On this day last year, I posted two charts that I developed using the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s interactive website.

Those two charts showed that the current recovery was very weak compared to the boom of the early 1980s.

But perhaps that was an unfair comparison. Maybe the Reagan recovery started strong and then hit a wall. Or maybe the Obama recovery was the economic equivalent of a late bloomer.

So let’s look at the same charts, but add an extra year of data. Does it make a difference?

Meh… not so much.

Let’s start with the GDP data. The comparison is striking. Under Reagan’s policies, the economy skyrocketed.  Heck, the chart prepared by the Minneapolis Fed doesn’t even go high enough to show how well the economy performed during the 1980s.

Under Obama’s policies, by contrast, we’ve just barely gotten back to where we were when the recession began. Unlike past recessions, we haven’t enjoyed a strong bounce. And this means we haven’t recovered the output that was lost during the downturn.

This is a damning indictment of Obamanomics

Indeed, I made this point several months ago when analyzing some work by Nobel laureate Robert Lucas. And it’s been highlighted more recently by James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute and the news pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Unfortunately, the jobs chart is probably even more discouraging. As you can see, employment is still far below where it started.

This is in stark contrast to the jobs boom during the Reagan years.

So what does this mean? How do we measure the human cost of the foregone growth and jobs that haven’t been created?

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, former Senator Phil Gramm and budgetary expert Mike Solon compare the current recovery to the post-war average as well as to what happened under Reagan.

If in this “recovery” our economy had grown and generated jobs at the average rate achieved following the 10 previous postwar recessions, GDP per person would be $4,528 higher and 13.7 million more Americans would be working today. …President Ronald Reagan’s policies ignited a recovery so powerful that if it were being repeated today, real per capita GDP would be $5,694 higher than it is now—an extra $22,776 for a family of four. Some 16.9 million more Americans would have jobs.

By the way, the Gramm-Solon column also addresses the argument that this recovery is anemic because the downturn was caused by a financial crisis. That’s certainly a reasonable argument, but they point out that Reagan had to deal with the damage caused by high inflation, which certainly wreaked havoc with parts of the financial system. They also compare today’s weak recovery to the boom that followed the financial crisis of 1907.

But I want to make a different point. As I’ve written before, Obama is not responsible for the current downturn. Yes, he was a Senator and he was part of the bipartisan consensus for easy money, Fannie/Freddie subsidies, bailout-fueled moral hazard, and a playing field tilted in favor of debt, but his share of the blame wouldn’t even merit an asterisk.

My problem with Obama is that he hasn’t fixed any of the problems. Instead, he has kept in place all of the bad policies – and in some cases made them worse. Indeed, I challenge anyone to identify a meaningful difference between the economic policy of Obama and the economic policy of Bush.

• Bush increased government spending. Obama has been increasing government spending.
• Bush adopted Keynesian “stimulus” policies. Obama adopted Keynesian “stimulus” policies.
• Bush bailed out politically connected companies. Obama has been bailing out politically connected companies.
• Bush supported the Fed’s easy-money policy. Obama has been supporting the Fed’s easy-money policy.
• Bush created a new health care entitlement. Obama created a new health care entitlement.
• Bush imposed costly new regulations on the financial sector. Obama imposed costly new regulations on the financial sector.

I could continue, but you probably get the  point. On economic issues, the only real difference is that Bush cut taxes and Obama is in favor of higher taxes. Though even that difference is somewhat overblown since Obama’s tax policies – up to this point – haven’t had a big impact on the overall tax burden (though that could change if his plans for higher tax rates ever go into effect).

This is why I always tell people not to pay attention to party labels. Bigger government doesn’t work, regardless of whether a politician is a Republican or Democrat. The problem isn’t Obamanomics, it’s Bushobamanomics. But since that’s a bit awkward, let’s just call it statism.

One Year Later, Another Look at Obamanomics vs. Reaganomics is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I am debating the need for more government spending to goose the economy and create jobs over at PolicyMic.com. I argue that we’ve had enough government “stimulation” (see here). My opponent argues that the federal government hasn’t spent enough money (see here). Readers will decide the “winner” and can add their own two cents.

Debate on Government Stimulus is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Desperate to fend off cuts in military spending, the defenders of the status quo are claiming that potential reductions included in the debt ceiling deal’s sequestration provision would result in huge job losses. In September, Leon Panetta suggested that cuts of up to $1 trillion would increase the nation’s unemployment rate by a full percentage point, and put up to 1.5 million people out of work.

