Dean Baker Archive

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Joe Biden is considering including a financial transactions tax (FTT) as part of his campaign for the Democratic nomination. For those of us who have long advocated such a tax, this is very good news.

On this issue, Bernie Sanders has taken the lead among presidential candidates, including an FTT as part of his plan for free college tuition free. Several other candidates also support an FTT, but if the Democratic Party’s leading centrist candidate endorses the tax, it would mark a new degree of acceptance within the mainstream of political debate.

It may be somewhat surprising, but Senator Warren is not among those supporting an FTT. This is certainly not due to a reluctance to challenge the interests of the wealthy. Warren has proposed a wide variety of measures that would directly challenge the interests of the rich and powerful.

The most ambitious item on this agenda is a wealth tax. Her tax would tax wealth above $50 million at the rate of 2.0 percent a year and wealth above $1 billion at the rate of 3.0 percent a year. (Sanders has an even larger wealth tax.) While there are good reasons for wanting to tax the very rich, an FTT is almost certainly a better economic policy and would have much better political prospects.  

We can see the economics of an FTT are superior when we consider the motivation for taxation by the federal government. As the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory remind us, the federal government doesn’t need revenue to spend, it prints money. The purpose of taxation by the federal government is to reduce consumption, so as to create the economic space for spending. The argument is that if the government spent a large amount of money, and didn’t have any taxes, it is likely to create too much demand in the economy, thereby generating inflation.

To see this point, imagine that the federal government was to spend another $1 trillion next year on Green New Deal policies (a bit more than 20 percent of current federal spending), such as clean energy and mass transit subsidies. If there were no increase in taxes, we would expect to see a huge surge in demand in the economy, likely leading to inflation. (Assume that the Federal Reserve Board simply prints more money so that interest rates are little changed.)

Now suppose we had another big Republican-style tax cut where we handed $1 trillion annually to the very richest people in the country. Also assume that we have no offsetting reduction in spending or increase in other taxes.

Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to raise the value of the Chinese yuan and other currencies against the dollar is not getting good reviews in the media from economists. As can be expected, some of the arguments are pretty strange.

As the usually astute Noah Smith tells it in his Bloomberg piece, the problem with the trade deficit is:

“U.S. consumers are consistently living beyond their means, which seems unsustainable.”

The implication is that if the trade deficit were lower than we would be forced to cut back consumption. But the major problem the United States has faced over the last decade, according to many economists, is “secular stagnation,” which is an obscure way of saying, not enough demand.

Contrary to what Smith tells us, U.S. consumers are not living beyond their means, rather we actually need them to spend more money to bring the economy to full employment. To be more precise, we need them to spend more in the domestic economy, to increase demand here as opposed to in our trading partners. (We can also bring the economy to full employment by having the government spend more money on things like health care or a green new deal.)

Smith also disagrees with Warren’s mechanism for getting the dollar down, which involves a mixture of negotiations and threats of countervailing measures. The idea is that the biggest actor is China, who for some reason it is assumed would never agree to raise the value of its currency. CNN raises similar concerns. This view seems badly off the mark.

First, it is assumed in both pieces that China is no longer acting to deliberately keep down the value of the yuan against the dollar, even though most economists now concede that it deliberately depressed the value of its currency to maintain large trade surpluses in the last decade. (They did not acknowledge China’s currency management at the time.)

It is wrong to claim that China is not now acting to keep down the value of the yuan. While it is no longer buying large amounts of dollars and other currencies, it holds a stock of more than $3 trillion in reserves, which is well over $4 trillion if we add in its sovereign wealth fund.

This huge stock of foreign assets has the effect of depressing the value of the yuan against the dollar in the same way that the Fed’s holding of more than $3 trillion is assets helps to keep down interest rates. While few economists question that the Fed’s holding of assets leads to lower long-term rates than would otherwise be the case, they seem to deny that China’s holding of a large stock of foreign assets has similar effects in currency markets.

Donald Trump seems determined to double down and keep pressing forward on his trade war with China. He promises more and higher tariffs, apparently not realizing that U.S. consumers are the ones paying these taxes - not China's government or corporations.

While tariffs clearly impose a cost on people in the United States, this cost could be justified as a weapon to change a trading partner's harmful practices. During his campaign, Trump pledged to wage a trade war with China over its currency policy. He said he would declare China a "currency manipulator" on day one of his administration, putting pressure on China to raise the value of its currency against the dollar.

The value of China's currency matters, since it determines the relative price of goods and services produced in China and the United States. Ordinarily, the currency of a rapidly growing country with a large trade surplus like China would be expected to rise against the currency of a country with a large trade deficit like the United States. However, China's government intervened in currency markets to keep its currency from rising, thereby keeping down the price of China's goods and services.

