Ever the iconoclast, Dean Baker over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research uses some data that shows consumers are on a tear right now, and that what’s really holding our economy back is our chronic trade deficit, much of which comes  from our need to import hundreds of billions of dollars in petroleum.

On the arithmetic front, the piece comes up with a story where consumption of durables is $267 billion below the long-term average, while consumption of non-durables are $127 billion below their long-term average. While it has consumption of services somewhat about the long-term average, the next effect is that weak consumption is a big drag on the economy and accounts for a large share of the shortfall. It tells us:

“Consumers are holding onto their wallets — a continuing burden for the weak economy.”

Wow, that isn’t what the Commerce Department is telling my spreadsheet. I get that the average share of consumption (all categories together) in GDP was 67.3 percent in the years from 1985 to 2005. I get that it was 70.8 percent in the most recent quarter. This means that consumption was 3.5 percent higher than its longer period average as a share of GDP. This means that consumers are not hanging onto their wallets at all. In fact, they are spending at very ambitious rate. (Boys and girls, you can check this one for yourself by going to the National Income and Product Accounts and clicking up Table 1.1.5.)

This is consistent with the data showing that consumption is higher than normal relative to disposable income. (The adjusted consumption line has to do with the treatment of the statistical discrepancy in the national income accounts.) This means that consumption is not holding back the economy, it is actually unusually high.

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The amount of excess consumption is even more than this comparison suggests, since one reason that consumption is high relative to GDP is that tax revenue is low relative to GDP (i.e. we are running large budget deficits). If the deficit starts to come down, then disposable income will fall relative to GDP, which means that consumption will fall relative to GDP, even if the saving rate stays constant.

The other error along these lines is that imports should be expected to rise relative to GDP as the economy moves back toward its potential. If GDP were to rise by 6 percent to bring it back in line with its potential then imports would rise by roughly 20 percent as much or 1.2 percentage points of GDP. This would make it more clear that the biggest factor that is out of line with our historical experience is the trade deficit. That would be even more clear if we took a longer period as the basis of comparison that was not so distorted by asset bubbles.

Of course given the Washington Post’s unabashed celebration of recent trade agreements its reporters are probably not allowed to call attention to such facts.

Beezer here.  I pass this article along because it might challenge our belief that household savings is the biggest drag on our economy.  Can households be spending this much AND saving too?  Or is the consumption figure really one of spending on petroleum, which is sucking money away from other productive enterprises?  If that is the case, then a push to boost our own resource use could mitigate that drag a lot.  Of course I would prefer we use sustainable energy rather than fossil energy, which imposes very expensive costs on society that never appear on those companies’ bottom lines because these costs happen after they’ve sold their product.  Which means we pay the costs in other ways, to other vendors, like health care providers who make money treating chronic problems like asthma.  Robert F. Kennedy gives a good explanation below as to why we might be a lot better off using alternative energy resources.

Dean Baker over at the blogsite ‘Beat the Press’ uses a chart to show that right now our burden of paying interest on debt is at historic lows.   This basically shows how low interest rates have gotten.  The line rises up from there, but that’s because it’s assumed these low rates cannot last forever.  I still think the Treasury should be aggressively lengthening it’s debt portfolio duration in order to lock in these low rates.

Asking whether America is better off today than four years ago when President Obama took office is like asking the Fire Chief if the burning house is better off for having its fire put out.   From Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

While the source is not clear, someone developed a simple way to identify incompetent news reporters. If you hear a reporter ask people in President Obama’s administration, ideally in a belligerent tone, “are the American people better off than they were four years ago?,”the reporter is trying to tell you that they are not qualified to do their job.

The reason we know that the questioners are incompetent reporters is that this is a pointless question. Suppose your house is on fire and the firefighters race to the scene. They set up their hoses and start spraying water on the blaze as quickly as possible. After the fire is put out, the courageous news reporter on the scene asks the chief firefighter, “is the house in better shape than when you got here?”

