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Social spending and poverty

June 7, 2010

It’s commonly thought that a market-liberal political economy is best for the rich while a social-democratic one is best for the poor. Some recent research suggests reason to question this. Analyses by Willem Adema of the OECD, by Adema and Maxime Ladaique, and by Price Fishback conclude that the quantity of social expenditures in the United States is similar to or greater than in Denmark and Sweden, two nations long considered large-welfare-state exemplars.*

How so? Government social transfers account for a much larger share of GDP in Sweden and Denmark. But the U.S. government distributes more benefits in the form of tax breaks rather than transfers than do the two Nordic countries; Denmark and Sweden tax back a larger portion of public transfers than the United States does; private social expenditures, such as those on employment-based health insurance and pensions, are greater in the U.S.; and America’s per capita GDP is larger.

The standard indicator of social policy effort is gross public social expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Denmark and Sweden are much higher than the United States on this measure.

Now shift to net (rather than gross) public and private (rather than public alone) expenditures per person (rather than as a percentage of GDP, with purchasing power parities used to convert Danish and Swedish kroner into U.S. dollars). According to the calculations by Adema and Ladaique (Fishback’s are similar), we get a very different picture. By this measure the U.S. is the biggest spender.

This looks like good news for the poor in the United States. Is it? Unfortunately, no. These adjustments change the story with respect to the aggregate quantity of resources spent on social protection in the three countries, but they have limited bearing on redistribution and on the living standards of the poor.

Begin with tax breaks. Researchers count as “social” those designed to provide support in circumstances that adversely affect people’s well-being. In the United States these disproportionately go to the affluent and the middle class. The chief ones are tax advantages for employer and employee contributions to private health insurance and private pensions. These do little to help people at the low end of the distribution, who often work for employers that don’t provide health or retirement benefits. One valuable tax benefit for low-income households is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), but it is already included in the standard OECD data on government social expenditures. Another is the child tax credit, but it is non-refundable and so of limited value to low-income households, many of whom don’t owe any federal income tax.

Next consider tax “clawbacks” in the Nordic countries. Public transfer programs in Denmark and Sweden tend to be “universal” in design: a large share of the population is eligible for the benefit. This is thought to boost public support for such programs. But it renders them very expensive. To make them more affordable, the government claws back some of the benefit by taxing it as though it were regular income. All countries do this, including the United States, but the Nordic countries do it more extensively. Does that hurt their poor? Very little. The tax rates tend to increase with household income, so much of the tax clawback hits middle- and upper-income households.

What’s the impact of private social spending? In the U.S. this accounts for roughly two-fifths of all social expenditures. It consists mainly of employer contributions to health insurance and employment-based pension benefits. Here too the picture changes a great deal on average, but not much for the poor. Employer-based health insurance and pension plans reach few low-income households.

So how well-off are the poor in the United States, with its “hidden welfare state,” compared to social-democratic Denmark and Sweden? One measure is average posttransfer-posttax (“disposable”) income among households in the bottom decile of the income distribution. Here are my calculations using the best available comparative data, from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). (The numbers are adjusted for household size. They refer to a household with a single adult. For a family of four, multiply by two.)

This is a pretty big difference, not in America’s favor.

In his paper, Fishback cites similar numbers from the OECD. He cautions, though, that “One advantage the poor Americans would have had in spending their disposable income is that they face consumption tax rates in the 4 to 7 percent range, while consumption taxes in the Nordic countries are above 20 percent.” Actually, consumption tax rates are incorporated in the purchasing power parities (PPPs) used to convert incomes to a common currency, so these income figures already adjust for differences in consumption taxes.

What’s the source of this cross-country difference in the incomes of low-end households? It’s entirely a function of government transfers. Again using the LIS data, I’ve calculated mid-2000s averages for households in the bottom income decile for the three chief sources of household income: earnings, net government transfers (transfers received minus taxes paid), and “other” income (money from family or friends, alimony, etc.). Average earnings are virtually identical across the three countries, at about $2,500. The same is true for “other” income, which averages around $500 in each of the three. Where bottom-decile Danish and Swedish households fare much better than their American counterparts is in net government transfers:

Fishback rightly points to one other key difference between these countries: “Public services not counted in disposable income, like health care and education, likely are better for the very poor in the Nordic countries than in the United States.” It’s difficult to measure the impact of services on living standards with any precision. One indirect way to assess their effect is to switch from income to material deprivation. Two OECD researchers, Romina Boarini and Marco Mira d’Ercole, have compiled material deprivation data from surveys in various rich nations as of the mid-2000s. Each of the surveys asked identical or very similar questions about seven indicators of material hardship: inability to adequately heat one’s home, constrained food choices, overcrowding, poor environmental conditions (e.g., noise, pollution), arrears in payment of utility bills, arrears in mortgage or rent payment, and difficulty in making ends meet. Boarini and Mira d’Ercole create a summary measure of deprivation by averaging, for each country, the shares of the population reporting deprivation on questions in each of these seven areas.

