One Year Later, Another Look at Obamanomics vs. Reaganomics
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.
Tina Brown and the Economics of Recession
Talking about royal weddings on NPR, Tina Brown says that there’s high unemployment in Britain, as there was in 1981, because of Conservative governments’ budget cuts (transcript edited to match broadcast):
Of course, the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana occurred three decades ago, but Brown points out that there are plenty of similarities between the two eras. “2.5 million are out of work right now with the budget slashes and all the economic austerity that’s happening in England,” Brown says. “There were actually the same amount of people exactly out of work at the time of Charles and Diana, when Mrs. Thatcher came in and began her draconian moves.”
I know that Tina Brown is a journalist, not an economist, but surely she’s heard of the recessions of 1979 and 2009, both of which may have helped to usher in a new government pledged to economic reform. It isn’t budget cuts that have increased British unemployment, it’s the recession. The unemployment rate started rising in early 2008 and kept right on rising during the world financial crisis, which featured not budget cuts but massive spending by governments around the world.
New Era of Big Government
The George W. Bush administration ushered in a new era of big government. The Obama administration has built on Bush’s profligacy, and the president’s new fiscal 2012 budget proposal would further cement the trend.
Spending as a percentage of GDP has increased dramatically since the surplus years of the late 1990s. As the chart shows, the president’s budget once again seeks a permanently high level of federal spending as a share of the economy:
While the numbers drop from their stimulus- and recession-induced highs, it is not because the president has suddenly decided that he desires a less active government. Rather, optimistic economic assumptions largely account for the slight retrenchment.
Tax increases and optimistic economic assumptions explain the projected rise in revenue as a share of the economy. While the president would like us to believe he’s found religion on spending cuts, he’s actually relying on a rosy economic forecast and sucking more money out of the private sector to reduce annual deficits.
Taking more money from the productive private economy to maintain destructively high levels of federal spending is not a recipe for economic growth. Therefore, this budget proposal is as dangerous as it is disingenuous. Fortunately, it’s also dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House.
Debunking the Myth of Oil Dependence
An article in today’s Boston Globe might help to debunk one of the more pervasive myths that distorts U.S. foreign policy: the belief that access to oil from the Middle East is a vital national security issue for the United States.
I discuss the issue in my book, The Power Problem (pp. 107-114). In addition, the Cato Institute and/or Cato scholars have published no fewer than five papers and articles over the past two decades documenting the many reasons why access to oil — or any other natural resource, for that matter — should not be cast as a national security threat. (See, e.g. here, here, here, here and here).
An article in the journal Security Studies expands on the last of these papers, published by Eugene Gholz, at the University of Texas, and Daryl Press, at Dartmouth College. (Justin Logan deserves credit for locating an early version of this paper, and working with Gholz and Press to publish the paper in Cato’s Policy Analysis series in 2007).
But the Gholz/Press plea that U.S. policy not fall victim to ”energy alarmism” isn’t particularly controversial. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be. Writes the Globe‘s Jeremy Kahn:
Gholz and Press are hardly the only researchers who have concluded that we are far too worried about oil shocks. The economy also faced a large increase in prices in the mid-2000s, largely as the result of surging demand from emerging markets, with no ill effects. “If you take any economics textbook written before 2000, it would talk about what a calamitous effect a doubling in oil prices would have,” said Philip Auerswald, an associate professor at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy who has written about oil shocks and their implications for US foreign policy. “Well, we had a price quadrupling from 2003 and 2007 and nothing bad happened.” (The recession of 2008-9 was triggered by factors unrelated to oil prices.)
And yet, the idea that is rejected by most economists is almost universally believed by politicians, and hyped by interest groups who stand to gain by stoking public fears. Auerswald explains:
“This argument is like the familiar old jeans of American politics,” he said. “They are nice and cozy and comfortable and everyone can wear them. Because of ethanol, the farm lobby loves it; for coal, well it’s their core argument; for the offshore drilling folks, they love it.” Even the environmental movement relies on it, he said, because they use it as bogeyman to scare Americans into taking renewable energy and energy conservation more seriously. As for the US military, “The US Navy is not interested in hearing that one of their two main theaters of operation has no justification for being,” Auerswald said.
