Looking Back: Cato Scholars Critical of Bush’s Big Government Policies

Posted by Cato Editors

In selling his big-spending ideas for reviving the U.S. economy, President Obama has chastised “the same policies that, for the last eight years, doubled our national debt, and threw our economy into a tail spin.”

We couldn’t agree more with the president.

Unfortunately, he seems unaware that exploding the size of government, as he is proposing to do with this stimulus package, is a remarkably Bush-esque ideal.

While Bush was in office, scholars at the Cato Institute were critical of his big government policies. In a new section on cato.org/fiscalreality, you can find some of our research and commentary throughout the Bush years, including:

Stimulus Agreement Means Lower Long-Run Growth

Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell

News reports indicate there is some sort of final deal on the so-called stimulus. Some of the politicians are acting as if this massive spending bill is “fiscally responsible” merely because the total amount of money is fractionally smaller than the House and Senate proposals. Ironically, as Veronique de Rugy explains for reason.com, even the Congressional Budget Office, which relies on a deeply-flawed Keynesian economic model, is warning that bigger government will hurt the economy’s long-run performance.

In a report to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) writes in plain English—well, economic language—that the Senate bill would eventually cause not a stimulus but a recession in “the longer run.” …On the CBO’s The Director’s Blog, Elmendorf explains why the Senate legislation would eventually reduce economic output:

The principal channel for this effect is that the legislation would result in an increase in government debt. To the extent that people hold their wealth in the form of government bonds rather than in a form that can be used to finance private investment, the increased government debt would tend to ‘crowd out’ private investment—thus reducing the stock of private capital and the long-term potential output of the economy.

The Senate might have done something straightforward, like cutting the corporate income tax or cutting the payroll tax that all workers pay. Instead, most of the provisions are tax credits, many of which are refundable. In other words, individuals and businesses need to pay their taxes up front and then will get money back from the government. These sorts of programs, aimed incentivizing investment, are better understood as spending programs disguised as “tax cuts.”

And here is one more thing to consider: There is absolutely no evidence that any stimulus package in the past 80 years has goosed economic activity—not FDR’s during the Great Depression, not Japan’s during the 1990s, and not George W. Bush’s in 2001 and 2008. If anything, the economic evidence suggests that such spending packages actually intensified and prolonged misery.

The Congressional Budget Office is right, albeit for reasons other than the ones generated by its garbage-in-garbage-out model. Bigger government hurts economic efficiency by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy, and it does not matter whether government spending is financed by taxes or borrowing.

Will Stimulus Become a $3 Trillion Nightmare?

Posted by Chris Edwards

A huge threat from the $800 billion stimulus plan in front of Congress this week is that much of the spending may morph into a permanent expansion of government. If the bill is signed into law, lobbyists will immediately start pressing for the long-term extension of all the new spending on health care, transportation, education and other items.

Let’s look at the Senate bill to illustrate the fiscal impact of such a nightmare scenario. The CBO finds that the Senate bill would increase outlays by $546 billion and cut taxes $292 billion over fiscal years 2009-2019.

Figure 1 shows CBO’s assumed pattern of spending under the bill. Since we are already part way through 2009, outlays peak in 2010 at $206 billion and taper off after that. Note that 41 percent of total spending occurs after 2010 because federal and state agencies have limits on how fast they can spend the huge pile of cash. (Thus 41 percent of spending in the bill is certainly not short-term “stimulus” even if you believe in Keynesian theory).

What if special interest groups successfully lobby to extend all the new benefits and subsidies? One possibility would be that the 2010 funding level of $206 billion is extended permanently, as shown in Figure 2. Rather than the stimulus bill costing $546 billion through 2019, it would trigger spending totaling $2.2 trillion over the period.

In sum, here are the budget effects through 2019 of the stimulus nightmare scenario:

- Temporary tax cuts in the Senate bill: $292 billion

- Spending continued permanently at the 2010 level: $2.2 trillion

- Rough guess at the additional federal interest costs: $500 billion

- Total increase in federal debt under nightmare scenario: $3 trillion

Extending the (mainly useless) tax cuts in the stimulus package would make deficits even larger. And, of course, all this increase in debt would come on top of the debt piling up from financial industry bailouts and regular budget spending. It’s madness.

Obama Truth Check

Posted by Cato Editors

President Obama may have preempted the first hour of prime time Monday night, but he certainly did not fail to entertain with several pronouncements that require suspension of disbelief.

