Imports Wrongly Blamed for Unemployment
Import competition can throw Americans out of work. Even advocates of free trade like me will readily acknowledge that fact. And nobody needs to remind the people of Hickory, North Carolina.
On the front page of the Washington Post this morning, under the headline, “In N.C., damage not easily mended: Globalization drives unemployment to 15% in one corner of state,” the paper reports in detail how the people of that community are struggling to adjust to a more open U.S. economy:
The region has lost more of its jobs to international competition than just about anywhere else in the nation, according to federal trade-assistance statistics, as textile mills have closed, furniture factories have dwindled and even the fiber-optic plants have undergone mass layoffs. The unemployment rate is one of the highest in the nation–about 15 percent.
Nobody wants to lose their job involuntarily, but a story like this needs to be read in perspective. As I document in my new Cato book Mad about Trade, the large majority of Americans who lose their jobs each year are not displaced by trade. Technology is the great job disruptor, but Americans also lose their jobs because of domestic competition, changing consumer tastes, and recessions.
For every person who loses their job because of globalization, I estimate there are 30 who have lost their jobs for other reasons. I’m waiting for a front-page story on all the newspaper workers who have lost their jobs because of the Internet, or the 30,000 workers laid off by Kodak in the past 5 years because of the spread of digital cameras and plunging film sales, or the book stores and record stores that have shut down and laid off workers because of Amazon.com and iTunes.
Trade is not a cause of higher unemployment nationwide, either, as the Post story seems to imply. Imports have fallen sharply during the latest recession along with the trade deficit. In contrast, imports were rising at double-digit rates when the unemployment rate was below 5 percent. Like technology, trade can put people out of work, but it also creates new and generally better paying opportunities for employment, while raising our overall standard of living.
The Fed and Policy Uncertainty
How and when should the Fed unwind the enormous monetary expansion it undertook in response to the financial crisis and recession? The WSJ reports [$]:
As the Federal Reserve’s next meeting approaches in early November, an internal debate is brewing about how and when to signal the possibility of interest-rate increases.
The Fed has said since March that it will keep rates very low for an “extended period.” Long before it raises rates, however, it will need to change that public signal to financial markets.
Because the recovery is so young and is expected to be so weak, many central bank officials are comfortable, for now, keeping rates very low. But they are beginning to strategize about how to walk away from the “extended period” language.
My suggestion is that the Fed announce a path of gradual increases in the federal funds rate, say beginning next year and lasting for two years, until the rate is at some “normal level.”
This approach is different than what the Fed is likely to undertake; it will probably want to maximize “discretion,” the ability to adjust on the fly as conditions unfold.
My approach maximizes predictability and reassurance: it commits the Fed to shrinking the money supply and heading off future inflation. This reassures markets and takes substantial uncertainty out of the picture.
The problem with my approach is the pre-commitment: everyone knows the Fed could abandon a pre-announced path.
But such an announcement might still give markets useful guidance, and the Fed would know that any deviation would itself upset markets, and this might encourage adherence to the pre-commitment.
C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General
Crist and Cato
Florida’s airwaves are alive with the sound of Governor Charlie Crist’s radio advertisement trumpeting his grade of “A” on Cato’s “Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors.”
I am pleased that Gov. Crist values Cato’s ratings because we work hard to make them accurate and nonpartisan. But the radio ad is making many fiscally conservative Floridians scratch their heads because of the governor’s recent policy actions.
The governor earned his Cato grade in last year’s report mainly because of his large property tax cuts and moderate spending approach. The grade was based purely on quantitative data on revenues, general fund spending, and tax rate changes.
However, since I wrote the report in mid-2008, the governor seems to have fallen off the fiscal responsibility horse.
In particular, Crist approved a huge $2.2 billion tax increase for the fiscal 2010 budget, even though he had promised that $12 billion in federal “stimulus” money showered on Florida over three years would obviate the need for tax increases.
About $1 billion of the tax increases are on cigarette consumers, which will particularly harm moderate-income families. The rest of the increases are in the form of higher costs for often mandatory services, such as automobile registration, which is really just a sneaky form of tax increases.