Government services — medical care, child care, housing, transportation, and so on — reduce material hardship directly. They also free up income to be spent on other needs. The comparative data, though by no means perfect, are consistent with the hypothesis that public services help the poor more in the Nordic countries than in the United States. The gap between the countries in material deprivation is larger than in low-end incomes.

Helping the poor is not, of course, the only thing we want from social spending. But it surely is one thing. The United States spends more money on social protection than is often thought, yet that spending doesn’t do nearly as much to help America’s poor as we might like.

For those interested, I’m finishing up a book manuscript that looks at this issue and related ones in more detail.

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* Related research: Adema, Garfinkel-Rainwater-Smeeding, Hacker, Howard . Blog commentary: Fishback, Salam, Schulz, Wilkinson, Yglesias.

Posted in Abroad, Poverty, Social policy | 8 Comments »

Should progressives oppose the health-care reform bill?

January 6, 2010

Why would a progressive oppose the health-care reform bill that’s now on the table? Three main reasons have been offered.

One is that the bill will require (most) people to have health insurance. This means some low-income Americans, those who don’t get health insurance from their employer or from the government (Medicaid or Medicare), will have to buy insurance from a private insurer. They’ll receive a subsidy to help offset the cost, but for most the subsidy will be only partial; a new insurance policy may cost a family as much as 8% of its income. Thus, the argument goes, these people will be worse off.

I don’t see the logic in this. Unless you’re a libertarian, I’m not sure why you’d believe forcing people to spend money on something that’s in their self-interest — and calculations show that it clearly is in the interest of those who need health-care services — makes them worse off. Think of the Social Security and Medicare tax. It amounts to forced savings of nearly 8% of earnings — perhaps twice that, since the portion employers contribute arguably comes out of pay. But there is a benefit that outweighs the cost: guaranteed income and health care during retirement years, plus the accompanying peace of mind.

A second argument against the health-care reform bill is that health insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms will benefit. But opposing the bill on the grounds that it will benefit the already-powerful amounts to prioritizing equality over the well-being of America’s poor and lower middle-class (and others too, since the reform will sharply limit insurers’ ability to refuse or restrict insurance to people with preexisting conditions or greater likelihood of illness).

Here I think progressives ought to turn to John Rawls, the most influential moral philosopher of the past century. Rawls’s full view of justice is complex, and I won’t attempt to explicate it here. (There’s a nice summary in chapter 6 of Michael Sandel’s new book Justice.) The key point is that we ought to care more about the absolute well-being of the poorest than about the gap between the rich and the poor or between the powerful and the powerless. Rawls didn’t feel inequality is irrelevant, but he argued that it is secondary. This, he suggested, is what we all would believe if we thought about it carefully enough. I think he’s right.

The third reason for opposing the bill is a belief that it can be replaced by a better one in the not-too-distant future. Unfortunately, as many commentators have pointed out (Hacker, Klein, Krugman, Skocpol, Starr), experience suggests that is very unlikely.

Posted in Health, Social policy | 22 Comments »

The conscience of a modern conservative

November 11, 2009

“In my opinion, we are past the point where tax cuts can fix what ails us. Large tax increases will be necessary to pay for all the promises that have been made. Instead of opposing them entirely, conservatives should use their insights to design a new tax system better able to raise higher revenues at the least possible cost in terms of economic growth and freedom.” That is Bruce Bartlett in his book The New American Economy. It’s a surprising message coming from a leading supply-side advocate of the 1980s, though it won’t shock anyone who has followed Bartlett’s print and online writings over the past few years.

Bartlett argues that successful economic policies tend to be effective only in a specific set of circumstances. Their success, however, encourages supporters to believe their applicability is universal. Eventually they get overused, prove counterproductive, fall out of favor, and get replaced by new ideas.