Yes, that would be a really ridiculous question. Hence George Stephanopoulos was being absurd when he posed this question to David Plouffe, a top political adviser to President Obama on ABC’s This Week. Bob Schieffer was being equally silly when he asked Martin O’Malley, the Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, the same question on CBS’s Face the Nation.

A serious reporter asks the fire chief if he had brought a large enough crew, if they enough hoses, if the water pressure was sufficient. That might require some minimal knowledge of how to put out fires.

Similarly, serious reporters would ask whether the stimulus was large enough, was it well-designed, and were there other measures that could have been taken like promoting shorter workweeks, as Germany has done. That would of course require some knowledge of economics, but it sure makes more sense than asking if a house is better off after it was nearly burnt to the ground.

Beezer here.  People have short memories, apparently.

The argument over whether or not we can afford Social Security is becoming unanchored from reality.  The cited deficits are imaginary under almost any real world scenario.

From Dean Baker over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, some common sense arithmetic.

“The projected shortfall in 2033 is $623 billion, according to the trustees’ latest report. It reaches $1 trillion in 2045 and nearly $7 trillion in 2086, the end of a 75-year period used by Social Security’s number crunchers because it covers the retirement years of just about everyone working today.”

To make sense of these numbers it would be necessary to know how large the economy is projected to be in 2033, 2045, and 2086. GDP in these years is projected to be approximately $41 trillion, $72 trillion, and $440 trillion. Providing these GDP numbers would have allowed readers to put these projected deficit figures in some context.

If the Globe was interested in conveying information instead of pushing its agenda for cutting benefits it might have told readers that the tax increase needed to keep the system fully funded over its 75-year planning horizon is just over 5 percent of projected wage growth for the next 30 years. (This is using the Social Security trustees projections. It would be less than 4 percent of projected wage growth using the projections from the Congressional Budget Office.)

While many readers would point out that most workers have not been seeing wage growth in recent decades, that complaint would highlight the absurdity of the Globe’s piece. The upward redistribution of income over the last three decades has done far more to hurt the living standards of ordinary workers than any possible tax increases associated with Social Security.

Beezer here.  Just another negative effect of the income inequality trend of the past 30 plus years.  So let’s give Mitt another tax break, shall we?  Why can’t we have a better press corps?

Sometimes a commentator writes the most precise explanations for our problems.  Such was the case recently in a comment to an article written by Dean Baker at the blogsite for the Center for Economic and Policy Research about how market’s naturally shift income upward, not downward.  The commentator is simply signed on as ‘bmz.’

written by bmz, January 05, 2012  9:29 AM

Just about every Republican politician alleges that: “we do not have a taxing problem, we have a spending problem;” but this is a lie. Everyone knows that Ronald Reagan reduced income taxes (more than one half for the wealthy); what is less commonly understood is that he offset this by raising payroll taxes(more than double for most self-employed). Today, most American families pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. Prior to 1981, income taxes averaged 12%(+/-1%) of normalized GDP. Reagan reduced income taxes to near 9%. Clinton increased them back to 12%; and Bush/Obama reduced them again to 9 %(and below). However, on budget expenses(which excludes Medicare and Social Security) have remained 12%(+/-1%) of normalized GDP throughout. The deficit in income taxes has been financed by borrowing, largely from the Social Security trust fund.  When Clinton raised income taxes back to 12%, this eliminated the on budget deficit. The CBO projected that this, plus the Social Security and Medicare surpluses, was enough to pay off the entire US debt by the time that the Social Security/Medicare trust funds would have to be amortized for beneficiary payments, all without having to raise taxes to pay for the amortization of those trust funds. Like Reagan before him, Bush took those excess payroll tax receipts and gave them “back” as income tax reductions, heavily weighted to the wealthy–who didn’t create those surpluses in the first place. By doing this, Bush guaranteed that income taxes would have to be raised in order to amortize the trust funds. The failure to do so simply permits the 1% to steal the money contributed by workers for their retirement. Everything about not raising taxes or limiting expenses, is about stealing the 99%’s money. The national debt has been caused primarily by income taxes which were reduced far below their historic 12%(+/-1%), not by on budget expenses, which have remained at their historic 12%(+/-1%) throughout. These taxing games have transferred $ trillions from the 99%’s payroll taxes to subsidize the wealthy’s income taxes.