Early last week, the Aerospace Industry of America (AIA) jumped in claiming that “more than one million American jobs could be lost as a result of defense budget cuts if the deficit reduction select committee fails to reach agreement on alternative balanced budget solutions….”

The media picked up on the AIA’s press release, but their documentation was flimsy, at best: AIA offered up a five-page summary of the research conducted by George Mason University professor Stephen S. Fuller, and a video of the press conference in which Fuller, AIA CEO Marion Blakey, and Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, railed against the “devastating impact” (Blakey) of military spending cuts and the “economic turmoil” (Buffenbarger) that would result.

Yesterday, nearly seven weeks after the secretary issued his dire warning, Panetta’s office released the findings of a report from Interindustry Forecasting at the University of Maryland (INFORUM) to buttress their claims.

By then, the counteroffensive was already in full swing. Bill Hartung has one of the better assessments that I’ve seen because it includes Bill’s insight into the inner workings of the military-industrial complex, blended with his characteristic wit. The bottom line, he explains, is that the contractors are doing just fine, and they will be in the future. The claims of massive job losses are just the latest in a string of scaremongering tactics aimed at allowing them to hold onto their loot.

Other opinion writers and columnists have fixed on aspects of the jobs argument that suit their broader purpose. Paul Krugman pushed a predictably Keynesian line (all government spending is good, but non-military spending is better). Others pointed to the hypocrisy of the situational Keynesians, people who generally oppose government spending when it buys road and bridges, but who embrace military spending for its supposedly magical stimulative effects. These are the “believers in the military spending fairy,” explains Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy Research.

None of this debate is new. In the late 1940s, Keynesians assailed Harry Truman for questioning whether excessive military spending might drag down the economy. Nonsense, they said. We can afford much more spending, and it will have wonderful stimulative effects, to boot. Many of these same Keynesians claimed that Dwight Eisenhower’s fiscal restraint was forcing the country to fight the Soviets with one arm tied behind its back. (Truman eventually relented, which has earned him the undying respect and admiration of liberal and conservative hawks alike; Ike’s fiscal conservatism, by contrast, has generated only scorn from the same group).

Ronald Reagan was no Keynesian, but he seemed to agree with them when it came to military spending. “Defense is not a budget issue,” he said, “You spend what you need.” And yet, not even the Gipper spent as much as we do today on our military. We are spending more, in inflation-adjusted terms, than at any time since World War II. More than during Korea, more than during Vietnam, and more, even, than in the early 1980s. It is likely that total military spending will be lower in 2012 than 2011, but most of these savings will come from the troop reductions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s base budget may yet emerge unscathed.

Military spending advocates routinely skirt around such inconvenient facts. Looking at absolute spending, even if adjusted for inflation, they say, obscures the reality that spending as a share of GDP is relatively modest, in historical terms. But the hawks can’t have it both ways: they can’t claim on the one hand that military spending constitutes a very small share of the total economy (and therefore we can spend as much, or more, with ease), and at the same time wail about the massive job losses that would result from cuts in military spending.

In the end, it all comes back to opportunity costs. Unless one believes that every dollar saved from the Pentagon’s budget will be thrown into a huge government money hole in the New Mexico desert, the reality is that at least some–and likely most–of the taxpayers’ dollars that are currently dedicated to the military could be better employed elsewhere. My preference would be for each of us to keep a bit more of the money that we earn, money that we will then choose to spend as we see fit. This new private spending would more than offset the cuts in government spending, given the government’s inherent inefficiencies, dead-weight losses, etc. Yes, some workers might lose jobs in the near term, but, as Gordon Adams notes, the economy has recovered from a number of previous military build downs, which were deeper and faster than those envisioned today.

Finally, we should embrace the discipline that even modest fiscal constraints can have on our grand strategy. The most “draconian” cuts envisioned under sequestration would take the military’s budget back to 2007 levels–hardly a “lean” year for the defense industry–but policymakers are likely to pay more attention to how they allocate resources if they perceive that they have less of them.

