The Growth Stealers

The wages of most workers have barely risen since 1980 because the vast majority of the gains from growth have gone to those at the top of the income distribution.



by DEAN BAKER


The Wall Street crew has been in high gear trying to convince the public that our children’s well-being is going to be threatened by their parents’ and grandparents’ Social Security. This story would be laughable except that it is endlessly repeated by people in positions of power and responsibility. For this reason it is worth going over the basic numbers yet again so that everyone knows that the people making these assertions are either ignorant or dishonest.

The basic point is that the economy gets more productive through time. This has been true for hundreds of years and no one has any good stories as to why it should not continue to be true long into the future.

Our measures of productivity growth are not very good for the years prior to World War II, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the 65 years since 1947 productivity growth has averaged 2.2 percent annually. There have been periods of more and less rapid growth.

The strongest growth was in the quarter century after the war when productivity growth averaged 2.9 percent annually. We then had a slowdown in the years from 1973 to 1995 when growth averaged just 1.3 percent annually. Since 1995 productivity growth has averaged 2.3 percent.

These numbers should be well known to everyone involved in economic policy and budget debates. Productivity is the measure of the value of the goods and services that workers produce in an hour of work. When productivity rises through time it means that workers are producing more value through time. If workers get their share of the gains of productivity growth then they will be getting richer through time.

These gains would have a dramatic effect on living standards over time. Suppose that we continued to see productivity grow at a 2.3 percent annual rate over the next quarter century, the same pace that we have seen over the last 15 years. If workers got their share of this growth, wages would be on average more than 75 percent higher than they are today. Just to be clear, this adjusts for any inflation over this period; in 2038 a typical worker would be able to buy 75 percent more goods and services than a typical worker today.

Even in a more pessimistic productivity story there would still be room for large improvements in living standards. If productivity growth fell to the 1.3 percent rate of the slowdown years, a typical worker in 2038 would still have a wage that is 38 percent higher than the average wage today. In short, even in a worst-case scenario, where productivity falls back to the slowest pace we have seen in the last 70 years, workers will on average be much wealthier than workers are today.

Now let’s bring in the deficit hawks who are screaming about demographics and the burdens of Social Security and Medicare. Imagine the case where we raise the Social Security and Medicare taxes by a total of 5 percentage points over the next quarter century. This is highly unlikely since there are many other ways to deal with the projected shortfalls in these programs, but since the Wall Street folks have put up so much money to push their agenda, let’s give them an extreme case.

In the case where productivity growth continues at its recent 2.3 percent annual rate, in a quarter century after-tax wages would still be more than 65 percent higher than they are today. Even if productivity growth falls back to the rate of the slowdown years, after-tax wages would still be 30 percent higher in 2038 than today.

It is also important to remember that after 2038 the demographics barely change but productivity keeps growing. This means that our children and grandchildren will continue to grow richer through time without any negative impact from an increasing population of retirees.

In reality there are some complications in converting productivity growth to wage growth, so the rise in wages would be somewhat less than these calculations imply; but the basic story is not debatable. All plausible projections of productivity growth show that average wage growth will swamp any negative impact on workers’ living standards from a growing burden of retirees.

At this point everyone should be screaming that workers have not been seeing the gains of productivity growth in the last three decades. This is exactly right. The wages of most workers have barely risen since 1980 because the vast majority of the gains from growth have gone to those at the top of the income distribution.

This is worth repeating a few hundred million times. Most workers have seen little benefit from growth because the gains have gone to those at the top.

This is why the yapping about the burden of Social Security and Medicare is so pernicious. If workers share in the gains of economic growth then there is no way that the cost of these programs will impose a serious burden on their living standards. In fact, workers’ living standards rose rapidly in the past in spite of large increases in the payroll taxes used to support these programs.

It will matter far more to our children and grandchildren whether they share in the gains of economic growth than if they have to pay higher tax rates for Social Security and Medicare. The rich, with the full complicity of the media, are doing their best to keep national policy focused on the cost of Social Security and Medicare. But the arithmetic says that the upward redistribution to the wealthy is the far more important issue for future living standards.

The Dawn of Austerity in America

Distinctions of Little Difference


by JASON HIRTHLER


Since the rosy fingered dawn of austerity in America, the liberal media have consistently proclaimed that the Republicans are a deluded gang of filibustering rejectionists. By contrast, they make the rather more strident claim that, for all their faults, Democrats at least believe, as The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it, “in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.” But is this true? Are Democrats a clear-eyed party of well-meaning centrists, and are conservatives a frothing admixture of venal Congressional lifers and mob-backed junior legislators, both taking their talking points from a dim confection of scripture and grainy clips of “Free to Choose”?

The Right—Delusional and Demented?

First, liberals seem to believe that the Republicans who push for austerity are ignorant knaves, a seething clan of badly misguided ideologues who whitewash their realities with the worst theoretical models to emerge from the Chicago School of Economics. For his part, Krugman has nobly piled fact upon fact in his columns and blogs, outlining the harshly regressive outcomes associated with spending cuts during economic downturns. Exhaustively argued, scrupulously referenced, Krugman is an economic champion of the liberal class. Even so, in articles like, “The Ignorance Caucus,” “Sequester of Fools,” and “Friends of Fraud,” Krugman asks, in a state of jaded disbelief, how could it be that, “Republicans are deep in denial about what actually happened to our financial system and economy.”

He’s not alone in this regard. Leslie Savan in The Nation also chalks up the deficit obsessions to the pitfalls of “groupthink,” a kind of innocent self-delusion that encourages “the punditocracy to repeat, despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that austerity will pave toward economic growth.” Robert Reich, who regularly and expertly denounces austerity, also seems baffled by the apparent inability of Congress to look facts in the eye. Columnist Ezra Klein touts studies that confirm the myopia of GOP legislators.

But the facts suggest that conservatives foresee austerity’s aftermath quite clearly, but are simply disinterested. To put it bluntly, Republicans and their backers know precisely what they’re doing. They aren’t mathematically-challenged stooges fumbling away the American dream. They’re conniving dogmatists bent on real social change—for the worse. A recent joint investigation by Democracy Now! and the Center for Media and Democracy is rapidly exposing the fraudulent claims of the "Fix the Debt" gang, a group of at least 127 corporate CEOs led by billionaire Pete Peterson. Like their Congressional shills, the Fix the Debt thugs claim they want to salvage America’s economy from being wrecked by debt. But what lies just beneath the surface of this thinly veiled publicity campaign is a desire by corporate interests to decimate the New Deal and Great Society initiatives.

Why? For a couple of reasons.

First, because this faction of plutocrats and their confederates genuinely believe in the radical individualism they espouse: tax is theft, welfare is the path to dependency, and poverty is the rightful destiny of the dilatory and thriftless. And here’s the crucial verdict: if preserving the sanctity of individualism means America becomes a sea of indigence, so be it. If each of us controls our fate, and if our fate has led us to ruin, who’s to blame but ourselves? In this sense, we are witnessing the rise of a kind of secular Calvinism in which our destinies reveal our character.

Second, eviscerating the safety net is a good bottom-line bargain. A dramatically enervated and sickly state, bereft of its capacity to regulate, stripped of its assets, and shorn of its social mandate, is a state deterred from taxation for want of cause, and too enfeebled to counter the rapacity of monopoly capital. Capital is thus freed to cannibalize labor. Like a mining colony in a jungle with natives swept aside, the drills won’t cease until every fluid drop and mineral grain of profit is safely nestled on a northbound container vessel. Anything to stave off a declining rate of profit.

The related claim that our half-sighted multinationals needs to recognize that if American incomes continue to slide, the populace will no longer be able to purchase the products they peddle, is neither important nor novel for elite interests. Renewed lending and debt accumulation can falsely inflate another housing market, generating a freshet of new derivative plunder. But the larger point is that America is no longer corporate America’s primary growth market. China is. India is. Latin America is. The United States already looms large in the rear view mirror, diminishing by the day.

The Left—Decency Denied?

If conservatives are Machiavellis incarnate, what about those malleable Democrats? That glum tribe forever beset by weak temperaments, constitutionally incapable of taking a hard line, handicapped, perhaps, by their bottomless empathy. Along these lines, liberals are happy to claim that President Obama is simply being stonewalled by his Republican colleagues, who have capitalized on his naïve faith in human decency to press their savage austerity agenda on the population.

The President, exhausted by ceaseless good-faith attempts to reason with pathologically irrational extremists, finally capitulates. “Alas,” writes Krugman, fawning with forgiveness, “Mr. Obama did not stand firm.” The intimation is that the President is a paragon of progressive values, an emblem of liberalism clad in multi-cultural cloth. In fact, the multi-cultural is running interference for the multi-national.

But looking past Obama’s hypnotic rhetoric, one finds a political graph marked by one artificial crisis after another, perpetrated by Democrats and Republicans alike. The debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, sequestration. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. Every one a politically manufactured, fear-mongered crisis. Every one carrying a trillion-dollar price tag. Every one a bipartisan swindle. It’s Disaster Capitalism par excellence, as Naomi Klein laid out in her bestseller The Shock Doctrine, which popularized how crises are manipulated to justify the introduction of fiscal austerity.

