Archive

Joseph Minarik

“Are You Gonna Get Any Better, Or Is This It?”

May 9, 2013
Joseph Minarik
Leave a Comment

Attributed to the late Earl Weaver
Former manager, Baltimore Orioles

So the nation has addressed its mounting public debt problem by failing to take explicit action, and therefore allowing an automatic “sequester” of spending to take effect.  The sequester is a mindless across-the-board cut, reducing defense and non-defense spending alike, and the highest and the lowest public priorities equally.  And for all of the pain it will cause, it is far insufficient to solve the debt problem.  It is the proverbial basketball player who made up for his lack of size with his lack of speed.

The House and the Senate have passed budget resolutions that are trillions apart, literally and figuratively, and they cannot agree to go to conference to reconcile the two.  The House Speaker says that he has been jilted one too many times, and will not meet with the President privately.  The President has taken groups of Republican Senators out for very nice dinners, and even has picked up the check.  (Personal deficit spending?)  But those Republican Senators say that they cannot cut a deal without their Minority Leader, who so far apparently prefers to eat at home.  And there are no signs of any communication between the dining Republican Senators and their House Majority counterparts.

So in those immortal words reportedly shouted at the tips of innumerable umpires’ noses by the late Earl Weaver, “Are you gonna get any better, or is this it?”  Apparently, Weaver never reached a very positive opinion of the quality of major league umpiring, and there is precious little evidence to inspire much greater confidence in the workings of Washington these days.

On first principles, no one had great fondness for the sequester.  Republicans by and large could not abide the defense cuts, and Democrats felt the same about the domestic cuts.  But Democrats, including the President, concluded that the defense cuts could be used as bargaining leverage, and some even embraced the prospect of the sequester as the only way they could squeeze the Pentagon budget.

But the tables appear to have turned.  Enough Republicans have embraced the defense cuts to move the balance in their caucus; and apparently most if not all Republicans enjoy watching the Democrats squirm at the mechanistic reductions on the domestic side (including small cuts in entitlement programs, which are seldom mentioned but have real consequences).  It is easy to blame the White House’s management for any pain and suffering that eventuates, and if an intolerable problem emerges (like air traffic control or food inspection), the Republican House can easily pass a rifle-shot bill to fix it.  If the Democratic Senate were to refuse to move such a bill along, it would have to accept direct responsibility for the problem.  So while some people have expected the sequester to arouse broad-based opposition, that does not appear imminent, or perhaps even likely.

Read More

The Winding Road Back

May 3, 2013
Joseph Minarik
Leave a Comment

I’ve been saying for several years that the best person to manage our way out of the current economic doldrums would be George Balanchine (if only he weren’t dead) – because this will need to be the most carefully choreographed dance of monetary and fiscal policy in all history.  The Federal Reserve will at some point need to raise interest rates that currently are on the floor (“at the zero bound,” in econ speak) and draw down a balance sheet that is orders of magnitude greater than its normal size, to head off inflation – all in a shaky economy nestled in a shaky world economy.  Meanwhile, the fiscal policymakers will have to head off a mounting debt by slashing a far-oversized budget deficit, which is driven by complex structural problems with their own powerful political self-defense mechanisms – all the while avoiding crunching that same vulnerable economy, and somehow acting in harmony with the aforementioned independent Federal Reserve.  It is a situation only an academic economist could love:  It offers plenty of ivy-covered reward for writing theoretical papers which will never be tested in practice, and so have no real-world consequences.

And that is the good news.  A recent more-practical (but still plenty wonkish) paper by two Federal Reserve economists, Christopher J. Erceg and Andrew T. Levin, explains that today’s labor market is not only painful, but also puzzling to policymakers.  It identifies yet another unprecedented challenge that is layered upon all the others to make the path back to Normal, wherever that is (unfortunately not the town that is readily visible on the map of Illinois), even more tortuous.

The Erceg and Levin paper already has gotten plenty of press (for example, see a New York Times reference here), but is worth your attention if you have not seen a close discussion.

Read More

Chairman Baucus Retires

April 26, 2013
Joseph Minarik
Leave a Comment

As you may have read by now, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has announced that he will not seek re-election in November of 2014.  Washington is abuzz with speculation about the implications for policy (tax and health reform) and politics (Democratic control of the Senate, the identity of the next Finance Committee Chairman).