These tax increases will be particularly painful to Floridians in the short-term because of the recession. But Crist has also jeopardized the state’s long-term finances with his expanded subsidies for hurricane insurance. Hurricanes are a major challenge in Florida, but giving big subsidies to coastal property owners, driving private insurers out of the state, and guaranteeing a massive state bailout when the next hurricane hits strikes me as the height of fiscally irresponsibility.
More on the Crist campaign here.
New Paper: Would a Stricter Fed Policy and Financial Regulation Have Averted the Financial Crisis?
Many commentators have argued that if the Federal Reserve had followed a stricter monetary policy earlier this decade when the housing bubble was forming, and if Congress had not deregulated banking but had imposed tighter financial standards, the housing boom and bust—and the subsequent financial crisis and recession—would have been averted.
In a new study, Cato scholars Jagadeesh Gokhale and Peter Van Doren investigate those claims and dispute them.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy
Debt Aggravates Spending Disease
USA Today’s Dennis Cauchon reports that ”state governments are rushing to borrow money to take advantage of cheap and plentiful credit at a time when tax collections are tumbling.” That will allow them to “avoid some painful spending cuts,” Cauchon notes, but it will sadly impose more pain on taxpayers down the road.
When politicians have the chance to act irresponsibly, they will act irresponsibly. Give them low interest rates and they go on a borrowing binge. The result is that they are in over their heads with massive piles of bond debt on top of the huge unfunded obligations they have built up for state pension and health care plans.
The chart shows that total state and local government debt soared 93 percent this decade. It jumped from $1.2 trillion in 2000 to $2.3 trillion by the second quarter of 2009, according to Federal Reserve data (Table D.3).
Government debt has soared during good times and bad. During recessions, politicians say that they need to borrow to avoid spending cuts. But during boomtimes, such as from 2003 to 2008, they say that borrowing makes sense because an expanding economy can handle a higher debt load. I’ve argued that there is little reason for allowing state and local government politicians to issue bond debt at all.
Unfortunately, the political urge to spend has resulted in the states shoving a massive pile of debt onto future taxpayers at the same time that they have built up huge unfunded obligations for worker retirement plans.
We’ve seen how uncontrolled debt issuance has encouraged spending sprees at the federal level. Sadly, it appears that the same debt-fueled spending disease has spread to the states and the cities.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Tuesday Links
- Richard Rahn on the growing debt bomb, set to explode within three years: “Expect to see record high real interest rates and/or inflation, coupled with a collapse of many ‘entitlements.’”
- Why right wing “czar mania” is a needless distraction.
- Obama says that “nobody” considers the government mandate to buy health care a tax. But here are a couple of Obama appointees who do.
- Let the battle of ideas begin: Economists debate the monetary lessons of the last recession.
- Podcast: “Muddling Missions in Afghanistan” featuring Malou Innocent. More on Afghanistan here.
Weekend Links
- Nat Hentoff has a few tough questions for doctors who aided CIA torture.
- Is public option a private insurer killer? Larry McNeely and Michael Cannon debate.
- Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says the recession is probably over. But was he the man who saved the economy?
- Podcast: Should the government have the power to punish you for speaking your mind? Many Americans think it should…so long as it’s people with whom they don’t agree.
Republicans Just as Guilty of Flawed Keynesian Thinking
The core of Keynesian economic policy is that the government must come in and replace reductions in private sector demand with public sector demand, therefore bringing overall demand back to its previous level. One of the many flaws in this thinking is in assuming that the previous level of demand was “correct” and getting us back to that level is the appropriate policy response.
Take the example of the housing market and the government response. The primary response of Republicans in Washington has been to offer tax credits and other incentives to replace the drop in demand for housing. Witness Senator Johnny Isakson’s recent comments on why we need to extend the $8,000 homebuyer tax credit: “If you take that kind of business out of what’s already a very weak housing market, you do nothing but protract and extend the recession.”