While Republican intransigence—cemented by record filibusters in the last two years—has muddled the president’s efforts to add some progressive sops to legislation, an obsession with conservative obstructionism obscures the bipartisan foundation of the deficit debate. From the earliest days of his presidency, Obama signaled that “entitlement reform” was a central plank in his agenda, offering up these sacrificial lambs marinated in talk of “bitter pills” and “reasonable” spending cuts. Not only did Obama appoint Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to head his deficit commission, knowing they were deficit hawks of the highest order, but Peterson’s Fix the Debt gang grandly supported Simpson-Bowles precisely because it advocated the dramatic spending cuts both parties favor. Yet former New York Times editor Bill Keller recently claimed that Obama has not embraced the commission’s wisdom.

Obama’s own 2011 plan—different from the commission’s version in that its tax revenues were at least mildly progressive—also aimed at $4 trillion in deficit reduction, with all three social programs included for euphemistic “reforms.” Sequestration itself was hatched in the White House, a trigger mechanism that creates the illusion that Congress is at the mercy of a higher law and, of course, conservative hordes brandishing wildly underlined copies of Atlas Shrugged. Likewise, the notion that the Senate can only pass a bill with a super-majority of sixty is a technicality that can be dispatched by a simple Democratic majority. But the decorum of tradition trumps the exigencies of an anonymous populace. In the end, the policy prescriptions of both parties are overwhelmingly austere.

When the administration does differ from its conservative counterparts, largely in the desire to impose a degree of taxation to polish its progressive credentials, the onus falls largely on the working class. Obama’s much-celebrated tax on the wealthy is a clever sleight of hand: the tax hits a couple of million Americans whose incomes exceed $450,000, but the tax only applies to income over $450,000 and only by the smallest of marginal increases. Cobbled together with slight increases in capital gains taxes, new Obamacare taxes, and fewer deductions for the wealthy, the 1 percent will cede an extra $62 billion a year. By contrast, the media-slighted payroll tax will sift $95 billion in 2013 alone from the pockets of the working class. Although initially and intelligently proposed by Democrats as a stimulative measure in 2010, the payroll tax was allowed to expire with the consent of both parties. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he saw no reason to extend it. (Granted, it is hard to discern the smoking ruin through the cloud bank.) Nor did Obama bother to include it in his 2013 budget. Yet the tax penalizes 160 million working class Americans with a 50 percent increase in what amounts to a nationwide wage cut, wiping out the wage gains of 2012.

If it’s not austerity, it’s elitism. Both are now beltway consensus; the notion of handcuffed liberal do-gooders has worn thin, exposing the Janus face of progressive Washington—rhetorically populist, practically bought.
The Media—Paying the Price of Inclusion?

As crass and crude an image as it may seem, the Oval Office is little more than a luxury suite being peddled to palm-greasing plutocrats, their lobbyists, and the venal sophists whose pockets they ply with cash. The political hue is never red or blue—but always green. It is ever Spring in Washington. But this truth, that both parties are consciously visiting hardship on a defenseless populace—is unspeakable. That Obama knows he’s favoring wealth at paucity’s expense—unmentionable. That conservatives know austerity will crush vast majorities—unprintable. And to coin a lie of this magnitude and continue to employ it as ideological currency requires you to simply elide sizeable sections of reality from your worldview.

Perhaps the price of writing for a mainstream paper like the Times, then, is silence on this point and substituting for it the fallacy that our leaders have honorable intentions. That purity of motive is part of our American exceptionalism, our ahistorical singularity. But even if it were so, and by our well-intentioned deeds we were unwittingly paving a highway to hell, how would this be any more ethically commendable than the brainwashed suicide bomber who believes liked a blind Bush that his actions are pure? Both are tragedies of delusion. Yet evidence abounds as counterpoint. The powers that be know exactly what they’re doing and attempts to render their Machiavellianism more palatable by obtruding it from sight, is itself a form of complicity. As Noam Chomsky once noted, there isn’t much value in speaking truth to power; they already know it.

'Collusion With Austerity' Will Sink Obama, say Progressives

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 by Common Dreams  
An 'elite bipartisan consensus' sends the bill for Wall Street’s mess to the middle class and the president has done far too much "playing along"
- Jon Queally, staff writer


As the deadline of the so-called "budget sequestration" nears, progressives are warning President Obama that his obsession with giving credence to the "cut the deficit" antics of Republicans is a trap and that if Democrats don't jettison the failed "economics of austerity" immediately, they'll have no one to blame but themselves.

Richard Eskow calls it "Washington's Stupid, Destructive Game."

Robert Kuttner, his colleague at the Campaign for America's Future, names it "The Sequestering of Barack Obama," while The Nation's Katrina vanden Huevel says it's not the president, but "common sense" that's being locked up in Washington as Democrats systematically trade the proven economics of stimulus spending—which has so far saved the economy from ruin following its collapse in 2008—for the 'slash and burn' politics of the Republican party.

With the usual candor, Princeton economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman marked the whole debacle down last week as the "Sequester of Fools."

What these progressive voices have in common (in addition to acknowledging the ridiculous nature of the debate by Beltway establishment figures) is agreement that President Obama and the Democrats—far from winning a public opinion "blame game"—are sadly playing directly into the hands of a Republican Party hell bent on pushing an economic austerity agenda on the country at a time when the exact opposite course is needed.

And the chorus of alarm against the President's strategy—namely his willingness to cut programs like Social Security and Medicare while simultaneously embracing the flawed wisdom of budget cuts and deficit reduction—is growing.
As recently as today, in remarks made at a shipbuilding plant in Virginia, Obama said:

Now, the reason that we're even thinking about the sequester is because people are rightly concerned about the deficit and the debt.

But, according to economists, that's exactly "not right." That's exactly "wrong." And this is the problem.

Writing at The American Prospect, Kuttner explains:

Though too few Democrats will come right out and say it, there is a far better path to both economic recovery and eventual stabilization of the debt ratio. We need to increase public spending in the next few years, using both deficit spending and higher taxes on the wealthy, to get the economy back on a high-growth path. Taxes on the wealthy are better put toward public investment than to deficit reduction. Taxing the rich is far less of a hit to purchasing power than hiking taxes on working families, who spend nearly all of their disposable income. With a program of economic expansion, we can reach a stable long-term debt ratio, but at a higher level of economic output and a more broadly shared prosperity. The goal is economic recovery—and the recovery improves the debt ratio, not the other way around.

Among the economists in this camp are Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, as well as Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, James Galbraith of the University of Texas, and former Biden chief economist Jared Bernstein. In a recent article for the Economic Policy Institute, economists Josh Bivens and Andrew Fieldhouse observed that the “output gap”—the difference between what the economy is producing and what it is capable of producing—is now about a trillion dollars a year. If you cut the budget in such circumstances, you slow growth and get further away from stabilizing the debt ratio. The problem is that these people are not part of the conversation at the White House, which is a dialogue among Obama’s top aides, the corporate austerity-mongers, and Republicans, all of whom believe in deficit reduction.

At the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Dean Baker says the clear problem is that both parties have played into the idea that deficits are a problem when, in fact, the opposite is true.

"Rather than being a bad thing," Baker writes, "the deficit is providing a needed boost to the economy." And challenging the idea that deficit reduction will spur private spending, he adds: "There is no plausible story whereby private-sector demand will fill the gap created by a smaller deficit."

"Colluding in the politics of budget austerity has left Obama with no real capacity to offer the public investment that the economy needs for a robust, broadly-based recovery, and leaves him with the prospect of a weak economy between now and the end of his term–unless he drastically shifts course and repudiates the entire view of the budget and the economy." -Robert Kuttner

Robert Reich, UC Berkeley economist and former labor secretary, argues that unless Obama and the Democrats confront the two-headed lie of "austerity economics and trickle-down economics" pushed daily by the GOP, "the nation will continue to careen from crisis to crisis, showdown to showdown."

The problem is not deficits, according to Reich, but "too few jobs, lousy wages, and slow growth." He continues, "Cutting the budget deficit anytime soon makes the problem worse because it reduces overall demand. As a result, the economy will slow or fall into recession – which enlarges the deficit in proportion."

If you want proof, says Reich, just look at what austerity policies have done to economies across Europe.

Yet, as vanden Huevel writes, "most of Washington — from the newly reelected Democratic president to the self-described insurgent Tea Party Republicans — is ignoring this reality to focus on cutting deficits." She writes:

The Republican Congress seems intent on letting the “sequester” take place — the idiotic across the board cuts that were explicitly designed to be anathema to both parties. Senate Democrats call not for repealing these cuts, but for “paying for” delaying them for a few more months.

Why this fixation? Deficits aren’t careering out of control. In fact, as the Congressional Budget Office reports, in relation to the economy, the deficit has fallen faster over the past three years than at any time since the demobilization after World War II. Calls for cutting Medicare benefits ignore the reality that the slowing rise in Medicare costs has already cut about $500 billion from its projected costs over 10 years compared to estimates made two years ago.

