Why scrapping NAFTA would be Trump’s big gift to China

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I was in Mexico Thursday seeing the Mexican president, foreign minister and finance minister and addressing a convention of bankers. The only subjects anyone is interested is the future of NAFTA and U.S. Mexican relations.

I came to Mexico from Beijing, and so I was able to report that there was no greater strategic gift the United States could give China than to abrogate NAFTA and rupture the North American community.

In narrow commercial terms right now, Mexican goods enter the United States on a preferred basis relative to Asian goods. This preference would disappear with NAFTA suspension. Furthermore about 70 percent of Mexican exports are of goods that are not finished but are inputs to further U.S. production. Anything that hurts Mexico therefore hurts us in global economic competition with China.

There is a further, even more important, strategic dimension. As illustrated by the more than $60 billion China has poured into Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, China would regard opportunities to ally with a hard-left anti-American government as strategic windfalls. What better than a country of 130 million people with a 2,000 mile border with the United States? Every Mexican with whom I spoke said that the risk of Mexico electing a Chávezlike government had gone way up in recent months on account of American disrespect and truculence.

China apart, NAFTA strengthens the U.S. economy. U.S. tariffs without NAFTA would average less than 3 percent, so repeal would not greatly reduce protection. Indeed by undermining the peso, U.S. challenges to NAFTA have led to an effective 10 to 15 percent subsidy on all Mexican goods. There is the further point that the United States competes more effectively globally with access to low-cost Mexican inputs. More than two-thirds of our imports from Mexico are inputs to further U.S. processing.

There is a silver lining in all the fuss over NAFTA — it needs updating. Digital trade didn’t exist in 1993. Thinking has shifted on the need to assure that trade agreements are in worker interests. This means more emphasis on labor standards and more need to ensure that dispute settlement systems do not overly empower corporate interests. Most important, with more competition from Asia and with the increased sophistication of the Mexican economy, there is a strong case for strengthened rules of origin that enhance North American manufacturing.

Changes along these lines may have an “America first” aspect but they are also in Mexico’s interest. They are the right way forward.

It is also essential that the United States and Mexico find a way forward on immigration. A wall is a 19th-century response to a 21st-century concern. I’m told that most illegal immigration does not take place through people crossing open borders in the desert — the only thing a wall could address. Rather it takes place through illegal entry at legal checkpoints as people are smuggled in in freight containers and the like. This will be unaffected by a wall. Technology, data science, enhanced collaboration, and cooperation with respect to Central America are much better ways to resist illegal immigration flows. They are also much more likely to strengthen our alliance with our most populous neighbor.

 

Robots are wealth creators and taxing them is illogical

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March 5, 2017

Governments can offset lost jobs by investing in education and retraining

I usually agree with Bill Gates on matters of public policy and admire his emphasis on the combined power of markets and technology. But I think he went seriously astray in a recent interview when he proposed, without apparent irony, a tax on robots to cushion worker dislocation and limit inequality.

The Microsoft co-founder is right about the gravity of the problem and need for action, but he is profoundly misguided in his proposed solution – and in ways that point up problems with the current public debate.

First, I cannot see any logic to singling out robots as job destroyers. What about kiosks that dispense aeroplane boarding passes? Word processing programmes that accelerate the production of documents? Mobile banking technologies? Autonomous vehicles? Vaccines that, by preventing disease, destroy jobs in medicine?

There are many kinds of innovation that allow the production of more or better output with less labour input. Why pick on robots? Does Mr Gates think anyone, let alone the US Congress, the Trump administration or a commission comprised of his fellow technocrats, can distinguish labour-saving activities from labour-enhancing ones?

Surely even if experts could draw such distinctions, the ability of the US Internal Revenue Service to administer them is in doubt.

Second, much innovative activity, even of a robot-like variety, involves producing better goods and services rather than simply extracting more output from the same input.

Autonomous vehicles, for example, will probably be safer than ones driven by humans. Robotics already help surgeons perform certain operations better than they can on their own. Online reservation systems are faster and more convenient than travel agents.

Moreover, because of emulation and competition, innovators capture only a small part of the benefit of their innovation. It follows that there is as much a case for subsidising as taxing types of capital that embody innovation.

Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, why tax in ways that reduce the size of the pie rather than ways that assure that the larger pie is well distributed? Imagine that 50 people can produce robots who will do the work of 100. A sufficiently high tax on robots would prevent them from being produced.

Surely it would be better for society to instead enjoy the extra output and establish suitable taxes and transfers to protect displaced workers?

It is hard to see why shrinking the pie, rather than enlarging it as much as possible and then redistributing, is the right way forward.

This last point has long been standard in international trade theory. Indeed, it is common to point out that opening a country up to international trade is just like giving it access to a technology for transforming one good into another. The argument, then, is that since one surely would not regard such a technical change as bad, neither is trade, and so protectionism is bad. Mr Gates’ robot tax risks essentially being protectionism against progress.

None of this is to minimise the problem of job destruction and rising inequality (although it is a major paradox that we seem to be seeing unprecedentedly rapid job destruction by machinery while at the same time observing extraordinarily low productivity growth).

Rather, it is to suggest that staving off progress is a poor strategy for helping less-fortunate workers. In addition to difficulties of definition and collateral costs, there is the further problem that in an open world, taxes on technology are likely to drive production offshore rather than create jobs at home.

There are many better approaches. Governments will, however, have to concern themselves with problems of structural joblessness. They likely will need to take a more explicit role in ensuring full employment than has been the practice in the US.

Among other things, this will mean major reforms of education and retraining systems, consideration of targeted wage subsidies for groups with particularly severe employment problems, major investments in infrastructure and, possibly, direct public employment programmes.

This will be a major debate that I suspect will define a large part of the politics of the industrial world over the next decade. Little is certain. But we will do better going forward than backward.

That means making America even greater, not great again. And it means embracing rather than rejecting technological progress.

A correction to my farewell to Kenneth Arrow

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In my tribute to Kenneth Arrow, I asserted that he was unique among economists in having a theorem named after him.  He may be unique in having an impossibility theorem named after him, and his may be the most profound theorem named after an economist, but my statement was wrong.   Alas I was for the first time writing about economic theory without the benefit of Kenneth’s advice.  He no doubt would have provided within 60 seconds a list twice as long as the one that follows.

Among the theorems named after economists are: the Coase theorem, the Modigliani-Miller theorem, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem, and the Debreu-Scarf theorem.  Kudos to any graduate student who can summarize the content of all 6 of them or remind me of others.

Case Still Out on Whether Corporate Short-Termism Is a Problem

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McKinsey has a new study out on an important topic—the question of whether corporations systematically take too short a view and do not invest enough for the long term.  If true — as many CEOs believe — this is a serious indictment of current corporate governance arrangements and has important policy implications.  To take one close to my heart, if short termism causes under investment it will be a cause of secular stagnation.

I am not sure what to believe in this area.  On the one hand, there are many anecdotes suggesting that pressures to manage earnings hold back investment.  And the short termism view is very widely believed.

On the other hand, some of what is done in the name of long term may be unmonitored waste.  The observation that many “unicorn” companies with no profits, and sometimes no revenues or even fully developed products, get valued so highly makes me skeptical of the idea that the capital market is systematically myopic.  It is also the case that the companies generating the highest immediate cash flows — which should be overvalued on the myopia theory — historically have had the highest stock market returns, implying undervaluation rather than overvaluation.

I was therefore excited to see that McKinsey had a new empirical study out that provides evidence in favor of the view that corporations should take longer views.  They have a reasonable methodology.  They divide their sample between companies that take a long-term view and those that do not and then compare their performance.  They find that companies that take a long-term view perform better on many metrics like employment growth and shareholder return.

Their findings deserve much discussion, debate and attempts at replication.  At this point though I would give a Scottish verdict of “not proven” to their case.  They may be right but I do not think they have provided evidence that would convince anyone other than a prior believer.

Consider an analogy. It is doubtless the case that golfers with long swings like Phil Mickelson hit the ball further and more accurately than golfers with short swings like myself.  An index of swing length would be highly correlated with almost any measure of golf performance.  Does this mean I should lengthen my swing?  I doubt it.  Those with more flexibility and coordination are able to take and control longer swings and play golf better.  If I were to try to swing like Phil, I would mishit the ball and maybe break my back.

