August 2, 2010
The people described by Barry Ritholtz as “deficit chicken hawks” have their hands full. Just as some Democrats, concerned about getting campaign contributions from rich people, were joining the ranks of the deficit chicken hawks to support extension of the Bush tax cuts, people from across the political spectrum spoke out against the idea. As I pointed out on July 19, President Reagan’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – David Stockman – spoke out against extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, during an interview with Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast:
The Bush tax cuts never should’ve been passed because, one, we couldn’t afford them, and second, we didn’t earn them …
The infamous former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, had already spoken out against the Bush tax cuts on July 16, during an interview with Judy Woodruff on Bloomberg Television. In response to Ms. Woodruff’s question as to whether the Bush tax cuts should be extended, Greenspan replied: “I should say they should follow the law and let them lapse.”
When Alan Greenspan appeared on the August 1 broadcast of NBC’s Meet The Press, David Gregory directed Greenspan’s attention back to the interview with Judy Woodruff, and asked Mr. Greenspan if he felt that all of the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to lapse. Here is Greenspan’s reply and the follow-up:
MR.GREENSPAN: Look, I’m very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we’ve gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day, that proves disastrous. And my view is I don’t think we can play subtle policy here on it.
MR. GREGORY: You don’t agree with Republican leaders who say tax cuts pay for themselves?
MR. GREENSPAN: They do not.
The drumbeat to extend the Bush tax cuts has been ongoing. Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, claimed on July 23, that those tax cuts would be one way of providing stimulus for the economy – provided that such a move were to be offset “with increased revenue or lower spending.” Increased revenue? Does that mean that people – other than those earning in excess of $250,000 per year – should make up the difference by paying higher taxes?
On July 31, David Stockman came back with a huge dose of common sense, in the form of an op-ed piece for The New York Times entitled, “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse”. It began with this statement:
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
The article included a boxcar full of great thoughts – among them was Stockman’s criticism of the latest incarnation of voodoo economics:
Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
Mr. Stockman took care to lay blame at the foot of the man he described in the Lloyd Grove interview as an “evil genius” – Milton Friedman – who convinced President Nixon in 1971 to “to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves.”
Despite the fact that tax cuts are considered by many as the ultimate panacea for all of America’s economic problems, David Stockman set the record straight about how the religion of taxcut-ology began:
Through the 1984 election, the old guard earnestly tried to control the deficit, rolling back about 40 percent of the original Reagan tax cuts. But when, in the following years, the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, finally crushed inflation, enabling a solid economic rebound, the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.
By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s.
Stockman’s discussion of “the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial culture” is probably just a teaser for his upcoming book on the financial crisis:
But the trillion-dollar conglomerates that inhabit this new financial world are not free enterprises. They are rather wards of the state, extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. They could never have survived, much less thrived, if their deposits had not been governmentguaranteed and if they hadn’t been able to obtain virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets.
On the day following the publication of Stockman’s essay, Sarah Palin appeared on Fox News Sunday – prepared with notes again written on the palm of her hand – to argue in support of extending the Bush tax cuts. Although her argument was directed against the Obama administration, I was fixated on the idea of a debate on the subject between Palin and her fellow Republican, David Stockman. Some of those Republicans vying for their party’s 2012 Presidential nomination were probably thinking about the same thing.
Lack Of Stimulation
September 9, 2010
You don’t have to look very far to find a rabid, hostile reaction to President Obama’s proposed $50 billion transportation infrastructure program. After all – it’s an election year. I was quite surprised when I read this paragraph from a BusinessWeek report about the proposal:
Stop and think about that for a moment. The phrase I wish to bring to your attention is:
The first question that came to mind was: Why the hell wasn’t it spent last year? We’ve been reading about how the effects of the “Obama stimulus bill” (a/k/a the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) have already stopped boosting the economy. How much more of that money has been sitting on the sidelines? Beyond that, why didn’t the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provide more funding for infrastructure?
The proposed transportation infrastructure program will cost approximately the same as the B-2 Stealth Bomber program, which produced 21 bombers at an average cost of $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997 dollars.
Since July of last year, I have been among those arguing that the $787 billion economic stimulus package was inadequate, after reading about a Bloomberg survey of economists, which supported that conclusion in February of 2009. In early 2009, there was a greater sense of urgency about the state of the economy and a stronger political will to enact a more significant stimulus. Unfortunately, President Obama was not up to the task of pushing a larger bill through. As a result, the President is now making piecemeal stimulus efforts, such as the $50-billion infrastructure proposal. The tragedy of not getting it right the first time seemed more unfortunate after I read a recent posting by Barry Ritholtz at his blog, The Big Picture. Here is what Mr. Ritholtz had to say:
After reading about the Infrastructure Report Card, I couldn’t help but wonder how our economy would have benefited from a $2.2 trillion infrastructure program rather than the $850 billion stimulus program enacted in 2009. Consider what economist Joseph Stiglitz had to say about how the global financial crisis was affecting Australia in August of 2010:
There’s a right way of doing economic stimulus and a wrong way of implementing such a program. Unfortunately, America did it the wrong way.
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