Here’s hoping that Jeremy Kahn’s article will help to set the record straight.
Comparing Reaganomics and Obamanomics
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.
A Happier New Year for the Beltway
An article in the Washington Post provides another example of how the Washington metro area has become virtually recession-proof:
The Washington region posted the highest year-over-year home price gains in the nation this fall, as real estate values slumped in nearly every other metropolitan area, a key housing report said Tuesday.
A healthy job market, particularly for high-salaried workers, buoyed demand and prices for housing in the D.C. area, local economists said. Home values climbed 3.7 percent in Washington in October from a year earlier, making it one of only four regions nationally to avoid a dip in prices, the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home-price index said.
My colleagues David Boaz and Walter Olsen have highlighted numerous examples of how the Washington metro economy has prospered relative to the rest of the recession-battered country.
A map of Virginia’s unemployment rate by county produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is illustrative:
Unemployment rates for counties closest to the “Imperial City” are dramatically lower than the rates for those counties that are further removed. Arlington County unemployment is 3.8 percent, Alexandria City is 4.4 percent, and Fairfax County is 4.6 percent.
As David points out, the Washington region’s relative prosperity is a reflection of high pay for federal workers and “the boom in lobbying as government comes to claim and redistribute more of the wealth produced in all those other metropolitan areas.” Like an insatiable parasite, the Beltway class continues to gorge itself at the expense of the country’s productive class.
Taxpaying citizens should bear this in mind the next time they are tempted to look to Washington for “solutions” to the country’s problems.
The ‘Consumer Spending’ Myth
Journalists talk endlessly these days about the need for more consumer spending to revive the economy, and for government programs to juice consumer spending. Economist Steven Horwitz takes on the assumption that spending is the key to economic activity:
One of the most pernicious and widespread economic fallacies is the belief that consumption is the key to a healthy economy. We hear this idea all the time in the popular press and casual conversation, particularly during economic downturns. People say things like, “Well, if folks would just start buying things again, the economy would pick up” or “If we could only get more money in the hands of consumers, we’d get out of this recession.” This belief in the power of consumption is also what has guided much of economic policy in the last couple of years, with its endless stream of stimulus packages.
This belief is an inheritance of misguided Keynesian thinking. Production, not consumption, is the source of wealth. If we want a healthy economy, we need to create the conditions under which producers can get on with the process of creating wealth for others to consume, and under which households and firms can engage in thesaving necessary to finance that production….
Putting more resources in the hands of consumers through a government stimulus package fails precisely because the wealth so transferred ultimately has to come from producers. This is obvious when the spending is financed by taxation, but it’s equally true for deficit spending and inflation. With deficit spending the wealth comes from producers’ purchases of government bonds. With inflation it comes proportionately from holders of dollars (obtained through acts of production) whose purchasing power is weakened by the excess supply of money. In neither case does government create wealth. Nor does consumption. The new ability to consume still originates in prior acts of production. If we want real stimulus, we need to free up producers by creating a more hospitable environment for production and not penalize the saving that finances them.