During his last few months as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen explained that the Pentagon had forgotten how to prioritize during more than a decade of ever-rising budgets. The White House and others in the national security community have as well. I’m confident that shrinking budgets will infuse a measure of prudence and restraint that is long overdue.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

The Pentagon and Jobs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

From my article “ObamaCare–The Way of the Dodo” in Virtual Mentor, a journal of the American Medical Association:

The CBO projects the law will eliminate an estimated 800,000 jobs. The fashionable retort is to note that this effect “primarily comes from workers who choose not to work because they no longer have to work at jobs just for the health insurance.” That defense fails for two reasons. First, a “job” is when Smith and Jones exchange labor for money. It doesn’t matter whether Jones withdraws the money or Smith withdraws the labor. Either act eliminates a job. Second, it’s an odd defense of a law to say it encourages people to consume without producing.

Emphasis added; citations embedded as hyperlinks.

Put differently: why should we care only about someone not getting a paycheck and not at all about a job left undone?

Yes, ObamaCare Will Eliminate Some 800,000 Jobs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A stated aim of the Obama-Reid jobs bill is to preserve the “competitive edge” that our “world-class” education system purportedly gives us. In an attempt to do that it would throw tens of billions of extra taxpayer dollars at public school employees.

A few problems with that: we’re not educationally world-class; we don’t have a competitive edge in k-12 education; and this bill would actually push the U.S. economy closer to a Greek-style economic disaster.

First, the belief that increasing public school employment helps students learn is demonstrably false. Over the past forty years, public school employment has grown 10 times faster than enrollment. If more teachers union jobs were going to boost student achievement, we’d have seen it by now. We haven’t. Achievement at the end of high school has been flat in reading and math and has declined in science over this period. I documented these facts the last time Democrats decided to stimulate their teachers union base, just one year and $10 billion ago.

So what has our public school hiring binge done for us? Since 1980, it has raised the cost of sending a child from Kindergarten through the 12th grade by $75,000 — doubling it to around $150,000, in 2009 dollars.

And what would going back to the staff-to-student ratio of 1980 do? It would save taxpayers over $140 billion annually.

But don’t those school employees need jobs? Of course they do. But we can’t afford to keep paying for millions of phony-baloney state jobs that have no impact on student learning. We need these men and women working in the productive sector of the economy — the free enterprise sector — so that they contribute to economic growth instead of being a fiscal anchor that drags us ever closer to the bottom of the Aegean. Freeing up the $140 billion currently squandered by the state schools would provide the resources to create those productive private sector jobs.

Continuing to tax the American people to sustain or even expand the current bloat, as Obama and Reid want to do, cripples our economic growth prospects by warehousing millions of potentially productive workers in unproductive jobs. The longer we do that, the slimmer our chances of economic recovery become. This Obama-Reid bill is such an incredibly bad idea, so obviously bad, that it is hard to imagine any remotely well-informed policymaker supporting it… unless, of course, they think the short term good will of public school employee unions is more important than the long-term prosperity of the American people.

Obama-Reid ‘Jobs’ Bill Soaked in Greece is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I recently posted four charts eviscerating Obama’s record on jobs.

My Cato colleagues, Caleb Brown and Austin Bragg, have a good complement to those charts. They’ve put together a short video looking at how government spending and regulation undermine job creation.

Caleb says he will be doing more excellent videos like this, which is very encouraging since there is so much more ground to cover — particularly when trying to educate people in Washington.

One thing he should explain is that jobs don’t exist without profits. As I explained in a New York Post column last year, employers “only create jobs when they think that the total revenue generated by new workers will exceed the total cost of employing those workers.”

This seems like an elementary observation, but it’s one that most politicians don’t seem to understand. Or don’t care to understand.

That certainly seems to be the case at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The president will speak tonight and supposedly will propose a $300 billion plan. He’ll claim, of course, that this new “stimulus” package will boost growth.

But a look at the various components that reportedly will be in his plan doesn’t create a sense of optimism. Especially since it appears that he’s mostly recycling proposals that already have failed at least once.

Maybe the President should copy the policies of a former resident of the White House, who also had to deal with a deep downturn, but managed to produce dramatically better results.

Government and Job Creation: Help or Hindrance? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama will be unveiling another “jobs plan” tomorrow night, though Democrats are being careful not to call it stimulus after the failure of the $800 billion package from 2008.

But just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, bigger government is not good for the economy, regardless of how it is characterized.

Here are the most likely provisions for Obama’s new stimulus, as reported by the Associated Press, along with a grade reflecting whether the proposals will be effective.

• Payroll tax relief – C – This proposal won’t do any harm, but it probably won’t have much positive impact because people generally don’t make permanent decisions on creating jobs and expanding output on the basis of temporary tax cuts.