This, according to Bartlett, is the story of both Keynesianism and supply-side economics. Keynes was a pragmatist. His recommendation to use fiscal policy to stimulate the economy was formulated in response to the conditions of the Great Depression. It worked. But then, in Bartlett’s telling, it came to be viewed as an appropriate remedy for all economic downturns. By the 1970s overuse of fiscal stimulus contributed to inflation without reducing unemployment. This led to its abandonment by many economists and policy makers.

Bartlett tells a parallel tale about supply-side economics. Its core thesis is that if marginal tax rates are too high, they discourage innovation, investment, and work effort. Bartlett says this was the situation in the 1970s. The Reagan administration’s sharp reduction of marginal rates in its 1981 and 1986 tax reforms was therefore effective medicine for the American economy. It “laid the foundation for higher real growth well into the 1990s.” But like the use of budget deficits to fight recession, the supply-side strategy of reducing tax rates came to be seen by its backers as an all-purpose cure — the appropriate tonic irrespective of the economy’s ailment.

The chief economic problem we now face, in Bartlett’s view, is not high marginal tax rates. It is the aging of baby boomers to whom we have made Medicare and Social Security commitments. Absent “massive and politically impossible cuts,” this will cause federal government expenditures to rise from 20% of GDP to around 30% over the coming generation. Supply-side dogma leaves Republicans ill-prepared for this challenge. “When the crunch comes and the need for a major increase in revenue becomes overwhelming,” says Bartlett, “I expect that Republicans will refuse to participate in the process. If Democrats have to raise taxes with no bipartisan support, then they will have no choice but to cater to the demands of their party’s most liberal wing. This will mean higher rates on businesses and entrepreneurs, and soak-the-rich policies that would make Franklin D. Roosevelt blush.”

A better result, according to Bartlett, would be to bring government revenues into line with projected expenditures via a value-added tax (VAT), a type of consumption tax. Heavy use of VATs is a key reason, he says, why “many European countries have tax/GDP ratios far higher than here without suffering particularly ill effects. They may not be growing as fast as they would if taxes and spending were lower, but neither are their standards of living significantly below those of the United States. Even strenuous efforts to show that Europeans are poorer than Americans show that the differences are merely trivial.”

I agree with a good bit of what Bartlett says in the book, and I’m particularly sympathetic to this diagnosis and prescription (see here and here). It’s a long way from Barry Goldwater, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan.

I wish Bartlett had gone further. If modern conservatism is by necessity “big-government” conservatism, what principles should guide it? If conservatives must give up the goal of rolling back the welfare state, if they must acquiesce to government provision of generous cushions and supports, what should they aim for in economic and social policy? David Brooks, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, Will Wilkinson, Ron Haskins and Isabell Sawhill, and others have weighed in on this question. I’d be interested to know Bartlett’s take.

Some likely candidates:

A tax system conducive to entrepreneurship, investment, and work (Bartlett’s emphasis)

Employment incentives for able working-age adults

Enhancement of individual opportunity: early intervention, improvements to K-12 schools

Limited regulation of product and labor markets

Competition and choice in public services: charter schools, vouchers for schools and child care, maybe even a public option in health insurance

Decentralized administration of public services to ensure attentiveness to local conditions

Privatization of services where possible

Benefits and services targeted at the most needy rather than the middle class

Data. Many conservatives believe the poor are better off — more affluent and upwardly mobile — than government statistics and social scientists’ analyses tend to suggest. Why not allocate money for a large high-quality panel survey (something like a PSID on steroids) that will allow us to better assess this claim?

As it happens, we have a real-world illustration, albeit on a small scale, of what much of this — all of it except heavy privatization and targeting — looks like. It looks like this.

Posted in Book reviews, Economic policy, Social policy, Taxes | 5 Comments »

“The tyranny of dead ideas”

May 4, 2009

Matt Miller’s new book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, is very good. I agree with a great deal of what he has to say. On what Miller thinks is our most important problem, though, the book falls a little short.

Here’s a brief summary of what Miller suggests are six influential but misleading ideas, why they’re wrong, and what we should do:

1. Taxes hurt the economy, and they’re always too high

It’s time, says Miller, to stop pretending that federal tax revenues can remain at their current level, much less be reduced. Rising costs of Medicare (and eventually Social Security) alone will require increases. And real solutions to the myriad other problems we face necessitate further increase. Even (honest) conservatives acknowledge this, though few are willing to do so publicly. “Once this rendezvous with reality trickles down from conservative intellectuals to pols, and liberals find the courage to say the obvious, we’ll start the debate we need: not about whether taxes should go up, but given that taxes are going up, what’s the best way to fund the government we want, consistent with strong economic growth and other vital goals such as saving the planet?” (p. 183).