Rise of an Imperial City, Cont’d
From time to time my colleague David Boaz posts about the many ongoing ways in which the economy of Washington, D.C. continues to outpace that of the rest of the country, thanks to a well-paid and layoff-resistant workforce of federal employees and contractors, a thriving lobbying sector, and so forth. Thus David noted this week that the Washington, D.C. metro area has now attained the highest family median income of any major city, and last month that, according to Census Bureau figures analyzed by Newsweek, “seven of the 10 richest counties in America, including the top three, are in the Washington area.” I thought I’d add three more data points to this picture:
- Even as most of the country remains mired in serious housing recession, the capital has bounced back smartly: “The District claims the top ranking on the agency’s state-by-state list of annual price appreciation, with 5.29 percent growth since the third quarter of last year,” compared with a 3.2 percent decline nationally. Virginia and Maryland did less well, but most of both states’ population lives outside the D.C. orbit. [Washington Post]
- Commercial rents in downtown Washington have likewise defied the steep national slump, as the federal government expands its demand for office space: “The rise has been so dramatic that for the first time in five years, the average asking rent in D.C. is higher than in New York City, according to CoStar and a new report of third-quarter activity by commercial real estate firm Cassidy Turley…. ‘The federal government has created a smooth but slow rise in rents [in D.C.],’” noted one real estate economist. [Washington Post again]
- A business boom — in journalism? Even as veteran reporters elsewhere scrounge for work, talent and money continue to pour into Washington’s specialized news-gathering business, most particularly the sorts of newsletters that (for a subscription price in the thousands of dollars) will bring you fresh and fine-grained news of the doings of federal regulatory agencies in fields like energy, pharmaceuticals, securities and telecommunications. “[B]y dint of its regulatory powers, its executive orders, its judicial decisions, its ability to conjure money out of thin air, and its budget-making authority, Washington dictates who can do business and how,” writes Jack Shafer. “… Although $5,700 for a subscription to Bloomberg Government might sound steep to you, it’s chump change for businessmen who become the first in their cohort to read Line 125 in a pending bit of legislation and can place a bet on — or against — it in the market.” [Slate]
No Recession in Washington
Forbes looks at new data on household income in different metro areas:
Median family incomes across the country decreased dramatically from 2008 to 2009, and no region was left untouched by the recession. But despite shrinking paychecks nearly across the board, some cities still stand out for their bigger-than-average salaries.
To find the places where Americans earn the most, we looked at median family income data for 2009, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau. In September, as part of its annual American Community Survey, the Census released updated data for several hundred Metropolitan Statistical Areas — geographic entities defined by the U.S. government that roughly correspond to major cities.
The place with the highest median family income is the Washington, D.C., metro area, which includes the nation’s capital, as well as wealthy suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. In 2009 families in this region earned a median income of $102,340, a 0.7 percent increase from 2008. D.C. also boasts a better than average unemployment rate of 5.9 percent, far below the September’s 9.2 percent national average.
As we’ve reported here before, these trends began even before the Obama administration started concentrating job creation on the federal sector. In the middle of the Bush bubble, the Washington Post reported:
The three most prosperous large counties in the United States are in the Washington suburbs, according to census figures released yesterday, which show that the region has the second-highest income and the least poverty of any major metropolitan area in the country.
Rapidly growing Loudoun County has emerged as the wealthiest jurisdiction in the nation, with its households last year having a median income of more than $98,000. It is followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, with Montgomery County not far behind.
This of course reflects partly the high level of federal pay, as Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven have been detailing. And it also reflects the boom in lobbying as government comes to claim and redistribute more of the wealth produced in all those other metropolitan areas.
To slightly amend a ditty I posted a few years ago,
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys,
Don’t let ‘em make software and sell people trucks,
Make ‘em be bureaucrats and lobbyists and such.
Postal Service Announces $8.5 Billion Loss
The U.S. Postal service has announced a net loss of $8.5 billion for fiscal 2010. Since 2006, the USPS has lost $20 billion, and the organization is close to maxing out its $15 billion line of credit with the U.S. Treasury. Although the USPS has achieved some cost savings, they haven’t been enough to overcome a large drop in revenue due to the recession and the greater use of electronic alternatives by the public.
The USPS is required to make substantial annual payments to pre-fund retiree health care benefits. Last year, Congress allowed the USPS to postpone $4 billion of its fiscal 2009 into the future. However, Congress did not provide similar relief on this year’s required payment of $5.5 billion.
Critics of the retiree health care pre-funding requirement argue that no other federal agencies or private companies face such obligations. The argument is largely irrelevant for two reasons. First, the federal government’s financial practices are nothing to emulate. Second, very few private sector workers even receive retiree health care benefits.
