Pragmatos

A Partisan Post, You Have Been Warned

Last night I read a post by Brad DeLong that made me so mad I had trouble falling asleep. (Not at DeLong, mind you.)  There’s really nothing unusual in there — hysteria about the deficit, people who voted for the Bush tax cuts and the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit but suddenly think the national debt is killing us, political pandering — but maybe it was the proverbial straw.

First, let me say that I largely agree with DeLong here:

“I am–in normal times–a deficit hawk. I think the right target for the deficit in normal times is zero, with the added provision that when there are foreseeable future increases in spending shares of GDP we should run a surplus to pay for those foreseeable increases in an actuarially-sound manner. I think this because I know that there will come abnormal times when spending increases are appropriate. And I think that the combination of (a) actuarially-sound provision for future increases in spending shares and (b) nominal balance for the operating budget in normal times will create the headroom for (c) deficit spending in emergencies when it is advisable while (d) maintaining a non-explosive path for the debt as a whole.”

Now, let me tell you what I am sick of:

1. People who insist that the recent change in our fiscal spending is the product of high spending, without looking at the numbers, because their political priors are so strong they assume that high deficits under a Democratic president must be due to runaway spending. And it’s not just Robert Samuelson.

2. People who forecast the end of the world without pointing out why the world is ending. Here’s Niall Ferguson, in an article entitled “An Empire at Risk:”

“The deficit for the fiscal year 2009 came in at more than $1.4 trillion—about 11.2 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That’s a bigger deficit than any seen in the past 60 years—only slightly larger in relative terms than the deficit in 1942.”

But does he mention that the reason for the 2009 deficit is lower tax revenues due to the financial crisis and recession? No.

Here’s Ferguson on the 10-year projection:

“Meanwhile, in dollar terms, the total debt held by the public (excluding government agencies, but including foreigners) rises from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019—from 41 percent of GDP to 68 percent.”

Does he mention that, as early as January 2008, that number was projected to fall to 22%, and the majority of the change is due to lower tax revenues? No.

3. People who posture about our fiscal crisis who voted for the Bush tax cuts — shouldn’t shame require them to keep silent?

4. People who say, like Judd Gregg, “after the possibility of a terrorist getting a weapon of mass destruction and using it against us somewhere here in the United States, the single biggest threat that we face as a nation is the fact that we’re on a course toward fiscal insolvency,” as if this is a new problem, when it’s been around since 2004 (see Figure 1) — when, I might add, Judd Gregg was a member of the majority.

(Tell me, was Niall Ferguson forecasting the end of the American empire in 2004, when everything he says now about long-term entitlement spending was already true? That’s a real question.)

5. People who say that we can’t pass health care reform because it costs too much, ignoring the fact that the CBO projects the bills to be roughly deficit neutral, ignoring the fact that the Senate bill has received bipartisan health-economist support for its cost-cutting measures, and ignoring the fact that our long-term fiscal problem is, and always has been, about health care costs (see Figure 2).

6. People who say the Obama administration is weak on the deficit (Ferguson refers to Obama’s “indecision on the deficit”, and he is gentle by Republican standards), when by tackling health care costs head-on — and in the process angering their political base — they are doing the absolute most important thing necessary to solve the long-term debt problem.

7. People who cite “financial ruin” purely, absolutely, incontrovertibly as a political tactic to try to kill health care reform (courtesy of DeLong and Brian Beutler):

8. Joe Lieberman.

By James Kwak

Krugman. We all know this, I’m sure, but a reminder can’t hurt. 300,000 new jobs a month for five years, just to make up lost ground.

The jobs deficit

It was truly amazing the way last week’s employment report was hailed by many people as a sign that our troubles are over. Here we are, having suffered huge job losses, and needing to make up the lost ground — and a report showing that we’re still losing jobs, but not as fast, is grounds for celebration?

Anyway, I thought it might be useful to create a sort of benchmark for the level of job growth that would really count as good news. I start from the fact that we’ve lost about 8 million jobs since the recession began — that’s the official number plus the preliminary estimate of the coming benchmark revision. I then take EPI’s estimate that we need to add 127,000 jobs a month. EPI points out that when you put these numbers together, they say that to return to pre-crisis unemployment within two years we’d have to add 580,000 jobs a month. That’s not going to happen.

But let’s set a more modest goal: return to more or less full employment in 5 years –which means seven lean years of depressed employment. To keep up with population growth over those 7 years, the United States would have had to add 84 times 127,000 or 10.668 million jobs. (If that sounds high, bear in mind that we added more than 20 million jobs over the 8 Clinton years). Add in the need to make up lost ground, and we’re at around 18 million jobs over the next five years — or 300,000 a month.

So that’s a useful benchmark. Even if we add 300,000 jobs a month, we’re looking at a prolonged period of suffering — a huge cost from the Great Recession. So that’s kind of a minimal definition of success. Anything less than that, and it’s bad news. It sort of puts that wonderful report that we only lost 11,000 jobs in perspective, doesn’t it?

This is the abstract of Brent White’s paper “Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis“.

Despite reports that homeowners are increasingly “walking away” from their mortgages, most homeowners continue to make their payments even when they are significantly underwater. This article suggests that most homeowners choose not to strategically default as a result of two emotional forces: 1) the desire to avoid the shame and guilt of foreclosure; and 2) exaggerated anxiety over foreclosure’s perceived consequences. Moreover, these emotional constraints are actively cultivated by the government and other social control agents in order to encourage homeowners to follow social and moral norms related to the honoring of financial obligations – and to ignore market and legal norms under which strategic default might be both viable and the wisest financial decision. Norms governing homeowner behavior stand in sharp contrast to norms governing lenders, who seek to maximize profits or minimize losses irrespective of concerns of morality or social responsibility. This norm asymmetry leads to distributional inequalities in which individual homeowners shoulder a disproportionate burden from the housing collapse.

Here’s the tail of Felix Salmon’s post on the subject.

The world’s largest guilt trip

… White goes on to enumerate an astonishingly long list of institutions, up to and including the president himself, which are speaking with a single voice on this question, and saying that paying an underwater mortgage in full is the morally correct thing to do. Hank Paulson did it, despite the fact that he would have fired anyone at Goldman who behaved similarly; Neil Cavuto likened people who walk away from their mortgages to people who would have “quit” and handed over Europe to the Nazis.

Even Gail Cunningham, of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, declared in an interview on NPR that “Walking away from one’s home should be the absolute last resort. However desperate a situation might become for a homeowner, that does not relieve us of our responsibilities.” If you’re thinking of walking away, you’ll almost certainly do so while overcoming enormous feelings of guilt. And where there’s guilt, there’s belief in dire consequences:

Most people simply do not believe they will escape punishment for their moral transgressions. Guilt and fear of punishment go together. Thus, the notion that one will suffer great consequences for walking away from one’s financial obligations not only seems possible, but feels quite right. It just can’t be that one can walk away from their mortgage with no significant consequence. As such, people rarely question apocalyptic descriptions of foreclosure’s consequences.

The result is a system tilted enormously in favor of institutional lenders who exist in a world of morality-free contracts, and who conspire to lay the world’s largest-ever guilt trip on any borrower who might think about joining them in that world. It’s asymmetrical, it’s unfair, and it’s about time that homeowners started being informed that a ding to their credit score is not the end of the world; that no one would expect a capitalist company to behave in the way that individuals are being told to behave; and that their options are in fact broader than they might believe. White’s paper is the perfect place for them to start their reading.