from $679 million to $350 million. The administration cites reports from the HHS inspector general and the Government Accountability Office that “have documented failures in program oversight and accountability.” However, instead of proposing to completely terminate it, the administration says it’s going to fix the program and basically apologizes for having to cut it to meet discretionary spending caps.
- The administration proposes to cut funding by $226 million for fossil fuel subsidies administered by the Department of Energy. These subsidies should be eliminated. But they should be eliminated along with all energy subsidies because the federal government should stop trying to pick winners and losers in the energy market. Unfortunately, it appears that the administration is really only interested in scoring political points with the “green” crowd.
- The administration proposes to save a whopping $3 million by terminating the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s public broadcasting grant program. The administration correctly points out that the program is duplicative of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. However, the CPB would get another $1 million in funding for an overall budget of $445 million. In other words, the proposed cut would have practically no effect on the federal government’s subsidization of PBS and NPR.
I could go on and on with examples but there’s no point. A glass-half-full type might say, “Well, at least the administration is proposing to cut something.” Unfortunately, the glass is nowhere close to being half full – it’s empty. The administration’s relatively paltry savings would still leave the budget with a projected deficit of $901 billion for fiscal 2013. And the deficit would only be smaller than last year because the government is projected to take in more revenue – not because the government would spend less. Worse, the federal government under this budget would continue to be an intrusive, metastasizing cancer on individual liberty and the economy.
Obama’s Budget: This Isn’t Built to Last
In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama said that he wanted an American economy that is “built to last.” Today’s release of his fiscal 2013 budget proposal shows that the president still thinks he can build economic prosperity with more spending, taxes, and debt. Those are the building materials for an economic time-bomb that will explode on future generations.
The following charts show that federal spending and debt as a share of the economy would remain at elevated levels under the president’s budget proposal:
Given that policymakers always seem to find an excuse to spend more money than was planned – and that there are virtually no limits on what the government can spend money on – these figures could prove to be optimistic.
So forget about the president’s cheap sloganeering about “investing in our future.” And ignore the double-talk about “re-establish[ing] fiscal responsibility.” The fact is the president is proposing to spend $47 trillion dollars over the next ten years – almost $6 trillion of which would go toward interest on the debt alone. This budget isn’t about creating an economy that’s built to last – it’s about keeping the president’s Democratic constituencies satisfied in November and selling voters on the impossible promise of more free lunches.
Another Log for the Government Spending Multiplier Fire
At the center of the debate over efforts by policymakers to “stimulate” the economy with government spending is the issue of fiscal multipliers. Some economists argue that government spending can be a free lunch: an additional dollar of government spending increases GDP by more than one dollar. Other economists say that government spending is not so free: an additional dollar of government spending increases GDP by less than one dollar or even reduces it.
My non-empirically based view is that the mainstream media tends to treat the free lunch position as gospel. Why that appears to be the case I’ll leave to others to speculate, but it is decidedly irritating. Back in 2010, my colleague Alan Reynolds noted that a survey conducted by an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco counted several studies that concluded that the multiplier effect of government spending is less than one.
We can now add to the list another study that found a multiplier of less than one.
From a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by economist Valerie Ramey:
For the most part, it appears that a rise in government spending does not stimulate private spending; most estimates suggest that it significantly lowers private spending. These results imply that the government spending multiplier is below unity. Adjusting the implied multiplier for increases in tax rates has only a small effect. The results imply a multiplier on total GDP of around 0.5.
Note: For readers who are interested in real world examples of how government spending hinders economic growth, check out DownsizingGovernment.org.
Earmarks are a Symptom of the Problem
A Washington Post investigation identified dozens of examples of federal policymakers directing federal dollars to projects that benefited their property or an immediate family member. Members of Congress have been enriching themselves at taxpayer expense? In other news, the sun rose this morning.