  But, to be fair, if the tax cut keeps getting extended, people may begin to view it as a semi-permanent part of the tax code, which would make it a bit more potent.

• Extended unemployment benefits – F – I agree with Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, both of whom have written that you extend joblessness when you pay people to be unemployed for longer and longer periods of time.

  And I recently produced a chart showing how long-term unemployment has jumped sharply since Obama entered the White House, a dismal result that almost surely is related to the numerous expansions of unemployment benefits.

• New-hire tax credit – D – This proposal actually would subsidize employment rather than joblessness, so it’s an improvement over extending unemployment benefits, but it’s unclear how the IRS can effectively enforce such a scheme.

  This approach was tried already, as part of HIRE Act of 2010 (which was infamous for the FATCA provision), and it obviously didn’t generate great results. Simply stated, giving special tax breaks to companies with high employee turnover is not an effective approach.

• School construction subsidies – F – The federal government should have no role in education. Period.

  That being said, the economic flaw of school construction spending-cum-stimulus is that government spending must be financed with either taxes or borrowing, both of which divert resources from the productive sector of the economy. Simply stated, Keynesian spending does not work.

• Temporary expensing of business investment – B – The current tax code penalizes new business investment by forcing companies to “depreciate” those costs rather than “expense” them, thus forcing companies to artificially overstate profits. Temporary expensing mitigates this foolish bias.

  But temporary tax cuts, as noted above, are unlikely to have a permanent impact on growth. Temporary expensing, however, will encourage companies to accelerate planned investment to take advantage of better tax treatment, so it can lead to more short-term economic activity (albeit perhaps by reducing economic activity in future years).

The only good news – at least relatively speaking – is that Obama supposedly will propose to misallocate $300 billion of resources, significantly less than what was squandered as part of the 2009 faux stimulus.

But the bad news is that the AP story also notes that “Obama has said he intends to propose long-term deficit reduction measures to cover the up-front costs of his jobs plan.” Translated into English, that means the gimmicks and new spending in the plan proposed tomorrow night will lead to proposed tax hikes at some point in the future.

More taxes and more spending. Hey, it worked for the Greeks, right?

Grading the Likely Components of Obama’s New Stimulus Plan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama may have a buddy-buddy relationship with big labor, but he’s no friend to ordinary workers. Here are four damning pieces of evidence.

1. The unemployment rate remains above 9 percent according to the Labor Department data released on Friday.

This is about 2-1/2 percentage points higher than Obama promised it would be at this stage if we adopted the failed stimulus.

This is a spectacular failure.

2. Black unemployment has jumped to 15.6 percent.

I’ve already commented on how Obama has produced bad results for the African-American community, and the joblessness numbers are rather conclusive.

What makes that figure especially remarkable is that the black unemployment rate during the Obama years is more than 50 percent higher than it was during the Bush years.

3. More than 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months.

These bad numbers almost certainly are caused, at least in part, by the unemployment insurance program — as even senior Democrat economists have acknowledged.

4. Millions of people have dropped out of the labor force, dropping the employment-population ratio to the lowest level in decades.

Here’s the chart I posted last month. It hasn’t changed, and it’s perhaps the clearest evidence that Obama’s policies are crippling America’s long-run economic outlook.

All four of these charts are bad news. But the economy periodically hits a speed bump. The real problem is not bad numbers, but the fact that bad numbers have persisted for several years.

And the really bad news is that there is little reason to expect a turnaround given the current Administration’s affinity for bigger and more burdensome government.

Obama’s Failure on Jobs: Four Damning Charts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a recent interview, President Obama hints at the core of his much-anticipated jobs plan:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: what we do have, I think, is the capacity to do some things right now that would make a big difference …

TOM JOYNER: Like?

OBAMA: For example, putting people to work rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our schools all across America…

We’ve got the capacity right now to help local school districts make sure that they’re not laying off more teachers. We haven’t been as aggressive as we need to, both at the state and federal level.

So we haven’t been aggressive enough with our hiring at the K-12 level, hmm? Perhaps I’m an unusually timid sort, but the trend below looks pretty darn aggressive to me: k-12 employment has been growing 10 times faster than enrollment for forty years.