The most off-base chatter is the suggestion that a retiring Chairman Baucus will pursue different policy than would a campaigning Chairman Baucus.  Such talk is a branch office of the chatter in late 2008, late 2010 and late 2012 that a monumental budget deal would emerge from those “lame-duck” sessions of Congress.  The thinking (to be kind) was that departing Members of Congress, at last freed from the tyranny of their constituents, finally could vote their true convictions and would turn a policy 180 to make the tough choices.

What we learned, instead, was that those free-at-last Members of Congress actually had been voting their convictions all along, and had no reason or inclination to change their stripes in the dying days of their final Congresses.

Chairman Baucus fits that mold.  What he has done has been to represent his constituents, as he understood their views to be.  (One can of course argue the dichotomy between representing, on the one hand, and educating and leading, on the other hand.)  It turns out that Montana is different from what many metro-centric pundits live and breathe.  I would like to think that economics and policy science are geography-neutral, but I fear that they really are geography-ignorant.  My eyes were opened by a private conversation with a Washington reporter newly transplanted from upstate, rural New York, who related that the really good jobs in her home town were carrying the mail – because they provided the employee benefits (especially good health insurance) that we in Washington consider to be a prerequisite of even a near-poverty standard of living, plus a pay scale that is set nationally and approximates more closely compensation in urban areas.

So people in Montana do not see the issues of the day in precisely the same light that we “dazzling urbanites” do.  Chairman Baucus has reflected the perspective of Montanans in Washington.  He likely will continue to do so until he heads back home.

There is plenty of speculation over whether the Senate majority will see major action on tax reform (and health reform, also primarily under the jurisdiction of the Finance Committee) as helpful or harmful to their 2014 electoral prospects.  Politicos further wonder how Senator Ron Wyden, who in 2015 will be the senior Democrat on Finance (Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), now senior to Senator Wyden, has announced that he also will retire next year), will weigh his probable hopes to become Chairman (if the Democrats maintain their majority) against his willingness to take risks.  Recall that Senator Wyden has designed adventurous reform packages in collaboration with Republicans (former Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) on taxes, former Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) and current House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) on health care).  He will need to consider how any positions that he takes in these two years will affect his standing with the Democratic Senate leadership.

But all of that amounts to a matrix of suppositions at this point.  About the only thing that we do know is that Chairman Baucus will have more time on his hands, given that he is not running for re-election.  Frequent trips back home would eat up a lot of his time, given that he has among the worst commutes of all Members of Congress (even worse than mine, by at least a little).  His retirement decisions will free him from some of that.

Still, all of this is mostly window dressing.  Chairman Baucus has an important position, but to accomplish anything he must have the support of a majority in the Finance Committee, plus the cooperation of the Senate Democratic leadership to get any bill to the floor.  And then, under the most likely scenarios, he will need 60 votes on the floor (although it is conceivable that he could have a reconciliation instruction from a budget resolution, which could allow passage with 50 votes plus the Vice President), plus a majority in the House.  And that final product must be acceptable to the President, as well.  The fundamentals are daunting, and whether Chairman Baucus’s retirement will facilitate or prevent major budget action is anyone’s guess.

Oops: Debt and Economic Growth

April 26, 2013
Joseph Minarik
1 Comment

Every now and then in economics, as I suspect in many other fields, some piece of supposedly settled wisdom is thrown into question by a revelation of human error.  Such was the case in recent days with respect to a book and several papers by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff.  Reinhart and Rogoff’s research, initially published just before the financial crisis but reprised over several years (and henceforth referenced in the common academic style as “RR”), has been widely cited to make the case that excesses of public debt lead to reduced economic growth.  This finding, in turn, undergirds arguments in Europe and the United States for government budget retrenchment.

But earlier this month, three faculty members of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, hereinafter stuck with the moniker of “HAP”), working in part with a data spreadsheet provided to them by Reinhart and Rogoff, discovered errors in the original calculations.

Given the prominence of Reinhart and Rogoff personally and of their findings in the budget debate, what should we conclude?  How, if at all, should our thinking change?

Read More

Tax Reform Prospects

April 19, 2013
Joseph Minarik
Leave a Comment

Just about every tennis player of a certain age – and every serious tennis buff – knows of Ken Rosewall.  Despite losing some of his best years to a period when professionals were barred from the major tournaments, Rosewall, an Australian born in 1934, compiled an incredible record.  He won eight “grand slam” singles tournaments, and in his prime and on his day was widely considered almost impossible to beat.

