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Argentina

Latin America and the Caribbean

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British Analysts Side with Argentina on Falklands/Malvinas dispute, or … as a headline from the Onion might read, “Surprise! Occupiers of occupied land want to remain part of occupying state."
On Tuesday, the results of the British Referendum on the Falkland/Malvinas Islands came in. According to the BBC, out of the 1,517 votes cast in the referendum, representing 90 percent of eligible voters on the island, all but three of them voted for having the islands remain territory of the U.K. As the British government must have realized before holding the poll, this is not surprising. Despite the relative proximity of the islands to the Argentine mainland, their inhabitants of the island ha

CEPR and Sara Kozameh / March 15, 2013

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Steve Rattner: Stop Stealing from Our Kids!

Steve Rattner wants someone to stop stealing from our kids according to the headline of his blog post in the NYT. The finger should be pointed backwards in Rattner's case because if anyone is going to jeopardize the living standards of our kids, it is wealthy people like Mr. Rattner.

We have seen an enormous upward redistribution of income over the last three decades. As a result most workers have seen little of the benefits of economic growth. If this upward redistribution continues, then our children are unlikely to see much of the gains of growth in the future.

Rather than have people focus on the policies that have led to this upward redistribution (trade policy, too big to fail banks, patent policy etc.), wealthy people like Rattner use their money and power to try to divert attention to the cost of Social Security and Medicare. They have thrown enormous resources into trying to scare people with the prospective burdens posed by these programs. For example, Rattner today tells us that with Social Security:

"The present value of the unfunded liability is 'only' $9 trillion."

Are you scared yet? After all, it's "only" $9 trillion. Didn't you love that sarcasm? Yes, $9 trillion is a lot of money, none of us will ever see that much money, even Bill Gates or Warren Buffet. But if we are having a serious discussion, we would talk about this as a share of future income. It's about 0.7 percent of future GDP. Does that scare you?

That's a bit less than half of the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade, that's hardly trivial, but that expense would not impoverish our kids. Medicare and Medicaid are projected to cost more but that has nothing to do with the old stealing from the young, their higher costs are the result of doctors, drug companies, medical supply companies and other providers in the industry charging us two to three times as much as their counterparts in other wealthy countries. If we paid the same amount per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries then we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses rather than deficits.

Dean Baker / March 14, 2013

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Economists Generate Confusion About Poverty: Old and Young

Given the disastrous failure of the economics profession to warn of the housing bubble, it is amazing that the country has not rounded up the lot of us (I'll go too) and chased us out of the country. Unfortunately, we still have a profession continuing to use its authority to spread confusion rather than enlightenment. 

Thomas Edsall and his readers are the victims today. In an interesting discussion of trends in poverty, Edsall includes a reference to work by Bruce Meyer and James Sullivan that shows poverty among the elderly has fallen to just 3.2 percent using a consumption based measure of poverty. There are many issues that can be raised about this analysis, as my colleague Shawn Fremstad has pointed out.

However perhaps the most fundamental point for purposes of Edsall's analysis, which explicitly compares poverty rates among the young and the old, is the fact that Meyer and Sullivan:

"report results using an adjusted CPIU-RS that subtracts 0.8 percentage points from the growth in the CPI-U-RS index each year (p 17)."

Okay, if the meaning of this line is not immediately clear, Meyer and Sullivan are assuming that actual rate of annual inflation is 0.8 percentage points less than official data show. This claim is debatable, but its implications are not. If we have been overstating inflation by 0.8 percentage point each year, then we have been understating real income growth by 0.8 percentage points.

This claim lies at the center of Meyer and Sullivan's claim that poverty has fallen sharply. Their adjustment would mean that income has risen by roughly 8 percent more over the last decade than official data show and 16 percent more over the last two decades. (I'm ignoring compounding to keep this simple.) This additional rise in income (or consumption) gets a lot of people over the poverty line.

The Meyer and Sullivan assumption has another important implication which they do not discuss in this paper and apparently did not discuss in their conversations with Mr. Edsall. If income is growing more rapidly than the official data indicate then people were much poorer in the recent past than official data indicate.

Dean Baker / March 14, 2013

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The Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget: A Serious Budget That the Serious People Won't Take Seriously

For those upset that the budget debate is getting ever further removed from the real world problems of an economy that is suffering from a deficit of 9 million jobs, there is good news. The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) has produced a budget that is intended to make the unemployment situation better rather than worse.

The story of course is that we are still in a situation where we need the government as a source of demand in the economy. This is independent of how much we like the government or the private sector. The private sector does not expand and create jobs just because governments want it to, as is being discovered now by leaders in the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Spain and everywhere else where deficit reduction is now in vogue. In the current economic situation, loss of demand from the government is a loss of demand to the economy. That is why recent steps to reduce the deficit, such as the ending of the payroll tax cut (which put money in consumers' pockets) and the sequester, will lead to slower growth and higher unemployment.

The CPC decided to produce a budget that recognized this reality. It provides for a mix of short-term measures aimed at immediate job creation, such as jobs programs and additional money to defray state and local government revenue shortfalls, along with an ambitious long-term infrastructure agenda. According to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute this agenda would create 6.9 million additional jobs by the end of next year compared to the CBO baseline scenario.

CEPR / March 13, 2013

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Does Paul Ryan Want to Change the Relationship Between Americans and Their Government or Give Money to Rich People?

Ezra Klein looked at Paul Ryan's latest budget and told readers:

"Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career."

Well, that is one possibility. There is another option: Paul Ryan wants to makes rich people richer. I think the evidence supports the latter view.

Let's look at some of Ryan's trademark policies. Ryan repeatedly has proposed replacing Medicare with a voucher system or "premium support" as he likes to say. Note that Ryan has not proposed just eliminating Medicare and telling people when they turn age 65 (or 67) that they are on their own. 

What's the difference between handing people a voucher to buy insurance from private insurers and giving them access to a government-run Medicare system when they turn age 65? Over Medicare's 75-year planning period the difference is tens of trillions of dollars in additional money for private insurers and the health care industry, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). 

As CBO and many other independent analysts have documented, using private insurers raises rather than lowers costs. We can believe that Representative Ryan is ignorant of this research or alternatively we can believe he knows and understands the findings, but still wants to use private insurers anyhow.

Dean Baker / March 13, 2013