Here are four Obama statements that deserve closer scrutiny:

1.      “[I]f you delay acting on an economy of this severity, then you potentially create a negative spiral that becomes much more difficult for us to get out of. We saw this happen in Japan in the 1990s, where they did not act boldly and swiftly enough…”

The fact is that numerous presidents, including Obama’s immediate predecessor, have used desperation and fear to sell some of the truly awful policies to come out of the U.S. government in the last 50 years — the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the Iraq War resolution, to name two.

2.      “What it does not contain, however, is a single pet project, not a single earmark, and it has been stripped of the projects members of both parties found most objectionable.”

This one severely strains credulity.  The president is right about one thing: many of the bill’s projects are online for all to see.  But could any reasonable person agree that these projects are stimulative and not aimed at special political interests?

3.      “Most economists, almost unanimously, recognize that…when you have the kind of problem we have right now…that government is an important element of introducing some additional demand into the economy.”

We’ve been over this, Mr. President.  The truth is that a huge and still-growing number of respected economists think that a massive government spending effort in our present circumstances is wasteful and foolhardy.

4.      “What I won’t do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place…”

OK, so we actually agree with the president on that one.  But then why is he bound and determined to repeat the reckless spending habits of George W. Bush?  We thought the November campaign was all about “change.”

Show Your Opposition to the Stimulus Plan

Posted by Chris Moody

The Cato ad showing that there is no consensus among economists about the stimulus plan is still running in print and online publications nationwide. To spread the word even further, we’ve created a special widget that you can post on your blog or website.

We’re calling on all bloggers who agree that lessening the burden of government is the best way to boost economic growth to post the widget on your site.

It’s easy: Grab the code on Cato.org/fiscalreality by clicking “Spread the word.”  Post it on your blog and let readers know where you stand on stimulus.

Don’t Call It “Stimulus”

Posted by David Boaz

David Friedman raises a very good point:

A well chosen name wins an argument by assuming its conclusion. Label cash subsidies to foreign government as “foreign aid” and who can be so hard hearted as to oppose them? Call subsidies to the public schools “aid to education” and you neatly skip over the question of whether additional spending in the public school system results in more education.

And “economic stimulus” is a classic example.

Everyone—including Obama, back when he was running for President—is against deficit spending. Relabel it “stimulus” and everyone is for it. The label neatly evades the question of whether having the government borrow money and spend it is actually a way of getting out of a recession—a claim for which evidence is distinctly thin. It is stimulus, so obviously it must stimulate.

So what should we call it? President Obama’s spending proposal? The deficit-spending package? I think we’d have trouble getting the media to call it the Big Boondoggle. Maybe the government bailout, following the Wall Street bailout and the auto bailout?

Alas, we’re probably stuck debating the “stimulus.” But that means the battle was half lost before it began.

Week in Review

Posted by Chris Moody

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Cato Leads Opposition to Fiscal Stimulus

In reaction to statements from Obama administration officials who say “all economists agree” that the only way to fight the economic recession is to go on a massive government spending spree, the Cato Institute took out a full page ad in the nation’s largest newspapers that showed that those words were not true. Signed by more than 200 economists, including Nobel laureates and other highly respected scholars, the statement was published this week in The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other publications.

On the day the ad ran in The New York Times, Cato executive vice president David Boaz added more names to the list of economists who are skeptical of the spending bill.

Commenting on the principles behind the stimulus, Cato adjunct scholar Lawrence H. White and fellow economist David C. Rose discuss why we can’t spend our way out of this mess:

You can’t solve an excessive spending problem by spending more. We are making the crisis worse.

In The Wall Street Journal, Cato senior fellow Alan Reynolds examines the numbers and discovers that each government job created  will cost taxpayers a staggering $646,214 per hire.

Read the rest of this post »

Economists against the Stimulus

Posted by David Boaz

Cato has just published a full-page ad in the New York Times with the names of some 200 economists, including some Nobel laureates and other highly respected scholars, who “do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance” — contrary to widespread claims that “Economists from across the political spectrum agree” on a massive fiscal stimulus package. Of course, many economists don’t like to sign joint statements, so this is only a fraction of stimulus opponents in the profession. Greg Mankiw pointed to a few noted skeptics last week:

In a TV interview last month, Vice President Joe Biden said the following:

Every economist, as I’ve said, from conservative to liberal, acknowledges that direct government spending on a direct program now is the best way to infuse economic growth and create jobs.