Some companies have great ideas, great management teams, and compelling strategies.  They invest heavily, seek to grow revenue, ignore the management of earnings, and do limited stock buybacks.  These are the criteria McKinsey uses to measure long termism.  Others lack vision and have mediocre management.  They invest less, cut costs more, manage earnings and buy back stock.  McKinsey deems them short term focused.

No surprise the long-term companies outperform the short-term companies.  But this may be due to their vision and execution capacity not their long-term focus.  Mediocre companies seeking to imitate them will be like me trying to imitate Phil—painful failures.  I do not see any basis in the McKinsey results for saying that companies should extend their horizons.

McKinsey tries to address this issue by doing comparisons within industries.  But everything we know suggests that there are substantial differences in company quality within industries as well as across industries.

Again, it may be that the long-termism hypothesis is right and there may be ways of teasing causality out of the very interesting data set that McKinsey has created.  But at this point I think the issue is still unresolved.

US adoption of a carbon tax would encourage others to follow

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Ideas should be judged by their quality not their pedigree.  I am not usually a fan of Republican tax policy proposals or environmental initiatives. But I strongly support the proposal put forward yesterday by Republicans George Shultz, James Baker, Martin Feldstein, Hank Paulson, Greg Mankiw and others for a substantial carbon tax in the USA to address global climate change.  Their proposal that the carbon tax be coupled with a mechanism for rebates to consumers, a rollback of command and control regulation, and a border adjustment mechanism is also sound.

The United States has a moral and a prudential obligation to lead on global climate change. There would be no clearer sign of our commitment than the introduction of a substantial carbon tax.  Our adoption of a carbon tax would encourage others to follow.  The border adjustment mechanism would be a further inducement since foreign countries would presumably prefer their carbon emitters pay them than pay us.  And because a carbon tax is easy to change it would enable us to be responsive to new developments in the science of global climate change.

Some of my friends may not completely agree, but I think the replacement of command and control regulation with a carbon tax is a positive step.  It will reduce uncertainty and thereby encourage investment.  Raising carbon prices has the virtue of discouraging all types of carbon use, be it from power production or transportation, from changing fuels or reducing energy use.  It is therefore likely an efficient way to reduce emissions.  Of course the devil is in the details and, as the authors point out, the tax has to be set high enough to reduce emissions at least as much as any repealed regulations.

I also think that the proposal for a lump sum rebate that gives an equal amount to all citizens is a very sound one.  Since a person with a $2 million income gets no more than a person with a $20,000 income, it is highly progressive.  It reminds me of Alaska’s approach of sharing oil revenues equally with all citizens.  I think that the approach of not adjusting the income tax but instead declaring a social dividend also will operate to give people a stake in environmental protection because whenever the carbon tax is raised, people will get a larger and highly visible rebate.

It is hard to know how the Trump administration, which has flirted with climate denialism and has been less than embracing of traditional Republicans, will react to today’s proposal.  I do know that they could change the way they are perceived in many parts of the world and by many well-intentioned Americans if they tried to run with it.  It is also hard to know how Democrats will react.  I hope they will seize on prominent Republican endorsement to take the largest steps on global climate change in our history and at the same time to achieve the most universal social benefit.

Big risks in the hasty rollback of financial regulation

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Many business people think it is wonderful that we now have an Administration filled with people from business backgrounds. To a point, I relate. People who have worked primarily in the private sector bring an awareness that others sometimes lack of maintaining business confidence, which as I have often said is the cheapest form of stimulus. And for some government tasks, management experience is much more important than policy experience. That is why Bob Rubin and I worked to install a (Republican) business leader as commissioner of the IRS given its vast IT problems.

Unfortunately, just as being able in government does not equip you to step in and run a company—at least not without much help—so also business experience does not equip you to run on your own public policy and political processes.

The concerns of those who worry about business dominated government have been demonstrated all too clearly by the Trump administration’s roll-out of plans to scale back financial regulation. There are surely areas where regulation is too burdensome, particularly involving bureaucratization and small banks. But much of what was said by the President and his advisors sounds more like grousing at an East Hampton cocktail party than a serious basis for public policy reform.

The President suggested that it was a problem that many of his good friends could not get as much credit as they wanted. We do not travel in the same social circles, so I am not sure who he means. But if he is saying that real estate developers cannot get all the credit they want, that would seem a good thing. Indeed, I would submit that the financial history of the last 40 years demonstrates that often when real estate operators are thrilled about credit availability, financial crisis is only a few years away.

Gary Cohn, the former number two at Goldman Sachs now heading the NEC, asserts that “ we are not going to burden the banks with literally hundreds of billions of dollars of regulatory costs every year”. I would challenge him to document that such costs exist today, which feels to me like an “alternative fact”. Note that total bank profits last year were about 170 billion so the claim is that without excessive regulation profits would more than double.

There is room for reasonable argument about the fiduciary rule requiring that financial advisors act in the best interest of their clients. I think the case made in the Obama CEA report is very strong but I can see counter arguments. Cohn’s analogy that “this is like putting only healthy food on the menu, because unhealthy food tastes good but you still shouldn’t eat it because you might die younger” is bizarre. We do after all require food labeling, inspect food processing, and no one is suggesting that financial products be banned, only that the economic interests of advisors be disclosed.

It does not get better. Leaving aside Cohn’s statement that “we have all submitted living wills” referring to Goldman Sachs, which was a slip for a policy official, I wonder why an Administration that professes to hate “too-big-to-fail” wants to scale living wills for banks and plans for resolution way back.

And Cohn’s argument that since banks are so well capitalized now we do not have to worry much about other aspects needs to reckon with the experience of 2008. Some of the institutions that failed, like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, had capital cushions well above what both the Federal Reserve and Basel required to be labeled as “well-capitalized” in the week before their failures.  Others like Goldman would likely have failed but for the bailout of their counterparties. Evidence on ratios of the market value of equity to assets suggests that even after the recent run-up, banks are operating with historically high levels of operating leverage.

Blog Graph Feb 7

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would rather live with even a very bad knee than let a carpenter operate on me. On the evidence of statements so far by those in the executive branch, the safest posture is to resist changes in the financial regulatory framework until there is proof that they have been thought through carefully. If and when this happens, there will be room to promote the flow of credit, reduce bureaucratic burdens, and make the financial system safer.

 

Revoking trade deals will not help American middle classes 

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February 6, 2017

The advent of global supply chains has changed production patterns in the US
 
Trade agreements have been central to American politics for some years. The idea that renegotiating trade agreements will “make America great again” by substantially increasing job creation and economic growth swept Donald Trump into office.

More broadly, the idea that past trade agreements have damaged the American middle class and that the prospective Trans-Pacific Partnership would do further damage is now widely accepted in both major US political parties.

As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed, participants in political debate are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. The reality is that the impact of trade and globalisation on wages is debatable and could be substantial. But the idea that the US trade agreements of the past generation have impoverished to any significant extent is absurd.

There is a debate to be had about the impact of globalisation on middle class wages and inequality. Increased imports have displaced jobs. Companies have been able to drive harder bargains with workers, particularly in unionised sectors, because of the threat they can outsource. The advent of global supply chains has changed production patterns in the US.

My judgment is that these effects are considerably smaller than the impacts of technological progress. This is based on a variety of economic studies, experience in hypercompetitive Germany and the observation that the proportion of American workers in manufacturing has been steadily declining for 75 years. That said I acknowledge that global trends and new studies show that the impact of trade on wages is much more pronounced than a decade ago.

But an assessment of the impact of trade on wages is very different than an assessment of trade agreements. It is inconceivable that multilateral trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, have had a meaningful impact on US wages and jobs for the simple reason that the US market was almost completely open 40 years ago before entering into any of the controversial agreements.

American tariffs on Mexican goods, for example, averaged about 4 per cent before Nafta came into force. China had what was then called “most favoured nation” trading status with the US before its accession to the World Trade Organization and received the same access as other countries. Before the Korea Free Trade Agreement, US tariffs on Korea averaged a paltry 2.8 per cent.