Meanwhile, Kuttner argues that by playing into the GOP's mantra on 'cutting deficits' as a legitimate strategy, Obama has "miscalculated both the tactical politics of the sequester and the depressive economic impact of budget cuts on the rest of his presidency."

He continues:

Long term, colluding in the politics of budget austerity has left Obama with no real capacity to offer the public investment that the economy needs for a robust, broadly-based recovery, and leaves him with the prospect of a weak economy between now and the end of his term–unless he drastically shifts course and repudiates the entire view of the budget and the economy.

And later notes:

As the Greeks have painfully learned over and over again, you can cut spending and raise taxes, and the deficit just keeps growing larger—because you are destroying your economy. The same has been demonstrated for Spain, Portugal, and Britain. Something similar occurred on a more modest scale in the fourth quarter of 2012 right at home.

And George Lakoff, professor of linguistics and political analyst, says that until Democrats confront the GOP's moral stance—one that actually favors the pain imposed by austerity—the Democrats and Obama continue to miss an opportunity to discuss the "heart of the problem" that undergirds the ongoing series of fights over the economy. What that demands, says Lakoff, is a vocal challenge on the part of the Democrats and progressives to address the "moral divide at the heart of our public life."

"Whether they know it or not, those pushing for smaller deficits are promoting less growth and more unemployment." - Dean Baker, CEPR

Taking a deeper look at Republican intentions, Eskow says the ongoing debate amounts to a "hostage crisis" in which austerity economics is being forced on "an unwilling population – [cloaked] in a false debate about how to do it, not about why we shouldn’t do it at all."

And to Republicans, argues Kuttner, it hardly matters if the fight now hurts them in the short term, when their eyes are fixed on 2014 and 2016 when few voters will likely remember the current series of events.

"An austere budget slows the recovery and leaves the Democrats with no economic bragging rights going into 2014 and 2016," he writes.

But would the GOP be so cynical as to trash the economy for political gain? Yes, says Kuttner, before concluding that in upcoming election cycles: "nobody will much remember who was more at fault in the sequester battle of early 2013. The voters will be looking at their own economic situation, and it won't be pretty."

And as Baker concludes: "Whether they know it or not, those pushing for smaller deficits are promoting less growth and more unemployment. It would be the best possible outcome of the sequester debate if this simple point could be made in polite circles in Washington again."

But it's not to be. As vanden Huevel laments:

This elite consensus ignores how we got into the fix we are in. The deficit was under 2 percent of gross domestic product in 2007 and the debt under 40 percent of GDP when Wall Street’s wilding blew up the housing bubble and drove the economy into the Great Recession. Wall Street got bailed out, but the deficit soared to 11 percent of GDP and Americans lost nearly 40 percent of their wealth. You’d think anyone so fixated on avoiding another Pearl Harbor moment would focus on making certain Wall Street was properly shackled, and the too-big-to-fail banks broken up.

But the elite bipartisan consensus is focused on sending the bill for Wall Street’s mess to an already battered middle class, by weakening the basic pillars of a family’s economic security — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And they are a lot closer than anyone thinks. The sequester is just the first of a series of austerity bombs that the Republican Congress will use to extort cuts in these benefits.

It’s time to stop such extortionists from holding our country’s economic future hostage.

The most notable hostage of the austerity trap, however, seems to be President Obama himself. And unless he changes course soon, his critics say, it will be more than his legacy that gets sunk.

Still Clueless About the Economy

The Debt-to-GDP Nonsense
by DEAN BAKER


The latest fad in Washington economic policy debates is arguing over the level at which the government should stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio. The doves are okay with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 73 percent or even 76 percent. The hawks want 60 percent or even less. This is the most fun since the same crew was debating over the year when we would pay off the national debt back in 2000. The good times just keep coming.

If you think that this is an incredibly silly debate and that our leading policymakers don’t have a clue about how the economy works, you’ve got the picture right. Remember, these are people who could not see the $8 trillion housing bubble whose collapse wrecked the economy. They haven’t learned much economics in the last five years.

The argument over the debt-to-GDP ratio is especially annoying because it shows these people don’t have the faintest clue what they are talking about. There are all sorts of obvious reasons why debt is not a good measure of the burden that we are placing on future taxpayers.

For example, the government has a huge amount of assets that it could sell at any time and thereby reduce its debt. The Institute for Energy Research, an industry-funded research outfit, claims the government owns more than $120 trillion in energy resources. Let’s say they exaggerated by a factor of ten, leaving us $12 trillion in assets.

If we sold off half of these resources it would net the government $6 trillion. This would reduce our debt by almost 40 percentage points of GDP. That should make even the most ardent deficit hawk happy.

Of course it’s not just physical assets that the government can sell. The government gives out monopolies in various areas that have enormous value. That is what patents and copyrights are. The rents earned from these and other forms of intellectual property run into many hundreds of billions of dollars a year. In prescription drugs alone they are close to $250 billion a year.

The government could always sell off more monopolies in order to reduce its debt-to-GDP ratio. A flow of revenue equal to what the pharmaceutical industry gets from its patent monopolies could easily be worth $2-3 trillion. That would go very far toward reducing our debt-to-GDP ratio.

These sorts of monopolies will impose large costs on the economy in the future, leading to distortions and rent-seeking. That would be a good reason not to go in this direction. But the debt-to-GDP crew doesn’t ask questions about how well off the country is, they just want a lower debt-to-GDP ratio. And selling monopolies will get us there.

However there is an even more simple and completely painless path to a lower debt-to-GDP ratio. The price of long-term bonds rises when interest rates fall. The price of these bonds falls when interest rates rise.

This latter point is important. Currently interest rates are at near post-war lows. We have issued 10-year Treasury bonds at interest rates close to 1.5 percent and 30-year bonds at interest rates of 2.75 percent. The Congressional Budget Office, along with other official forecasters, project that interest rates will rise sharply over the next few years.
If interest rates rise as projected, then the price of these long-term bonds fall sharply. For example, if the interest rate on 30-year bonds rises to 6 percent by 2016, then the price of a 30-year bond issued at 2.75 percent in 2012 will have fallen by more than 40 percent. This means that if the government issued $100 billion in bonds at the low 2012 rate it could buy them back for less than $60 billion in 2016, instantly eliminating $40 billion of government debt. (Allan Sloan made this point in a slightly different context).

The government can follow this practice of buying up large numbers of bonds issued at low interest rates to eliminate much of the debt it has incurred. Although the government’s debt-to-GDP ratio is reaching heights not seen since the years just after World War II, the ratio of interest on the debt-to-GDP is at post-World War II lows.

This means that when interest rates rise, there will be a sharp decline in the market value of government debt, allowing for massive amounts of debt reduction simply by buying back debt at the discounted value that the CBO is effectively projecting. We should have little problem shaving 15-20 percentage points off our debt-to-GDP ratio through such purchases, hitting whatever target the deficit hawks have decided is necessary.

Of course this is ridiculous. Buying back debt at discounted prices will not change our interest burden at all. But we live in a world where the folks deciding economic policy have now decided that the debt-to-GDP ratio will be the new guidepost for economic policy.

If it seems hard to believe that the very well-credentialed people who control economic policy can be utterly clueless about the economy, remember these are people that missed a $10 trillion stock bubble. They also missed an $8 trillion housing bubble. The same cast of characters who have been getting it completely wrong over the last 15 years are still calling the shots. And there is no reason to believe that their understanding of the economy has improved as a result of their past mistakes.

America's Deceptive Fiscal Cliff

How Today’s Fiscal Austerity is Reminiscent of World War I’s Economic Misunderstandings
by MICHAEL HUDSON

When World War I broke out in August 1914, economists on both sides forecast that hostilities could not last more than about six months. Wars had grown so expensive that governments quickly would run out of money. It seemed that if Germany could not defeat France by springtime, the Allied and Central Powers would run out of savings and reach what today is called a fiscal cliff and be forced to negotiate a peace agreement.

But the Great War dragged on for four destructive years. European governments did what the United States had done after the Civil War broke out in 1861 when the Treasury printed greenbacks. They paid for more fighting simply by printing their own money. Their economies did not buckle and there was no major inflation. That would happen only after the war ended, as a result of Germany trying to pay reparations in foreign currency. This is what caused its exchange rate to plunge, raising import prices and hence domestic prices. The culprit was not government spending on the war itself (much less on social programs).

But history is written by the victors, and the past generation has seen the banks and financial sector emerge victorious. Holding the bottom 99% in debt, the top 1% are now in the process of subsidizing a deceptive economic theory to persuade voters to pursue policies that benefit the financial sector at the expense of labor, industry, and democratic government as we know it.

Wall Street lobbyists blame unemployment and the loss of industrial competitiveness on government spending and budget deficits – especially on social programs – and labor’s demand to share in the economy’s rising productivity. The myth (perhaps we should call it junk economics) is that (1) governments should not run deficits (at least, not by printing their own money), because (2) public money creation and high taxes (at lest on the wealthy) cause prices to rise. The cure for economic malaise (which they themselves have caused), is said to be less public spending, along with more tax cuts for the wealthy, who euphemize themselves as “job creators.” Demanding budget surpluses, bank lobbyists promise that banks can provide the economy with enough purchasing power to grow. Then, when this ends in crisis, they insist that austerity can squeeze out enough income to enable private-sector debts to be paid.