Miller’s answer is a value-added tax (VAT) and a carbon tax. On the former, “liberals will find that they can offset the regressive tilt of a VAT in several ways: first, by using it to fund progressive programs (like universal health coverage); second, by using a fraction of the proceeds to boost subsidies to the working poor; or third, by exempting certain basic necessities from the tax” (p. 186). I agree.

2. Your company should take care of you

Structuring our health insurance system around employers was reasonable once upon a time, but these days it’s asinine. It results in bloated health care expenditures, inadequate coverage, and an excessive cost burden on firms. This role needs to be shifted to government. Yes.

3. Free trade is “good,” no matter how many people get hurt

The fact that free trade is good for Americans on average doesn’t mean that it’s good for all Americans. Some lose their jobs, and some experience stagnant or falling wages. The answer isn’t protectionism; that would hurt lots of people in developing nations who are far poorer than we are. Instead, we need “a new formulation: that free trade is good, provided we have protections in place to make people feel sufficiently secure in a time of rapid economic change. This means health care and pension security that aren’t tied to a job that can suddenly disappear. It means broader trade adjustment assistance, job retraining, and wage insurance that keeps offshoring from being a catastrophe for affected families” (p. 60). Good.

I think Miller is wrong, however, on an important tactical question. He says politicians should not commit to any further expansion of trade until these protections are in place (p. 60). I disagree.

4. Schools are a local matter

Our decentralized educational system, in which administration and funding of public elementary and secondary schools are primarily local responsibilities, does a disservice to virtually all students, but particularly to those living in districts that are poor and/or have overly intrusive school boards. We need enhanced federal government spending, mainly to raise the salaries of good teachers, and imposition of nationwide performance standards. I like this too.

5. The kids will earn more than we do

For most of the period since World War II, Americans have taken it for granted that income would grow steadily across generations. But new technologies facilitate the automation of more and more jobs, and globalization encourages the offshoring of others. In the past generation many kids have ended up with incomes no higher than their parents’, and in Miller’s view this is likely to continue.

Part of the answer, he ways, is technology, which continuously reduces prices, improving living standards for the middle class and the poor even as their incomes stagnate or decline. Beyond that lie changes in our preferences: “The economic challenges ahead will spark a renaissance of interest in less material sources of meaning and happiness, and for many a flight from the consumer culture altogether…. Time with friends and loved ones will become more cherished. The craving for community will deepen. And curiosities like today’s nascent ‘slow movement,’ which cheerleads for (among other things) longer meals savored with loved ones and a quieter pace of life in general, will expand from a niche lifestyle to a broader force in the culture” (pp. 202-03). Again good, though I would add that expansion and improvement of public services can help to push up the floor of consumption and experience.

6. Money follows merit

Traditionally, Americans haven’t gotten too worked up about high levels of income inequality because they’ve believed that the big paychecks go to those who contribute the most. But when CEOs of companies whose stock price has fallen through the floor walk away with $25 million severance packages and financial players run the economy into the ground yet rake in mammoth bonuses, things clearly have gone awry. Miller says frustration is likely to be especially pronounced among highly-educated professionals who, for reasons that seemingly have nothing to do with merit or societal contribution, bring home a mere $150,000 a year instead of $15 million.

Inequality is a major problem, in Miller’s view. Indeed, he says it is “the preeminent economic issue of the twenty-first century” (pp. 146, 148).

Here’s what he believes these “lower uppers,” and more broadly we as a society, will and should do:

Now that their second-tier status is awakening them to the fragility of ‘merit’ as the source of their self-esteem and as the basis for where they ‘deserve’ to stand in society, Lower Uppers will start seeing luck’s hand elsewhere. They’ll see it not only in their own story or in the fate of the ultrarich above them, but in the destiny of millions of their countrymen, now buffeted and struggling with rapid economic change. They’ll be open to fresh appeals about what these powerful forces outside people’s control should mean for society’s basic arrangements. As a result they’ll become stronger voices for equal opportunity, and for some set of minimal protections appropriate for a wealthy nation like the United States. Like their Progressive Era predecessors … they’ll also see justice (and take satisfaction) in asking the ultrarich to kick a little more into the pot to make this happen. (pp. 195-96)

Compared to Miller’s other proposals, this is pretty vague. One of the things I like most about Miller’s earlier book, The Two-Percent Solution, is that he picked a small set of problems and offered specific proposals for what to do. To some extent that is true of The Tyranny of Dead Ideas as well. Miller gives us concrete numbers for what the federal government’s contribution to school expenditures should be and for what share of GDP tax revenues will need to rise to, and he tells us what specific programs will help to cushion the impact of globalization. But here, on this “preeminent issue,” detail is absent.