According to the Post, “Under the ethics rules Congress has written for itself, this is both legal and undisclosed”:
By design, ethics rules governing Congress are intended to preserve the freedom of members to direct federal spending in their districts, a process known as earmarking. Such spending has long been cloaked in secrecy and only in recent years has been subjected to more transparency. Although Congress has imposed numerous conflict-of-interest rules on federal agencies and private businesses, the rules it has set for itself are far more permissive.
Lawmakers are required to certify that they do not have a financial stake in the actions they take. In the cases The Post examined, not one lawmaker mentioned that he or she owned property that was near the earmarked project or had a relative who was employed by the company or institution that received the earmark. The reason: Nothing in congressional rules requires them to do so, and the rules do not address proximity.
With the fox guarding the henhouse, the most one can hope to accomplish is to limit the carnage. Many pundits, politicians, and policy wonks argue that a permanent ban on earmarks would be an effective limit. Unfortunately, that’s just wishful thinking as earmarks are merely a symptom of the real problem: Congress can spend other peoples’ money on virtually anything it wants.
Take the example of Rep. Candace Miller (R-MI):
In Harrison Township, Mich., Rep. Candice S. Miller’s home is on the banks of the Clinton River, about 900 feet downstream of the Bridgeview Bridge. The Republican lawmaker said when she learned local officials were going to replace the aging bridge, she decided to make sure the new one had a bike lane.
“I told the road commission, ‘I am going to try to get an earmark for the bike path,’” Miller said, recalling that she said, “If we don’t put a bike path on there while you guys are reconstructing the bridge, it will never happen.”
A member of the House Transportation Committee, Miller in 2006 was able to secure a $486,000 earmark that helped add a 14-foot-wide bike lane to the new bridge. That lane is a critical link in the many miles of bike paths that Miller has championed over the years. When the bridge had its grand reopening in 2009, Miller walked over from her home.
“People earmark for all kinds of things,” she said. “I’m pretty proud of this; I think I did what my people wanted. Should I have told them, ‘We can never have this bike path complete because I happen to live by one section of it’? They would have thrown me out of office.”
Forget how the federal money made it to Harrison Township, Michigan. As I’ve discussed before, the more important concern is that the federal government is funding countless activities that are not properly its domain:
There just isn’t much difference between the activities funded via earmarking and the activities funded by standard bureaucratic processes. The means are different, but the ends are typically the same: federal taxpayers paying for parochial benefits that are properly the domain of state and local governments, or preferably, the private sector. As a federal taxpayer, I’m no better off if the U.S. Dept. of Transportation decides to fund a bridge in Alaska or if Alaska’s congressional delegation instructs the DOT to fund the bridge.
As a taxpayer, it disgusts me that Rep. Miller steered federal dollars to a project in her district that she personally benefited from. But would I be any better off had the money for a bike path in Harrison Township, Michigan come from a grant awarded by the Department of Transportation?
If Harrison Township wanted a bike path, then it should have been paid for with taxes collected by the appropriate unit of local government. Better yet, a private group could have raised the funds. Either way, I don’t see how it’s possible to argue that the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to spend taxpayer money on such activities. Invoking the General Welfare Clause doesn’t pass the laugh test as the bike path obviously doesn’t benefit the rest of the country. The Commerce Clause? Please.
For more on why the federal government should stop subsidizing activities that are properly the domain of the state and local government, see this Cato essay on fiscal federalism.
Biennial Budgeting: Baloney Budget Reform
I don’t recall ever agreeing with the left-liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), but their new paper on the drawbacks of the federal government switching to biennial budgeting is a good read. Congressional Republicans, including House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-AL), are the chief proponents of switching to a biennial budget cycle. By providing (qualified) support to the CBPP paper, I’m hoping to demonstrate to would-be GOP naysayers that criticism of biennial budgeting isn’t confined to one area of the ideological spectrum.
I don’t agree with everything in the paper and I don’t share some of the authors’ concerns, but here are three solid points that the paper makes:
- In 1940, 44 states practiced biennial budgeting. Currently, only nineteen do. In addition, larger states typically have an annual budget cycle. The authors correctly ask, “if large state governments find that biennial budgeting is not the best approach given the responsibilities they shoulder, is it likely to prove appropriate for an entity with the far more extensive domestic and international responsibilities of the U.S. government?”