The reality is that when banks load the economy down with debt, this leaves less to spend on domestic goods and services while driving up housing prices (and hence the cost of living) with reckless credit creation on looser lending terms. Yet on top of this debt deflation, bank lobbyists urge fiscal deflation: budget surpluses rather than pump-priming deficits. The effect is to further reduce private-sector market demand, shrinking markets and employment. Governments fall deeper into distress, and are told to sell off land and natural resources, public enterprises, and other assets. This creates a lucrative market for bank loans to finance privatization on credit. This explains why financial lobbyists back the new buyers’ right to raise the prices they charge for basic needs, creating a united front to endorse rent extraction. The effect is to enrich the financial sector owned by the 1% in ways that indebt and privatize the economy at large – individuals, business and the government itself.

This policy was exposed as destructive in the late 1920s and early 1930s when John Maynard Keynes, Harold Moulton and a few others countered the claims of Jacques Rueff and Bertil Ohlin that debts of any magnitude could be paid if governments would impose deep enough austerity and suffering. This is the doctrine adopted by the International Monetary

Fund to impose on Third World debtors since the 1960s, and by European neoliberals defending creditors imposing austerity on Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal.

This pro-austerity mythology aims to distract the public from asking why peacetime governments can’t simply print the money they need. Given the option of printing money instead of levying taxes, why do politicians only create new spending power for the purpose of waging war and destroying property, not to build or repair bridges, roads and other public infrastructure? Why should the government tax employees for future retirement payouts, but not Wall Street for similar user fees and financial insurance to build up a fund to pay for future bank over-lending crises? For that matter, why doesn’t the U.S. Government print the money to pay for Social Security and medical care, just as it created new debt for the $13 trillion post-2008 bank bailout? (I will return to this question below.)

The answer to these questions has little to do with markets, or with monetary and tax theory. Bankers claim that if they have to pay more user fees to pre-fund future bad-loan claims and deposit insurance to save the Treasury or taxpayers from being stuck with the bill, they will have to charge customers more – despite their current record profits, which seem to grab everything they can get. But they support a double standard when it comes to taxing labor.

Shifting the tax burden onto labor and industry is achieved most easily by cutting back public spending on the 99%. That is the root of the December 2012 showdown over whether to impose the anti-deficit policies proposed by the Bowles-Simpson commission of budget cutters whom President Obama appointed in 2010. Shedding crocodile tears over the government’s failure to balance the budget, banks insist that today’s 15.3% FICA wage withholding be raised – as if this will not raise the break-even cost of living and drain the consumer economy of purchasing power. Employers and their work force are told to save in advance for Social Security or other public programs. This is a disguised income tax on the bottom 99%, whose proceeds are used to reduce the budget deficit so that taxes can be cut on finance and the 1%. To paraphrase Leona Helmsley’s quip that “Only the little people pay taxes,” the post-2008 motto is that only the 99% have to suffer losses, not the 1% as debt deflation plunges real estate and stock market prices to inaugurate a Negative Equity economy while unemployment rates soar.

There is no more need to save in advance for Social Security than there is to save in advance to pay for war. Selling Treasury bonds to pay for retirees has the identical monetary and fiscal effect of selling newly printed securities. It is a charade – to shift the tax burden onto labor and industry. Governments need to provide the economy with money and credit to expand markets and employment. They do this by running budget deficits, and this can be done by creating their own money. That is what banks oppose, accusing it of leading to hyperinflation rather than help economies grow.

Their motivation for this wrong accusation is self-serving and their logic is deceptive. Bankers always have fought to block government from creating its own money – at least under normal peacetime conditions. For many centuries, government bonds were the largest and most secure investment for the financial elites that hold most savings. Investment bankers and brokers monopolized public finance, at substantial underwriting commissions. The market for stocks and corporate bonds was rife with fraud, dominated by insiders for the railroads and great trusts being organized by Wall Street, and the canal ventures organized by French and British stockbrokers.

However, there was little alternative to governments creating their own money when the costs of waging an international war far exceeded the volume of national savings or tax revenue available. This obvious need quieted the usual opposition mounted by bankers to limit the public monetary option. It shows that governments can do more under force majeur emergencies than under normal conditions. And the September 2008 financial crisis provided an opportunity for the U.S. and European governments to create new debt for bank bailouts. This turned out to be as expensive as waging a war. It was indeed a financial war. Banks already had captured the regulatory agencies to engage in reckless lending and a wave of fraud and corruption not seen since the 1920s. And now they were holding economies hostage to a break in the chain of payments if they were not bailed out for their speculative gambles, junk mortgages and fraudulent loan packaging.

Their first victory was to disable the ability – or at least the willingness – of the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Comptroller of the Currency to regulate the financial sector. Goldman Sachs, Citicorp and their fellow Wall Street giants hold veto power the appointment of key administrators at these agencies. They used this beachhead to weed out nominees who might not favor their interests, preferring ideological deregulators in the stripe of Alan Greenspan and Tim Geithner. As John Kenneth Galbraith quipped, a precondition for obtaining a central bank post is tunnel vision when it comes to understanding that governments can create their credit as readily as banks can. What is necessary is for one’s political loyalties to lie with the banks.

In the post-2008 financial wreckage it took only a series of computer keystrokes for the U.S. Government to create $13 trillion in debt to save banks from suffering losses on their reckless real estate loans (which computer models pretended would make banks so rich that they could pay their managers enormous salaries, bonuses and stock options), insurance bets gone bad (underpricing risk to win business to pay their managers enormous salaries and bonuses), arbitrage gambles and outright fraud (to give the illusion of earnings justifying enormous salaries, bonuses and stock options). The $800 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and $2 trillion of Federal Reserve “cash for trash” swaps enabled the banks to continue their remuneration of executives and bondholders with hardly a hiccup – while incomes and wealth plunged for the remaining 99% of Americans.

A new term, Casino Capitalism, was coined to describe the transformation that finance capitalism was undergoing in the post-1980 era of deregulation that opened the gates for banks to do what governments hitherto did in time of war: create money and new public debt simply by “printing it” – in this case, electronically on their computer keyboards.

Taking the insolvent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage financing agencies onto the public balance sheet for $5.2 trillion accounted for over a third of the $13 trillion bailout. This saved their bondholders from having to suffer losses from the fraudulent appraisals on the junk mortgages with which Countrywide, Bank of America, Citibank and other “too big to fail” banks had stuck them. This enormous debt increase was done without raising taxes. In fact, the Bush administration cut taxes, giving the largest cuts to the highest income and wealth brackets who were its major campaign contributors. Special tax privileges were given to banks so that they could “earn their way out of debt” (and indeed, out of negative equity).[1] The Federal Reserve gave a free line of credit (Quantitative Easing) to the banking system at only 0.25% annual interest by 2011 – that is, one quarter of a percentage point, with no questions asked about the quality of the junk mortgages and other securities pledged as collateral at their full face value, which was far above market price.

This $13 trillion debt creation to save banks from having to suffer a loss was not accused of threatening economic stability. It enabled them to resume paying exorbitant salaries and bonuses, dividends to bondholders and also to pay counterparties on casino-capitalist arbitrage bets. These payments have helped the 1% receive a reported 93% of the gains in income since 2008. The bailout thus polarized the economy, giving the financial sector more power over labor and consumers, industry and the government than has been the case since the late 19th-century Gilded Age.

All this makes today’s financial war much like the aftermath of World War I and countless earlier wars. The effect is to impoverish the losers, appropriate hitherto public assets for the victors, and impose debt service and taxes much like levying tribute. “The financial crisis has been as economically devastating as a world war and may still be a burden on ‘our grandchildren,’” Bank of England official Andrew Haldane recently observed. “‘In terms of the loss of incomes and outputs, this is as bad as a world war.’ he said. The rise in government debt has prompted calls for austerity – on the part of those who did not receive the giveaway. ‘It would be astonishing if people weren’t asking big questions about where finance has gone wrong.’”[2]

But as long as the financial sector is winning its war against the economy at large, it prefers that people believe that There Is No Alternative. Having captured mainstream economics as well as government policy, finance seeks to deter students, voters and the media from questioning whether the financial system really needs to be organized in the way it is. Once such a line of questioning is pursued, people may realize that banking, pension and Social Security systems and public deficit financing do not have to be organized in the way they are. There are better alternatives to today’s road to austerity and debt peonage.


The Financial War Against the Economy at Large

Today’s economic warfare is not the kind waged a century ago between labor and its industrial employers. Finance has moved to capture the economy at large, industry and mining, public infrastructure (via privatization) and now even the educational system. (At over $1 trillion, U.S. student loan debt came to exceed credit-card debt in 2012.) The weapon in this financial warfare is no longer military force. The tactic is to load economies (governments, companies and families) with debt, siphon off their income as debt service and then foreclose when debtors lack the means to pay. Indebting government gives creditors a lever to pry away land, public infrastructure and other property in the public domain. Indebting companies enables creditors to seize employee pension savings. And Indebting labor means that it no longer is necessary to hire strikebreakers to attack union organizers and strikers.