Ray Ruffels (2)

In contrast, only the true tennis buff – of a certain age – has heard of Ray Ruffels.  Ruffels, another Australian, born in 1946, evolved into a doubles specialist, notably mixed doubles.  In 1978, when Billie Jean King had just about reached the zenith of her remarkable career and sought a 20th Wimbledon championship to surpass the lifetime record of 19 long held by Elizabeth Ryan, she chose Ray Ruffels as her mixed-doubles partner to do it.

Ironically in the nascent Australian tennis madness of the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were few quality public courts.  Serious players had to build their own behind their homes.  Rosewall and Ruffels were good friends, and often would visit each other’s homes to practice and play.  The story goes that in these private matches, Ken Rosewall never beat Ray Ruffels.  But in major tournament play, and despite being 12 years younger, Ray Ruffels very rarely beat Ken Rosewall.  Somehow, when the cameras were focused and the money was on the table, Ken Rosewall always could find the steel in his spine to withstand the pressure.  Ray Ruffels couldn’t.

Graceful transition to tax policy:  As they declared in their April 8 opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) have begun to collaborate on a tax reform bill.  As required by the Constitution, this bill, if it in fact proceeds into the legislative process, must originate in the House.

And therein lies a cautionary tale.

Read More

As Good As It Gets, Realistically Speaking

April 12, 2013
Joseph Minarik
3 Comments

President Obama submitted his fiscal year 2014 budget on April 10.  Some have criticized the President on the ground that the budget was more than two months late.  (The statutory deadline is the first Monday in February.)  That criticism is fair enough – with the footnote that budget decisions for the preceding, ongoing fiscal year were well behind schedule as well, and in fact were not completed at the turn of the calendar year, when the ink of a President’s budget always has been both figuratively and literally drying.  The budget law was written under the presumption that a President would know the budget outcomes for one fiscal year before he was required to prepare and submit the budget for the next.

There was a throwaway comment in the early press that “the President’s budget has virtually no chance of being adopted.”  Well, no President’s budget ever is adopted; the Congress always makes changes (if it adopts meaningful budget legislation at all).  A much more important test today is whether the President’s budget moves the current fiscal stalemate off of dead center (with the accent on the “dead”).

We will have a deeper account of the prospects for the politics and policymaking of the budget season next week.  But the big-picture takeaway from the release of the budget is that this is the biggest and best opportunity to move the ball that anyone in Washington could have had a right to expect.  It’s time, guys.

Read More

What’s Old is New Again: Tax Reform

April 12, 2013
Joseph Minarik
Leave a Comment

As you may know, an early but active debate on tax reform is underway.  My 1987 article, HOW TAX REFORM CAME ABOUT, provides a useful perspective from the time of the last successful attempt at tax reform. The situation in 1986 was different from today in many important respects – in particular, the overall budget situation was bad, but better than it is now. Still, the “1986 model” remains relevant, because many key tradeoffs – between total revenues and tax rates, among groups that enjoy tax preferences, among income groups – are inherent in any quantum change in tax policy.

Perhaps most important is the political dynamic.  Tax reform in 1986 required the cooperation of the Congress with a President whose party controlled the Senate, but did not control the House.  Still, leaders of the two parties communicated with each other, and found common ground. Policymakers came to realize that the serious faults in the then-current system gave them the potential to achieve important steps forward for many taxpayers and for the economy.

And as policymakers studied the issues, they learned that there were important advantages to a tax system with a broader, more-neutral base and lower tax rates.

The article is made available with the permission of Tax Notes, which is the original publisher.

That Bad Treasury Bond is Turning Up Again

April 5, 2013
Joseph Minarik
Leave a Comment

***An abbreviated version of this blog post appeared in The Hill’s Congress Blog on April 4. This version takes a deeper dive than is possible with 750 words.***

The temporary “suspension” of the nation’s debt limit expires on May 19, 2013.  On that date, the limit will become the amount of debt already incurred (see here).  The Treasury is prohibited from “borrowing ahead” to build up a cash balance, which makes the determination of the precise amount of the limit as of that date quite complex.

But the concept is clear enough.  On May 19, the debt limit will be (approximately) what the debt actually is as of that moment.  So the Secretary of the Treasury will need immediately to revert to the use of his “extraordinary measures” – highly technical authorities granted to him by law or custom, which over the last two decades or so have become unfortunately all too ordinary – to keep the debt subject to limit below the statutory ceiling.  As always, the public is not privy to the Treasury’s own internal estimates, and the future is always uncertain; but the best analysis available suggests that the Secretary will have run out of tricks by some time in this coming August.