Dean Baker is one of those rare people (compared to any national politician) who actually look at the data before mouthing off about our economy and our economic policies.  In this article he skewers most of what people, including those who read the NYT, believe about our current economy. 

The NYT decided to have a special dialogue around a letter to the editor that called on President Obama to take “decisive action” on the economy. Remarkably, only one item on the list of decisive actions, investing in infrastructure, would have any positive impact on jobs and even this would be limited. While investing in infrastructure is a very good idea, there are not very many people who can be usefully employed on infrastructure projects in the next two years.

It takes time to plan a project and many projects, like building high speed rail, are only going to be built over many years. This means that even the most aggressive infrastructure program will only have a limited impact on jobs in the rest of 2011, 2012, and even 2013. If we want to see substantial reductions in unemployment over the next two years we will need more decisive action than this.

The rest of the items in the letter all involve reducing the deficit. While some of the proposals are very reasonable, like ending the war in Afghanistan and raising taxes on the wealthy, these will certainly not help create jobs. The list also contains two profoundly silly proposals, means-testing Social Security and raising the age of Medicare eligibility to 67.

The idea of cutting Social Security is especially off-base since the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office show that the progarm is fully funded through the year 2038 with no changes whatsoever. Even after this date, the program would always be able to pay more than 80 percent of scheduled benefits. Given the overall health of the program, proposals for cuts are effectively taking away benefits that people have already paid for. 

In addition to the fact that such cuts would be unnecessary and arguably unfair it also is worth noting that means-testing is an especially bad way to make cuts. While investment banker Peter Peterson likes to go around the country boasting that he doesn’t need his Social Security, the reality is that there are very few rich elderly people like Mr. Peterson. In order to have any noticeable impact on the program’s finances, a means-test would have to hit very middle income people — people with incomes in the neighborhood of $40,000 a year.

Even then the impact would be very limited. To have a major impact on the program’s expenses it would probably necessary to move the means-test down to people with incomes around $30,000 a year. This would not fit most people’s definition of rich.

The proposal to raise the age of Medicare eligibility is also incredibly misguided. It is extremely expensive for seniors to get health care insurance. Many workers struggle to stay on jobs until age 65 when they can first qualify for Medicare. This proposal would push the bar out two years. Those who lose their jobs or can’t find jobs will generally not be able to afford insurance, which could easily exceed $20,000 a year for those with even minor pre-existing conditions.

Rather than looking to reduce benefits the more obvious way to go with Medicare is to reduce the cost of care. The United States pays more than twice as much per person for its health care as the average for other wealthy countries. If we could get our costs down to those of other countries we would be facing huge long-run budget surpluses, not deficits. One way to get lower costs would be to allow Medicare beneficiaries to buy into the more efficient health care systems in other countries. The enormous potential savings could be split between the government and the beneficiary.

It is perverse that the NYT thinks it is reasonable to have major cuts to programs that affect retirees or near retirees. These people were especially hard hit by the collapse of the housing bubble. Many of them saw most of their life’s savings disappear as their house price plummeted. Insofar as we need revenue (which we clearly do not now), the most obvious place would be to tax the people who profited most from the bubble, the Wall Street crew.

A tax on financial speculation could easily raise more than $100 billion a year. Congress could also instruct the Federal Reserve Board to hold onto the $3 trillion in assets that it has acquired as part of its quantitative easing program. This could save the government more than $100 billion a year in interest payments later in the decade. In short, it is not difficult to find money for people who are not afraid of going after the rich and powerful.

Beezer here.  Of course the average NYT reader, including most NYT editorialists, obviously don’t read Baker.  Too bad.  If they did we’d have a much better handle on ways to create jobs and pay down deficits/debt.  That said, we disagree with Baker’s viewpoint that short term effects of infrastructure projects would not amount to significant hiring.  Baker, as do many others, underappreciate how quickly jobs appear when programs are announced and funded.   Baker underestimates the amount of work needed before these projects begin construction.