Workers have become so deeply indebted on their home mortgages, credit cards and other bank debt that they fear to strike or even to complain about working conditions. Losing work means missing payments on their monthly bills, enabling banks to jack up interest rates to levels that used to be deemed usurious. So debt peonage and unemployment loom on top of the wage slavery that was the main focus of class warfare a century ago. And to cap matters, credit-card bank lobbyists have rewritten the bankruptcy laws to curtail debtor rights, and the referees appointed to adjudicate disputes brought by debtors and consumers are subject to veto from the banks and businesses that are mainly responsible for inflicting injury.

The aim of financial warfare is not merely to acquire land, natural resources and key infrastructure rents as in military warfare; it is to centralize creditor control over society. In contrast to the promise of democratic reform nurturing a middle class a century ago, we are witnessing a regression to a world of special privilege in which one must inherit wealth in order to avoid debt and job dependency.

The emerging financial oligarchy seeks to shift taxes off banks and their major customers (real estate, natural resources and monopolies) onto labor. Given the need to win voter acquiescence, this aim is best achieved by rolling back everyone’s taxes. The easiest way to do this is to shrink government spending, headed by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Yet these are the programs that enjoy the strongest voter support. This fact has inspired what may be called the Big Lie of our epoch: the pretense that governments can only create money to pay the financial sector, and that the beneficiaries of social programs should be entirely responsible for paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not the wealthy. This Big Lie is used to reverse the concept of progressive taxation, turning the tax system into a ploy of the financial sector to levy tribute on the economy at large.

Financial lobbyists quickly discovered that the easiest ploy to shift the cost of social programs onto labor is to conceal new taxes as user fees, using the proceeds to cut taxes for the elite 1%. This fiscal sleight-of-hand was the aim of the 1983 Greenspan Commission. It confused people into thinking that government budgets are like family budgets, concealing the fact that governments can finance their spending by creating their own money. They do not have to borrow, or even to tax (at least, not tax mainly the 99%).

The Greenspan tax shift played on the fact that most people see the need to save for their own retirement. The carefully crafted and well-subsidized deception at work is that Social Security requires a similar pre-funding – by raising wage withholding. The trick is to convince wage earners it is fair to tax them more to pay for government social spending, yet not also to ask the banking sector to pay similar a user fee to pre-save for the next time it itself will need bailouts to cover its losses. Also asymmetrical is the fact that nobody suggests that the government set up a fund to pay for future wars, so that future adventures such as Iraq or Afghanistan will not “run a deficit” to burden the budget. So the first deception is to treat only Social Security and medical care as user fees. The second is to aggravate matters by insisting that such fees be paid long in advance, by pre-saving.

There is no inherent need to single out any particular area of public spending as causing a budget deficit if it is not pre-funded. It is a travesty of progressive tax policy to only oblige workers whose wages are less than (at present) $105,000 to pay this FICA wage withholding, exempting higher earnings, capital gains, rental income and profits. The raison d’être for taxing the 99% for Social Security and Medicare is simply to avoid taxing wealth, by falling on low wage income at a much higher rate than that of the wealthy. This is not how the original U.S. income tax was created at its inception in 1913. During its early years only the wealthiest 1% of the population had to file a return. There were few loopholes, and capital gains were taxed at the same rate as earned income.

The government’s seashore insurance program, for instance, recently incurred a $1 trillion liability to rebuild the private beaches and homes that Hurricane Sandy washed out. Why should this insurance subsidy at below-commercial rates for the wealthy minority who live in this scenic high-risk property be treated as normal spending, but not Social Security? Why save in advance by a special wage tax to pay for these programs that benefit the general population, but not levy a similar “user fee” tax to pay for flood insurance for beachfront homes or war? And while we are at it, why not save another $13 trillion in advance to pay for the next bailout of Wall Street when debt deflation causes another crisis to drain the budget?

But on whom should we levy these taxes? To impose user fees for the beachfront reconstruction would require a tax falling mainly on the wealthy owners of such properties. Their dominant role in funding the election campaigns of the Congressmen and Senators who draw up the tax code suggests why they are able to avoid prepaying for the cost of rebuilding their seashore property. Such taxation is only for wage earners on their retirement income, not the 1% on their own vacation and retirement homes.

By not raising taxes on the wealthy or using the central bank to monetize spending on anything except bailing out the banks and subsidizing the financial sector, the government follows a pro-creditor policy. Tax favoritism for the wealthy deepens the budget deficit, forcing governments to borrow more. Paying interest on this debt diverts revenue from being spent on goods and services. This fiscal austerity shrinks markets, reducing tax revenue to the brink of default. This enables bondholders to treat the government in the same way that banks treat a bankrupt family, forcing the debtor to sell off assets – in this case the public domain as if it were the family silver, as Britain’s Prime Minister Harold MacMillan characterized Margaret Thatcher’s privatization sell-offs.

In an Orwellian doublethink twist this privatization is done in the name of free markets, despite being imposed by global financial institutions whose administrators are not democratically elected. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB) and EU bureaucracy treat governments like banks treat homeowners unable to pay their mortgage: by foreclosing. Greece, for example, has been told to start selling off prime tourist sites, ports, islands, offshore gas rights, water and sewer systems, roads and other property.

Sovereign governments are, in principle, free of such pressure. That is what makes them sovereign. They are not obliged to settle public debts and budget deficits by asset selloffs. They do not need to borrow more domestic currency; they can create it. This self-financing keeps the national patrimony in public hands rather than turning assets over to private buyers, or having to borrow from banks and bondholders.



Why the Fiscal Squeeze Imposes Needless Austerity

The financial sector promises that privatizing roads and ports, water and sewer systems, bus and railroad lines (on credit, of course) is more efficient and will lower the prices charged for their services. The reality is that the new buyers put up rent-extracting tollbooths on the infrastructure being sold. Their break-even costs include the high salaries and bonuses they pay themselves, as well as interest and dividends to their creditors and backers, spending on stock buy-backs and political lobbying.

Public borrowing creates a dependency that shifts economic planning to Wall Street and other financial centers. When voters resist, it is time to replace democracy with oligarchy. “Technocratic” rule replaces that of elected officials. In Europe the IMF, ECB and EU troika insists that all debts must be paid, even at the cost of austerity, depression, unemployment, emigration and bankruptcy. This is to be done without violence where possible, but with police-state practices when grabbers find it necessary to quell popular opposition.

Financializing the economy is depicted as a natural way to gain wealth – by taking on more debt. Yet it is hard to think of a more highly politicized policy, shaped as it is by tax rules that favor bankers. It also is self-terminating, because when public debt grows to the point where investors (“the market”) no longer believe that it can be repaid, creditors mount a raid (the military analogy is appropriate) by “going on strike” and not rolling over existing bonds as they fall due. Bond prices fall, yielding higher interest rates, until governments agree to balance the budget by voluntary pre-bankruptcy privatizations.

Selling Saved-up Treasury Bonds to Fund Public Programs is Like New Deficit Borrowing

If the aim of America’s military spending around the world is to prepare for future warfare, why not aim at saving up a fund of $10 trillion or even $30 trillion in advance, as with Social Security, so that we will have the money to pay for it?

The answer is that selling saved-up Treasury bills to finance Social Security, military spending or any other program has the same monetary and price effect as issuing new Treasury bills. The impact on financial markets – and on the private sector’s holding of government debt – by paying Social Security out of past savings – that is, by selling the Treasury securities in which Social Security funds are invested – is much like borrowing by selling new securities. It makes little difference whether the Treasury sells newly printed IOUs, or sells bonds that it has been accumulating in a special fund. The effect is to increase public debt owed to the financial sector.

If the savings are to be invested in Treasury bonds (as is the case with Social Security), will this pay for tax cuts elsewhere in the budget? If so, will these cuts be for the wealthy 1% or the 99%? Or, will the savings be invested in infrastructure, or turned over to states and cities to help balance their budget shortfalls and underfunded pension plans?

Another problem concerns who should pay for this pre-saving. The taxes needed to pre-fund a savings build-up siphon off income from somewhere in the economy. How much will the economy shrink by diverting income from being spent on goods and services? And whose income will taxed? These questions illustrate how politically self-interested it is to single out taxing wages to save for Social Security in contrast to war-making and beach-house rebuilding.

Government budgets usually are designed to be in balance under normal peacetime conditions, so most public debt has been brought into being by war (prior to today’s financial war of slashing taxes on the wealthy). Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (Book V) traced how each new British bond issue to raise funds for a military action had a dedicated tax to pay its interest charges. The accumulation of such war debts thus raised the cost of living and hence the break-even price of labor. To prevent this from undercutting of British competitiveness, Smith urged that wars be waged on a pay-as-you-go basis – by full taxation rather than by borrowing and entailing interest payments and taxes (as the debt itself rarely was amortized). Smith thought that populations should feel the cost of war directly and immediately, presumably leading them to be vigilant in checking grandiose projects of empire.

