Summing Up the Clinton-Sanders Policy Debate in One Line

April 18, 2016

18 Abril 2016

I like Jonathan Cohn personally and have great respect for his work as a reporter and writer on health care issues. However, I think he actually told readers the opposite of what he intended in his Huffington Post piece headlined, "this one line sums up the big Clinton-Sanders policy argument." The big line in Cohn's piece is that Senator Sanders' proposal for a single-payer system would cause a single mother with two children, earning $26,813 a year, to pay $2,314 in payroll taxes rather than getting health insurance for her family free through Medicaid, as would be the case now. Cohn sees this as a major hit to this family, which is a serious problem with Sanders' proposal. There are several points here worth noting. First, as Cohn points out, Sanders is also proposing a $15 an hour minimum wage. This means that if this single mother were working a full-time job, she would see her pay increase by almost $3,200 a year, even if her pay was only at the new minimum. Of course, since she is earning substantially more than the minimum wage now, it is likely that her pay would increase enough to leave her still well above the minimum. This means that she would be substantially better off with Sanders's agenda. (There are serious questions about whether we can have a $15 an hour minimum wage without a considerable impact on employment, but we'll ignore those for the moment.) The second point is that Cohn has to be very selective in finding his victim here. Let's suppose that this single mother was getting health care insurance through her employer, as most workers do. If we say the employer was paying $5,000 a year for health care insurance, under standard economics assumptions, this money will find its way into the worker's paycheck. This means that she will be paying an additional $2,314 in payroll taxes, but this will be deducted from the $5,000 a year that her employer used to pay in premiums that now going into her paycheck. (No, this will not happen immediately and not be the story with all workers, but this is what all good economists believe will eventually be the case.) This means that this worker will be $2,686 better off as a result of the Sanders plan.

The New York Times Brings Out the Vises on Dodd-Frank

By Dean BakerDean Baker

April 17, 2016

17 Abril 2016

The New York Times had an article on the downsizing of Citigroup in the wake of the passage of Dodd-Frank. The piece twice refers to the “vise of regulation” in discussing the pressures created by the law to downsize. While one use of the expression appears in a quote from an industry friendly source, the other use is the paper’s own characterization of the law.

It seems unlikely that the NYT would say that a vise of regulation is preventing Pfizer from marketing unsafe drugs. This is clearly an expression of disapproval implying that the regulations are excessive and unnecessary. That is the sort of thing that belongs in an opinion piece, not a news article.

The New York Times had an article on the downsizing of Citigroup in the wake of the passage of Dodd-Frank. The piece twice refers to the “vise of regulation” in discussing the pressures created by the law to downsize. While one use of the expression appears in a quote from an industry friendly source, the other use is the paper’s own characterization of the law.

It seems unlikely that the NYT would say that a vise of regulation is preventing Pfizer from marketing unsafe drugs. This is clearly an expression of disapproval implying that the regulations are excessive and unnecessary. That is the sort of thing that belongs in an opinion piece, not a news article.

Living the Good Life as a Verizon Worker?

By Dean BakerDean Baker

April 14, 2016

14 Abril 2016

Some readers may have been misled by a statement in a NYT article on the Verizon strike that the union members at Verizon receive an average of $130,000 a year in wages and benefits. This is what the company pays in labor costs per worker. This includes not only straight pay, but also overtime pay, employer-side Social Security and Medicare taxes, health insurance, and pension benefits. The pension payments are everything that Verizon pays into its pension, including payments to cover costs of retired employees, averaged over the size of its current unionized workforce.

While the $130,000 number would imply an average hourly wage of $65. The average non-overtime pay of Verizon’s workers is probably in the range of $35 to $40 an hourly. While this is still a relatively good wage in the U.S. economy, it is considerably lower than the $65 an hour that readers may have inferred from too quickly reading the article.

Some readers may have been misled by a statement in a NYT article on the Verizon strike that the union members at Verizon receive an average of $130,000 a year in wages and benefits. This is what the company pays in labor costs per worker. This includes not only straight pay, but also overtime pay, employer-side Social Security and Medicare taxes, health insurance, and pension benefits. The pension payments are everything that Verizon pays into its pension, including payments to cover costs of retired employees, averaged over the size of its current unionized workforce.

While the $130,000 number would imply an average hourly wage of $65. The average non-overtime pay of Verizon’s workers is probably in the range of $35 to $40 an hourly. While this is still a relatively good wage in the U.S. economy, it is considerably lower than the $65 an hour that readers may have inferred from too quickly reading the article.

Charles Lane and the Washington Post Are Very Generous with the Jobs and Wages of Ordinary Workers

By Dean BakerDean Baker

April 14, 2016

14 Abril 2016

Charles Lane used his op-ed column in the Washington Post to repeat the line that is now quite popular in elite circles: the stagnating wages and worsening living standards of large segments of the U.S. working class were a necessary price for lifting hundreds of millions of people in the developing world out of poverty. Oh yeah, and also the richest one percent happened to get unbelievably rich in the process as well. So people like Bernie Sanders, who want trade policies that will help U.S. workers, are actually being selfish. It’s the one percent who are really serving the poor.

This argument is incredibly wrongheaded for many reasons, but let’s just focus on its basic structure. The story goes that in the last three and a half decades we have seen substantial growth in the incomes of the poor in the developing world. (Actually the bulk of this story is in East Asia, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment.) During this period incomes of ordinary workers in the United States, and to a lesser extent Europe and Japan, have stagnated. Therefore, stagnating wages for rich country workers was a necessary condition for hundreds of millions of people to escape poverty.

Obviously there was a link between these events, but the serious question (okay, that leaves the WaPo folks out) is whether it was a necessary link. Suppose that a natural disaster, like a flood or earthquake, devastates a major city. In response the federal government throws in tens of billions in assistance to rebuild the city. Ten years later, the city has a thriving economy.

In Charles Lane Eliteland the disaster was a good thing, because otherwise the city never would have been revitalized. But that is not the real question. The question is whether we could have had a path that allowed developing countries to prosper without impoverishing U.S. workers.

The simple answer is we certainly could have gone a different route and most of the story is textbook economics. I lay this out more fully in a piece that was solicited for the Post Outlook/Post Everything section, but never run there because they lost the ability to reply to e-mails.

The basic story is that there is no reason that we had to run large trade deficits with developing countries like China. In the economics textbooks, capital is supposed to flow from rich countries to poor countries to finance their development. That would mean we run trade surpluses with developing countries. Furthermore, the reason that our autoworkers compete with low-paid autoworkers in the developing world, but our doctors don’t compete with their much lower paid counterparts (trained to U.S. standards), is that doctors have much more power than autoworkers. And, we enriched our one percent, while making developing countries poorer, by making patent and copyright monopolies stronger and longer.

Anyhow the story that U.S. workers had to suffer to help the world’s poor is very comforting for the country’s elite, and let’s face it, they own the media outlets. This means that we can look forward to hearing it repeated endlessly, no matter how little sense it makes.

Charles Lane used his op-ed column in the Washington Post to repeat the line that is now quite popular in elite circles: the stagnating wages and worsening living standards of large segments of the U.S. working class were a necessary price for lifting hundreds of millions of people in the developing world out of poverty. Oh yeah, and also the richest one percent happened to get unbelievably rich in the process as well. So people like Bernie Sanders, who want trade policies that will help U.S. workers, are actually being selfish. It’s the one percent who are really serving the poor.

This argument is incredibly wrongheaded for many reasons, but let’s just focus on its basic structure. The story goes that in the last three and a half decades we have seen substantial growth in the incomes of the poor in the developing world. (Actually the bulk of this story is in East Asia, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment.) During this period incomes of ordinary workers in the United States, and to a lesser extent Europe and Japan, have stagnated. Therefore, stagnating wages for rich country workers was a necessary condition for hundreds of millions of people to escape poverty.

Obviously there was a link between these events, but the serious question (okay, that leaves the WaPo folks out) is whether it was a necessary link. Suppose that a natural disaster, like a flood or earthquake, devastates a major city. In response the federal government throws in tens of billions in assistance to rebuild the city. Ten years later, the city has a thriving economy.

In Charles Lane Eliteland the disaster was a good thing, because otherwise the city never would have been revitalized. But that is not the real question. The question is whether we could have had a path that allowed developing countries to prosper without impoverishing U.S. workers.

The simple answer is we certainly could have gone a different route and most of the story is textbook economics. I lay this out more fully in a piece that was solicited for the Post Outlook/Post Everything section, but never run there because they lost the ability to reply to e-mails.

The basic story is that there is no reason that we had to run large trade deficits with developing countries like China. In the economics textbooks, capital is supposed to flow from rich countries to poor countries to finance their development. That would mean we run trade surpluses with developing countries. Furthermore, the reason that our autoworkers compete with low-paid autoworkers in the developing world, but our doctors don’t compete with their much lower paid counterparts (trained to U.S. standards), is that doctors have much more power than autoworkers. And, we enriched our one percent, while making developing countries poorer, by making patent and copyright monopolies stronger and longer.

Anyhow the story that U.S. workers had to suffer to help the world’s poor is very comforting for the country’s elite, and let’s face it, they own the media outlets. This means that we can look forward to hearing it repeated endlessly, no matter how little sense it makes.

Alternative to Drug Patents: Pay for Research Upfront

By Dean BakerDean Baker

April 13, 2016

13 Abril 2016

Eduardo Porter had an interesting piece discussing the extent to which patents can pose an obstacle to the diffusion of technology, especially in the case of drugs and clean energy. The piece points out that some folks have suggested alternatives to patent financing for drug research, generously linking to a CEPR paper. However, the piece only mentions the routes of buying up patents and placing them in the public domain and paying drug makers based on how much their drugs increased quality adjusted life-years.

There is another route preferred by some of us, which would just pay for the research upfront. The United States already does this to a substantial extent with the National Institutes of Health, which funds over $30 billion annually in biomedical research. The advantage of paying for the research upfront is that the results can be fully public and available to other researchers from the beginning. Also, there is no need for complex calculations to determine how important a specific contribution was to the end product.

An obvious point of entry would be to finance clinical trials, which account for more than 60 percent of research costs. The trial results would be fully public with detailed data (consistent with anonymity) on individual outcomes. Also, the drugs themselves would be available as generics from the day they are approved. The trials would be paid for on a contract basis, similar to the way the Department of Defense pays contractors to develop new technologies, with the difference that everything is placed in the public domain.

Eduardo Porter had an interesting piece discussing the extent to which patents can pose an obstacle to the diffusion of technology, especially in the case of drugs and clean energy. The piece points out that some folks have suggested alternatives to patent financing for drug research, generously linking to a CEPR paper. However, the piece only mentions the routes of buying up patents and placing them in the public domain and paying drug makers based on how much their drugs increased quality adjusted life-years.

There is another route preferred by some of us, which would just pay for the research upfront. The United States already does this to a substantial extent with the National Institutes of Health, which funds over $30 billion annually in biomedical research. The advantage of paying for the research upfront is that the results can be fully public and available to other researchers from the beginning. Also, there is no need for complex calculations to determine how important a specific contribution was to the end product.

An obvious point of entry would be to finance clinical trials, which account for more than 60 percent of research costs. The trial results would be fully public with detailed data (consistent with anonymity) on individual outcomes. Also, the drugs themselves would be available as generics from the day they are approved. The trials would be paid for on a contract basis, similar to the way the Department of Defense pays contractors to develop new technologies, with the difference that everything is placed in the public domain.

• Globalization and TradeGlobalización y comercio

Secretary Kerry Gets Confused About Jobs In Arguing for TPP

By Dean BakerDean Baker

April 13, 2016

13 Abril 2016

The Obama administration is starting its full court press to get Congress to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech in support of the pact according to the Washington Post.

According to the Post, in his speech blamed technology rather than trade for eliminating jobs in manufacturing. It is easy to show that this is mistaken. The number of jobs in manufacturing was little changed, apart from cyclical fluctuations from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. From the late 1990s to 2006 we lost more than 3.5 million manufacturing jobs, almost 20 percent of employment in the sector, as the trade deficit exploded.

Manufacturing Employment

manufacturing jobs

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There had been large gains in productivity due to technology throughout this period. It was only when the trade deficit soared from just over 1.0 percent of GDP in 1996 to almost 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005 that we saw massive job loss in manufacturing. It would have been helpful if the Washington Post had corrected Mr. Kerry’s misstatement, as it might have done for other public figures, like Senator Bernie Sanders.

The Obama administration is starting its full court press to get Congress to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech in support of the pact according to the Washington Post.

According to the Post, in his speech blamed technology rather than trade for eliminating jobs in manufacturing. It is easy to show that this is mistaken. The number of jobs in manufacturing was little changed, apart from cyclical fluctuations from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. From the late 1990s to 2006 we lost more than 3.5 million manufacturing jobs, almost 20 percent of employment in the sector, as the trade deficit exploded.

Manufacturing Employment

manufacturing jobs

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There had been large gains in productivity due to technology throughout this period. It was only when the trade deficit soared from just over 1.0 percent of GDP in 1996 to almost 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005 that we saw massive job loss in manufacturing. It would have been helpful if the Washington Post had corrected Mr. Kerry’s misstatement, as it might have done for other public figures, like Senator Bernie Sanders.

