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Article Artículo

Robert Samuelson Says Economics Is An Inexact Science, Except When He Wants to Cut Social Security and Medicare

Regular readers of the Washington Post have grown fond of Robert Samuelson's repeated calls for cuts to Social Security (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here , and here). At the core of Samuelson's complaints are long-term projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and other sources, that the country will have large deficits 15 years, 25 years, or further in the future.

He likes to say that these deficits are due to Social Security and Medicare, although the main driver is the fact that U.S. health care costs are vastly out of line with costs in the rest of the world. If our doctors, drug companies, and other health care providers got paid the same as their counterparts in other wealthy countries, the projections would show huge surpluses, not deficits. But Samuelson prefers to go after poor and middle class seniors rather than highly paid people in the health care sector.

But this is secondary to the big issue with today's column. Samuelson's repeated hyperventilations about Social Security and Medicare are based on budget projections made for the distant and very distant future. For this purpose Samuelson apparently is willing to accept that economics can be a very precise science even though the past track record of budget forecasters has been atrocious. (For cheap thrills check out these projections for large deficits in the year 2000, big surpluses in 2003, or modest deficits in 2010. In each case the overwhelming source of error was in the economic projection, not policy changes.)

But for today's column arguing that the Fed should be looking to raise interest rates sooner rather than later Samuelson has serious reservations about the quality of economic predictions:

"Although economists are arguing furiously over this [whether the Fed should be raising interest rates], there’s no scientific way to measure slack. Economic policymaking is often an exercise in educated guesswork, built on imperfect statistics, shaky assumptions, incomplete theories and political preferences. This is an instructive case in point."

He concludes the piece:

"The Fed is expected to begin raising rates in 2015, but the time and pace are unknown. The danger of waiting too long or going too slow is that inflation, now controlled in the market and in Americans’ thinking, will escape these convenient bounds. Once that happens — as the double-digit inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s showed — inflation takes on a life of its own and becomes self-fulfilling. It can be suppressed only through tight credit, recession and high unemployment. We don’t want to go there."

Dean Baker / August 11, 2014

Article Artículo

Health and Social Programs

What's 35 Grand to Marco Rubio? Apparently Not Much

Writing in the National Review recently, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida claims that Social Security will be insolvent by the time he retires. He goes on to make a few suggestions to fix the program. Each of these ‘fixes’ is problematic. The flaws with the Rubio fixes have been and will be repeated many times (for example, raising the retirement age can be problematic for workers in physically demanding jobs). But before getting to the fixes, there should be a full stop after the paragraph:

CEPR / August 07, 2014

Article Artículo

Argentina

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Wall Street Journal Uses Bogus Numbers to Smear Argentine President

Last week the Wall Street Journal had a front page article on the net worth of Argentina’s first family since 2003, the year Néstor Kirchner was elected president. Based on financial disclosures with Argentina’s Anti-Corruption Office, the Wall Street Journal reported that, “the couple's net worth rose from $2.5 million to $17.7 million” between 2003 and 2010. Implying that such returns must involve some sort of corruption, the Journal writes, a “lot of people in Argentina want to know where that money came from.”

But there is a serious problem with the way the data are presented here. The Journal is reporting the Kirchners’ net worth in dollars, without adjusting for local inflation. This makes the increase look much bigger than it is, since Argentina had cumulative inflation of nearly 200 percent during these years, according to private estimates.

WSJ Kirchner wealth

If the Wall Street Journal had taken inflation into account then the Kirchner’s net worth would have looked quite different. From $2.5 million in 2003, the Kirchners’ real net worth increased to around $6.1 million in 2010.

Simply adjusting for inflation takes away more than three-quarters of the Kirchners’ gain. Should the Journal have known this and adjusted for inflation? The question answers itself. We won’t speculate about anyone’s motives.

Jake Johnston and Mark Weisbrot / August 06, 2014

Article Artículo

Workers

Update on the Thirteen States that Raised their Minimum Wage

In a series of recent blogposts, we updated a methodology used by Goldman Sachs to evaluate the impact of minimum-wage increases in 13 states at the beginning of this year. A number of publications, including USA Today and The New York Times, cited these blog posts in pieces on the minimum wage.

As we noted at the time, the Goldman Sachs’ methodology is not ideal for a number of reasons. Now, economists Saul Hoffman and Wai-Kit (Ricky) Shum from the University of Delaware have done a more formal analysis of these 13 states and found qualitatively similar results to the pieces using the Goldman Sachs method. Specifically, all of the analyses have found no evidence of negative employment impacts. If anything, the results have indicated that minimum wage increases are associated with more rapid employment growth, although this relationship is not statistically significant.

CEPR and Ben Wolcott / August 06, 2014