And the $300 billion question is: what impact has doubling the workforce had on the cost and performance of America’s public schools? According to federal government data, the answer is this:

We’ve nearly tripled the cost of sending a child all the way through the K-12 system, while performance near the end of high school has been stagnant (reading and math) or even declining (science). Just returning to the staff-to-student ratio of 1980 would save almost $150 billion annually—and somehow students weren’t performing noticeably differently in the ’80s than today.

And yet President Obama apparently wants more hiring and more spending. I wonder if voters will want more of President Obama if he indeed continues to flog the failed policies of the past two generations?

Obama Jobs Plan to Push More K-12 Bloat? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As its governor, Rick Perry, weighs a run for the White House, Texas has drawn attention for its healthy job growth. Since the recession ended in June 2009, Texas has accounted for half of the net new jobs added to the U.S. economy, according to the lead story in this morning’s USA Today. That’s quite a record for one lone state.

We’ll leave it to others for now to argue over how much credit Gov. Perry can claim. Some credit surely goes to high oil prices, fueling job growth in a sector important to the Texas economy. Another reason for its relatively strong job growth is a friendly business climate, including no state income tax and relatively light regulations. And for those who scapegoat trade for the nation’s persistently high unemployment rate, consider that Texas is the nation’s number one trading state. As the USA Today story notes:

Overseas shipments by Texas’ strong computer, electronics, petrochemical and other industries rose 21% last year, compared with 15% for the nation, according to the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. The state also benefits from its proximity to Latin American countries that are big importers of U.S. goods … The surge creates jobs for Texas manufacturers and ports.

As I can attest from recent speaking engagements in San Antonio and Laredo, Texans have embraced their state’s position as the nation’s leading gateway for trade with NAFTA-partner Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

While politicians and union bosses from other states grumble about allegedly unfair trade, the latest trade and job numbers show that the people of Texas are making the most of the opportunities created by our more open economy.

Trade Helps Explain Texas-Sized Job Growth is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Barack Obama recently sat down with the Today Show’s Ann Curry to discuss jobs and private sector hiring.  Curry asked him why during a time of “record profits” for corporations they had only spent 2% more toward hiring new workers but 26% percent more on new equipment.

Obama explained how structural economic changes have shifted businesses toward using more equipment and technology, explaining how “businesses have learned to be more efficient with fewer workers” in response to the recession. He provided some examples: “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

Much coverage of the interview falsely claimed that Obama blamed technology, or ATMs for high unemployment. This is simply untrue. He did not claim that technology is driving unemployment, but instead that employment is changing as technology increases the productivity of labor.

The interview did reveal that his alleged solution to the problem is more government control of the economy, administered by a panel of experts: “What we have to do now, and this is what the jobs council is all about, is identifying where the jobs for the future are going to be, how do we make sure that there’s a match between what people are getting trained for and the jobs that exist, how do we make sure that capital is flowing in those places with the greatest opportunity.” This may sound good in theory, yet the question remains: how does he know where the jobs of the future are going to be, and how can he determine which job training will prove most valuable, and how can he know which areas have the greatest opportunity, and how can he know where to send capital?

It is not likely that the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, made up of about two dozen bright and capable business men and women, will have sufficient knowledge either to determine where capital should flow or where the future jobs will be, or what job training will be best rewarded. Private investors, risking their own capital, cannot consistently predict what markets will succeed or which technologies will flourish. How can we expect a council of political appointees wagering other people’s money to do any better?

Nobel laureate FA Hayek discussed the problems associated with central economic planning in his seminal American Economic Review article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and in his book The Fatal Conceit. Hayek argued that the economy is a very complex system, fueled by the knowledge and actions of millions of independent actors. Hayek warned that any plan to centrally control production would be doomed to inevitable failure because central planners lack sufficient information to ensure that supply equals demand in every market in the economy. The abysmal standard of living and collapse of the Soviet Union validated Hayek’s theory of the impossibility of planning something as complex as a country’s economy.

Clearly, Obama is not suggesting anything nearly as extreme as centrally planned production. Nevertheless, President Obama makes his assumptions clear in this interview that he believes this jobs council holds the capacity to gain sufficient knowledge to help guide capital investments and encourage job creation in the areas they identify. Instead of having our President and a few smart individuals making decisions with limited information, we could allow the market mechanism, made up of millions of individual decision markers, to transmit the information and knowledge necessary for market actors to guide capital appropriately.

For President Obama to assume that he and or his council have the knowledge sufficient to make these determinations is a fatal conceit.

