Tag: keynes

CBO, the Wizard of Oz, and the Keynesian Fairy Tale

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

The Obama Administration said that the so-called stimulus was necessary so that the unemployment rate would not rise above 8 percent. Indeed, the White House warned that the joblessness rate would climb to 9 percent if lawmakers did not approve the $787 billion package. Critics responded by explaining that making government bigger would divert resources from the productive sector of the economy and hurt growth. These skeptics also noted that nations using “Keynesian” policy, such as the United States in the 1930s and Japan in the 1990s, did not generate good results. And since the unemployment rate is now above 10 percent, it certainly seems like opponents were correct.

But now the supposedly non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has jumped to the defense of the White House, estimating that the spending bill actually generated beween 600,000 and 1.6 million jobs. How can that be, you may ask, when the number of jobs has fallen by more than 3 million? The CBO neatly sidesteps that real-world concern by moving the goalposts, using a slightly more sophisticated version of Obama’s “jobs created or saved” alchemy. Their jobs-created estimate is compared to a make-believe baseline of how many jobs there would be “without the law.”

CBO estimates that in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States, and real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.2 percent to 3.2 percent higher, than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA. …CBO’s current estimates differ only slightly from those CBO prepared in March 2009. At that time, CBO projected that in the third quarter of 2009, U.S. employment would be higher by 600,000 to 1.5 million people with ARRA than it would be without the law, and real GDP would be 1.1 percent to 3.0 percent higher. CBO’s new estimates reflect small revisions to earlier projections of the timing and magnitude of changes to spending and revenues under ARRA. …Economic output and employment in the spring and summer of 2009 were lower than CBO had projected at the beginning of the year. But in CBO’s judgment, that outcome reflects greater-than-projected weakness in the underlying economy rather than lower-than-expected effects of ARRA.

Needless to say, this means there is no objective benchmark. The unemployment rate could jump to 15 percent and total job losses could reach 10 million, but CBO would continue to say, for all intents and purposes, that the results from their Keynesian model are more important than any real-world numbers. This is the fiscal policy version of the Wizard of Oz, and we’re supposed to ignore reality just as Dorothy and friends were supposed to ignore the man behind the curtain.

To be fair, there is nothing inherently wrong with CBO’s methodology. Economic analysis frequently requires people to make assumptions about how the world would behave with or without a certain policy. So the real question is whether Keynesian economics makes sense from a theoretical perspective, whether there is any supporting evidence, and whether there are more compelling alternatives. Click the links and decide for yourself.

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

An Easy Target: Mocking the Stimulus

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

Writing for The Hill, I explain why Keynesian-style stimulus does not work. In addition, I note that the so-called stimulus was just an excuse for pork-barrel spending. But my concluding point, excerpted below, is that the White House goofed politically by making specific claims about the good things that ostensibly would happen by increasing the burden of government spending:

The only surprise was that the White House was foolish enough to make specific claims of the good results that supposedly would flow from all the pork-barrel spending. In part, this is the absurd notion of claiming 600,000-plus “jobs saved or created” when total employment actually has fallen by more than 3 million. But the bigger mistake was claiming that the faux stimulus would keep the unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent and that failure to squander $787 billion would cause the jobless rate to climb to 9 percent. The politicians got their wish, yet now the unemployment rate is above 10 percent. Brilliant.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

Republicans Just as Guilty of Flawed Keynesian Thinking

By
Mark A. Calabria

The core of Keynesian economic policy is that the government must come in and replace reductions in private sector demand with public sector demand, therefore bringing overall demand back to its previous level.  One of the many flaws in this thinking is in assuming that the previous level of demand was “correct” and getting us back to that level is the appropriate policy response.

Take the example of the housing market and the government response.  The primary response of Republicans in Washington has been to offer tax credits and other incentives to replace the drop in demand for housing.  Witness Senator Johnny Isakson’s  recent comments on why we need to extend the $8,000 homebuyer tax credit: “If you take that kind of business out of what’s already a very weak housing market, you do nothing but protract and extend the recession.”

This analysis could not be more wrong.  The tax credit largely acts to keep housing prices from falling further.  However, that is how markets are supposed to clear in an environment of excess supply.  If there’s too much housing, the way to address that is to allow housing prices to fall, which attracts buyers back into the market.

We should also recognize that the tax credit does not help the buyer, it helps the seller, by allowing the seller to charge that much more for the price of the home.

Perhaps the worst impact of the policy is that it encourages the continued building of homes, only adding to the over-supply, which itself will “protract and extend the recession.”  Witness the recent news that housing starts in the US just hit a nine month high.  While these levels are still low in historic terms, and housing inventories are declining, we still have an excess of housing.  The damage done by creating a false floor to housing prices is that builders don’t respond to inventory, they respond to prices, and as long as there is a positive gap between prices and construction costs, builders will build.  The tax credit only serves to widen that gap between prices and construction costs.

Back to Keynes: the central flaw in the thinking behind the tax credit proposal is its assumption that we need to re-inflate the housing bubble.  The previous level of housing demand, from say 2003 to 2006, was not driven by fundamentals; we had a bubble.  There will be a correction in the housing market.  Our choices are to either take that correction quickly and move on, or to prolong that correction, maybe even make it worse, by trying to create a false floor to the market.

Topics: 
Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy

Soaring Sales for “Road to Serfdom”

By
David Boaz

Cato’s new staff writer, Aaron Powell, told me he had recently seen two people on the Washington Metro reading The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek. That prompted me to check the sales figures for Road to Serfdom at Nielsen’s Bookscan. And whattaya know? Sales have increased this year at an even faster pace than sales of Atlas Shrugged. (Atlas sells 10 times as many copies, but the percentage increase over last year is less.)

So far this year the most popular edition of Road to Serfdom has sold 11,000 copies. That compares with 3,000 copies at the same point last year. That’s a 263 percent increase for those of you keeping score at home.

Why? Well, no doubt huge new government spending programs and attempts to massively expand the welfare state send people looking for classic literature that makes the case for liberty and limited government. But what the Marxists call the “objective conditions” can always use a bit of help. And indeed, just as I found in investigating the sales bump for Atlas Shrugged, it looks like an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was instrumental in boosting the sales of The Road to Serfdom.

On February 4, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, now chairman of Freedomworks, published an op-ed in the Journal titled “Washington Could Use Less Keynes and More Hayek.” Sales of Road to Serfdom, which were in the low hundreds each week since the beginning of 2009, more than doubled over the next four weeks. It seems likely that Armey’s op-ed caused the new interest.

Armey didn’t actually mention The Road to Serfdom – he just talked about Hayek and his ideas generally – but when you go looking for Hayek, you’re going to find his most popular book. So maybe we could attribute the sales bump instead to David Henderson’s review of The Road to Serfdom – titled “Still Relevant–Perhaps More So” – in the Spring issue of Regulation. But the Wall Street Journal does have a larger circulation.

Update: This item has been edited to remove proprietary information.

Topics: 
Political Philosophy

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