The irrelevance of trade agreements to import competition becomes obvious when one listens to the main arguments against trade agreements. They rarely, if ever, take the form of saying we are inappropriately taking down US trade barriers.

Rather the naysayers argue that different demands should be made on other countries during negotiations – on issues including intellectual property, labour standards, dispute resolution or exchange rate manipulation. I am sympathetic to the criticisms of TPP, but even if they were all correct they do not justify the conclusion that signing the deal would increase the challenges facing the American middle class.

The reason for the rise in US imports is not reduced trade barriers. Rather it is that emerging markets are indeed emerging. They are growing in their economic potential because of successful economic reforms and greater global integration.

These developments would have occurred with or without US trade pacts, though the agreements have usually been an impetus to reform. Indeed, since the US does very little to reduce trade barriers in our agreements, the impetus to reform is most of what foreign policymakers value in them along with political connection to the US.

The truth too often denied by both sides in this debate is that incremental agreements like TPP have been largely irrelevant to the fate of middle class workers. The real strategic choice Americans face is whether the objective of their policies is to see the economies of the rest of the world grow and prosper. Or, does the US want to keep the rest of the world from threatening it by slowing global growth and walling off products and people?

Framed this way the solution appears obvious. A strategy of returning to the protectionism of the past and seeking to thwart the growth of other nations is untenable and would likely lead to a downward spiral in the global economy. The right approach is to maintain openness while finding ways to help workers at home who are displaced by technical progress, trade or other challenges.

Markets enjoying a sugar high that will not last

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This week the Trump rally continued as the Dow crossed 20,000 and our President issued a celebratory tweet. How much does this mean? To what extent is it a vindication of the economic policy approaches pursued by the new Administration? Will the post election rally continue? No one knows these answer and market timing is a fool’s game but I remain persuaded that markets and the economy are most likely enjoying a sugar high that will not last a year.

First Dow 20,000 is a meaningless benchmark and crossing it means little. Its numerology not analysis to focus on round numbers. The Dow is an odd and arbitrary index which weights companies by their share price not their market value. It is highly limited in who is included with Goldman Sachs accounting for over 20 percent of the gain in the 30 stock index since election day.

Second, as Bob Rubin constantly reminded his colleagues in the Clinton administration “markets go up, markets go down” and it is a mistake to judge policy on immediate market reactions rather than concentrating on fundamentals. The observation that the best post-election pre-inauguration performance of the stock market in the last 100 years occurred during Herbert Hoover’s transition underscores this point as does the market’s poor performance during the Roosevelt and Obama transitions.

Third, there are indicators in markets of possible trouble ahead. While financial stocks have been very strong over the last several months, insider sales have soared.

Despite what most observers see as highly uncertain environment, market expectations of near term volatility are near record lows suggesting scope for sudden disillusionment. Rapid inflows into mutual funds could easily go into reverse.

Fourth, the fundamental basis for a big market rally is very unclear. If “pro business policies” were key over time it would not be the case that Democrat administrations have consistently seen stronger markets than Republican ones over the last 70 years. Recall also that nearly half of S&P 500 revenue is earned abroad and will not be enhanced by new US domestic policies but may be hurt by new nationalist measures. It is far from clear that corporate tax reform on the scale envisioned by the new administration will pass this year and even the hallmark 1986 Act had only modest stock market impacts. The impact of regulatory changes will be felt only in some sectors and may be offset by new populist measures such as restrictions on pharmaceutical pricing.

Fifth, and most important new governments with authoritarian tendencies have historically brought about bull markets even before they led to disaster. Governments with much stronger authoritarian tendencies than anything plausible in the USA like those of Hitler or Mussolini nonetheless saw strong markets in their early years.

I am not sure which is more difficult: predicting what President Trump will do next or timing the market. Either way after the events of the last week it is much easier to imagine downside than upside scenarios.

 

Time for Business Leaders To Wake Up

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I wonder what the business leaders who have been waxing enthusiastic about our new pro-business Administration are thinking right now.

Confidence and prosperity depend on a perception of government credibility and confidence. Is that present when an administration lies about readily observable facts like crowd sizes and then defends the lie with the Orwellian concept of alternative facts?

Does the business community really want NAFTA to be abrogated, Asian trade architecture turned over to the Chinese or a trade war launched with China?

Secretary of commerce Designate Wilbur Ross vows to self-initiate dumping cases rather than waiting for industry to file. During the two administrations I served in industry discouraged such efforts because of retaliation fears. Have matters really changed or is the new Secretary ahead of his constituency?

Do the financial cheerleaders for a business-leader dominated Administration approve of the emerging combination of weak dollar rhetoric from both the President and Treasury Secretary nominee along with strong dollar policy.

If as Secretary designate Mnuchin has just written to Congress and the President has asserted the administration believes the dollar is too strong why are all its policies calculated to raise the dollar: (i) very expansionary fiscal policy (ii) complaints about easy money (iii) measures like the border tax adjustment that discourage imports and encourage exports (iv) measures to reduce capital outflows as American companies outsource? This is the least coherent dollar policy since the Carter Administration.

I guess as someone put it to me in Davos business people are more comfortable with fellow business people than with policy people.  Perhaps in forming views they should get modern and look at data. Almost 30 years ago in 1988 Roger Altman and I had a piece in the WSJ showing that in the then preceding 35 years the economy and corporate profits did much better with Democrats in power. At the time I thought the point was a valid counter to Republican rhetoric but not necessarily a strong regularity. But the best test of any statistical finding is looking at data subsequent to its publication. The recent much more thorough study by Alan Blinder and Mark Watson shows that Democrats are much better for business than Republicans.

Little is going right or giving confidence. Increasingly I think the sugar high may be short lived. For the sake of their shareholders corporate leaders need to stop cheerleading and start insisting that policy have a modicum of logical coherence and factual support.

Disillusioned in Davos

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Edmund Burke famously cautioned that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”  I have been reminded of Burke’s words as I have observed the behavior of US business leaders in Davos over the last few days.  They know better but in their public rhetoric they have embraced and enabled our new President and his policies.

I understand and sympathize with the pressures they feel.  I used to remind my colleagues in the Obama White House that “confidence is the cheapest form of stimulus.”  There is a clear case for corporate tax reform, for some targeted regulatory relief and a more positive government attitude towards business.  Businesses who get on the wrong side of the new President have lost billions of dollars of value in sixty seconds because of a tweet.  And you cannot hope to have influence on an Administration you go out of the way to condemn.

Yet I am disturbed by (i) the spectacle of financiers who three months ago were telling anyone who would listen that they would never do business with a Trump company rushing to praise the new Administration (ii) the unwillingness of business leaders who rightly take pride in their corporate efforts to promote women and minorities to say anything about Presidentially sanctioned intolerance (iii) the failure of the leaders of global companies to say a critical word about US efforts to encourage the breakup of European unity and more generally to step away from underwriting an open global system (iv) the reluctance of business leaders who have a huge stake in the current global order to criticize provocative rhetoric with regard to China, Mexico or the Middle East (v) the willingness of too many to praise Trump nominees who advocate blatant protection merely because they have a business background.

I have my differences with the new Administration’s economic policies and suspect the recent market rally and run of economic statistics is a sugar high.  Reasonable people who I respect differ and time will tell.  My objection is not to disagreements over economic policy.  It is to enabling if not encouraging immoral and reckless policies in other spheres that ultimately bear on our prosperity.  Burke was right.  It is a lesson of human experience whether the issue is playground bullying, Enron or Europe in the 1930s that the worst outcomes occur when good people find reasons to accommodate themselves to what they know is wrong.  That is what I think happened much too often in Davos this week.

 

Congress is considering an extremely dangerous idea almost nobody has heard of

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Inevitably, Congress has more attractive uses for new funds than it has sources of new funds, so there is always is a desperate search for “pay-fors” — measures that are scored by the Congressional Budget Office as raising revenue or reducing outlays and so can be used to finance new initiatives. The pressure is particularly acute this year with the ambitious plans of the new administration. There is also the likelihood that the use of the budget reconciliation procedure will preclude careful deliberation of proposed pay-fors.

