Six Reasons to Downsize the Federal Government
1. Additional federal spending transfers resources from the more productive private sector to the less productive public sector of the economy. The bulk of federal spending goes toward subsidies and benefit payments, which generally do not enhance economic productivity. With lower productivity, average American incomes will fall.
2. As federal spending rises, it creates pressure to raise taxes now and in the future. Higher taxes reduce incentives for productive activities such as working, saving, investing, and starting businesses. Higher taxes also increase incentives to engage in unproductive activities such as tax avoidance.
3. Much federal spending is wasteful and many federal programs are mismanaged. Cost overruns, fraud and abuse, and other bureaucratic failures are endemic in many agencies. It’s true that failures also occur in the private sector, but they are weeded out by competition, bankruptcy, and other market forces. We need to similarly weed out government failures.
4. Federal programs often benefit special interest groups while harming the broader interests of the general public. How is that possible in a democracy? The answer is that logrolling or horse-trading in Congress allows programs to be enacted even though they are only favored by minorities of legislators and voters. One solution is to impose a legal or constitutional cap on the overall federal budget to force politicians to make spending trade-offs.
5. Many federal programs cause active damage to society, in addition to the damage caused by the higher taxes needed to fund them. Programs usually distort markets and they sometimes cause social and environmental damage. Some examples are housing subsidies that helped to cause the financial crises, welfare programs that have created dependency, and farm subsidies that have harmed the environment.
6. The expansion of the federal government in recent decades runs counter to the American tradition of federalism. Federal functions should be “few and defined” in James Madison’s words, with most government activities left to the states. The explosion in federal aid to the states since the 1960s has strangled diversity and innovation in state governments because aid has been accompanied by a mass of one-size-fits-all regulations.
For more, see DownsizingGovernment.org.
Unions, Productivity, and the 2010 Economic Report of the President
I’ve become a fan over the years of the annual Economic Report of the President, released around this time each year by the Council of Economic Advisers. The more than 100 tables in the back of the book provide an invaluable picture of the economy over many decades, covering all the major indicators from output and employment to interest rates and trade. Each report also contains chapters explaining the economic thinking behind administration policies.
Chapter 10 of the latest report focuses on “Fostering Productivity Growth through Innovation and Trade.” For critics of trade, it offers sound economic reasons why trade raises U.S. productivity and, thus, over the long run, U.S. living standards.
One of ways trade promotes growth is “Firm Productivity.” Economists have come to appreciate that firms within an industry will differ in their productivity. Those that are more productive will tend to grow and prosper in larger and more competitive global markets. As a result,
when a country opens to trade, more productive firms grow relative to less productive firms, thus shifting labor and other resources to the better organized firms and increasing overall productivity. Even if workers do not switch industries, they move from firms that are either poorly managed or that use less advanced technology and production processes toward the more productive firms.
The report doesn’t mention this, but one reason why firms differ in their productivity is unionization. As I spell out in an “Economic Watch” column in today’s Washington Times, and explore in more detail in the latest Cato Journal, unionized firms tend to lose market share to non-unionized firms:
The weight of evidence indicates that, for most firms in most sectors, unionization leaves companies less able to compete successfully. The core problem is that unions cause compensation to rise faster than productivity, eroding profits while at the same time reducing the ability of firms to remain price-competitive. The result over time is that unionized firms have tended to lose market share to non-unionized firms, in domestic as well as international markets.
Compared to equivalent non-unionized competitors, unionized firms are associated with lower profits, less investment in physical capital, and less spending on research and development. By exposing an industry (say, automobiles) to more vigorous international competition, trade accelerates the shift from less competitive unionized firms to more competitive non-unionized firms.
Economists serving a Democratic administration would be understandably reluctant to say such a thing explicitly, but it is certainly there between the lines in Chapter 10 of the new Economic Report of the President.
A Few Notes on Climate Change
As the Copenhagen Climate Conference is taking place, it is appropriate to clarify once again what is more or less accurately known about the climate of our planet and about climate change.
Obviously, a brief post can not substitute for detailed studies of professionals in a variety of scientific disciplines – climatology, atmospheric physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and economics. However, a short post can summarize basic theses on the main trends in climate evolution, on its forecasts, and on its actual and projected effects.
