January 04, 2016
The Wall Street Journal devoted an article to the presidential candidates economic plans and their potential to affect growth and to help the middle class. Remarkably, the piece never once mentions the Federal Reserve Board and its current plans to raise interest rates in order to slow growth.
The Fed’s plans should be front and center in any discussion of efforts to boost growth either through tax cuts or additional spending, since if the Fed believes that such plans will simply lead to more inflation, then it will accelerate its rate hikes in order to prevent the economy from growing more rapidly. This means that in order to boost the growth rate, a plan would not just have to be well-designed for the economy, but it also would be necessary to get the approval of the Fed to allow additional growth. This point should have been mentioned.
In this respect, it is worth noting that Senator Bernie Sanders plan for a financial transactions tax would directly open up a considerable amount of economic space by eliminating close to $100 billion annually in wasteful financial transactions. Most research indicates that trading is relatively elastic, meaning that trading volume will decline in rough proportion to the extent that a tax raises cost. This means that the amount of revenue raised by a tax will correspond to resources freed up in the financial sector by reduced trading volume. These resources (worker and capital) could then be diverted to more productive sectors.
In principle, since this involves a reallocation from finance to other sectors, rather than a net increase in output, the Fed should be content to allow it to take place. Since so many of the top incomes are in finance, Sanders’ proposal would be hugely redistributive from the rich to the middle class.
The piece also includes the bizarre comment:
“Some economists believe that 4% [the growth rate targeted by Governors Bush and Christie] would be a stretch, at least for any significant period of time, given an aging U.S. population and lethargic productivity, big factors in determining growth.”
Actually, nearly all economists believe that 4 percent would be completely impossible on a sustained basis. Even sustaining a 3 percent growth rate over the next decade would be an extraordinary accomplishment. In other words Bush and Christie are just using nutty numbers. They presumably are aware of this fact, WSJ readers should be as well.
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