This omission is even more problematic because though Miller advocates higher taxes on those with top incomes, in a prior chapter he offers a caution: “Some suggest … we eliminate the cap on the amount of earnings subjected to the 12.4 percent payroll tax, so that it would apply to a person’s entire income. While at first blush this step might seem fair, if it were done in addition to proposals to return marginal income tax rates to the 39.6 percent that prevailed under President Clinton, it would effectively boost marginal rates beyond 50 percent — and this would be before high tax states and localities add what could be another 7 to 10 percent. You don’t need to be a Reagan Republican to think that marginal income tax rates at these levels would have negative economic effects” (p. 185).

It isn’t easy to figure out exactly what the tax rate should be on high-income households, or what programs would be most useful in boosting the living standards of those in the lower half of the income distribution. I wish Miller, whose policy thinking tends to be both interesting and level-headed, had made more of an attempt. It’s a small scar on what’s otherwise a very helpful book.

Posted in Book reviews, Inequality, Living standards, Social policy | 2 Comments »

Reducing inequality: expand and improve public services

April 16, 2009

How do we boost the incomes of Americans in the lower half (or two-thirds) of the distribution? I’ve discussed what I think are some helpful and some probably-not-so-helpful proposals. But our focus shouldn’t be exclusively on income. The well-being of lower- and middle-class Americans can be improved markedly by enhanced provision of government services.

Service use (consumption) doesn’t show up in income statistics. But services matter for living standards. If I have two kids in a public school that spends about $10,000 per year per child, I’m receiving the equivalent of a government transfer of $20,000. Other public services and public spaces — health care, child care, policing, transportation, roads, parks, libraries, and so on — have the same property. So too does free time funded or mandated by government via holidays and paid parental leave.

When provided by government at little or no cost to users, these services are akin to a transfer given in equal dollar amounts to all individuals or households. Our tax system is roughly flat: households at different points in the income distribution pay approximately the same share of their market (pretransfer-pretax) income in taxes. But a flat tax rate means those with high incomes pay many more dollars in taxes than do poor households. If the value of the government services the rich and poor use is roughly the same in dollars, then the tax-services system overall is quite redistributive. Here’s a way to see this, using tax payment data for 2004 and hypothetical data for consumption of public services:

Some services charge user fees that are structured progressively; those with higher incomes pay more. This makes the tax-services system even more redistributive. Financial aid means this is true for public (and many private) colleges here in the U.S., though we could go much farther. In Denmark and Sweden, fees for child care are scaled according to household income.

Imagine an America in which high-quality public services raise the consumption floor to a high level: most citizens can put their kids in high-quality child care followed by good public schooling and affordable access to a good college; they have access to good health care throughout life; they can get to or near work on clean and efficient public transportation or roads with limited congestion; they enjoy clean and safe neighborhoods, parks, roads, museums, libraries, and other public spaces; they have low-cost access to information, communication, and entertainment via reliable high-speed broadband; they have four weeks of paid vacation each year, an additional week or so of paid sickness leave, and a year of paid family leave to care for a child or other needy relative. Even if the degree of income inequality were no less than today and we still had CEOs, financiers, and entertainers raking in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year, that society would be markedly less unequal than our current one.

It’s worth emphasizing that markets too boost the consumption floor. New technologies and consumer products — indoor plumbing, cars, air conditioning, cell phones, ipods, and many others — have eventually become affordable for even the least well-off, and in doing so they reduce inequality of living standards. But markets haven’t, and likely won’t, bring us affordability coupled with high quality in health care, education, child care, safety, and mass ground transportation. In these and other areas, government is needed.

The United States provides less in the way of public services than many other rich countries, but we nevertheless have a rich history here, from universal elementary and secondary education to the interstate highway system to the internet. There’s a legacy to build on, and good reason to do so.