This analysis could not be more wrong. The tax credit largely acts to keep housing prices from falling further. However, that is how markets are supposed to clear in an environment of excess supply. If there’s too much housing, the way to address that is to allow housing prices to fall, which attracts buyers back into the market.
We should also recognize that the tax credit does not help the buyer, it helps the seller, by allowing the seller to charge that much more for the price of the home.
A Flat Tire for Low-Income Drivers?
Will the President raise taxes on new tires?
President Obama will need to decide any day now whether to impose tariffs on lower-end automobile tires imported from China. As my colleague Dan Ikenson has ably argued, the decision will tell us much about whether the president believes trade policy should serve the general interest of all Americans, or whether it is simply a political tool to satisfy key constituencies.
Neglected in the news coverage of the pending decision is the impact it could have on consumers. The imported tires targeted by this Section 421 case are of the cheaper variety, the kind that low-income Americans would buy to keep their cars on the road during a recession. If the president decides to impose tariffs, his union supporters will cheer, but “working families’ will find it more difficult to keep their cars running safely.
A central theme of my new Cato book, Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization, is that import competition is a working family’s best friend, especially imports from China. As I write in an excerpt published in today’s Washington Examiner,
Imports from China have delivered lower prices on goods that matter most to the poor, helping to offset other forces in our economy that tend to widen income inequality. …
Imposing steep tariffs on imports from China would, of course, hurt producers and workers in China, but it would also punish millions of American consumers through higher prices for shoes, clothing, toys, sporting goods, bicycles, TVs, radios, stereos, and personal and laptop computers.
We will see shortly if President Obama will punish low-income Americans who drive.
Tuesday Links
- Will Afghanistan become Obama’s Vietnam?
- Why America’s experience in Bosnia and Iraq offers ample warning against taking the mission too far in Afghanistan.
- Paul Krugman claims a victory for Big Government, which he says “saved” the economy from an economic depression. Alan Reynolds debunks his claim and shows why bigger government produces only bigger and longer recessions.
- Podcast: Johan Norberg explores the causes of the financial crisis. For more, don’t miss his new book, Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis.
Deficits, Spending, and Taxes
The White House and the CBO announced this week that:
The nation’s fiscal outlook is even bleaker than the government forecast earlier this year because the recession turned out to be deeper than widely expected, the budget offices of the White House and Congress agreed in separate updates on Tuesday.
The Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget raised its 10-year tally of deficits expected through 2019 to $9.05 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than it projected in February. That would represent 5.1 percent of the economy’s estimated gross domestic product for the decade, a higher level than is generally considered healthy.
What is the right response to these deficits?
One view holds that most current expenditure is desirable — indeed, that expenditure should ideally be much higher — so the United States should raise taxes to balance the budget. Taxes are a drag on economic growth, however, and unpopular with many voters, so this view presents politicians with an unhappy tradeoff.
The alternative view holds that a substantial fraction of current expenditure is undesirable and should be eliminated, even if the revenue to pay for it could be manufactured out of thin air. To be concrete:
- Medicare and Medicaid encourage excessive spending on health care.
- The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan encourage hostility to the U.S. and thereby increase the risk of terrorism.
- Drug prohibition generates crime and corruption.
- Agricultural subsidies distort decisions about which crops to grow, and where.
- And much, much more.
So, under this view, the United States can have its cake and eat it too: improve the economy and reduce the deficit without the need to raise taxes.
This approach is not, of course, politically trivial, since existing expenditure programs have constituencies that will fight their elimination.
But thinking about these two views of the deficits is nevertheless useful: it shows that discussion should really be about which aspects of government are truly beneficial, not just about the deficits per se.
Federal Pay Continues Rapid Ascent
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its annual data on compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D here). The data show that the pay advantage enjoyed by federal civilian workers over private-sector workers continues to expand.
The George W. Bush years were very lucrative for federal workers. In 2000, the average compensation (wages and benefits) of federal workers was 66 percent higher than the average compensation in the U.S. private sector. The new data show that average federal compensation is now more than double the average in the private sector.