This was ostensibly the behavior that Trump was determined to change in his China trade war. But now that we are in the war, the currency issue has largely disappeared from the conversation. According to the published accounts, the big issue is over China's respect for the intellectual property claims (i.e., patent and copyrights) of U.S. corporations.

The most bizarre aspect of this turn is that Trump's demands in this area have the support of economists and commentators across the political spectrum. We repeatedly hear the line that we have to stop China's theft of "our" intellectual property.

The problem with this argument is that it is not "our" intellectual property that Trump is protecting. After all, very few people have any patents or copyrights that we are worried about China using without compensation.

The intellectual property that Trump and his allies across the political spectrum want to protect belongs to major corporations like Boeing, Pfizer and Microsoft. Their goal is to make China pay more money to get access to technology these companies have developed. That's great for their profits - sort of like Trump's tax cut - but does not help the vast majority of people who do not own lots of stock in these companies.

Matt Bruenig — the president of the progressive, grassroots-funded People’s Policy Project think tank — put forward a creative set of policy proposals last month on child care and family policy under the title of the Family Fun Pack. It prompted a major discussion in progressive circles on child care policy, helped in part by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s important proposal in this area that was released the next week.

In the hope of prompting the same sort of debate on policy directed toward the financial sector, I am putting forward the “Finance Fun Pack.” While the full list of policies to rein in finance would be far more extensive, this one has three main components:

1. A modest tax on financial transactions;
2. Complete transparency on the contract terms that public pension funds sign with private equity companies; and 
3. Complete transparency on the contract terms that university and other nonprofit endowments sign with hedge funds.

The goal of these policies is to have a smaller and more efficient financial sector. They are also likely to reduce the opportunity for earning huge fortunes in the sector. People looking to get fabulously rich will instead have to do something productive.

A modest tax on trades in stock, bonds and derivatives (like options, futures and credit default swaps) can raise a large amount of money while making the financial sector more efficient. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a tax of 0.1 percent on trades, as proposed in a new bill by Sen. Brian Schatz, would raise close to $100 billion a year or 0.5 percent of GDP.

Sorry, I misread that one. This is what he quoted my friend Steve Rose saying about the people who disagree with him on income stagnation. Yes, it's Monday and Robert Samuelson is once again trying to insist that everyone's income is rising just fine.

The bizarre part of the story is that no one is really disagreeing on the facts, just how we talk about them. Before-tax income has been largely stagnant over the last four decades. For families at the middle and bottom, there has been some rise, but this has largely been because there are more earners per family, not rising hourly wages.

This is primarily the story of women entering the labor force. That was mostly a 1979–2000 story, since women's employment rates have actually slipped somewhat in the last two decades. It's great that barriers to women working are lower today than four decades ago (although discrimination is still huge), but saying that a two-earner family typically has higher income than a one-earner family doesn't really contradict the stagnation story.

The way Samuelson shows larger gains for families at the middle and bottom is by including government transfers, most importantly health care programs like Medicaid and SCHIP, in the story. As I pointed out in the past, the value of these transfers increases every time the pay of a heart surgeon or the cost of drugs increase, so people can be excused for not seeing this as a rise in their income.

It is also important to note that most people are healthy and have few health expenses. This means they don't directly benefit to any great extent from having these forms of insurance, although they are clearly valuable if their health deteriorates.

Samuelson is also intent on picking the price index that shows the lowest rate of inflation and therefore the most income growth. While he is in tune with most economists in this respect, it is worth making a couple of points on these inflation measures.

Jim Tankersley had a very interesting piece in the NYT on how clothing manufacturers manage to minimize the impact of tariffs. The gist of the piece is that the tariffs led to very few jobs in the United States, but instead cause companies to spend lots of time gaming the system. We would presumably rather see them spend their time trying to design better products and production techniques.

While this a very interesting piece, that is written in reference to Donald Trump's latest and future rounds of tariffs, it would be interesting to see a similar piece in reference to patent monopolies, especially in the case of prescription drugs. While the tariffs discussed in the piece range from 7 percent to 27 percent, in the case of prescription drugs, patent protection often raises the price by a factor of 100 or even more. This is equivalent to tariffs of 10,000 percent. The vast majority of drugs would sell for ten to twenty dollars per prescription in a free market, instead of the hundreds or thousands of dollars that are charged as a result of patent protection.

Patents have a purpose (as does all protection), providing an incentive for researching new drugs. But there are other mechanisms for financing research (see chapter 5 of Rigged and this paper). To have a basis for assessing the merits of the different systems we need to know the costs they imply.