Posted in Inequality, Social policy | 3 Comments »

Reducing inequality: boosting incomes in the bottom half

April 16, 2009

So far in this series of posts on reducing income inequality in America I’ve said that it would be good if there were less inequality, that greater unionization might help but probably isn’t in the cards (even if EFCA becomes law), that more and better education would be a good thing but isn’t likely to make much of a dent in the inequality problem, and that curtailing globalization is a bad choice for progressives even if it would help a lot. So what should we do?

Recall that there are two key components of the rise in inequality: slow income growth in the lower half (or two-thirds) of the distribution and soaring incomes at the top. Let’s start with the first of these two. I think a key component of an effective and politically feasible strategy is an enhanced statutory minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

This year the minimum wage will increase to $7.25 per hour. I’d like to see it raised again in 2010, to $8.00. A more important change is to index the minimum wage to inflation. As the following chart shows, since the late 1970s the minimum wage has been allowed to languish for lengthy periods with no increase, resulting in large declines in its inflation-adjusted value. With increases in 2007, 2008, and 2009, it will be at a reasonably high level compared to the past three decades, though still below its late-1960s peak. Raising it to $8.00/hour and keeping it at that value would be a significant step in the right direction.

Is $8.00 an hour high enough? It’s difficult to tell. Two considerations make me inclined to prioritize locking in something like that level rather than aiming for a larger increase right away. The first is jobs. Opponents of raising the minimum wage often contend that any increase will produce employment declines. Our experience with past increases suggests little support for this notion, but it’s equally wrong to presume there won’t be an adverse employment effect no matter how high the minimum wage. Surely there is some level that is too high. This argues for incremental upward adjustment from a stable floor. Second, proponents of a sizable increase in the minimum often point out how inadequate it is given the cost of living in certain parts of the country. That’s quite true, but it’s probably better addressed by state and local governments stepping in with their own higher statutory minimums, as a growing number have done over the past decade.

An expanded Earned Income Tax Credit would be similarly helpful for low- and middle-income Americans. The EITC is a terrific policy: it boosts the incomes of low-earning households, it encourages employment, it has low administrative costs, it creates minimal stigma for recipients, and it’s indexed to inflation. Currently the maximum value of the credit is about $5,000, available to households with two children and with earnings between $12,500 and $19,500. It then declines steadily until it reaches zero at around $43,000 in earnings. For households with one child the credit is lower, and for those with no children it is quite small. A chart showing the current level and structure of the credit is available from the Tax Policy Center.

I’d like to see the EITC look something more like this:

This EITC would extend well into what most of us think of as the middle class. It wouldn’t provide a lot to those with earnings above $50,000, but it would help. Phasing out the credit more rapidly (making the slope of the line on the right side steeper) risks creating work disincentives. Moreover, there’s a potential political advantage to including those with higher incomes. When the middle class uses the same programs as the poor, it tends to be more supportive of those programs; the “us” versus “them” mentality that weakens support for social policy is likely to have less political bite. This EITC expansion would not be cheap. I’ll say a bit about how to pay for it in a future post.

With these changes in the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit, a single adult working full-time year-round at minimum wage would have an income — earnings plus EITC — of approximately $19,000, compared to 15,500 under current policy. A family of four with two minimum wage earners would have an income of about $38,500, compared to $32,500 currently. That’s not a full solution to the inequality challenge, but it’s a good start.

Posted in Inequality, Social policy | 2 Comments »

Why Embrace Economic Change?

April 6, 2008

I suggested in an earlier post that it would be good if leading Democrats encouraged Americans to embrace economic change. Doing so would increase the political feasibility of putting in place a policy package that enhances economic security and promotes mobility.

I want to try to spell out the argument a little more clearly and elaborate a bit.

The argument

1. Economic globalization tends to benefit Americans as consumers. We get to choose from a wider array of products and services, and the increased competition among firms tends to reduce the prices we pay.

2. Economic globalization also benefits some Americans as workers. The prices their employers pay for inputs are lower, and the number of customers is larger. Both may increase employment and/or wages.

3. Economic globalization hurts some Americans as workers. Some lose their job; others experience stagnant or falling wages.

4. Access to the U.S. market tends to benefit citizens in poor countries, in the form of more jobs at higher wages. This is good for Americans on both altruistic and self-interested grounds.