The Fatal Conceit Continues is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Based on this morning’s numbers, I’ve updated my chart showing what the Obama Administration said would happen with the so-called stimulus compared to what actually has happened. As you can see, the unemployment rate is about 2.5 percentage points higher than the White House claimed it would be at this point.

Since I just did an I-told-you-so post about Greece, I may as well pat myself on the back again (albeit for another completely obvious prediction). Here’s the video I narrated a couple of years ago on the Obama faux stimulus.

Heckuva Job on that Stimulus! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Labor Department released its latest job numbers today and they remind me of Clint Eastwood’s 1966 classic, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The good news is that the economy created 244,000 new jobs, the biggest gain in almost a year. And the jobs were in the productive sector of the economy rather than government, so the added employment means more taxpayers rather than more tax-consumers.

The bad news is that the jobless rate increased to 9.0 percent, up from 8.8 percent last month. This means that the number of people looking for work is increasing at a faster rate than the number of jobs being created.

The ugly news, at least from the perspective of the Obama administration, is that the latest data is yet another piece of evidence that the White House was grossly mistaken when it claimed that bigger government would translate into better economic performance.

The blue line in the chart below shows the administration’s prediction of what would happen to unemployment if the so-called stimulus was enacted. The dots represent the actual unemployment rate.

As you can see, the unemployment rate is easily more than two percentage points higher than the White House said it would be at this time.

Administration apologists respond by moving the goal posts, asserting that the original prediction underestimated the economy’s weakness and the unemployment data would have been even worse in the absence of all the spending.

Since economists are lousy at predicting the future, that’s a legitimate argument.

But is it an accurate argument? Since there’s no parallel universe where we can conduct policy experiments, there’s no way of proving which side is wrong. Nonetheless, this chart from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank is rather revealing. It compares employment numbers after the deep recession of the early 1980s with the employment numbers from the recent deep recession.

Perhaps I’m biased and reading this chart incorrectly, but it certainly seems as if Reaganomics generated better results than Obamanomics. Maybe it’s time to realize that government is the problem, not the solution?

New Job Numbers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A Deloitte Growth Enterprise Services survey of 527 executives at mid-market companies (annual revenues of between $50 million and $1 billion) found “tempered optimism” that the economic recovery will continue. However, the survey also found significant concern over government fiscal and regulatory policies.

A whopping 50 percent cited federal, state, and local debt as the greatest obstacle to U.S. growth in the coming year. Lack of consumer confidence (39 percent) and rising health care costs (33 percent) came in second and third. Lest anyone construe the executives’ concern about government debt as implied support for tax increases, high tax rates came in fourth at 30 percent. Government austerity, which can include tax increases, and infrastructure needs came in at 15 and 9 percent, respectively.

When asked to choose up to three items that represent their company’s main obstacle to growth, only 21 percent cited government budget cuts. I’m frankly surprised that the figure isn’t higher considering that a number of these companies probably “do business” with government. Increased regulatory compliance was only a tick higher at 22 percent. Health care costs came in third at 30 percent, and uncertain economic outlook was first at 41 percent. I would pin that uncertainty on government policies. It is likely that a substantial number of the respondents would agree given other survey results.

Reducing corporate tax rates (33 percent) was the clear winner when the executives were asked to choose up to two measures by the U.S. government that would most help mid-size businesses grow in the next year. Keeping interest rates low (32 percent) was close behind, followed by rolling back health care reform (23 percent). Keynesian measures that are popular in the White House, supporting increased infrastructure investment and stimulating private consumption, came in at 19 percent and 14 percent, respectively.

Finally, many, if not the majority, of respondents expect regulatory costs to increase next year, particularly in the area of health care reform. Respondents expect the president’s Affordable Care Act to sharply increase costs (33 percent) or slightly increase costs (33 percent). A majority (56 percent) expect tax compliance costs to increase. A near majority (49 percent) expect both economic and occupational health & safety regulatory costs to increase.

In sum, the good news is that optimism is on the rise in the business community. The bad news is that the heavy hand of government is still a dark cloud hovering over the recovery.

Deloitte Survey: Concerns about Government is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In my recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Myth of Corporate Cash Hoarding,” I quoted Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball asking Politico‘s Charles Mahtesian an apoplectic question about businesses “sitting on their money” just to keep the economy weak and hurt Obama’s reelection chance in 2012.   Then I carelessly added an erroneous superfluity −writing that “Mr. Mahtesian concurred.”