Figure 1 looks at average wages. In 2008, the average wage for 1.9 million federal civilian workers was $79,197, which compared to an average $50,028 for the nation’s 108 million private sector workers (measured in full-time equivalents). The figure shows that the federal pay advantage (the gap between the lines) is steadily increasing.
Figure 2 shows that the federal advantage is even more pronounced when worker benefits are included. In 2008, federal worker compensation averaged a remarkable $119,982, which was more than double the private sector average of $59,909.
What is going on here? Members of Congress who have large numbers of federal workers in their districts relentlessly push for expanding federal worker compensation. Also, the Bush administration had little interest in fiscal restraint, and it usually got rolled by the federal unions. The result has been an increasingly overpaid elite of government workers, who are insulated from the economic reality of recessions and from the tough competitive climate of the private sector.
It’s time to put a stop to this. Federal wages should be frozen for a period of years, at least until the private-sector economy has recovered and average workers start seeing some wage gains of their own. At the same time, gold-plated federal benefit packages should be scaled back as unaffordable given today’s massive budget deficits. There are many qualitative benefits of government work—such as extremely high job security—so taxpayers should not have to pay for such lavish government pay packages.
Update: I respond to some criticisms of this post here.
Update 2: Compensation data for federal workers vs. other industries here.
Update 3: In September, the government revised the data for private sector workers. On 9/30/09, Figure 1 and the related text were updated to reflect this change.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Our Tax Dollars Are Being Used to Lobby for More Government Handouts
The First Amendment guarantees our freedom to petition the government, which is one of the reasons why the statists who wants to restrict or even ban lobbying hopefully will not succeed. But that does not mean all lobbying is created equal. If a bunch of small business owners get together to lobby against higher taxes, that is a noble endeavor. If the same group of people get together and lobby for special handouts, by contrast, they are being despicable. And if they get a bailout from the government and use that money to mooch for more handouts, they deserve a reserved seat in a very hot place.
This is not just a hypothetical exercise. The Hill reports on the combined $20 million lobbying budget of some of the companies that stuck their snouts in the public trough:
Auto companies and eight of the country’s biggest banks that received tens of billions of dollars in federal bailout money spent more than $20 million on lobbying Washington lawmakers in the first half of this year. General Motors, Chrysler and GMAC, the finance arm of GM, cut back significantly on lobbying expenses in the period, spending about one-third less in total than they had in the first half of 2008. But the eight banks, the earliest recipients of billions of dollars from the federal government, continued to rely heavily on their Washington lobbying arms, spending more than $12.4 million in the first half of 2009. That is slightly more than they spent during the same period a year ago, according to a review of congressional records.
…big banks traditionally are among the most active Washington lobbying interests in the financial industry, and the recession has done little to dent their spending. …Since last fall, companies receiving government funds have argued that none of the taxpayer money they were receiving was being spent on lobbying.
…American International Group, the insurance firm crippled by trades in financial derivatives that received roughly $180 billion in bailout commitments, closed its Washington lobbying shop earlier this year. AIG continues to spend money on counsel to answer requests for information from the federal government, but the firm said it does not lobby on federal legislation.
The most absurd part of the story was the companies claiming that they did not use tax dollar for lobbying. I guess the corporate bureaucrats skipped the classes where their teachers explained that money is fungible.
The best part of the story was learning that AIG closed its lobbying operation, though that does not mean much since AIG basically now exists as a subsidiary of the federal government. The most important message (which is absent from the story, of course) is that the real problem is that government is too big and that it intervenes in private markets. Companies would not need to lobby if government left them alone and/or did not offer them special favors. Indeed, that was the key point of my video entitled, “Want Less Corruption: Shrink the Size of Government.”
Obama’s New Numbers
A new ABC/Washington Post poll is out. The trends are not comforting for the White House. President Obama’s approval rating – probably the most important number for a president these days – continues to drop. Approval by independents has fallen by 9 points over his term. Support for his handling of the economy now garners the approval of barely half of respondents. The number of people who see him as an “old-style tax and spend” Democrat has risen by 11 percentage points; the number who see him as a new Democrat “careful with public money” has dropped by about the same number.