5. It is economically and politically wise to have government policies in place that help those hurt by globalization to adjust. These include unemployment insurance, portable pensions and health insurance, retraining, job placement assistance, wage insurance, infrastructure improvement for hard-hit communities, and a higher and inflation-adjusted minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit. In addition, government can support job creation via a large-scale investment in renewable energy and/or an employer subsidy. By compensating the losers, these policies make globalization win-win. And in doing so, they lessen opposition.

6. Technological advance has properties similar to globalization; it tends to benefit us as consumers and some of us as workers, but it also hurts some of us as workers. So too does the ability to move, buy, and sell across state borders within the United States.

7. The policies described in #5 are just as appropriate for those hurt by technological change or internal economic movement as for those hurt by globalization. We would want these policies even if there were no cross-country trade or offshoring at all.

8. These policies are likely to be easier to sell politically if framed as a response to all forms of economic change, including globalization.

9. We already have most of these policies, but they are inadequate in coverage, funding, and coordination.

10. Part of the reason these programs are inadequate is that debate about economic globalization tends to get stuck on the question of free trade vs. managed trade. Three groups have an interest in framing the debate in these terms. One is Republicans who find it helpful to argue that Democrats are protectionist and therefore against the interests of American as consumers. The second is lobbyists for firms that stand to benefit from protection. The third group is people who work in manufacturing and offshorable services. They hope that blocking trade and offshoring will help protect their jobs. Democrats want their votes and hence often say they’ll address globalization in part by restricting it.

Regardless of whether the proposed restrictions are relatively minor (minimal labor and/or environmental standards) or extensive, once this door is opened it almost inevitably takes center stage in the debate. Far less attention, if any, gets devoted to the adjustment and cushioning side. As a result, the political constituency and momentum for these policies tend to be far smaller than they could be.

11. For Democrats, it might not be harmful politically to shift toward a position that embraces economic change — in other words, that forgoes managed trade. Democrats could then ask voters whether they prefer globalization and technological advance with less government help (the Republican position) or with more. But even if it hurts them politically in the short run, an approach that focuses on responding to globalization via adjustment and cushioning rather than managed trade is, in my view, the right thing for Democrats to do.

12. This does not mean Democrats ought to rule out trade restrictions altogether. What it means is that they should leave them off the list, or put them at the very bottom, of strategies for addressing job loss and wage stagnation. And labor and environmental standards should be discussed mainly in the context of foreign and/or environmental policy, rather than trade policy.

A couple of examples

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In campaigning in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Clinton and Obama have criticized trade agreements such as NAFTA for contributing to American job losses. What’s ironic is that the leading economic advisers to both candidates — Austan Goolsbee for Obama and Gene Sperling for Clinton — are known to have different views about how to approach economic globalization. I’m not sure whether the candidates’ positions are due to the closeness of the campaign or to a genuine difference between them and their advisers (more on this here, here, and here). Either way, I’m afraid there will be little significant advance in pursuing the policy agenda highlighted in point 5 above until leading Democrats move away from the managed trade approach to globalization.

Jared Bernstein. I’ve just read Jared Bernstein’s book All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy. It’s full of compelling analysis and argument. On addressing the challenge of globalization, he offers a three-pronged proposal (pp. 72-77). One is help with adjustment. A second is a proactive strategy to create new jobs. These are both terrific. The third, though, is to more actively manage our trade arrangements, mainly in the form of imposing conditions on our trading partners — “some degree of labor standards and honesty in exchange rates.” There is nothing wrong with this per se. But once managed trade is introduced as an option, it ends up crowding out discussion of other approaches.

Okay, but …

They don’t really mean it. Neither Obama nor Clinton is likely to press for serious restrictions on trade or offshoring if elected president. This holds for most Democrats running for Congress too. But that isn’t the point. Even if they did follow through on a managed trade agenda, it probably wouldn’t have much impact on actual import levels. Pacts such as NAFTA seldom dramatically alter the degree of cross-border trade; had it not passed, imports from Mexico would not be much lower than they are today. The problem isn’t that managed trade rhetoric might lead to actual trade restrictions; it’s that it distracts from efforts to advance the scope and generosity of adjustment and cushioning policies.

Are there really net gains to Americans from globalization? I think the evidence leans heavily in favor of believing so, but some reasonable analysts are skeptical. Even if this skeptical view were correct, though, I doubt that trade restrictions would do nearly as much good for Americans as a generous set of cushioning and adjustment policies.

