March 31, 2011

Forget about Spending and Get Serious about the Economy

Washington today, especially the Congress, has a textbook case of cognitive dissonance. A confluence of black swan developments may well threaten the American and global recoveries. There’s the civil war in Libya and unrest across much of the Middle East that could disrupt world energy supplies, the natural catastrophes in Japan may upend the world’s third largest economy, and several European governments are flirting with junk-bond status. On top of all this, recent data on housing, investment, and consumer spending all point to a still-fragile U.S. expansion. Yet, with all of this, Congress spends its time bickering over funds the federal government needs week to week just to keep operating.

This debate has become almost willfully wrong-headed. An economy not yet recovered fully from a historic financial meltdown and deep recession, and now facing possible major shocks from three directions, is no candidate for budget cuts. In fact, a new National Journal survey of 44 Washington economists and “economic insiders,” Democratic and Republican, found only one of the 44 who sees immediate spending cuts as the highest priority. (Full disclosure: I am one of the 44 surveyed.) If there are still any doubts about what happens when governments ignore this basic economics, consider Great Britain and Germany. Both embraced the austerity snake oil and plowed ahead with sharp spending cuts and tax increases. Two quarters later, the recoveries in both countries are stumbling badly.

Of course, these debates are not about economics at all. Here and in Europe, they’re driven by anti-government factions inside the base of each country’s conservative party. Congressional Republicans might take note, however, that this approach no better politics than it is economics. After enacting their programs, the governments of David Cameron and Angela Merkel find themselves hemorrhaging public support.

There is a time for serious debate about the role of American government in our economy and daily lives. The 2012 elections could provide a platform for real public deliberation about how much the government should do in the future to provide health care for elderly and poor people, ensure access to higher education for young people unlucky enough not to be born into affluence, or support the weapon systems, manpower and womanpower needed to wage multiple wars. At a minimum, the campaign should include some serious talk about whether the Obama administration did the right thing in driving health care coverage for most Americans.

Right now, however, is the time to focus on the clear and present dangers to the jobs and incomes of average Americans. The President made a good start this week with proposals to make the U.S. economy less energy intensive and especially less dependent on imported oil. Dealing with the continuing problems in Japan and Europe will be tougher. As we outlined last week, if the crisis in Japan persists for another month or longer, it will disrupt production here of everything that uses parts or elements made-in-Japan, from automobiles and electronics to medical equipment and even pharmaceuticals. Congress should take this time to consider steps that will help our manufacturers keep their U.S. workforces intact through such supply chain disruptions — for example, a temporary tax break on foreign earnings brought back home by manufacturers who expand their U.S. jobs. If Japan’s crisis deepens, it also will absorb all of Japanese saving, and then some. That development would likely drive sales of U.S. stocks by Japanese investors and sales of U.S. government securities by the Japanese government, creating new downward pressures on U.S. stock prices and new upward pressures on our interest rates. All of this means that the Federal Reserve and Treasury should take this time to prepare for another round of quantitative easing.  

A new debt crisis in Europe would threaten the balance sheets of our large financial institutions, yet one more time. They don’t have large holdings of Greek, Irish, Portuguese, Belgian or Spanish government debt, all of which now hang in the balance. But our big banks do have hundreds of billions of dollars in normal business with the large European banks that do carry huge portfolios of those bonds — and which might find themselves unable to carry out their contracts with our banks if another crisis hit. That’s what happened, in reverse, in September 2008, when American banks couldn’t honor their contracts with many European banks in the post-Lehman panic. Today, instead of arguing about PBS funding, congressional leaders should be quietly talking with the administration about ways to contain another financial crisis without bailouts which the public would never support again.

If the Congress and administration could refocus their current debate around these real and pressing issues, perhaps they could then move on to the longer-term problems that matter to most Americans outside the Tea Party. To begin, what can Washington do to help American businesses create new jobs at the vigorous rates we all considered merely normal, until the last decade?  There might even come a time for a serious public discussion about what steps might help reverse the corrosive income patterns of the last 30 years, which have seen a small minority of very rich and very highly-skilled Americans capture nearly all of the nation’s income gains, while middle class people stagnated and poor people lost ground.

And one point should be very clear: Budget cuts are no more of an answer to these long-term issues than they are for the more immediate problems facing the American economy.