I recently learned of a particularly dangerous pay-for that may have superficial appeal —the repeal of Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA).  This repeal, if enacted, will exacerbate moral hazard, impair financial stability, increase economic vulnerability and in all likelihood increase the national debt. It would be a major unforced error.

OLA is a new bankruptcy-type provision included in Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that gives the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. the authority to resolve insolvent systemic financial institutions (think future Lehman-like episodes). It allows the FDIC to borrow funds from the Treasury to support the liquidation of such firms with the proviso that in the event of any losses, fees will be levied on bank holding companies and other financial institutions to fully reimburse the Treasury. This authority is a wholly rational response to the gaping hole in our financial architecture evinced by the catastrophic Lehman failure, where policymakers’ only alternatives were uncontrolled bankruptcy or taxpayer-financed bailout. Had it been in place in 2008, much carnage could have been avoided.

So, much is wrong with eliminating OLA in order to get about $20 billion in CBO-blessed revenue.

Economy under Trump: Plan for the worst

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An ironic contradiction is likely to define the global economic community’s convocation in Davos this week as it awaits Donald Trump’s inauguration. There has not been so much anxiety about U.S. global leadership or about the sustainability of market-oriented democracy at any time in the past half-century. Yet with markets not only failing to swoon as predicted, but actually rallying strongly after both the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory, the animal spirits of business are running hot.

Many chief executives are coming to believe that, whatever the president-elect’s infirmities, the strongly pro-business attitude of his administration, combined with Republican control of Congress, will lead to a new era of support for business, along with much lower taxes and regulatory burdens. This in turn, it is argued, will drive major increases in investment and hiring, setting off a virtuous circle of economic growth and rising confidence.

While it has to be admitted that such a scenario looks more plausible today than it did on Election Day, I believe that it is very much odds-off. More likely is that the current run of happy markets and favorable sentiment will be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, as a sugar high. John Maynard Keynes was right to emphasize the great importance of animal spirits, but other economists have also been right to emphasize that it is political and economic fundamentals that dominate in the medium and long terms. History is replete with examples of populist authoritarian policies that produced short-run benefits but poor long-run outcomes.

The new U.S. president will be operating on a weak political foundation, is unlikely to be able to deliver the results he has promised to key constituencies and seems likely to take dangerous gambles in the international arena. This makes it probable that a cycle of growing disillusion, disappointment and disapproval will set in within a year.

Trump will likely be the first modern U.S. president to come into office with more public disapproval than approval. No outsider can know the validity of allegations regarding his campaign’s involvement with Russia, but the shadow of possible scandal is far more present in the pre-inaugural press than it was even before Richard Nixon’s second term in the White House. And the Trump family’s continued operation of his business interests offers potential for at least the allegation of serious misconduct.

Nor is Trump likely to be able to keep his promises to key middle-class constituencies. The consequence of the weak Mexican peso that has been a consequence of his rhetoric is more Mexican immigration to the United States and more businesses choosing Mexico over Ohio as a location for production.

Moreover, it is not possible to repeal Obamacare without taking health insurance away from millions of Americans and placing new burdens on those with preexisting conditions. If Trump follows through on proposed increases in tariffs, the result will be lower real wages and incomes as prices rise faster than wages. All in Congress agree that tax reform will not happen in a few months, and it is impossible to reconcile the president-elect’s stated goals of major reductions in corporate and top rates, a fair distribution of the benefits of tax cuts and preventing a huge increase in federal debt.

Finally, Trump will be taking some major risks. Seeking to use the one- China policy as a lever for extracting trade concessions from China risks major confrontation and will complicate cooperation on critical issues such as North Korean nuclear proliferation. Questioning the value of the European Union and NATO risks undermining our principal democratic allies at a time when they are already politically fragile. Unilateral imposition of tariffs or enactment of a tax system that subsidizes exports and penalizes imports risks both retaliatory protectionism and a spiking dollar, with potentially grave consequences for the global economy. And threatening businesses, as happened with the attack on the pharmaceutical industry during Trump’s last news conference, risks major increases in uncertainty and even questions about the rule of law.

Animal spirits are as fickle as they are important. Right now they certainly are an impetus to economic growth. The speed with which they changed after the Brexit vote and after the U.S. election should be cautionary. They can easily change again. If ever there were a time to hope for the best but plan for the worst, it is now.

 

The case for a proper program of infrastructure spending

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On Monday, I gave a speech at Brookings and then had a discussion with my Harvard colleague Ed Glaeser on aspects of infrastructure investment. Here are the links to the video and transcript. While for reasons described below I believe the Trump campaign proposals are wholly ill-conceived, I remain convinced that an increased and improved programme of public infrastructure investment would be very much in the American national interest. The case for public investment today rests largely on grounds of long-run policy and microeconomic efficiency given the sub-5 per cent unemployment rate.

My remarks and conversation with Ed focused on five main issues.

First, improved infrastructure has benefits that go well beyond what is picked up in standard rate of return on investment calculations. Because infrastructure is integrative, we often fail fully to understand the benefits of investment.

Nonquantitative historians are convinced that the Transcontinental railway played a crucial role in American history. They believe it permitted the integration of the west and more broadly drew our nation together. This idea was famously challenged by Nobel Prize economist Robert Fogel in his doctoral dissertation. Fogel pointed out that transport made up only a small per cent of GDP and that the railroad was only a certain per cent cheaper than canals so the contribution to economic growth had to be small. I suspect this calculation, which mirrors those usually done in evaluating infrastructure projects such as high-speed rail, misses the benefits of integrative infrastructure in spurring investment and promoting agglomeration by increasing the range over which the best companies can expand and compete. My bet is that the railway project was in fact very important for the US economy. I suspect something similar can be said on a global basis about the Suez or Panama Canal projects.

There is a broader point as well. Investments in a location can be divided between those that have “spill-out consequences” and those that have “pull-in” effects. Investments in new science, for example, have benefits that spread out widely, as do investments in educating children some of whom inevitably migrate. Investments in infrastructure on the other hand have benefits that are local to where they take place and are likely to attract other investments. For example, Dulles airport and its successive expansion has been a huge spur to the economic development of Northern Virginia. At a time of resurgent interest in the national dimension of economic success, infrastructure projects have the virtue that their benefits are very much concentrated where the investments take place.

Second, there is a particularly compelling case for maintenance investment. Ed and I agreed that there was a presumption that this should be the case since all the incentives facing political decision makers work against adequate maintenance. Deferred maintenance liabilities are largely unmeasured, unnoticed and passed on to subsequent generations of elected officials. No one can name a maintenance project. The desire to come in on budget discourages what might be called “pre-maintenance”, such as when the high-return insulation investments got stripped out at the last moment of Harvard building projects.

The examples are pretty stark. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which is admittedly an interested party, estimates that extra repairs for American automobiles each year have a cost that is the equivalent of a 75 cent a gallon gasoline tax. As I have said many times, look at La Guardia or Kennedy airport. I was struck many years ago by the young teacher who approached me in Oakland after, as secretary of the Treasury, I gave a speech about the importance of education. She said “Secretary Summers — that was a great speech. But the paint is chipping off the walls of this school, not off the walls at McDonald’s or the movie theatre. So why should the kids believe this society thinks their education is the most important thing?” I had no good answer.

As with potentially collapsing bridges, prevention is cheaper than cure and in many cases the return on “un-derferring” maintenance far exceeds government borrowing rates. Borrowing to finance maintenance should not be viewed as incurring a new cost but as shifting from the fast-compounding liability of maintenance to the slowly compounding liability of explicit debt. It should also be noted that inevitably one maintains what has been used, so maintenance investment is much less likely to turn out a white elephant than new infrastructure investment.

My guess is that the US could profitably spend an additional 0.5 per cent of GDP, or about $1.25tn over the next decade, on maintenance of its infrastructure.