1. The Earth’s climate is constantly changing. The climate was changing in the past, is changing now and, obviously, will be changing in the future – as long as our planet exists.
2. Climatic changes are largely cyclical in nature. There are various time horizons of climatic cycles – from the annual cycle known to everyone to cycles of 65-70 years, of 1,300 years, or of 100,000 years (the so called Milankovitch cycles).
3. There is no fundamental disagreement among scientists, public figures and governments about the fact that the climate is changing. There is a broad consensus that climate changes occur constantly. The myth, created by climate alarmists, that their opponents deny climate change is sheer propaganda.
4. Current debate among climatologists, economists and public figures is not about the fact of climate change, but about other issues. In particular, disagreements exist on:
- Comparative levels of modern day temperatures (relative to the historically observed),
- The direction of climate change depending on the length of record,
- The extent of climate change,
- The rate of climate change,
- Causes of climate change,
- Forecasts of climate change,
- Consequences of climate change,
- The optimal strategy for human beings to respond to climate change.
5. Unbiased answers to many of these issues are critically dependent on a chosen time horizon – whether it is 10 years, or 30 years, or 70 years, or 1000 years, or 10,000 years, or hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Depending on the time horizon, the answers to many of these questions may be different, even opposite.
The Land Is There, the Cubans Are There, but the Incentives Are Not
The Washington Post has an interesting story today on the program of the Cuban government to transfer idle state-owned land to private farmers so they can resurrect the dilapidated agricultural sector on the communist island. As Ian Vásquez and I wrote in the chapter on U.S. policy toward Cuba in Cato Handbook for Policymakers, before this reform, the agricultural productivity of Cuba’s tiny non-state sector (comprising cooperatives and small private farmers) was already 25 percent higher than that of the state sector.
At stake is an issue of incentives. Collective land doesn’t give farmers an incentive to work hard and be productive, since the benefits of their labor go to the government who distributes them (in theory) evenly among everyone, regardless of who worked hard or not. While with private property, “The harder you work, the better you do,” as a Cuban farmer said in the Post story.
The country’s ruler, Raúl Castro, recently declared that “The land is there, and here are the Cubans! Let’s see if we can get to work or not, if we produce or not… The land is there waiting for our sweat.” However, it’s not a matter of just having land and lots of people. It’s also a matter of incentives to produce. Failing to see this, as in the case of Cuba’s failed communist model, is a recipe for failure.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Political Philosophy
A Picture Is Worth $300 Billion
I blogged this morning that the research shows higher public school spending slows the economy, and explained that this is because spending more on public schools doesn’t increase students’ academic performance. Some readers no doubt find that hard to accept. With them in mind, I present the following chart:
Spending vs. Achievement
If public schools had merely maintained the level of productivity they exhibited in 1970, Americans would enjoy a permanent $300 billion annual tax cut. Now THAT would stimulate economic growth.
Has Any Other Field Suffered a Productivity Collapse like Education?
I’ve repeatedly claimed that public schools are alone in having suffered a productivity collapse over the past 40 years: their outcomes stagnating or even declining while per pupil costs have skyrocketed. Is that really true?
Dr. Stephen Bohrer, who appears to work in Colorado’s public school system, begs to differ. Responding to a recent op-ed of mine, he writes that: “The price of a Baby Ruth is up 2,000% since 1970. It doesn’t taste any better and is smaller.”
Though historical prices on Baby Ruths are hard to find, there’s a nice suite of data on the Hershey bar, which seems a fair enough test of the good Dr.’s claim. According to FoodTimeline, the price of a 1.375 oz Hershey bar in 1970 was 10 c, and the price of a 1.55 oz bar in 2008 was 59 c. Adjusting the first price to 2008 dollars puts it at 55.5 c.
So the real price-per-oz of a Hershey bar FELL from 40.4 c to 38.1 c over the past 40 years. And it didn’t get any smaller. No gold star for Dr. Bohrer.
So, who else wants to play Stump the Chump? If you think you know a field that has suffered a productivity collapse like education over the past 40 years, send me an e-mail with your claim and the data on which it’s based (ACoulson |at| cato.org). If anybody comes up with a winner, I’ll report it here.
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