The United States issued fiat greenback currency to pay for much of its Civil War, but also issued bonds. In analyzing this war finance the Canadian-American astronomer and monetary theorist Simon Newcomb pointed out that all wars must be paid for in the form of tangible material and lives by the generation that fights them. Paying for the war by borrowing from bondholders, he explained, involved levying taxes to pay the interest. The effect was to transfer income from the Western states (taxpayers) to bondholders in the East.

In the case of Social Security today the beneficiary of government debt is still the financial sector. The economy must provide the housing, food, health care, transportation and clothing to enable retirees to live normal lives. This economic surplus can be paid for either out of taxation, new money creation or borrowing. But instead of “the West,” the major payers of the Social Security tax are wage earners across the nation. Taxing labor shrinks markets and forces the economy into austerity.

Quantitative Easing as Free Money Creation – To Subsidize the Big Banks

The Federal Reserve’s three waves of Quantitative Easing since 2008 show how easy it is to create free money. Yet this has been provided only to the largest banks, not to strapped homeowners or industry. An immediate $2 trillion in “cash for trash” took the form of the Fed creating new bank-reserve credit in exchange for mortgage-backed securities valued far above market prices. QE2 provided another $800 billion in 2011-12. The banks used this injection of credit for interest rate arbitrage and exchange rate speculation on the currencies of Brazil, Australia and other high-interest-rate economies. So nearly all the Fed’s new money went abroad rather than being lent out for investment or employment at home.

U.S. Government debt was run up mainly to re-inflate prices for packaged bank mortgages, and hence real estate prices. Instead of alleviating private-sector debt by writing down mortgages in line with the homeowners’ ability to pay, the Federal Reserve and Treasury created money to support property prices – to push the banking system’s balance sheets back above negative net worth. The Fed’s QE3 program in 2012-13 created money to buy mortgage-backed securities each month, to provide banks with money to lend to new property buyers.

For the economy at large, the debts were left in place. Yet commentators focused only on government debt. In a double standard, they accused budget deficits of inflating wages and consumer prices, yet the explicit aim of quantitative easing was to support asset prices. Inflating asset prices on credit is deemed to be good for the economy, despite loading it down with debt. But public spending into the “real” economy, raising employment levels and sustaining consumer spending, is deemed bad – except when this is financed by personal borrowing from the banks. So in each case, increasing bank profits is the standard by which fiscal policy is to be judged!

The result is a policy asymmetry that is opposite from what most epochs have deemed fair or helpful to economic growth. Bankers and bondholders insist that the public sector borrow from them, blocking the government’s power to self-finance its operations – with one glaring exception. That exception occurs when the banks themselves need free money creation. The Fed provided nearly free credit to the banks under QE2, and Chairman Ben Bernanke promised to continue this policy until such time as the unemployment rate drops to 6.5%. The pretense is that low interest rates spur employment, but the most pressing aim is to provide easy credit to revive borrowing and bid asset prices back up.

Fiscal Deflation on Top of Debt Deflation

The main financial problem with funding war occurs after the return to normalcy, when creditors press for budget surpluses to roll back the public debt that has been run up. This imposes fiscal austerity, reducing wages and commodity prices relative to the debts that are owed. Consumer spending shrinks and prices decline as governments spend less, while higher taxes withdraw revenue. This is what is occurring in today’s financial war, much as it has in past military postwar returns to peace.

Governments have the power to resist this deflationary policy. Like commercial banks, they can create money on their computer keyboards. Indeed, since 2008 the government has created debt to support the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector more than the “real” production and consumption economy.

In contrast to public spending for goods and services (or social programs that increase market demand), most of the bank credit that led to the 2008 financial collapse was created to finance the purchase property already in place, stocks and bonds already issued, or companies already in existence. The effect has been to load down the economy with mortgages, bonds and bank debt whose carrying charges eat into spending on current output. The $13 trillion bank subsidy since 2008 (to enable banks to earn their way out of negative equity) brings us back to the question of why taxes should be levied on the 99% to pre-save for Social Security and Medicare, but not for the bank bailout.

Current tax policy encourages financial and rent extraction that has become the major economic problem of our epoch. Industrial productivity continues to rise, but debt is growing even more inexorably. Instead of fueling economic growth, this of credit/debt threatens to absorb the economic surplus, plunging the economy into austerity, debt deflation and negative equity.

So despite the fact that the financial system is broken, it has gained control over public policy to sustain and even obtain tax favoritism for a dysfunctional overgrowth of bank credit. Unlike the progress of science and technology, this debt is not part of nature. It is a social construct. The financial sector has politicized it by pressing to privatize economic rent rather than collect it as the tax base. This financialization of rent-extracting opportunities does not reflect a natural or inevitable evolution of “the market.” It is a capture of market structures and fiscal policy. Bank lobbyists have campaigned to shift the economic arena to the political sphere of lawmaking and tax policy, with side battlegrounds in the mass media and universities to capture the hearts and minds of voters to believe that the quickest and most efficient way to build up wealth is by bank credit and debt leverage.

Budget Deficits as an Antidote to Austerity

Public debts everywhere are growing, as taxes only cover part of public spending. The least costly way to finance this expenditure is to issue money – the paper currency and coins we carry in our pockets. Holders of this currency technically are creditors to the government – and to society, which accepts this money in payment. Yet despite being nominally a form of public debt, this money serves as public capital inasmuch as it is not normally expected to be repaid. This government money does not bear interest, and may be thought of as “equity capital” or “equity money,” and hence part of the economy’s net worth.

If taxes did fully cover government spending, there would be no budget deficit – or new public money creation. Government budget deficits pump money into the economy. Conversely, running a budget surplus retires the public debt or currency outstanding. This deflationary effect occurred in the late 19th-century, causing monetary deflation that plunged the U.S. economy into depression. Likewise when President Bill Clinton ran a budget surplus late in his administration, the economy relied on commercial banks to supply credit to use as the means of payment, charging interest for this service. As Stephanie Kelton summarizes this historical experience:

The federal government has achieved fiscal balance (even surpluses) in just seven periods since 1776, bringing in enough revenue to cover all of its spending during 1817-21, 1823-36, 1852-57, 1867-73, 1880-93, 1920-30 and 1998-2001. We have also experienced six depressions. They began in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929.

Do you see the correlation? The one exception to this pattern occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the dot-com and housing bubbles fueled a consumption binge that delayed the harmful effects of the Clinton surpluses until the Great Recession of 2007-09.

When taxpayers pay more to the government than the economy receives in public spending, the effect is like paying banks more than they provide in new credit. The debt volume is reduced (increasing the reported savings rate). The resulting austerity is favorable to the financial sector but harmful to the rest of the economy.

Most people think of money as a pure asset (like a coin or a $10 dollar bill), not as being simultaneously a public debt. But to an accountant, a balance sheet always balances: Assets = Liabilities + Net Worth. This liability-side ambivalence is confusing to most people. It takes some time to think in terms of offsetting assets and liabilities as mirror images of each other. Much as cosmologists assume that the universe is symmetrical – with positively charged matter having an anti-matter counterpart somewhere at the other end – so accountants view the money in our pocket as being created by the government’s deficit spending. Holders of the Federal Reserve’s paper currency technically can redeem it, but they will simply get paid in other denominations of the same currency.

The word “redeem” comes from settling debts. This was the purpose for which money first came into being. Governments redeem money by accepting it for tax payment. In addition to issuing paper currency, the Federal Reserve injects money into the economy by writing checks electronically. The recipients (usually banks selling Treasury bonds or, more recently, packages of mortgage loans) gain a deposit at the central bank. This is the kind of deposit that was created by the above-mentioned $13 trillion in new debt that the government turned over to Wall Street after the September 2008 crisis. The price impact was felt in financial asset markets, not in prices for goods and services or labor’s wages.

This Federal Reserve and Treasury credit was not counted as part of the government’s operating deficit. Yet it increased public debt, without being spent on “real” GDP. The banks used this money mainly to gamble on foreign exchange and interest-rate arbitrage as noted above, to buy smaller banks (helping make themselves Too Big To Fail), and to keep paying their managers high salaries and bonuses.

This monetization of debt shows how different government budgets are from family budgets. Individuals must save to pay for retirement or other spending. They cannot print their own money, or tax others. But governments do not need to “save” (or tax) to pay for their spending. Their ability to create money means that they do not need to save in advance to pay for wars, Social Security or other needs.

Keynesian Deficit Spending vs. Bailing out Wall Street to Keep the Debt Overhead in Place

There are two kinds of markets: hiring labor to produce goods and services in the “real” economy, and transactions in financial assets and property claims in the FIRE sector. Governments can run budget deficits by financing either of these two spheres. Since President Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA programs in the 1930s, along with his public infrastructure investment in roads, dams and other construction – and military arms spending after World War II broke out – “Keynesian” spending on goods and services has been used to hire labor or pay for social programs. This pumps money into the economy via the GDP-type transactions that appear in the National Income and Product Accounts. It is not inflationary when unemployment exists.