Third, there are important new infrastructure investment projects that almost certainly have high rates of return. I have previously used as an example the renewal of the US air traffic control system. While vacuum tubes are no longer in use in our system, radar technology of the kind used during the second world war is pervasive, and there is essentially no role for GPS in our current architecture. The result is greater than necessary threats to safety, substantial unnecessary emission of greenhouse gases as planes circle to maintain greater than necessary distances from each other, pervasive delays during peak travel times, and inefficient usage of airport capacity. Current plans do not involve a satisfactory system being fully implemented until the mid-2030s.

The Treasury department recently released a study identifying 40 projects with a combined cost in the range of $200bn and cost-benefit ratios in the range of 2 to 10. This does not take account of technological progress. For example, autonomous vehicle technology will create new possibilities for very high speed travel lanes. And new developments in energy storage and transmission create potential for infrastructure technologies that will yield large social benefits by facilitating the adoption of renewable energy technologies like solar and wind, where intermittency is an important issue. I suspect also that pervasive fast wireless will create benefits that are currently unimaginable in the same way that the Transcontinental Railroad did.

I would be very surprised if another 0.5 per cent of GDP could not be profitably invested in new infrastructure over the next decade. A $2.5tn programme would still leave public investment at levels that are low by the standards of the post-war period in the US or other countries. Given how much less we are now spending — of the order of 3 per cent of GDP — on national defence compared to the more than 5 per cent we spent for much of the post-war period, it is not plausible to assert that we cannot afford these investments as a nation. Indeed, if over time infrastructure investments yield a return of even 6 per cent and if government can capture even 1/6 of that return in increased tax collection, they will pay for themselves at current low levels of real interest rates.

Fourth, better infrastructure investment is as important as more infrastructure investment. Quality is as important as quantity. Progressives are right to decry the inadequate level of public investment in the US. Conservative complaints about regulatory obstacles, problems in project selection, inefficient procurement and inattention to the use of pricing in assuring the efficient use of infrastructure are equally valid. The short 300-foot bridge outside my office connecting Cambridge and Boston has been under repair with substantial traffic delays for nearly five years. Julius Caesar built from scratch a bridge seven times as long spanning the Rhine in nine days! Famously, it has taken longer to repair the eastern span of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco than took to build the original. Yes, Robert Moses and his contemporaries were too heedless of the environment and the interests of local communities. But we can surely find ways of coming to far more rapid decisions with far less promiscuously distributed veto power than is the case in much of the country today.

There is too much pork barrel and too little cost-benefit analysis in infrastructure decision-making. Projects should be required to pass cost-benefit tests and proposals like a national infrastructure bank that would insulate a larger portion of decision-making from politics should be seriously considered. Ed Glaeser is right that new infrastructure investment in declining areas is often a terrible idea as shrinking populations means that these areas have if anything too much infrastructure. And Field of Dreams — “build it and they will come” approaches do not have a very good track record. Ways should be found to make the costs of procrastination on maintenance more salient and to institutionalise resistance to low-ball cost estimates from advocates of more visionary projects.

The goal of building rapidly at minimum cost should be the primary objective in infrastructure procurement. Deviations from this principle should take place only with compelling justification.

Crucially, modern technology makes possible much more pricing of infrastructure usage than was once the case. In particular, transponder technology means that usage of roads can be priced with sensitivity to exact location and time much as power is priced today. To date, congestion pricing has been very difficult politically. My hope is that in the same way that pricing in the environmental area was once decried as “purchased licences to pollute” but is today quite widely accepted, formulas can be found to introduce congestion pricing. The benefits are potentially very large. And it should be possible to find formulas to compensate losers.

To assert that current public investment decision-making is highly flawed should not be taken as a blanket endorsement of private sector reliance. While there are areas where public-private partnerships are desirable, these should be approached with great caution. The private sector often demands rates of return far greater than public sector borrowing costs, especially in the current low interest rate environment. Insisting on private participation could well substantially raise costs without addressing major problems.

The proposals of Trump advisors Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross to rely on tax credits to augment infrastructure investment are a textbook case of the dangers of knee-jerk private sector reliance. These benefits would (i) largely go to developers and contractors for infrastructure projects like new pipelines that would happen even without new incentives and so be highly regressive; (ii) raise costs by failing to reach the tax-free pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and international investors that are the most plausible sources of incremental infrastructure finance; (iii) not encourage at all the highest return maintenance projects like fixing potholes that do not yield a pecuniary return for investors; and (iv) by offering credits at an unprecedented 82 per cent rate, invite all kinds of tax-shelter abuse.

Fifth, while the case for expanded infrastructure investment does not depend on Keynesian stimulus or aggregate demand considerations, secular stagnation risks reinforce the argument for increased public investment. As the previous points illustrate, there is a compelling case (wholly apart from any ideas about aggregate demand) for increased infrastructure investment. To the extent that, as I have argued elsewhere, the industrial world is likely to be prone to a chronic excess of saving over private investment in the years ahead, this case is reinforced. Excess saving means that very low real interest costs are likely to persist, reducing the capital cost of infrastructure investment.

While the evidence is far from conclusive, my guess is that low real borrowing costs raise the risk of bubbles and financial instability. This argues for a shift in the policy mix, from monetary policy towards fiscal policy. And to the extent that, because of constraints on how low interest rates can go, recessions become more frequent and protracted in the years ahead, the case for expansionary fiscal policy is reinforced. To be clear, I do not believe that infrastructure investment can be turned on and off in response to cyclical fluctuations without big efficiency losses. And I do not believe there is a case for make-work projects that cannot be justified on microeconomic grounds. There is, however, a case for expanded public investment on a sustained basis with financing from borrowing or taxes that varies with cyclical conditions.

There is also the consideration that infrastructure investment is likely to disproportionately benefit groups such as middle-aged men with limited education who face a major structural employment problem. One way of thinking about this is that it means the real cost of investment is lower because those working on infrastructure would otherwise have been jobless and perhaps collecting unemployment or disability benefits. Another is to simply note that even if the economy does not face a chronic shortage of demand overall, it does face a shortage of demand for certain types of labour and policies that address this shortfall are, other things being equal, desirable.

While President-elect Trump’s plans for infrastructure stimulus are, I think, misguided and probablyharmful, I agree with the incoming administration on one thing: the case for a substantially increased programme of public infrastructure is undeniable.

Public Infrastructure Investment in the National Interest

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On Monday, I gave a speech at Brookings and then had a discussion with my Harvard colleague Ed Glaeser on aspects of infrastructure investment.  Here are the links to the video and transcript.  While for reasons described below I believe the Trump campaign proposals are wholly ill conceived, I remain convinced that an increased and improved program of public infrastructure investment would be very much in the American national interest.  The case for public investment today rests largely on grounds of long run policy and microeconomic efficiency given the sub-5 percent unemployment rate.

My remarks and conversation with Ed focused on five main issues.

First, improved infrastructure has benefits that go well beyond what is picked up in standard rate of return on investment calculations.  Because infrastructure is integrative, we often fail to fully understand the benefits of investment.

Nonquantitative historians are convinced that the Transcontinental railroad played a crucial role in American history.  They believe it permitted the integration of the West and more broadly drew our nation together. This idea was famously challenged by Nobel Prize economist Robert Fogel in his doctoral dissertation.  Fogel pointed out that transport was only a small percent of GDP and that the railroad was only a certain percent cheaper than canals so the contribution to economic growth had to be small.  I suspect this calculation, which mirrors the ones usually done in evaluating infrastructure projects like high-speed rail, misses the benefits of integrative infrastructure in spurring investment and promoting agglomeration by increasing the range over which the best firms can expand and compete.  My bet is that the railroad project in fact was very important for the American economy.  I suspect something similar can be said on a global basis about the Suez or Panama Canal projects.

There is a broader point as well.  Investments in a location can be divided between those that have “spill-out consequences” and those that have “pull-in” effects.  Investments in new science for example has benefits that spread out widely, as do investments in educating children some of whom inevitably migrate.  Investments in infrastructure on the other hand have benefits that are local to where the investment takes place and are likely to attract other investments. For example Dulles airport and its successive expansions has been a huge spur to the economic development of Northern Virginia.  At a time of resurgent interest in the national dimension of economic success, infrastructure projects have the virtue that their benefits are very much concentrated where the investments take place.