A majority of the public now rejects a second spending splurge. Most now give avoiding deficits a higher priority than increasing spending, even to fight the recession.
The number of people in the poll identifying themselves as independents is at a post-1981 high. Most of those people may well vote most of the time for one of the major parties. For now, neither party is attracting much loyalty.
Surely some Democrats in Congress must be starting to wonder how far they should follow the president and his desire for ever greater spending.
America Suffers When Washington Wins
The Washington Post has a “feel-good” story about how the huge expansion in the federal government has created a relatively strong job market in the D.C. area.
The story mentions that the federal workforce will expand by another 200,000 during the Obama years. Yet at no point does the author bother to mention (or perhaps even understand) that all these new bureaucrats are financed by draining resources from the productive sector of the economy.
A sample:
They came in droves wearing dark suits and carrying résumés yesterday — some lined up for a block in the hot sun waiting for the doors to open — to the only employer in this dismal economy hiring by the thousands: the federal government.
More than 6,000 people jammed into the National Building Museum in Washington to apply for openings at 75 agencies, including the departments of Treasury, Homeland Security, Justice, Veterans Affairs and Energy.[I]n the government, added [an applicant from] Silver Spring, “you get stability, you get great benefits and [an opportunity] to move up and progress in your job.” The federal government represents about one-third of the Washington region’s $401 billion economy. Some analysts said they think the ramp-up in federal hiring and spending will help the area emerge from the recession before most other metropolitan regions. From May 2008 to May 2009, the region lost 55,000 jobs. But during that same period, nearly 20,000 jobs were created, mainly in the federal government and federal contracting sector.
…The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that sponsored the job fair and is surveying federal agencies to determine their staffing needs, estimates that the government will hire about 600,000 people over the next four years, as many as 120,000 of whom would work in the Washington region. The federal workforce, currently at 1.9 million, is expected to grow to about 2.1 million during the Obama administration, according to the Partnership for Public Service. That is comparable to the staffing level during the Johnson administration’s Great Society programs of the 1960s.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Back to the Bad Old Days of High Marginal Tax Rates
As Mike Tanner has written, the health care bill means a big tax hike — indeed, a lot of tax hikes. It also means a reversal of one of President Ronald Reagan’s great achievements, bringing down the top marginal income tax rate.
Small-business owners are warning that the economy would suffer under a health care bill proposed by House Democrats, which would drive tax rates for high-income taxpayers to levels not seen since before President Reagan’s tax reform of 1986.
The top federal income tax rate, which Mr. Reagan and a bipartisan Congress lowered from 50 percent to 28 percent, would reach 45 percent in 2011 if Congress and President Obama enact the surtaxes that are part of the health care reform plan that House Democrats announced Tuesday.
Small-business owners, who would take a direct hit from the surtaxes, expressed dismay over the proposal, saying it would force them to curtail hiring and reduce wages amid the worst recession in a generation.
“If they institute a 5 percent surtax on income, it will have a severe impact on small businesses that are already hurting,” said Michael Fredrich, whose Wisconsin company, MCM Composites, molds plastic parts.
“We run maybe three days a week, sometimes four days a week, sometimes zero days,” he said. “I can tell you that at some point, people … running a small business are just going to say, ‘To hell with it.’ “
Individuals tend to focus on their tax burden. After all, our overall tax bill reflects the amount of money we lose as legislators speed about the country allegedly “serving” us while promoting their own political ends.
Marginal tax rates more directly affect decisions on saving, investment, business formation, work effort, job creation, and more. Even politicians not enamored of the “rich,” whatever that term means, should recognize that we all benefit from an economic system which encourages entrepreneurship.
Proponents of big tax hikes might want to recall Aesop’s Fable, The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs. Wreck the economy, and the health care system will crash too.
Filed under: Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
Federal Workers Not Underpaid
The head of the Office of Personnel Management claims that federal workers are underpaid compared to private sector workers by 20 percent, on average. Federal unions and other cheerleaders for the bureaucracy have been making similar claims for years.
I’ve pointed out the dramatic acceleration of federal compensation over the last decade and the excessive generosity of federal worker benefits.