However, the debt that characterized the Paulson-Geithner bailout of Wall Street was created not to spend on goods and services, but to buy (or take liability for) mortgages and bank loans, insurance default bets and arbitrage gambles. The aim was to subsidize financial losses while keeping the debt overhead in place, so that banks and other financial institutions could “earn their way” out of negative net worth, at the economy’s expense. The idea was that they could start lending again to prevent real estate prices from falling further, saving them from having to write down their debt claims to bring levels back down within the ability to be paid.
The Ideological Crisis Underlying Today’s Tax and Financial Policy

From antiquity and for thousands of years, land, natural resources and monopolies, seaports and roads were kept in the public domain. In more recent times railroads, subway lines, airlines, and gas and electric utilities were made public. The aim was to provide their basic services at cost or at subsidized prices rather than letting them be privatized into rent-extracting opportunities. The Progressive Era capped this transition to a more equitable economy by enacting progressive income and wealth taxes.

Economies were liberating themselves from the special privileges that European feudalism and colonialism had granted to favored insiders. The aim of ending these privileges – or taxing away economic rent where it occurs naturally, as in the land’s site value and natural resource rent – was to lower the costs of living and doing business. This was expected to make progressive economies more competitive, obliging other countries to follow suit or be rendered obsolete. The era of what was considered to be socialism in one form or another seemed to be at hand – rising role of the public sector as part and parcel of the evolution of technology and prosperity.

But the landowning and financial classes fought back, seeking to expunge the central policy conclusion of classical economics: the doctrine that free-lunch economic rent should serve as the tax base for economies seeking to be most efficient and fair. Imbued with academic legitimacy by the University of Chicago (which Upton Sinclair aptly named the University of Standard Oil) the new post-classical economics has adopted Milton Friedman’s motto: “There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” (TINSTAAFL). If it is not seen, it has less likelihood of being taxed.

The political problem faced by rentiers – the “idle rich” siphoning off most of the economy’s gains for themselves – is to convince voters to agree that labor and consumers should be taxed rather than the financial gains of the wealthiest 1%. How long can they defer people from seeing that making interest tax-exempt pushes the government’s budget further into deficit? To free financial wealth and asset-price gains from taxes – while blocking the government from financing its deficits by its own public option for money creation – the academics sponsored by financial lobbyists hijacked monetary theory, fiscal policy and economic theory in general. On seeming grounds of efficiency they claimed that government no longer should regulate Wall Street and its corporate clients. Instead of criticizing rent seeking as in earlier centuries, they depicted government as an oppressive Leviathan for using its power to protect markets from monopolies, crooked drug companies, health insurance companies and predatory finance.

This idea that a “free market” is one free for Wall Street to act without regulation can be popularized only by censoring the history of economic thought. It would not do for people to read what Adam Smith and subsequent economists actually taught about rent, taxes and the need for regulation or public ownership. Academic economics is turned into an Orwellian exercise in doublethink, designed to convince the population that the bottom 99% should pay taxes rather than the 1% that obtain most interest, dividends and capital gains. By denying that a free lunch exists, and by confusing the relationship between money and taxes, they have turned the economics discipline and much political discourse into a lobbying effort for the 1%.

Lobbyists for the 1% frame the fiscal question in terms of “How can we make the 99% pay for their own social programs?” The implicit follow-up is, “so that we (the 1%) don’t have to pay?” This is how the Social Security system came to be “funded” and then “underfunded.” The most regressive tax of all is the FICA payroll tax at 15.3% of wages up to about $105,000. Above that, the rich don’t have to contribute. This payroll tax exceeds the income tax paid by many blue-collar families. The pretense is that not taxing these free lunchers will make economies more competitive and pull them out of depression. The reality is the opposite: Instead of taxing the wealthy on their free lunch, the tax burden raises the cost of living and doing business. This is a major reason why the U.S. economy is being de-industrialized today.

The key question is what the 1% do with their revenue “freed” from taxes. The answer is that they lend it out to indebt the 99%. This polarizes the economy between creditors and debtors. Over the past generation the wealthiest 1% have rewritten the tax laws to a point where they now receive an estimated 66% – two thirds – of all returns to wealth (interest, dividends, rents and capital gains), and a reported 93% of all income gains since the Wall Street bailout of September 2008.

They have used this money to finance the election campaigns of politicians committed to shifting taxes onto the 99%. They also have bought control of the major news media that shape peoples’ understanding of what is happening. And as Thorstein Veblen described nearly a century ago, businessmen have become the heads most universities and directed their curriculum along “business friendly” lines.

The clearest way to analyze any financial system is to ask Who/Whom. That is because financial systems are basically a set of debts owed to creditors. In today’s neo-rentier economy the bottom 99% (labor and consumers) owe the 1% (bondholders, stockholders and property owners). Corporate business and government bodies also are indebted to this 1%. The degree of financial polarization has sharply accelerated as the 1% are making their move to indebt the 99% – along with industry, state, local and federal government – to the point where the entire economic surplus is owed as debt service. The aim is to monopolize the economy, above all the money-creating privilege of supplying the credit that the economy needs to grow and transact business, enabling them to extract interest and other fees for this privilege.

The top 1% have nearly succeeded in siphoning off the entire surplus for themselves, receiving 93% of U.S. income growth since September 2008. Their control over the political process has enabled them to use each new financial crisis to strengthen their position by forcing companies, states and localities to relinquish property to creditors and financial investors. So after monopolizing the economic surplus, they now are seeking to transfer to themselves the economic infrastructure, land and natural resources, and any other asset on which a rent-extracting tollbooth can be placed.

The situation is akin to that of medieval Europe in the wake of the Nordic invasions. The supra-national force of Rome in feudal times is now situated in Washington, with Christianity replaced by the Washington Consensus wielded via the IMF, World Bank, WTO and its satellite institutions such as the European Central Bank, backed by the moral and ideological role academic economists rather than the Church. And on the new financial battlefield, Wall Street underwriters have used the crisis as an opportunity to press for privatization. Chicago’s strong Democratic political machine sold rights to install parking meters on its sidewalks, and has tried to turn its public roads into privatized toll roads. And the city’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel has used privatization of its airport services to break labor unionization, Thatcher-style. The class war is back in business, with financial tactics playing a leading role barely anticipated a century ago.

This monopolization of property is what Europe’s medieval military conquests sought to achieve, and what its colonization of foreign continents replicated. But whereas it achieved this originally by military conquest of the land, today’s 1% do it l by financializing the economy (although the military arm of force is not absent, to be sure, as the world saw in Chile after 1973).

The financial quandary confronting us

The economy’s debt overhead has grown so large that not everyone can be paid. Rising default rates pose the question age-old question of Who/Whom. The answer almost always is that big fish eat little fish. Big banks (too big to fail) are eating little banks, while the 1% try to take the lion’s share for themselves by annulling public and corporate debts owed to the 99%. Their plan is to downgrade Social Security and Medicare savings to “entitlements,” as if it is a matter of sound fiscal choice not to pay low-income payers whilerentiers at the top re-christen themselves “job creators,” as if they have made their gains by helping wage-earners rather than waging war against them.

The problem is not Social Security, which can be paid out of normal tax revenue, as in Germany’s pay-as-you-go system. This fiscal problem – untaxing real estate, oil and gas, natural resources, monopolies and the banks – has been depicted as financial – as if one needs to save in advance by a special tax to lend to the government to cut taxes on the 99%.

The real pension cliff is with corporate, state and local pension plans, which are being underfunded and looted by financial managers. The shortfall is getting worse as the downturn reduces local tax revenues, leaving states and cities unable to fund their programs, to invest in new public infrastructure, or even to maintain and repair existing investments. Public transportation in particular is suffering, raising user fees to riders in order to pay bondholders. But it is mainly retirees who are being told to sacrifice. (The sanctimonious verb is “share” in the sacrifice, although this evidently does not apply to the 1%.)

The bank lobby would like the economy to keep trying to borrow its way out of debt and thus dig itself deeper into a financial hole that puts yet more private and public property at risk of default and foreclosure. The idea is for the government to “stabilize” the financial system by bailing out the banks – that is, doing for them what it has not been willing to do for recipients of Social Security and Medicare, or for states and localities no longer receiving revenue sharing, or for homeowners in negative equity suffering from exploding interest rates even while bank borrowing costs from the Fed have plunged. The dream is that the happy Greenspan financial bubble can be recovered, making everyone rich again, if only they will debt-leverage to bid up real estate, stock and bond prices and create new capital gains.

Realizing this dream is the only way that pension funds can pay retirees. They will be insolvent if they cannot make their scheduled 8+%, giving new meaning to the term “fictitious capital.” And in the real estate market, prices will not soar again until speculators jump back in as they did prior to 2008. If student loans are not annulled, graduates face a lifetime of indentured servitude. But that is how much of colonial America was settled, after all – working off the price of their liberty, only to be plunged into the cauldron of vast real estate speculations and fortunes-by-theft on which the Republic was founded (or at least the greatest American fortunes). It was imagined that such bondage belonged only to a bygone era, not to the future of the West. But we may now look back to that era for a snapshot of our future.