Second, there is a particularly compelling case for maintenance investment.  Ed and I agreed that there was a presumption that this should be the case since all of the incentives facing political decision makers work against adequate maintenance.  Deferred maintenance liabilities are largely unmeasured, unnoticed and passed on to subsequent generations of elected officials.  No one can name a maintenance project.  The desire to come in on budget discourages what might be called “pre-maintenance,” such as when the high return insulation investments got stripped out at the last moment of Harvard building projects.

The examples are pretty stark.  The American Society of Civil Engineers, who are admittedly an interested party, estimate that extra repairs costs for American automobiles each year have a cost that is the equivalent of a 75 cent a gallon gasoline tax.  As I have said many times, look at La Guardia or Kennedy airport.  I was struck many years ago by the young teacher who approached me in Oakland after as Secretary of the Treasury I gave a speech about the importance of education. She said “Secretary Summers—that was a great speech.  But the paint is chipping off the walls of this school, not off the walls at McDonald’s or the movie theatre. So why should the kids believe this society thinks their education is the most important thing”  I had no good answer.

As with potentially collapsing bridges, prevention is cheaper than cure and in many cases the return on “un-derferring” maintenance far exceeds government borrowing rates.  Borrowing to finance maintenance should not be viewed as incurring a new cost but as shifting from the fast compounding liability of maintenance to the slowly compounding liability of explicit debt.  It should also be noted that inevitably one maintains what has been used, so maintenance investment is much less likely to turn out a white elephant than new infrastructure investment.

My guess is that the United States could profitably spend an additional 0.5 percent of GDP or about $1.25 trillion over the next decade on maintenance of its infrastructure.

Third, there are important new infrastructure investment projects that almost certainly have high rates of return.  I have previously used as an example the renewal of the US air traffic control system.  While vacuum tubes are no longer in use in our system, radar technology of the kind used during World War II is pervasive, and there is essentially no role for GPS in our current architecture.  The result is greater than necessary threats to safety, substantial unnecessary emission of greenhouse gases as planes circle to maintain greater than necessary distances between themselves, pervasive delays during peak travel times, and inefficient usage of airport capacity.  Current plans do not involve a satisfactory system being fully implemented until the mid 2030s.  The Treasury Department recently released a study identifying 40 projects with a combined cost in the range of $200 billion and cost-benefit ratios in the range of 2 to 10.  This does not take account for projects that take account of new technological progress.  For example, autonomous vehicle technology will create new possibilities for very high speed travel lanes.  And new developments in energy storage and transmission create potential for infrastructure technologies that will yield large social benefits by facilitating the adoption of renewable energy technologies like solar and wind, where intermittency is an important issue.  I suspect also that pervasive fast wireless will create benefits that are currently unimaginable in the same way that the Transcontinental Railroad did.

I would be very surprised if another 0.5 percent of GDP could not be profitably invested in new infrastructure over the next decade.  A $2.5 trillion program would still leave public investment at levels that are low by the standards of the post-World War II period in the United States or other countries.  Given how much less we are now spending–on the order of 3 percent of GDP — on national defense compared to the above 5 percent we spent for much of the post-War period, it is not plausible to assert that we cannot afford these investments as a nation.  Indeed, if over time infrastructure investments yield a return of even 6 percent and if government can capture even 1/6 of that return in increased tax collections, they will pay for themselves at current low levels of real interest rates.

Fourth, better infrastructure investment is as important as more infrastructure investment.  Quality is as important as Quantity.  Progressives are right to decry the inadequate level of public investment in the United States.  Conservative complaints about regulatory obstacles, problems in project selection, inefficient procurement, and inattention to the use of pricing in assuring the efficient use of infrastructure are equally valid.  The short 300 foot bridge outside my office connecting Cambridge and Boston has been under repair with substantial traffic delays for nearly 5 years. Julius Caesar built from scratch a bridge 7x as long spanning the Rhine in 9 days! Famously, it has taken longer to repair the eastern span of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco than took to build the original.  Yes, Robert Moses and his contemporaries were too heedless of the environment and the interests of local communities.  But we can surely find ways of coming to far more rapid decisions with far less promiscuously distributed veto power than is the case in much of the United States today.

There is too much pork barrel and too little cost-benefit analysis in infrastructure decision making.  Projects should be required to pass cost-benefit tests and proposals like a national infrastructure bank that would insulate a larger portion of decision-making from politics should be seriously considered.  Ed Glaeser is right that new infrastructure investment in declining areas is often a terrible idea as declining population means that these areas have if anything too much infrastructure.  And Field of Dreams— “build it and they will come” approaches do not have a very good track record.  Ways should be found to make the costs of procrastination on maintenance more salient and to institutionalize resistance to low-ball cost estimates from advocates of more visionary projects.

The goal of building rapidly at minimum cost should be the primary objective in infrastructure procurement.  Deviations from this principle should take place only with compelling justification.

Crucially, modern technology makes possible much more pricing of infrastructure usage than was once the case.  In particular, transponder technology means that usage of roads can be priced with sensitivity to exact location and time much as power is priced today.  To date, congestion pricing has been very difficult politically.  My hope is that in the same way that pricing in the environmental area was once decried as “purchased licenses to pollute” and is today quite widely accepted,  formulas can be found to introduce congestion pricing.  The benefits are potentially very large.  And it should be possible to find formulas that assure that losers are compensated.

To assert that current public investment decision-making is highly flawed should not be taken as a blanket endorsement of private sector reliance.  While there are areas where public-private partnerships are desirable, these should be approached with great caution.  The private sector often demands rates of return far greater than public sector borrowing costs, especially in the current low interest rate environment.  Insisting on private participation could well substantially raise costs without addressing major problems.

The proposals of Trump advisors Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross to rely on tax credits to augment infrastructure investment are a textbook case of the dangers of knee-jerk private sector reliance.  These benefits would (i) largely go to developers and contractors for infrastructure projects like new pipelines that would  happen even without new incentives and so be highly regressive; (ii) raise costs by failing to reach the tax-free pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and international investors who are the most plausible sources of incremental infrastructure finance; (iii) not encourage at all the highest return maintenance projects like fixing potholes that do not yield a pecuniary return for investors; and (iv) by offering credits at an unprecedented 82 percent rate, invite all kinds of tax shelter abuse.

Fifth, while the case for expanded infrastructure investment does not depend on Keynesian stimulus or aggregate demand considerations, secular stagnation risks reinforce the argument for increased public investment.  As the previous points illustrate, there is a compelling case (wholly apart from any ideas about aggregate demand) for increased infrastructure investment.  To the extent that, as I have argued elsewhere, the industrial world is likely to be prone to a chronic excess of saving over private investment in the years ahead, this case is reinforced.  Excess saving means that very low real interest costs are likely to persist, reducing the capital cost of infrastructure investment.  While the evidence is far from conclusive, my guess is that low real borrowing costs raise the risk of bubbles and financial instability.  This argues for a shift in the policy mix, from monetary policy towards fiscal policy.  And to the extent that, because of constraints on how low interest rates can go, recessions are more frequent and protracted in the years ahead, the case for expansionary fiscal policy is reinforced.  To be clear, I do not believe that infrastructure investment can be turned on and off in response to cyclical fluctuations without big efficiency losses.  And I do not believe that there is a case for make-work projects that cannot be justified on microeconomic grounds.  There is however a case for expanded public investment on a sustained basis with financing from borrowing or taxes that varies with cyclical conditions.

There is also the consideration that infrastructure investment is likely to disproportionately benefit groups like middle-aged men with limited education who face a major structural employment problem.  One way of thinking about this is that it means the real cost of investment is lower because those working on infrastructure would otherwise have been unemployed and perhaps collecting unemployment or disability benefits. Another is to simply note that even if the economy does not face a chronic shortage of demand overall, it does face a shortage of demand for certain types of labor and policies that address this shortfall are other things equal desirable.

While President-Elect Trump’s plans for infrastructure stimulus are I think misguided and likely harmful, I agree with the incoming Administration on one thing: the case for a substantially increased program of public infrastructure is undeniable.

