Even though he’s become more partisan in recent years, I still enjoy an occasional visit to Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But I was disappointed last night when I read one of his posts, in which he discussed whether government spending helps or hurts economic performance. He took the view that a bigger public sector stimulates growth, and criticized those who want to reduce the burden of government spending, snarkily observing that, “The notion that Herbert Hoover was right has become quite a dogged meme on the reality-challenged right.”

Since I’m one of those “reality-challenged” people who prefer smaller government, I obviously disagree with his analysis. But his reference to Hoover set off alarm bells. As I have noted before, Hoover increased the burden of government during his time in office.

But maybe my memory was wrong. So I went to the Historical Tables of the Budget and looked up the annual spending data. As you can see from the chart (click for larger image), it turns out that Hoover increased government spending by 47 percent in just four years. (If you adjust for falling prices, as Russ Roberts did at Cafe Hayek, it turns out that Hoover increased real government spending by more than 50 percent.)

I suppose I could make my own snarky comment about being “reality-challenged,” but Sullivan’s mistake is understandable. The historical analysis and understanding of the Great Depression is woefully inadequate, and millions of people genuinely believe that Hoover was an early version of Ronald Reagan.

I will say, however, that I agree with Sullivan’s conclusion. He closed by saying it would be “bonkers” to replicate Hoover’s policies today. I might have picked a different word, but I fully subscribe to the notion that making government bigger was a mistake then, and it’s a mistake now.

Yesterday Case-Shiller released their monthly housing price index.  Surprise, it fell by 4.2% in the first quarter of 2011.  I’ve been predicting a decline of about 6% over the course of 2011 (might need to adjust that).  Of course, this should come as no surprise.  We’ve spent the last couple of years trying to re-create the bubble, with little success.  While there’s been a home-buyer tax credit, the largest stimulus has been extremely cheap credit on the part of the Federal Reserve.  The problem with all these subsidies is they ignore the fact that eventually the housing market will come back to fundamentals.  And those fundamentals are demographics and income.  You cannot over long periods of time sustain house price increases without increases in incomes.  Loose credit only gets you so far.  Prices have already fallen enough to pretty much wipe out the entire value of the home-buyer tax credit.

Even worse than putting off the inevitable correction, subsidies that maintain prices above construction costs result in additional supply being added to an already glutted market.  While housing starts are near historic lows - they are still positive.  And worse, they are higher in the very markets in which we don’t want more building.  That permitting activity is twice as high in Phoenix as in San Diego, despite being of similar size, illustrates the perverse incentives of trying to re-inflate the bubble via demand subsides.  In supply-constrained markets you simply maintain prices at unaffordable levels - San Diego is still 54% above its 2000 price level - while in easy-to-build markets you add to the glut - prices in Phoenix are now back to 2000 levels. 

House prices were always going to find their “true” bottom. The question was simply: did we want to get there right away, or drag out the process? Washington chose the course of dragging out the process, at considerable cost.  I believe dragging out the process has only further spooked potential buyers.  Any buyer today has to suspect that further price declines are possible.  We need to get to the point where the only direction is up.  We aren’t there yet.  Policymakers continue to ignore the basics of supply and demand.  Unfortunately the rest of us pay the price for their doing so.

The Labor Department released its latest job numbers today and they remind me of Clint Eastwood’s 1966 classic, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The good news is that the economy created 244,000 new jobs, the biggest gain in almost a year. And the jobs were in the productive sector of the economy rather than government, so the added employment means more taxpayers rather than more tax-consumers.

The bad news is that the jobless rate increased to 9.0 percent, up from 8.8 percent last month. This means that the number of people looking for work is increasing at a faster rate than the number of jobs being created.

The ugly news, at least from the perspective of the Obama administration, is that the latest data is yet another piece of evidence that the White House was grossly mistaken when it claimed that bigger government would translate into better economic performance.

The blue line in the chart below shows the administration’s prediction of what would happen to unemployment if the so-called stimulus was enacted. The dots represent the actual unemployment rate.

As you can see, the unemployment rate is easily more than two percentage points higher than the White House said it would be at this time.

Administration apologists respond by moving the goal posts, asserting that the original prediction underestimated the economy’s weakness and the unemployment data would have been even worse in the absence of all the spending.

Since economists are lousy at predicting the future, that’s a legitimate argument.

But is it an accurate argument? Since there’s no parallel universe where we can conduct policy experiments, there’s no way of proving which side is wrong. Nonetheless, this chart from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank is rather revealing. It compares employment numbers after the deep recession of the early 1980s with the employment numbers from the recent deep recession.

Perhaps I’m biased and reading this chart incorrectly, but it certainly seems as if Reaganomics generated better results than Obamanomics. Maybe it’s time to realize that government is the problem, not the solution?