The financial plan is for the government is to supply nearly free credit to the banks, so that they can to lend debtors enough – at the widest interest-rate markups in recent memory (what banks charge borrowers and credit-card users over their less-than-1% borrowing costs) – to pay down the debts that were run up before 2008.

This is not a program to increase market demand for the products of labor. It is not the kind of circular flow that economists have described as the essence of industrial capitalism. It is a financial rake-off of a magnitude such as has not existed since medieval European times, and the last stifling days of the oligarchic Roman Empire two thousand years ago.

Imagining that an economy can be grounded on these policies will further destabilize the economy rather than alleviate today’s debt deflation. But if the economy is saved, the banks cannot be. This is why the Obama Administration has chosen to save the banks, not the economy. The Fed’s prime directive is to keep interest rates low – to revive lending not to finance new business investment to produce more, but simply to inflate the asset prices that back the bank loans that constitute bank reserves. It is the convoluted dream of a new Bubble Economy – or more accurately a new Great Giveaway.

Here’s the quandary: If the Fed keeps interest rates low, how are corporate, state and local pension plans to make the 8+% returns needed to pay their scheduled pensions? Are they to gamble more with hedge funds playing Casino Capitalism?

On the other hand, if interest rates rise, this will reduce the capitalization multiple at which banks lend against current rental income and profits. Higher interest rates will lower prices for real estate, corporate stocks and bonds, pushing the banks (and pension funds) even deeper into negative equity.

So something has to give. Either way, the financial system cannot continue along its present path. Only debt write-offs will “free” markets to resume spending on goods and services. And only a shift of taxes onto rent-yielding property and tollbooths, finance and monopolies will save prices from being loaded down with extractive overhead charges and refocus lending to finance production and employment. Unless this is done, there is no way the U.S. economy can become competitive in international markets, except of course for military hardware and intellectual property rights for escapist cultural artifacts.

The solution for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is to de-financialize them. Treat them like government programs for military spending, beachfront rebuilding and bank subsidies, and pay their costs out of current tax revenue and new money creation by central banks doing what they were founded to do.

Politicians shy away from confronting this solution mainly because the financial sector has sponsored a tunnel vision that ignores the role of debt, money, and the phenomena of economic rent, debt leverage and asset-price inflation that have become the defining characteristics of today’s financial crisis. Government policy has been captured to try and save – or at least subsidize – a financial system that cannot be saved more than temporarily. It is being kept on life support at the cost of shrinking the economy – while true medical spending for real life support is being cut back for much of the population.

The economy is dying from a financial respiratory disease, or what the Physiocrats would have called a circulatory disorder. Instead of freeing the economy from debt, income is being diverted to pay credit card debt and mortgage debts. Students without jobs remain burdened with over $1 trillion of student debt, with the time-honored safety valve of bankruptcy closed off to them. Many graduates must live with their parents as marriage rates and family formation (and hence, new house-buying) decline. The economy is dying. That is what neoliberalism does.

Now that the debt build-up has run its course, the banking sector has put its hope in gambling on mathematical probabilities via hedge fund capitalism. This Casino Capitalist has become the stage of finance capitalism following Pension Fund capitalism – and preceding the insolvency stage of austerity and property seizures.

The open question now is whether neofeudalism will be the end stage. Austerity deepens rather than cures public budget deficits. Unlike past centuries, these deficits are not being incurred to wage war, but to pay a financial system that has become predatory on the “real” economy of production and consumption. The collapse of this system is what caused today’s budget deficit. Instead of recognizing this, the Obama Administration is trying to make labor pay. Pushing wage-earners over the “fiscal cliff” to make them pay for Wall Street’s financial bailout (sanctimoniously calling their taxes “user fees”) can only shrink of market more, pushing the economy into a fatal combination of tax-ridden and debt-ridden fiscal and financial austerity.

The whistling in the intellectual dark that central bankers call by the technocratic term “deleveraging” (paying off the debts that have been run up) means diverting yet more income to pay the financial sector. This is antithetical to resuming economic growth and restoring employment levels. The recent lesson of European experience is that despite austerity, debt has risen from 381% of GDP in mid-2007 to 417% in mid—2012. That is what happens when economies shrink: debts mount up at arrears (and with stiff financial penalties).

But even as economies shrink, the financial sector enriches itself by turning its debt claims – what 19th-century economists called “fictitious capital” before it was called finance capital – into a property grab. This makes an unrealistic debt overhead – unrealistic because there is no way that it can be paid under existing property relations and income distribution – into a living nightmare. That is what is happening in Europe, and it is the aim of Obama Administration of Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Erik Holder et al. They would make America look like Europe, wracked by rising unemployment, falling markets and the related syndrome of adverse social and political consequences of the financial warfare waged against labor, industry and government together. The alternative to the road to serfdom – governments strong enough to protect populations against predatory finance – turns out to be a detour along the road to debt peonage and neofeudalism.

So we are experiencing the end of a myth, or at least the end of an Orwellian rhetorical patter talk about what free markets really are. They are not free if they are to pay rent-extractors rather than producers to cover the actual costs of production. Financial markets are not free if fraudsters are not punished for writing fictitious junk mortgages and paying ratings agencies to sell “opinions” that their clients’ predatory finance is sound wealth creation. A free market needs to be regulated from fraud and from rent seeking.

The other myth is that it is inflationary for central banks to monetize public spending. What increases prices is building interest and debt service, economic rent and financial charges into the cost of living and doing business. Debt-leveraging the price of housing, education and health care to make wage-earners pay over two-thirds of their income to the FIRE sector, FICA wage withholding and other taxes falling on labor are responsible for de-industrializing the economy and making it uncompetitive.

Central bank money creation is not inflationary if it funds new production and employment. But that is not what is happening today. Monetary policy has been hijacked to inflate asset prices, or at least to stem their decline, or simply to give to the banks to gamble. “The economy” is less and less the sphere of production, consumption and employment; it is more and more a sphere of credit creation to buy assets, turning profits and income into interest payments until the entire economic surplus and repertory of property is pledged for debt service.

To celebrate this as a “postindustrial society” as if it is a new kind of universe in which everyone can get rich on debt leveraging is a deception. The road leading into this trap has been baited with billions of dollars of subsidized junk economics to entice voters to act against their interests. The post-classical pro-rentier financial narrative is false – intentionally so. The purpose of its economic model is to make people see the world and act (or invest their money) in a way so that its backers can make money off the people who follow the illusion being subsidized. It remains the task of a new economics to revive the classical distinction between wealth and overhead, earned and unearned income, profit and rentier income – and ultimately between capitalism and feudalism.

Notes.

[1] No such benefits were given to homeowners whose real estate fell into negative equity. For the few who received debt write-downs to current market value, the credit was treated as normal income and taxed!

[2] Philip Aldrick, “Loss of income caused by banks as bad as a ‘world war’, says BoE’s Andrew Haldane,” The Telegraph, December 3, 2012. Mr. Haldane is the Bank’s executive director for financial stability.

Take Your Hands Off Social Security

It's Irrelevant to the Deficit
by DEAN BAKER


Millions of people are rightly outraged to hear that Social Security is in the gun-sights of both Speaker Boehner and President Obama in their budget negotiations. There is no reason that our political leaders should be discussing cuts to the country’s most successful social program.

While the promotion of budget hysteria is one of the largest industries in Washington, the most important and widely ignored fact about the budget situation is that we have large deficits today because the collapse of the housing bubble sank the economy. This is not a debatable point.

The budget deficit was just 1.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2007. Before the collapse of the housing bubble the deficit was projected to remain low for the next decade and the debt-to-GDP ratio was actually falling. This would have been the case even if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to continue.

When the bubble burst and the economy plummeted, tax collections fell. We also spent more on unemployment insurance and other benefits for unemployed workers. And we had further tax cuts and stimulus spending to try to boost the economy. The automatic and deliberate steps taken to counter the downturn fully explain the large deficits we have seen the last five years.

Record low interest rates on government bonds demonstrate that the current deficits are not a real problem. But even if they were, it is difficult to see how cutting Social Security could to be part of the solution. Under the law Social Security is not supposed to be part of the budget. It is an entirely separate program financed on its own.

This is not just a rhetorical point. We can talk about Social Security facing a financing shortfall in the future precisely because it is solely financed by its own revenue stream. One of the most widely discussed proposals to avert that shortfall is a revision in the cost-of-living calculation that would be the equivalent of a 3 percent cut in benefits over a typical retiree’s lifetime. (Perversely, the impact will be largest for the oldest and poorest retirees, since people who live the longest will accumulate the largest reduction in benefits.)

An overwhelming majority of the country strongly supports Social Security and does not want to see any benefit cuts. But because of the nature of this budget negotiation process, Americans are supposed to accept the cuts with no revenue increase whatsoever to shore up the program’s long-term financial position.

It is understandable that people who want to cut back or dismantle Social Security would argue for this position. It is difficult to see why anyone else would.