Federal workers are not underpaid.
Now a Human Resources expert writing in The Washington Post backs up my claims. Lily Garcia writes:
The primary advantages of working for the federal government are generous benefits, solid pay, and relative job security, a combination that is challenging to find in the private sector, even in the best of times . . . In addition to these benefits, federal employees, contrary to popular belief, are paid relatively well.
One policy implication is that federal worker compensation would be a good place to look for budget savings to reduce the federal deficit. We could start with a two-year freeze on federal salaries to save about $20 billion. During a recession, private wages are not increasing, so why should federal wages?
An Overdue Reckoning in the Auto Sector
Bloomberg reports:
General Motors Corp., facing a probable bankruptcy filing by June 1, is telling 1,100 “underperforming” U.S. dealers they will be terminated as the automaker starts shrinking its retail network.
Most of the closings will occur by October 2010, and none are happening now, Detroit-based GM said today. The targeted outlets will have until the end of the month to appeal the decisions, GM said, without specifying the stores on the list.
The shutdowns are the biggest U.S. automaker’s first step toward paring domestic dealers to a range of 3,600 to 4,000 from 5,969 by the end of 2010.
To be sure, it is a very sad day for thousands of workers and businesses around the country. But we’re in the midst of a deep recession, which may be nowhere deeper than in the auto sector. Demand for cars and light trucks has absolutely tanked, which means the economy has an excess supply of inventory, productive capacity, and retail capacity.
Now Is Not the Time to Reduce Credit Card Availability
With the House having passed credit card legislation and the Senate scheduled to take up its own bill this week, one questions keeps coming back to me: What’s the hurry?
We are in the midst of a recession, which will not turn around until consumer spending turns around—so why reduce the availability of consumer credit now? And the Federal Reserve has already proposed a rule that would address many of Congress’ supposed concerns. The Fed rule will be implemented July 2010. Were Congress to get a bill to the president by Memorial Day, as he has asked, the Federal Reserve and the industry still couldn’t implement it before maybe January, if they were lucky.
Congress should keep in mind that credit cards have been a significant source of consumer liquidity during this downturn. While few of us want to have to cover our basic living expenses on our credit card, that option is certainly better than going without those basic needs. The wide availability of credit cards has helped to significantly maintain some level of consumer purchasing, even while confidence and other indicators have nosedived.
It was the massive under-pricing of risk, often at the urging of Washington, that brought on our current financial market crisis. To now pressure credit card companies not to raise their fees or more accurately price credit risk, will only reduce the availability of credit while undermining the financial viability of the companies, ultimately prolonging the recession and potentially increasing the cost of bank bailouts to the taxpayer.
As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has repeatedly said, some of the biggest credit card issuers will not be allowed to fail (think Citibank, American Express, Capital One, KepCorp) should they suffer significant losses to their credit card portfolios. Will taxpayers ultimately be the ones covering those losses?
Congress should also further examine the wisdom of restricting credit to college students under the age of 21. Outside of the obvious age discrimination, why treat adults between the ages of 18 and 21 any differently from those above 21? The basic premise of college is making sacrifices today in order to have a wealthier tomorrow—accordingly being able to borrow against that better tomorrow should be an option for any college student. Just as some small number of college students don’t benefit from college, some don’t benefit from credit cards, but throwing the “baby out with the bathwater” hardly seems the idea solution.
Brother, Can You Spare A Trillion?
With the economy in a deep recession and policymakers turning to massive government intervention in an attempt to create jobs and bolster the financial system—it feels like the 1930s all over again. Today’s new New Deal is rapidly unfolding, with the Obama administration and many lawmakers making it clear that any question of the success of FDR’s New Deal policies was resolved long ago: government intervention worked, and history bears repeating.
However, there are deep disagreements about the New Deal, and whether Roosevelt’s policies deepened the depression and delayed recovery.
Join us at the Cato Institute on June 1 to be a part of a highly informative half-day conference. Recognized national experts will discuss the economic and legal impact of the New Deal, and how its legacy is being used and misused to shape policy responses to current economic hardships.
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