- The authors call the claims made by proponents that biennial budgeting will free up more time for oversight “overstated.” Authorizing committees can conduct oversight anytime they want. The appropriation committees conduct oversight when they review agency budget requests each year. What’s the benefit of having oversight conducted by the appropriations committees every two years? (For the record, I think the value of congressional oversight is overstated for public choice reasons, but I’ll play along for today.)
- The authors explain what I consider to be the fatal flaw with biennial budgeting:
The desire of many lawmakers to rein in such supplemental appropriations and reassert meaningful control over all annually appropriated funds — and the practice the Obama Administration has followed of including war funding within the regular defense appropriations bill, which has improved budget transparency — would become much harder to fulfill if biennial budgeting were implemented. It is not possible for Congress effectively to plan ahead for unexpected needs in the second year of a biennium. Large supplemental appropriations to meet such needs outside of the two-year budget plan would almost certainly become a regular part of the budget process and could further erode budget controls and accountability.
(Note: A recent paper from Cato adjunct scholar Veronique de Rugy explains that supplemental appropriations are already a problem.)
As a former budget official in a state that uses biennial budgeting, I just don’t understand what congressional Republicans think they’re going to accomplish. The cynic in me thinks that at least part of the support stems from the unwillingness of most Republicans to get specific on what they’d eliminate from the federal budget. Like the Balanced Budget Amendment, I think a lot of Republicans are simply using biennial budgeting as political cover.
State Dependency on the Federal Government
The president’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal is scheduled to be released on February 13th. State officials are predictably sounding the alarm on the coming “deep cuts” to federal subsidies now that stimulus funds are running out and Washington is being forced to confront its mounting red ink.
State officials have become addicted to federal subsidies because they allow them to spend money taken from taxpayers across the country instead of having to ask their voters to pony up the funds. As the following charts shows, total state spending continued to increase during the economic downturn because the federal government picked up the slack. Note that the federal share of total state spending went from 25.7 percent in 2001 to 34.1 percent in 2011.
See this Cato essay on federal subsidies to the states for more on why it is critical to reverse this trend.
U.S. Postal Service Fares Worse in Recession than Foreign Posts
A new paper from postal expert Michael Schuyler compares the financial performance of the U.S. Postal Service to foreign postal service providers. Not surprisingly, the USPS, which has lost over $25 billion since 2006 and ranks near the bottom of the Postal Index of Freedom, doesn’t fare too well.
From the paper:
[Universal Postal Union] data indicate that, in each year, the majority of posts in high-income jurisdictions were profitable. Declining mail demand was stressful, though: the share of posts reporting losses increased from less than one in ten in 2007 to more than one in three in 2010. Nevertheless, few posts lost money consistently: under 20% over the period 2008-2010 and under 10% over the period 2007-2008, which suggests most foreign posts reacted quickly and effectively to financial setbacks. The good news is that posts can adjust to change and remain financially viable. Unfortunately, USPS is among the posts with consistent losses. Further, UPU data show that, in each year, more than half the reporting posts in medium-income jurisdictions were profitable. Few spilled red ink year after year.
Schuyler says that he will explore the reasons for the USPS’s comparatively poor performance in a future paper, but notes that “A key finding will be that Congressional restrictions and pressure often deny the Postal Service the operational flexibility needed to manage its costs properly.” In a Cato essay, I discuss the problems with Congress’s micromanagement of the U.S. Postal Service and conclude that it should be placed on the path to privatization.
Another postal expert, Alan Robinson, notes Schuyler’s piece and offers additional commentary on the need for policymakers to figure out what to do with the flailing postal service. Should the USPS go back to being subsidized by taxpayers? Or should the USPS remain a part of the federal government at all? Robinson concludes that “it is time for postal service stakeholders, and in particular its labor unions, to develop an acceptable path toward privatization.”
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