Therefore, with the temporary tax cut expirations resolved, with appropriations for the federal agencies finally completed for the ongoing fiscal year, and the next fiscal year not beginning until September 30, 2013 (and with that appropriations process sure to be procrastinated down to the wire), it is likely that a collision with the debt limit will be the next budget-process bottleneck that the Congress and the White House will have to traverse.

Institutional memories are short in Washington, and history often is revised before it is written.  Somehow, a decent interval after the fact, 100 percent of the players on both sides of each Washington contest believe that they won the game.  So it is likely that the lessons of August, 2011 – and of the last several debt-limit standoffs – have not been learned as they should.  Thus, it is worth taking the opportunity of the waning days of the Easter/Passover congressional break to review just why going to the brink over the nation’s debt limit is such a bad idea.

This should not be a partisan issue.  The points below would apply regardless of who is in control of the White House, the Senate, or the House of Representatives.  Today’s situation is unique in detail, as is every day in Washington; but the amount of the stakes on this issue is always the same: approximately everything we’ve got.  So both current and future Congresses and Administrations should consider the following:

A fight over the debt limit is prone to disaster.  Even though the stakes on the debt limit are monumental, Members of Congress will always be inclined to grasp any opportunity to extract concessions from a President with different views.  Still, over time, standards of behavior on this front have deteriorated.  As they push a President further and further toward the brink, Members today should consider the precedent they risk setting.

Read More

Making Taxes Fair, and Good for the Economy

March 29, 2013
Joseph Minarik
1 Comment
  • There is considerable debate – but arguably somewhat less understanding – about what constitutes a “fair” tax system.
  • There is no simple numerical rule that defines fairness.  It is, instead, a collective political judgment.
  • There are arguably reasonable conditions for making a sound collective judgment – but they are not met in the real world.
  • If the nation can agree on opportunity as an objective, we are left with a choice:  Will we direct our resources to reward the few spectacular successes, as an incentive to others; or will we instead use those resources to limit the tax burden on many ongoing businesses, to facilitate effort?  This blog argues for the latter, on both economic and fairness grounds.

With recent changes in tax rates as part of the year-end “fiscal cliff” deal have come renewed discussion of the most fundamental question of tax policy:  What is “fair?”

A frequent form of this question is a lament that “the 1 percent of taxpayers with the highest incomes pay 22.3 percent of the taxes” (typically using the figures published for some time now by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO); the number I quote here is from their latest estimate, using 2009 data, available here).  A possible subtext, never articulated, is that because 22.3 percent is greater than 1 percent the tax system is excessively progressive.  To interpret that subtext we need a conceptual marker.  If the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 1 percent of the taxes (and the same for every other 1 percent ranked by income), then we would have the numerical equivalent of a head tax – both Warren Buffett and the proverbial elderly widow in the walk-up cold-water flat would write a check (if the widow had a checking account) to the Treasury for the same number of dollars.  That probably would not strike too many people as a “fair” tax system.

Sometimes the lament is a bit more sophisticated.  With a one-layer-deeper dive into the data, it can be worded as “the 1 percent of taxpayers with the highest incomes earn 13.4 percent of the income, but pay 22.3 percent of the taxes.”  Again, the unstated subtext can be read that 22.3 percent of the taxes, being greater than 13.4 percent of the income, is too high.  But the implied standard that those with 13.4 percent of the income should pay 13.4 percent of the taxes is the numerical equivalent of a single-rate income tax with no exemption or deduction.  Both Warren Buffett and the proverbial elderly widow would pay the same 13.4 percent of their income in taxes – and not the marginal rate (on their last dollar of income), but the average rate (the percentage of all of their income that they actually paid).  Most Americans probably would question whether that was a fair outcome, either.

(Footnote:  The numbers quoted above are for total federal taxes paid – income taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, and everything else.  This yields a different perspective than looking at income taxes alone.  The differences between the two are debated with an almost religious fervor, and are a topic for another, very long, day.  Also note that the sum of those different taxes is more a patchwork quilt than a “system.”  But we must persevere, because that is the tax “system” with which we must live.)

So if the 1 percent of Americans with the highest incomes earn 13.4 percent of the total income in the country, how much of the taxes should they pay?  Probably more than 13.4 percent; but how much more?  In truth, there is no simple numerical answer – as the very basic review of the tag lines above suggested.  This question can be answered only by the American people themselves, through the political process.