US tax reform is vital but Trump’s plan is flawed

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Corporate tax reform has rightly been identified by both the President-elect and Congress as an immediate priority. There is no doubt that the status quo — where America has the highest statutory rate among major countries and companies hoard cash overseas — can be improved on. Unfortunately, the reforms identified by Paul Ryan, speaker of the House of Representatives, and Donald Trump appear set to damage the tax base and the US and global economies.

The central concept put forward by Mr Ryan, which appears to have the support of Mr Trump, is to turn corporate income tax from a tax on the return to capital into a tax only on extraordinary profits. This would be done by taxing corporate cash flows. In addition to the major reduction of the overall rate, the system would change in three fundamental ways. First, all investment outlays can be written off in the year they occur rather than over time. Second, interest payments to bondholders, banks and other creditors will no longer be deductible. Third, companies will be able to exclude receipts from exports in calculating their taxable income and will not be permitted to deduct payments to foreign suppliers or affiliates from income.

Unlike some of Mr Trump’s other economic ideas, the corporate cash flow tax is supported by some experts in both political parties. However, it has four major — probably fatal — flaws.

First, the tax change will exacerbate inequality, with more than half the benefits going to the top 1 per cent of Americans. Eliminating the corporate tax on the returns to capital and substantially scaling back the rate on extraordinary profits is a radical step that might be defensible on grounds of eliminating double taxation in a world where capital returns are effectively taxed at the individual level. But it is very hard to justify in the current world, where exclusions and preferences mean that most corporate income is not taxed at the individual level and where the estate tax, which could be a backstop, is easily avoided and may well be eliminated.

Second, the tax change will capriciously redistribute income, increase uncertainty and place punitive burdens on some sectors. Think of a retailer who imports goods from abroad for 60 cents, incurs 30 cents in labour and interest costs, and then earns a 5 cent margin. With a 20 per cent tax, and no ability to deduct import or interest costs, the taxes will substantially exceed 100 per cent of profits even if there is some offset from a stronger dollar. Businesses that invest heavily, hire extensively and export a large part of their product will have negative taxable income on a chronic basis. It is hard to imagine that the political process will allow annual multibillion-dollar refunds, so they too may be victimised. Then there are the still unresolved questions of what the rules will be on interest deductibility for banks and of the treatment of businesses organised as partnerships that do not pay corporate taxes.

Third, the tax change will harm the global economy in ways that reverberate back to America. It will be seen by other countries and the World Trade Organisation as a protectionist act that violates US treaty obligations. Proponents may argue that it should be legal because it is like a value added tax, but the WTO is very clear that income taxes cannot discriminate to favour exports. While the WTO process would grind on, protectionist acts by other nations would be licensed immediately.

Proponents of the plan anticipate a rise in the dollar by an amount equal to the 15 to 20 per cent tax rate. This would do huge damage to dollar debtors all over the world and provoke financial crises in some emerging markets. Since US foreign assets are mostly held in foreign currencies, whereas debts are largely in dollars, American losses with even a partial appreciation would be in the trillions. Ironically, China, with its huge reserve hoard, would be a winner.

Fourth, the combination of a sharply lower rate, new opportunities for tax arbitrage and the fact that any revenue gains from bringing overseas cash home are one-shot means the Federal revenue base would erode. The result would be cuts in entitlement payments to consumers who spend heavily, tax hikes on individuals and reductions in government spending. Over time, this will slow growth and burden the middle class.

There is no need to reinvent the corporate tax wheel. Let’s fix the tax we have by cutting rates, closing shelters, broadening the base and cracking down on tax havens. That would be an important step to making our economy grow faster. It would also be fairer.

Trump’s tax plans favour the rich and will hamper economic growth

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Just as Ronald Reagan’s landmark 1986 bipartisan tax reform increased simplicity, fairness and economic efficiency by broadening the tax base and reducing rates, today reform of the system has the potential to help American families and the economy.
Properly designed, revenue-neutral reforms could help to offset the dramatic increases in inequality that have taken place over a generation, repair a business tax system that globalisation has rendered dysfunctional, reduce uncertainty and promote growth.
Unfortunately, what we know of the intentions of the president-elect and congressional leadership suggest that they risk pushing through the most misguided set of tax changes in US history.
The proposals from the presidential campaign, reiterated last week by President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Treasury secretary, will massively favour the top 1 per cent of income earners, threaten an explosive rise in federal debt, complicate the tax code and do little if anything to spur growth.
A core principle agreed to by all in 1986 was that reform would not reduce the tax burden on high-income taxpayers. Reagan achieved this objective while reducing top marginal rates because he raised capital gains rates, scaled back investment incentives, increased corporate tax collection, curtailed shelters and left estate and gift taxes alone. Unfortunately, neither the Trump plan, nor the one put forward by Paul Ryan, speaker of the House of Representatives, provides for nearly enough base-broadening to finance all the high-end tax cutting they include.
Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary-designate, asserts there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class because deductions would be scaled back. The rub is that totally eliminating all deductions for those with incomes over $1m would not even raise enough revenue to cover reducing their marginal tax rates from 39 to 33 per cent, let alone offset their benefit from huge rate reductions on business and corporate income, and the elimination of estate and gift taxes.
Estimates of the Trump plan suggest that it will raise the average after-tax income of the 0.9 per cent of the population with incomes over $1m by 14 per cent, or more than $215,000. This contrasts with proposed tax cuts for those in the middle of the income distribution of $1,000, or about 2 per cent.
The repeal of estate and gift taxes is especially problematic because it would provide a window for the very rich to use gift and trust structures to ensure that their wealth passes without tax not just to their children but to their grandchildren and great grandchildren, regardless of subsequent legislation.
The Reagan tax reform simplified the code by eliminating the need for rules distinguishing ordinary and capital gains income, because these were taxed at the same rate, and by doing away with industry-specific shelter provisions. In contrast, the Trump proposal creates sheltering opportunities by reducing to 15 per cent the tax rate on any income that can be characterised as coming from an incorporated entity. Rather than reducing targeted subsidies, it would establish a highly dubious 82 per cent credit – the highest in the world – for financial equity investments in infrastructure.
This would mean not only disproportionate tax reductions for the upper-income group that has seen its incomes rise most rapidly over the past generation. It would also mean grave damage to federal budget projections. The envisioned Trump tax cut is about the same size relative to the economy as the 1981 Reagan tax cut. It is worth remembering that Reagan, hardly a fan of reversing course or raising taxes, found it necessary to propose significant tax increases in 1982 and 1984 (the equivalent in today’s economy of $3.5tn over a decade) due to concerns about federal debt.
Today’s budget situation is much more worrisome. The baseline involves much higher levels of debt and deficits. Then the economy was suffering from a deep recession; now it approaches full employment. If extreme tax cuts are legislated in the next months, uncertainty about the federal budget and about further tax adjustments is likely to rise. Finally, I can find no basis in either economic history or logic for Mr Mnuchin’s claim that the proposed reforms would increase the economy’s growth rate from its current 2 per cent rate to the historical 3 to 4 per cent norm. Adult population growth has slowed by nearly a percentage point, the gains generated by more women entering the workforce have been exhausted, and it is far from clear why tax reform will hugely spur productivity growth.
Indeed, because the Trump proposal would redistribute after-tax income towards those most likely to save it, push up long-term interest rates because of debt pressures, increase uncertainty and the advantages of overseas production, it is as likely to retard growth as to accelerate it.
In the 1980s, treasury secretary Don Regan said the first Reagan reform proposal was written on a word processor to signal the administration’s openness to negotiation and radical alteration. We should all hope the Trump administration follows Reagan’s approach on both tax policy principles and a commitment to bipartisan negotiation.

Trump’s Carrier Deal – Ad Hoc Deal Capitalism

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There are many aspects of the economic policy of the new Administration that I find misguided.  But I am most troubled by what the President-elect did with Carrier to hold on to an extra 700 jobs in Indiana. Ronald Reagan’s response to the air traffic controllers’ strike was a small act that had profound consequences.  I fear in a similar way that the negotiation with Carrier is a small thing that is actually a very big thing—a change very much for the worse with regards to the operating assumptions of American capitalism.

Market economies can operate anywhere along a continuum between two poles.