In 2008, only 17 percent of private sector workers were employed at a business that offered health benefits to Medicare-eligible retirees, down from 28 percent in 1997. The actual number of private sector workers receiving these benefits is even lower as not all employees employed at the 17 percent of businesses that offers retiree health benefits are eligible to receive them.
The retiree health care benefit pre-funding requirement has become a rallying cry for the postal unions, as any threat to USPS solvency is a threat to the excessive compensation and benefits they’ve been able to extract from the postal service for their membership over the years.
Policymakers should properly view the retiree health care benefit as a symbol of postal labor excess, which continues to weigh the USPS down like an anchor. Therefore, they should avoid allowing the USPS to further postpone these payments into the future, which could lead to a taxpayer bailout. Instead, policymakers should recognize that the USPS’s financial woes require bolder action: privatization.
The GM ‘Turnaround’ in Bastiat’s View
GM’s long-rumored initial public stock offering will take place Thursday and self-anointed savior of the U.S. auto industry, Steven Rattner, is pretty bullish about the prospect of investors turning out in droves.
I’ve been saying for a while that I thought the government’s exposure [euphemism for taxpayer losses] in the auto bailout was in the $10-billion to $20-billion range.
But since investor interest has pushed the initial price up from the $26-to-$29 per share range to the $32-$33 range, Rattner now believes:
[T]his exposure is in the single-digit billion range, and arguably potentially better.
I won’t argue with Rattner’s numbers. After all, they affirm one of my many criticisms of the bailout: that taxpayers would never recoup the value of their “investment.” My bigger problem is with Rattner’s cavalier disregard for the other enduring—and arguably more significant—costs of the auto bailouts.
Rattner is like the foil in Frederic Bastiat’s excellent, but not-famous-enough, 1850 parable, That Which is Seen and That Which is Unseen. Rattner touts what is seen, namely that GM and Chrysler still exist. And they exist because of his and his colleagues’ commitment to a plan to ensure their survival, along with the hundreds of thousands (if not millions, as some “estimates” had it) of jobs that were imperiled had those companies vanished. (For starters, I very much question even what is seen here. I am skeptical of the counterfactual that GM and Chrysler would have disappeared and that there would have been significantly more job loss in the industry than there actually was during the recession and restructuring. But I’ll grant his view of what is seen because, frankly, the specifics are irrelevant in the final analysis).
Have Americans Turned against Free Trade?
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll would seem to say yes. In a story over the weekend under the headline, “Americans Sour on Trade,” the Journal reports:
more than half of those surveyed, 53%, said free-trade agreements have hurt the U.S. That is up from 46% three years ago and 32% in 1999.
One plausible explanation for the sour mood toward trade is the business cycle. 1999 was near the peak of the long boom of the 1990s, when Americans were feeling good about just about everything. Even three years ago, the stock market was at a record high and unemployment was below 5 percent. In this light, trade is another casualty of the lingering recession, not a cause as many trade critics want to argue.
“Outsourcing” was a major source of anxiety in the poll. Americans overwhelming believe outsourcing of production and manufacturing work to other countries is a reason why the economy is struggling and new jobs are not being created. This collective attitude is more reflective of the complaints people hear in the media than of any hard reality on the ground.
As I document in my 2009 Cato book, Mad about Trade, only about 3 percent of job displacement in the United States can be blamed on trade. (See pp. 31-33.) For every one person in the unemployment line because of imports or outsourcing, there are 30 people who have been displaced from their jobs by technology, domestic competition, changing consumer tastes, or the general business cycle.
Despite the popular worries, outsourcing is more likely to attract business to the United States than send it overseas. Year after year, more direct manufacturing investment flows into the United States than out to other countries. Year after year, Americans sell more “business and professional services” to customers abroad than they buy.
The facts are on the side of expanding the freedom of Americans to trade and invest with people in other countries. What is lacking are political leaders in Washington who will stand up for the broader national interest of our country against the special interests who are exploiting anxiety about the economy to trash trade.
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