Read More

Post-Mortem on the Budget Resolution Debate

March 26, 2013
Joseph Minarik
Leave a Comment

This is just to tie up any remaining loose ends for you on the weekend’s legislative action on a congressional budget resolution for fiscal year 2014.

As you heard, the Senate passed its version of a budget resolution, to provide the opposite bookend – on a very, very long shelf – to the House version.  Some have argued that the House resolution “jump-started” the budget process, and that the Senate version “set the stage” for a hard and contentious conference.  Neither did any such thing.  The greatest likelihood, though admittedly not a certainty, is that you already have seen the sum and total of meaningful action on a budget resolution for next year – hence a “post-mortem” is fully in order.

There may be an initial meeting of a conference committee on the resolution, but it most likely will be what in the trade is called a “photo-op” meeting.  That is, Members from the two chambers gather, and the press is invited to take pictures.  The Members read their opening statements.  Then the meeting is adjourned, and the Members leave subject to the call of the chair – a call that never comes.  There is no rule that different bills that pass the two chambers must be reconciled and enacted; history is replete with bills that passed the two chambers in different versions and went no further.  This instance seems a prime candidate to enter that gallery.

The Budget Act requires that the Congress pass a budget resolution, but it also provides a procedure in case it does not.  And no one ever has gone to Budget Jail for failing to pass one; Budget Jail was grossly (indeed totally) understaffed even before the recent spending sequester.  You will recall that the recent “no-budget, no-pay” law is satisfied by each individual chamber passing its own budget; there is no requirement that the Congress reconcile the two and pass a single, final budget resolution.  So any motivation from that provision has been fully sated.

The passage of the Senate resolution did provide good theater.  The Senate normally allows unlimited debate (which is what a filibuster is), but a primary motivation of the creation of the current budget process was to prevent the budget from being talked to death.  The compromise that was struck was to allow Senate floor consideration, even after the statutorily limited time for debate has expired, of any and all amendments filed before a deadline.  This yields the notorious “vote-a-rama,” during which amendments are voted on even though they cannot be debated.  The process ends only when all of the filed amendments are voted upon (typically many are withdrawn without a vote) or the Senators give up in exhaustion, whichever occurs first.  This year’s marathon extended almost until dawn on Saturday morning.

But all of those undebated votes have no real significance.  The budget resolution is only a concurrent resolution, and cannot become law.  Any amendments to the resolution – some mentioned prominently in the press this year relate to the Keystone XL pipeline, sales taxation of Internet transactions, and the 2010 healthcare law’s provisions for a tax on medical devices and a reduction of the maximum contribution to flexible spending accounts for out-of-pocket medical bills – are purely advisory.  The recent push for a budget resolution in the Senate was thought by some to be a necessary first step toward meaningful negotiations.  That might be, but a more cynical interpretation is that the vote-a-rama provided an unlimited opportunity to force votes on artfully worded amendments for purposes of attack ads for future election campaigns.

Even the most charitable interpretation of the intent of all those amendment votes must include that they do not predetermine any subsequent votes actually to change the law.  If a real bill comes along, Senators can find ways to prevent its ever coming to a vote.  And there always are details in actual legislation to justify a Senator’s vote that is seemingly contradictory to an earlier vote on an amendment to the budget resolution.  A Senator could point to some other provision of a later bill as requiring a contrary vote.  The later bill might have an unacceptable budgetary offset to the bill’s cost, or it might have no offset at all.  So one should not leap to the conclusion that a vote on an amendment to a budget resolution is a harbinger of future action to the same effect.

It is certainly better to have action on a budget resolution than not.  (And if you have a strong position on a particular issue, it is better to have a favorable vote on a budget resolution amendment than not.)  To say that a budget resolution is a necessary condition for serious action on our budget problem probably goes too far, though one might make a case that a full and fair debate on a resolution would facilitate success.  But it unquestionably would be way off the mark to say that a budget resolution is a sufficient condition for solving our deep-seated problem.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was reported in the press to have expressed skepticism at the prospect for a budget resolution conference.  Whether you agree with Senator Reid on the issues or not, he has a good sense of the politics of the Senate – and he has the authority to make the key decisions.  To paraphrase an old Washington friend of mine, the House and Senate passage of their budget resolutions plus $2.50 will buy you a day-old cheese sandwich – and not a very good one at that.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 56 other followers