My apologies to Charles Mahtesian (and congratulations for having had the good sense to disagree with Chris Matthews).

In reality, Mahtesian wisely dodged Chris Matthews’ bizarre interrogation about corporations willfully refusing to spend idle cash until after 2012 election.  Mahtesian instead switched to talking about business going “whole hog” during the 2010 congressional election (this show aired September 27).

Here is the transcript:

MATTHEWS:  You know, a great question, Charles, that wasn‘t on my list to ask, but I‘m going to ask you because you seem like a sophisticated guy of many parts.  Do you think business can sit on those billions and trillions of dollars for two more years after they screw Obama this time?  Are they going to keep sitting on their money so they don’t invest and help the economy for two long years just to get Mr. Excitement, Mitt Romney, elected president?  Would they do that to the country?

MAHTESIAN:  Well, I won’t touch the first question, Chris, but…

MATTHEWS:  That was all one question, bro!

MAHTESIAN:  Oh!  I prefer splitting the two.  I’d say that I think what you’re going to see the business community do is really go whole hog at this election right now because either way, you know, I think they can envision a scenario in which they lose … because, for example, number one, if the president has a Republican House, that’s probably going to be a rough scenario for them anyway because that’s what the White House wants if they want to get elected in 2012 — re-elected.  So, probably the best-case scenario for them.

MATTHEWS:  Yes.

MAHTESIAN:  So you know, either way, I mean, I think they — they weigh the equities, and you know, see it as a 50-50 endeavor.

MATTHEWS:  Anyway, I just hope business starts spending.

Correction: Charles Mahtesian at Politico Did NOT Agree with Chris Matthews is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

House Republicans engineered a continuing resolution for fiscal 2011 that would trim $61 billion in “regular” discretionary budget authority versus fiscal 2010. The Obama administration and the Democratic majority in the Senate balked at the cuts, and a two-week continuing resolution will be passed in order to avoid a “government shutdown” and give the sides more time to reach an agreement.

Based on the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the continuing resolution containing $61 billion in funding cuts, and the CBO’s recent budget projections, both discretionary and total federal outlays (actual spending) would still be higher in fiscal 2011 versus fiscal 2010.

Keep these charts in mind the next time you hear or read that the Republicans’ supposedly “major spending cuts” will lead to reduced economic growth and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost.

Spending Still Increases with GOP Cuts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I testified today to a a subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee looking at the effects of the 2009 stimulus bill (the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”).

Some of the discussion regarded the continuing claims by stimulus supporters that the $800 billion bill created millions of jobs. To most people, such a claim now seems laughable–unemployment is still very high two years later and the recovery from the recession is very sluggish compared to prior recessions.

Also testifying was Stanford economist John Taylor, who offered a view on why economists using Keynesian models are still claiming success for the ARRA bill:

“Why do some argue that ARRA has been more effective than the facts presented here indicate? Many evaluations of the impact of ARRA use economic models in which the answers are built-in, and were built-in before the stimulus package was enacted. The same economic models that said, two years ago, that the impact would be large now show that the impact is in fact large.”

Taylor’s testimony looks at the actual effects of the stimulus in the national income accounts data, rather using an assumption-filled model. Taylor concludes:

“In sum, the data presented here indicate that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not effective in stimulating the economy … Currently, the increased debt caused by ARRA—both directly through its deficit financing and indirectly through its de-emphasis on controlling spending—is likely a drag on economic growth.”

Thanks to Tyler Grimm and the committee team for organizing the hearing. It’s important to explore the costly failures of such big spending programs as ARRA because the next time the economy goes into a downcycle the Keynesians, sadly, will be back to Capitol Hill pushing their expensive solutions and further bankrupting the nation.

Stimulus Spending Testimony is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama’s visit with the Chamber of Commerce this week has infuriated the anti-business Left.  But short of expropriation and nationalization, what doesn’t? 

Robert Reich and NPR and the scribes at the Huffington Post just don’t get it.  Their man may be in the White House, but business holds the keys to the kingdom.  Whether the president’s priority is job creation or reelection, nothing matters more than sustained economic growth. And without business having confidence that policy in the United States will become more hospitable and predictable, investment and job creation will remain tepid.