That statement is clearly false. As I have documented on this blog in recent weeks, skeptics about a spending stimulus include quite a few well-known economists, such as (in alphabetical order) Alberto Alesina, Robert Barro, Gary Becker, John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Robert Lucas, Greg Mankiw, Kevin Murphy, Thomas Sargent, Harald Uhlig, and Luigi Zingales–and I am sure there many others as well. Regardless of whether one agrees with them on the merits of the case, it is hard to dispute that this list is pretty impressive, as judged by the standard objective criteria by which economists evaluate one another. If any university managed to hire all of them, it would immediately have a top ranked economics department.

And of course Mankiw’s list isn’t comprehensive. There’s also former Treasury economist Bruce Bartlett, former Yale professor Philip Levy, former Ohio State and Federal Reserve economist Alan Viard, Russell Roberts of George Mason, and many more. Under the current circumstances, plenty of economists are endorsing large fiscal stimulus programs. But it’s just not correct to claim that there’s any consensus or that “every economist . . . from conservative to liberal” supports the kind of massive spending program that the Obama-Biden administration has proposed.

UPDATE: Martin Feldstein, whose support last October for a fiscal stimulus is the reed upon which journalists justify their claims about “economists across the political spectrum,” now calls this stimulus bill “an $800 billion mistake.”

Did the New Deal ‘Help’?

Posted by Thomas Firey

While Barack Obama’s economics team hammers out its $800 billion fiscal stimulus plan, the commentariat is battling over the effectiveness of what some consider the prototype stimulus package, the New Deal.* The suppressed (and problematic) conclusion to all this punditry seems to be: Because government spending under the New Deal helped/didn’t help to end the Great Depression, the Obama stimulus plan will/won’t help to end the current recession.

One of the opening salvos was this exchange between George Will (anti-New Deal) and Paul Krugman (pro). More recently, New York Times editorial board member Adam Cohen (pro) wrote this column, responding to an op-ed by former Business Week bureau chief Andrew Wilson (anti) in the Wall Street Journal.

So who’s right? Did New Deal government spending “help,” as Cohen puts it?

To answer that, we first have to define Cohen’s term — what would it mean to say that government spending under the New Deal “helped”? Two possibilities come to mind:

  • New Deal spending boosted consumption, thereby increasing production, reducing unemployment, and ending the Depression.
  • New Deal spending aided people who would have otherwise been destitute during the Depression.

The first sense considers the New Deal as a stimulus program to revive the economy; the second considers it as a welfare program to aid the poor. The two notions are far from equivalent. My reading of the literature suggests that the New Deal did little as an economic stimulus, but it did provide welfare benefits.
Read the rest of this post »

What Is It Good For? Centralizing Power.

Posted by Gene Healy

The Politico reports that Vice President-elect Joe Biden has been comparing our current economic troubles to the 9/11 attacks.

“We’re at war,” Biden told congressional leaders of both parties during their sit-down with Barack Obama in the Capitol, according to two sources familiar with the exchange.

Libertarians and conservatives who fear that Obama’s inauguration heralds the coming of a new New Deal have new cause for discomfort, then.  FDR’s embrace of the war metaphor was central to building support for the New Deal:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected in a landslide in 1932, wasn’t the only political figure to analogize America’s economic collapse to an attack by a hostile power; his predecessor Hoover had made the comparison regularly. F.D.R. employed the war metaphor far more effectively, however. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address tends to be remembered as an attempt to calm the public, a warning against “fear itself.” The martial metaphors that appear throughout the speech make clear, though, that F.D.R. wanted fear replaced by collectivist ardor. Americans were to move forward as “a trained and loyal army,” with “a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.” Should the normal balance of legislative and executive powers prove insufficient, Roosevelt concluded, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis–broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Two days after his inauguration, Roosevelt used the Trading with the Enemy Act to order the closure of all American banks. Passed during World War I, the act was designed to restrict trade with hostile foreign powers “during the time of war.” Ignoring that limitation, Roosevelt wielded it in peacetime against Americans. It would not be the last time his administration would invoke powers forged in the Great War to battle the Depression. “Progressives turned instinctively to the war mobilization as a design for recovery,” wrote historian William Leuchtenburg in his essay “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” “There was scarcely a New Deal act or agency that did not owe something to the experience of World War I.”

Of course, viewing anything Joe Biden says as an example of calculated rhetoric may be a mistake.  As the character Hesh Rabkin once noted of the Sopranos matriarch Livia, “Between brain and mouth there is no interlocutor.”