I have always thought of American capitalism as dominantly rule and law based.  Courts enforce contracts and property rights in ways that are largely independent of just who it is who is before them.  Taxes are calculable on the basis of an arithmetic algorithm.  Companies and governments buy from the cheapest bidder.   Regulation follows previously promulgated rules. In the economic arena, the state’s monopoly on the use of force is used to enforce contract and property rights and to enforce previously promulgated laws.

Even though we know of instances of corruption, abuse of power, favoritism and selective enforcement, we take this rules-based system for granted.  But looking around the world today or back through American history, this model is hardly a norm.  Many market economies operate what might be called ad hoc or deals-based capitalism:  Economic actors assume that they have to protect their property and do their own contract enforcement.  Tax collectors use discretion in assessing taxes.  Companies and governments buy from their friends rather than seek low cost bids.  Regulators abuse their power. The state’s monopoly on the use of force is used to enrich and satisfy the desires of those who control the apparatus of the state.

This is the world of New York City under Tammany Hall, of Suharto’s Indonesia, and of Putin’s Russia.

Reliance on rules and law has enormous advantages.  It greatly increases predictability and reduces uncertainty.  It reduces expenditures on both guarding property and seeking to appropriate property.  It promotes freedom because most of the people most of the time do not take political positions with a view to gaining commercial advantage.  The advantages of the rule of law are so great that I would claim that there is no country more than 2/3 as rich as the United States that does not have a strong tradition of the rule of law based capitalism.  And I know of no country where the people are free where the rule of law does not largely govern market interactions.

What about Carrier?  The President-elect of the United States decided in a purely ad hoc basis that he wanted Carrier to remain in Indiana.  He deployed some combination of carrots and sticks at his disposal to lever Carrier into doing what he wanted.  Implicitly or explicitly, there must have been sticks, as press accounts suggest that the tax benefits provided offset only a small part of the savings foregone by staying in Indiana.   It is not hard to see from the point of view of United Technologies, the parent of Carrier, that for a company with more than $50 billion in revenue its surely worthy $60 million dollars to not be on the wrong side of a possibly vindictive President of the United States.

It seems to me what we have just witnessed is an act of ad hoc deal capitalism and worse yet its celebration as a model.  As with the air traffic controllers only a negligible sliver of the economy is involved but there is huge symbolic value.  A principle is being established: it is good for the President to try to figure out what people want and lean on companies to give it to them.  Predictability and procedure are less important than getting the right result at the right time.  Like Hong Kong as the mainland increasingly imposes its will, we may have taken a first step towards a kind of reverse transition from rule of law capitalism to ad hoc deal-based capitalism.

The commentary on the President-elect’s actions has emphasized its novelty, has emphasized the difficulties of scaling, and in the case of Bernie Sanders has argued that the actions taken were insufficiently forceful because some workers will still be relocated to Mexico.  All of this misses the point.  Presidents have enormous latent power and it is the custom of restraint in its use that is one of the important differences between us and banana republics.  If its ad hoc use is licensed, the possibilities are endless.  Most companies will prefer the good to the bad will of the US President and his leadership team.  Should that reality be levered to get them to locate where the President wants, to make contributions to the President’s re-election campaign , to hire people the President wants to see hired, to do the kinds of research the President wants carried out, or to lend money to those that the President wants to see assisted?

Some of the worst abuses of power are not those that leaders inflict on their people.   They are the acts that the people demand from their leaders.  I fear in a way that is more fundamental than a bad tax policy or tariff we have started down the road of changing the operating assumptions of our capitalism.  I hope I am wrong but I expect that as a consequence we are going to be not only poorer but less free.

 

The Future of Aid for Health

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Yesterday, I gave a keynote speech at the World Innovation Summit for Health on “The Future of Aid for Health”.  When I agreed to give the speech, which built on the work of a Commission I chaired several years ago on Global Health 2035, I did not imagine the degree of uncertainty that the US election would bring to the global health area and indeed to the global community.

We are in uncharted territory.  No one can know what the attitude of the new US administration will be to funding foreign assistance of any kind or to global cooperation in the health area.  Certainly an “America first” strategy is not highly propitious.  Global health has been an area of bipartisan cooperation with major initiatives launched during  both Democratic and Republican administrations and has some Congressional champions in both parties so perhaps things will work out.

Rather than dwelling on political uncertainties I could not dispel, I chose to concentrate on something that should be a priority for those concerned with reducing premature death around the world, for those looking to foreign assistance as forward defense of US interests, and to those primarily interested in reducing budgets—assuring the optimal allocation of aid resources.

My argument was simple.  The world needs to move decisively away from the current regime where 80 percent of health assistance is devoted to supporting national health care delivery and only 20 percent is devoted to global service delivery towards a model where half of assistance is devoted to global goods.

In part this is because of the problematic aspects of continuing foreign assistance to national governments for health which raises issues of fungibility, sustainability and of distortion of countries’ exchange rates.  Mostly though it is because of the overwhelming return on investments in global goods that bear on health.

I noted that:

–investments in the development of the polio vaccine had returns orders of magnitude greater than investments in more iron lungs.

—Dean Jamison, Victoria Fan and I demonstrated that the expected costs of global pandemics like the Spanish flu after World War I are in the same general range of those associated with climate change even though they receive almost no policy attention.

–research on tobacco and its health impacts, if fully acted on, could avert 200 million tobacco related deaths over this century.  And the set of issues around sugar and obesity are today in a place similar to where tobacco issues were 50 years ago.

–Many believe that the anti-microbial resistance—the development of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics is the largest health risk facing humanity in coming decades and that much too little is being done to address it.

I am reasonably confident about my judgement regarding health assistance priorities though aspects of my argument are certainly open to debate. I am certain though that foreign assistance priorities should be based on analysis, evidence and argument.  The more morally important the issue, the more important is rigorous analysis and debate.

While I have often disagreed with particular judgments or been distressed that political considerations sometime carried the day my experience in policymaking in the United States and at the international level is that reason has always had its day in court and usually carried the day.

I desperately hope this tradition continues.  But when the President of the United States is someone who believes that vaccines cause autism, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and that global climate change is a hoax, I am far from certain how decisions will be made going forward.

 

The Future of Aid for Health

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In a keynote address on November 30, 2016 at the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) in Doha, Qatar, Summers talked about the Future of Aid for Health. Summers said, “I have always believed that economics is a moral science because it is so centrally involved with choices that directly affect human well being.  And cancer at age 30 reinforced for me that no choices centrally affect human well being as those involving health. Economics is defined as ‘the study of the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends.’  Few if any resources allocation choices are as consequencial as those involved with health care. I have become convinced  that even as we fight for increases in global health aid, there is a need for a major reorientation of the global aid for health effort away from financing service delivery in individual countries and towards global priorities.”

Castro is Dead

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As I read the obituaries and saw reactions to Fidel Castro’s death I was struck by two things.

First, history will judge the US embargo policy a total failure. Suppose it’s authors had been told nearly 60 years ago that The Berlin Wall will fall. The Iron Curtain will fall. The USSR will break into 15 separate nations. Central Europe will join NATO. Russia and China will renounce Marxist Leninism. McDonald’s will come en masse to Moscow and Beijing.  US Presidents will routinely summit with China which will become one of our largest trading partners.

And a Castro will still rule Cuba for another quarter century.

There is a huge lesson here in the dangers of isolating a nation rather than engaging with it. Yitzhak Rabin was right when he noted that “you don’t make peace with your friends”. We could have done much better.

Second, President-elect Trump’s response has been highly problematic. I share his loathing of Castro, his record, his ideology and all he stood for. And I was disturbed by the statements like those of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau that seemed to celebrate Castro as a heroic leader.

But it’s instructive to contrast the President-elect’s celebration of Castro’s death, condemnation of Cuba’s governance, and bragging about his campaign with America’s response at other epochal moments. After Stalin died at the height of the Cold War, President Eisenhower’s reached out to the Russian people emphasizing our common humanity under God.  Or one can consider President George H.W. Bush’s carefully modest and non-gloating response  to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The goal of Presidential statements should be to advance US interests not to settle scores or score points. I hope the that President-elect Trump will adopt a different tone once in office.