The president doesn’t have nearly the leverage assumed in the delusions of groups like Public Citizen, which wrote: “What America needs is not olive branches to giant corporations but controls over the companies that sank the economy.”  Back here in reality, businesses have options.  Many can choose to produce and operate in other countries, where the economic environment may be more favorable.  In that regard, globalization has produced a veritable Galt’s Gulch, which serves as an important check on bad economic policy.  Governments are now competing with each other to attract the financial, physical, and human capital necessary to nourish high value-added, innovation-driven, 21^st century economies.  Gratuitously punitive anti-business policies will only chase away the companies that the president exhorts to invest and hire.

According to a survey of 13,000 business executives worldwide, conducted by the World Economic Forum, 52 countries have less burdensome regulations than the United States.  Add to that the fact that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate among all OECD countries and it becomes less mysterious why U.S. businesses shift more operations abroad.

As I wrote in a December 2009 Cato paper:

Governments are competing for investment and talent, which both tend to flow to jurisdictions where the rule of law is clear and abided; where there is greater certainty to the business and political climate; where the specter of asset expropriation is negligible; where physical and administrative infrastructure is in good shape; where the local work force is productive; where there are limited physical, political, and administrative frictions.

This global competition in policy is a positive development.  But we are kidding ourselves if we think that we don’t have to compete and earn our share with good policies.  The decisions we make now with respect to our policies on immigration, education, energy, trade, entitlements, taxes, and the role of government in managing the economy will determine the health, competitiveness, and relative significance of the U.S. economy in the decades ahead.

The president is beginning to get it – though grudgingly.  He acknowledges the burdens of excessive and superfluous regulations and bureaucracy (remember his SOTU story about the jurisdictions entangled in the salmon’s journey from salt water to fresh water to the smoker?).  The president has hinted that he would like to see the corporate tax rate lowered.  He knows that businesses have options to invest, produce, and hire abroad—and that oftentimes U.S. policy chases them there.  But, so far, rather than push policies to encourage domestic investment, production, and hiring, the president has done the opposite, while demonizing businesses that follow the incentives to go abroad.

The president’s position during his exchange at the Chamber of Commerce was that he has made concessions to business by moving toward the center on tax and trade policy, and that now it is time for business to show good faith by investing and hiring.  But Obama’s small steps toward the center come after two years of sprinting to the left on economic policy.  After ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, taxpayer bailouts, unorthodox and legally-questionable bankruptcy procedures, subsidies for select industries, Buy American and other regulations governing how and with whom “stimulus” dollars could be spent, and the administration’s tightening embrace of industrial policy, businesses want a more quiet, less intrusive, less antagonistic, predictable policy environment before they will feel comfortable playing the role Obama wants them to play.

Until that happens, the president shouldn’t expect torrents of investment and hiring from the business community.

Fixing the Economy Demands More Than a Stroll across Lafayette Park is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old on February 6, so let’s celebrate his life by comparing the success of his pro-market policies with the failure of Barack Obama’s policies (which are basically a continuation of George W. Bush’s policies, so this is not a partisan jab).

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has a fascinating (at least for economic geeks) interactive webpage that allows readers to compare economic downturns and recoveries, both on the basis of output and employment.

The results are remarkable. Reagan focused on reducing the burden of government and the economy responded. Obama (and Bush) tried the opposite approach, but spending, bailouts, and intervention have not worked. This first chart shows economic output.

The employment chart below provides an equally stark comparison. If anything, this second chart is even more damning since employment has not bounced back from the trough. But that shouldn’t be too surprising. Why create jobs when government is subsidizing unemployment and penalizing production? And we already know the so-called stimulus has been a flop.

None of this should be interpreted to mean Reagan is ready for sainthood. He made plenty of compromises during his eight years in office, and some of them were detours in the wrong direction. But the general direction was positive, which is why he’s the best President of my lifetime.*

*Though he may not be the best President of the 20th Century.

Comparing Reaganomics and Obamanomics is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced this morning that the unemployment rate jumped to 9.8 percent last month. As you can see from the chart, the White House claimed that if we enacted the so-called stimulus, the unemployment rate today would be about 7 percent today.

It’s never wise to over-interpret the meaning on a single month’s data, and it’s also a mistake to credit or blame any one policy for the economy’s performance. But it certainly does seem that the combination of bigger government and more intervention is not a recipe for growth.

Maybe the President should reverse course and try free markets and smaller government. After the jump is a helpful six-minute tutorial.

How’s that Stimulus Working, Mr. President? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog