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Globalization and Trade

The TPP and Nonsense on Trade

The early signals from the Obama administration are that the nonsense will be flowing fast and thick in its effort to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). We got an indication of the level of the nonsense factor in a CNN article reporting on the administration's efforts to promote the still secret agreement.

CNN cites a column that President Obama had in a New Hampshire newspaper that told readers:

"...trade is a substantial driver of New Hampshire's economy. Over 20,000 American jobs are currently supported by goods exports from New Hampshire, with 32 percent of Made in New Hampshire goods exports shipped to TPP partners."

What exactly does it mean for over 20,000 New Hampshire jobs to be supported by exports? Suppose the exports are car parts that are sent to Mexico to be assembled into a car that is shipped back to the United States. Are the workers in New Hampshire suppose to celebrate because their parts are being exported to Mexico (a TPP partner) rather than being shipped to be assembled in Ohio?

This is obviously a ridiculous thing to say and certainly President Obama knows it. He repeats the line because it has been focus group tested and he can apparently count on reporters not pointing out its absurdity.

Dean Baker / October 20, 2015

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Affordable Care Act

It's Monday, and Yes, Robert Samuelson Wants to Cut Social Security and Medicare

I know this is getting old, but let's go over the latest version. Robert Samuelson is unhappy about the presidential candidates' "flight from reality," which to him means they don't want to cut Social Security and Medicare, restrict immigration of less-educated workers (he means Democrats here), and promote more rapid economic growth. I will focus on the Social Security and Medicare story.

Samuelson tells us:

"Inevitably, the costs of Social Security, Medicare (federal health insurance for the elderly) and nursing home care under Medicaid (a federal-state insurance program for the poor) will grow dramatically. From 1965 to 2014, spending on Social Security and the major federal health care programs averaged 6.5 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). By 2040, the CBO projects this spending to exceed 14 percent of GDP.

"If we do not trim Social Security and Medicare spending — by slowly raising eligibility ages, cutting benefits and increasing premiums for wealthier recipients — we face savage cuts in other government programs, much higher taxes, bigger deficits or all three."

There are several points worth mentioning here. First, giving us the average spending from 1965–2014 on these programs as a baseline is the columnist's version of three-card monte. Spending in 1970 is not relevant to the increase going forward. What matters is what we are spending in 2015. The answer to that question is 10.1 percent of GDP. This means that the 14.2 percent of GDP projected for 2040 is an increase of 4.1 percentage points of GDP, a bit more than half of the increase implied by Samuelson.

It is also worth mentioning that the increase in spending on these programs in the years since 1965 was much larger than what we expect to see going forward. So what's the problem?

Dean Baker / October 19, 2015

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George Will, Bernie Sanders, Freedom and Income Inequality

George Will really takes it to Bernie Sanders in his column this morning.

"The fundamental producer of income inequality is freedom. Individuals have different aptitudes and attitudes. Not even universal free public education, even were it well done, could equalize the ability of individuals to add value to the economy."

Got that? Bill Gates is incredible rich because of his aptitude and attitude; the government's willingness to arrest anyone who infringes on the patent and copyright monopolies it gave him has nothing to do with his wealth. We're supposed to also ignore all the other millionaires and billionaires whose wealth depends on these government granted monopolies. 

And we should ignore the Wall Street boys who depend on their banks' too big to fail insurance or on the fact that the financial sector largely escapes the sort of taxation applied to the rest of the economy. And we shouldn't be bothered by the fact that Jeff Bezos got very rich in large part from avoiding the requirement to collect sales taxes which was imposed on his brick and mortar competitors. And, we need not pay attention to the tax scams that allow for much of the wealth of the private equity crew. 

Nor should we pay attention to Federal Reserve Board policies that deliberately slow the economy and reduce the rate of job creation any time workers are about to get substantial bargaining power. Nor should we pay attention to trade policies that put our manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in Mexico and China, but protect our doctors, lawyers, and other professionals.

It's all about freedom. George Will has spoken.

Dean Baker / October 18, 2015

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Serious Confusion About Fannie, Freddie, and Homeownership at the Washington Post

No one reads the Post's opinion pages for serious economic analysis, and Bethany McLean's Outlook piece on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reminds us why. While the basic point is fine (we should keep Fannie and Freddie), the argument is more than a bit confused.

The problem starts near the beginning when McLean tells us that GSE stands for "government-supported entities." In fact the acronym is for "government sponsored enterprises." The government created Fannie and Freddie and then turned them into largely private companies. (I apologize if the "government-supported entities" was meant to be ironic, but it went over my head if that's the case.)

Getting to more substantive matters, McLean tells us:

"Since 2008, while Fannie and Freddie have sat in limbo, homeownership has plunged. This summer, the Census Bureau reported that the homeownership rate had fallen to 63.4 percent, the lowest level in 48 years. (It had peaked at 69 percent, in 2004.) 'Renter nation,' one blog called the United States. The decline is particularly pronounced in minority communities. At the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference this year, housing advocates pointed out that the homeownership rate for the black population has decreased from nearly 50 percent in 2004 to about 43 percent, its lowest level in 20 years. It’s projected to continue to drop."

The story on homeownership rates is of course true, but it is not clear what it has to do with Fannie and Freddie being in "limbo." The GSEs continue to buy up the vast majority of newly issue mortgages in spite of their "limbo" status. Mortgage interest rates are at the lowest levels the country has seen in more than half a century. It's hard to see how the situation would be better for potential homebuyers if Fannie and Freddie were not in limbo.

Dean Baker / October 18, 2015

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More on TBTF: Quick Rejoinder to Mike Konczal

Mike Konczal has picked up on my post responding to his piece on too big to fail. Just to give folks a quick orientation, the point of entry here was a Paul Krugman post saying that Dodd-Frank had largely ended too big to fail (TBTF), which linked to Mike's piece.

Before getting to any of the nitty-gritty, I am not sure that we are actually arguing over anything. Mike's intro says:

"My point isn’t to say that the subsidy is completely over. Nor, as I’ll explain in a bit, is it to say that TBTF is over. Instead, understanding this decline lets us know we should push forward with what we are doing. It debunks conservative narratives about Dodd-Frank being fundamentally a protective permanent bailout for the largest firms that we should scrap, and provides evidence against repealing it. And ideally it gets us to understand this subsidy as just one part of the more general TBTF problem that needs to be solved."

I'm actually pretty comfortable with that statement. I certainly don't want to repeal Dodd-Frank, nor do I in any way buy the right-wing line that Dodd-Frank institutionalized bailouts. So I'm not sure we're really in a very different position on this one. Perhaps I have more of a difference with Krugman than Mike here. I don't believe that Dodd-Frank ended TBTF as Krugman seems to imply in his post.

In terms of the studies, I was pointing out that the GAO study found limited evidence of only a very small TBTF subsidy in 2006. I believe that the markets saw the big banks as very much TBTF in 2006. I'm not sure if Mike is arguing that TBTF only came about during the crisis. That certainly is not my view.

Dean Baker / October 17, 2015

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Was Poverty Reduction in the Developing World Worth the Hit to U.S. Workers?

That's the question that has been raging across the Internet following a piece in the NYT by Paul Theroux. Theroux decried the poverty in the South in the United States and bemoaned the fact that it was partly attributable to the outsourcing of jobs to the developing world. This prompted commentary by Annie Lowrey and Branko Milanovic and others, asking whether the gains for the poor in the developing world were worth whatever losses might have been incurred by the working class and poor in the United States.

That might be an interesting philosophical question, but it has nothing to do with the reality at hand. It assumes, without any obvious justification, that job loss and wage stagnation was a necessary price for the improvement of living standards in the developing world. Clearly, there has been an association between the two, as the manufacturing jobs lost in rich countries meant hundreds of millions of relatively good paying jobs for people in poor countries, but that doesn't mean this was the only path to growth for the developing countries. There are fundamental questions of both the size and composition of trade flows that this assumption ignores.

On the size front, there is no obvious reason that developing country growth had to be associated with the massive trade surpluses they ran in the last decade. In the 1990s, many developing countries had extremely rapid growth accompanied by large trade deficits. For example, from 1990 to 1997 GDP annual growth averaged 7.1 percent in Indonesia, its trade deficit averaged 2.1 percent of GDP. In Malaysia growth averaged 9.2 percent, while its trade deficit averaged 5.6 percent of GDP. In Thailand growth averaged 7.4 percent, while the trade deficit averaged 6.4 percent of GDP.

Dean Baker / October 17, 2015

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Workers

The Six-Hour Work Day: Preparing for the Attack of the Robots

We all have heard the stories about how the robots are going to take our jobs. The line is that innovations in computer technology will make robots ever more sophisticated, allowing them displace a rapidly growing number of workers. This could leave large numbers of workers with nothing to do, implying a massive amount of long-term unemployment.

There are two basic problems with this story. The first is a logical problem. The story of worker displacement by technology is not new, it goes back hundreds of years and it is ordinarily considered to be a good thing. This is what we call productivity growth. It means that workers can produce more goods and services in the same amount of time. This is the basis of rising wages and living standards.

If we see rapid productivity growth, as robots allow for the same output with fewer workers, this should allow the remaining workers to be paid more for each hour of work. This will allow them to spend more money, creating more demand in other sectors, which will allow displaced workers to be re-employed elsewhere.

Of course we have not seen workers getting the benefits of productivity growth in higher pay in recent years. This is due to policies and institutional changes that undermine workers' bargaining power. For example, trade policy has deliberately put manufacturing workers in competition with low paid workers in the developing world. The Federal Reserve Board routinely raises interest rates to slow job growth when it fears that workers are getting too much bargaining power and could possibly get inflationary wage increases. And, lower unionization rates mean that workers are less effective in demanding higher pay from employers.

For these reasons, most workers have not gotten their share of the gains from productivity growth, but there is another problem with the robots displacing workers story. Rather than robots leading to a massive surge in productivity, in recent years productivity growth has been unusually slow. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, annual productivity growth has averaged less than 0.6 percent since 2010. This compares to an average rate of 3.0 percent in the Internet boom years from 1995–2005 or 2.8 percent in the long post-World War II boom from 1947–1973. Even in the years of the productivity slowdown, from 1973–1995, had a 1.4 percent annual rate of growth, more than twice the recent pace. In short, there have not been many gains to share.

Dean Baker / October 15, 2015