Olivier Blanchard Is Worried About Inflation In Japan

By Dean BakerDean Baker

April 13, 2016

13 Abril 2016

Olivier Blanchard is one of the world’s leading macroeconomists. In addition to a long and distinguished academic career, in his tenure as the chief economist at the I.M.F. he turned its research department into a major producer of cutting edge research. In particular, the research department was instrumental in producing work that undermined the case for austerity that was being widely pushed across the globe. Unfortunately, politics was able to overcome the research, and austerity won. But that is the past. In an interview with the Telegraph, Blanchard warned that Japan will soon switch from combating deflation to a struggle to contain inflation. The core problem is its debt burden, which now stands at almost 250 percent of GDP. This concern seems more than a bit bizarre, especially coming from an economist as knowledgeable as Blanchard. The first point is that, in spite of the high ratio of debt to GDP, Japan actually has a low interest burden. According to the OECD, Japan’s net interest payments on its debt were 1.0 percent of GDP in 2015. By contrast, U.S. payments were well over 3.0 percent of GDP in the 1990s. This matters, not only because the interest payments represent the actual drain on resources, but also because the value of the debt is largely arbitrary. If that sounds strange, it’s worth thinking about what happens to the value of debt when interest rates rise. The current interest rate on a 10-year Japanese government bond is -0.09 percent. On a 30-year bond it’s 0.41 percent. Suppose that the interest rate on a 10-year bond rose to a still historically low 4.0 percent and the 30-year bond to 5.0 percent. According to my bond calculator, the market price of a newly issued 10-year bond would drop by almost one-third and the price of a newly issued 30-year bond would fall by more than 75 percent. Of course not all Japanese debt is long-term, nor is it all newly issued, but the point is that the market value of its outstanding debt would drop sharply if interest rates rose to even modest levels. If the 30-year rate got as high as 7.0 percent (lower than the U.S. rate in much of the 1990s), then the market price of the newly issued 30-year bond would drop by more than 85 percent from its current level. The way governments typically keep their books, this plunge in the market price would not affect Japan’s debt to GDP ratio. But if the markets were actually troubled by the high ratio of debt to GDP, Japan could simply issue new debt to buy up old debt at a fraction of its face value. This would quickly send its debt to GDP ratio plunging. (This is why the Reinhart-Rogoff 90 percent cliff story never should have passed the laugh test even before the exposure of the famous Excel spreadsheet error.)

Pension Panic: Round XXII

By Dean BakerDean Baker

April 13, 2016

13 Abril 2016

There has been a flurry of recent articles touting recent work by Stanford Business School Professor Joshua Rauh, arguing that state and local pension fund liabilities are far larger than generally reported. Rauh puts the unfunded liabilities of state and local pension funds at $3.4 trillion, more than three times the figures that the pensions themselves calculate. He predicts looming crises with many local governments driven into bankruptcy. The reason for the difference between Rauh’s $3.4 trillion number and the shortfall of roughly $1 trillion using the pension fund’s methodology is the rate of discount used to evaluate pensions’ liability. Pension funds calculate their liability using their expected rate of return as the rate of discount. This currently averages just over 7.0 percent on their assets. In contrast, Rauh uses the risk-free rate of interest for discounting, using the current 2.5 percent yield on 30-year Treasury bonds. The lower interest rate puts a much higher value on projected funding shortfalls 20-30 years in the future. While many would like the public to be scared by Rauh’s calculations, there are a few points worth keeping in mind. First, the return numbers that pension funds use are not pulled out of the air. They reflect projections of investment returns based on actual experience and a range of standard economic projections. They will of course not be exactly right, but they are also unlikely to be hugely wrong. As a recent report from Pew Research Center points out, the main reason that some pension funds are in serious trouble is not that they were overly optimistic about investment returns, the pensions that are into serious trouble were the ones that failed to make their required contributions. In states like New Jersey and Illinois, not making pension contributions became almost a sport among politicians. The same was true for the city of Chicago under Mayor Richard M. Daley. If governments don’t contribute to their pensions, they will be underfunded regardless of what returns are assumed.

Krugman on Falling Oil Prices and Inflation

By Dean BakerDean Baker

April 13, 2016

13 Abril 2016

I’m glad to see that Paul Krugman has the same story about falling oil prices, inflation, and real interest rates as me. He pointed out that to the extent that falling oil prices reduce the overall rate of inflation it should not matter for real interest rates. What matters for the real interest rate is the expected rate of inflation for goods and services in general. Lower oil prices will matter for energy investment, but not for the vast majority of goods and services in the economy.

I made this point a couple of months back, although probably many times before that as well.

I’m glad to see that Paul Krugman has the same story about falling oil prices, inflation, and real interest rates as me. He pointed out that to the extent that falling oil prices reduce the overall rate of inflation it should not matter for real interest rates. What matters for the real interest rate is the expected rate of inflation for goods and services in general. Lower oil prices will matter for energy investment, but not for the vast majority of goods and services in the economy.

I made this point a couple of months back, although probably many times before that as well.