We need the cushions in place first, before agreeing to forgo trade restrictions. This is a reasonable notion in the abstract. But it traps us in an unproductive loop. Insisting that the cushions come first reduces the chance we’ll get them. And round and round we go.

I might be wrong about the impact of restrictionist rhetoric on the politics of social policy. My argument rests on a hypothesis that Democratic leaders’ trade rhetoric has a significant effect on the political feasibility of more generous and extensive social policies. I could be wrong about this. But given that any trade restrictions they might actually put in place would probably do little to stem globalization, it seems to me the potential costs of abandoning managed trade rhetoric are likely small.

More reading

Here are links to some of my favorite writing on this issue:

Alan Blinder, Offshoring: the next industrial revolution?

Brad DeLong, Free vs. fair trade

James Galbraith, Why populists need to rethink trade

Nicholas Kristof, Inviting all Democrats

Paul Krugman, Pop internationalism

Paul Krugman, In praise of cheap labor

Paul Krugman, Divided over trade

Paul Krugman, Trade and wages, reconsidered

Robert Reich, Hillary and Barack, afta Nafta

Dani Rodrik, Has globalization gone too far?

Gene Sperling, The pro-growth progressive

Gene Sperling, Rising tide economics

Joseph Stiglitz, Making globalization work (ch. 3)

Mark Thoma and others, Helping the losers from globalization

Posted in Globalization, Social policy | 4 Comments »

Embrace Economic Change

March 2, 2008

Change has been the dominant theme of this presidential campaign. Barack Obama’s mantra has proved extremely popular among voters, so much so that other candidates in both parties have signed on.

The change they’ve embraced is political change. When it comes to economic change, enthusiasm is decidedly more muted. Many Americans would be happy with a change in our economic policies. But the notion that we should get used to — and perhaps even welcome — continuous, regular economic change is a tougher sell. This is particularly evident with respect to globalization. To many, change isn’t terribly appealing if it refers to more imports and outsourcing. For them this type of change equals disappearing jobs and smaller paychecks.

Globalization — much like technological advance, another key form of economic change — clearly does result in job loss and falling real wages for some Americans. Researchers disagree about the magnitude of the damage (see here). Some say it is tiny; others view it as small but growing; others conclude it is already large.

Yet on the whole economic globalization is a good thing. We benefit as consumers by having greater choice and paying lower prices. Citizens in other countries, especially poor ones, benefit from greater access to jobs and rising wages. The latter is beneficial not just on altruistic grounds. It is in Americans’ self-interest for poor countries to get richer. As countries develop economically they are more likely to become democratic, and to stay democratic. And democratic countries are less likely to attack one another. Also, as citizens in poor nations become richer they will be able to buy more goods and services produced here.

Yes, there are exceptions. But in the aggregate the advantages of globalization for Americans outweigh the costs. That, rather than because they are acting at the behest of corporate lobbyists, is the main reason why many Democrats are favorably disposed toward globalization.

Too often, though, they don’t talk that way. Especially when campaigning in states like Ohio, where large numbers of residents have lost a job in recent years or fear that may happen soon, Democratic candidates tend to say less about the benefits of economic change and more about the shortcomings of trade agreements such as NAFTA.

This is understandable as an election tactic. And on one view, it is largely innocuous. David Leonhardt of the New York Times aptly likens Democrats’ orientation toward globalization to the way many Republicans approach abortion: strong oppositional rhetoric during the campaign primaries, but little action once in office. If political leaders campaign against globalization but their later policy choices tend not to impede it, why worry?

The reason is that if leading Democrats instead were to advocate that we embrace economic change, they could stimulate a thorough discussion about, and likely generate greater public support for, policies that compensate for the adverse consequences of that change.

Most Americans who worry about globalization are not dead set against economic change. They just want government to do something to help. And government can do something. It can broaden eligibility for unemployment insurance. It can make benefits like pensions and health insurance more portable. It can help offset the cost of retraining and relocation. It can assist with job placement. It can offer wage insurance to limit income loss if getting a new job entails a pay cut. It can invest in infrastructure improvement to help rebuild hard-hit communities. It can gradually increase the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit. (More discussion here, here, here, and here.)

None of these policies would be inordinately expensive. None would require massive interference with markets. Each has considerable merit in its own right. And each would help to make globalization, technological advance, and other forms of economic change win-win.

But for this type of policy approach to make real headway in our political debate, we need our most visible political leaders to encourage us to embrace change.

Posted in Globalization, Social policy | 11 Comments »

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