In the case of patent monopolies, these costs are enormous. The NYT piece goes through the efforts companies will go through to avoid tariffs of 20 percent — think of the efforts that people can and do go through to avoid patent monopolies that are equivalent to tariffs of 1000 percent.

Donald Trump's tendency to make things up as he goes along naturally prompts a strong reaction from people who try to approach issues in a serious way. But serious people can sometimes get carried away in this reaction.

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's fact checker, got a bit carried away in trying to set readers straight on Trump's bizarre claim we have a $100 billion trade deficit with Canada. (We do have a trade deficit, but it is closer to $20 billion.) In his Fact Check piece, Kessler asserts:

"If overall trade increases between nations, people in each country gain, no matter the size of the trade deficit."

This is not necessarily true. Let me go through two cases, one in which the countries are below full employment and one in which they are at full employment.

Suppose in the first case one country, let's say Denmark, decided to subsidize $100 billion of exported cars to the United States, displacing $100 billion of domestic production. The immediate effect of the increased imports from Denmark is a loss of output and employment in the United States.

In principle, the Danes have another $100 billion to buy goods and services from the United States, but suppose they don't like anything we sell. In the textbook story, they would dump their $100 billion on world currency markets, driving down the value of the dollar. This would make US goods and services relatively cheaper, thereby causing us to export more and import less, possibly fully offsetting the $100 billion in increased imports.

But suppose the evil Danish central bank used these dollars to buy up US government bonds, as many countries have done over the last two decades. This would keep the dollar from falling. The purchase of US bonds would have some effect in lowering US interest rates, but this would be just like the Fed's quantitative easing policy. The lower interest rates would boost demand, but not nearly enough to offset the $100 billion increase in our trade deficit.

So, in this below full employment story we end up with a situation where trade has increased by $100 billion, but the US is left with lower employment and output. It sure looks like it has been hurt by more trade.

Earlier this year we did an analysis of CEO compensation in the health insurance industry to see if it was affected by the cap on deductibility imposed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). One of the provisions of the ACA limited the amount of CEO pay that health insurers could deduct on their taxes to $500,000, beginning in 2013.

This provision effectively raised the cost of CEO pay to insurers by more than 50 percent. Prior to 2013, the deduction in effect meant that the government was picking up 35 cents of every dollar of CEO pay, while the companies were paying just 65 cents. 1 With the new provision in place, insurers are now paying 100 cents of every dollar of CEO pay in excess of $500,000.

If the pay reflects the value of the CEO to the company, we should expect this change to reduce the pay of CEOs in the insurance industry. For example, if a CEO gets paid $20 million a year, this should mean that she delivers roughly $20 million in additional value to shareholders.

When the CEO’s pay was fully deductible, the $20 million paid to the CEO actually only cost the company $13 million. This would presumably be the number that matters to shareholders since they care about how much money comes out of their pockets, not the number on the CEO’s paycheck.

There has been much attention to the plan put forward by Republicans in Congress to cut individual and corporate income taxes. According to analysis done by independent sources, close to 80 percent of these cuts will go to the richest 1 percent of the population.

While this may seem unfair and unwarranted in an economy where the rich have seen the overwhelming majority of the gains from growth in the last four decades, we have been told not to worry because the boost to growth will make everyone winners. The average family has been promised an income gain of $4,000 a year and possibly as much as $9,000.

It is possible to construct economic theories where corporate tax cuts do produce large gains, but these theories clearly do not describe the world we live in. For example back in the mid-1980s, the US lowered the corporate tax rate from 46 percent to 35 percent. Rather than producing an investment boom, the late 1980s were the weakest non-recession period for investment in the post-World War II era.

The idea that investment is highly responsive to the after-tax rate of profit stands history on its head. The strongest period of investment in the last seven decades was the late 1970s when the profit rate was at its post-war low. By contrast, the near record profit rates seen in this recovery have coincided with mediocre levels of investment. It's difficult to believe that if we raised the rate of profit even further by cutting taxes, investment would somehow boom.

The usually sensible Brad DeLong is very unhappy with those who oppose the agenda that has passed for globalization over the last three decades. He argues that people are foolish for believing that globalization has had a major impact on employment and the distribution of income in recent years. I'll take the side of Brad's "fools" in this matter.

First, Brad is well aware that the economy has operated well below full employment at least since the collapse of the housing bubble, I would argue this has been the case for almost all of the period since the collapse of the stock bubble in 2001. But he attributes this to a simple failure of the government to run full employment policies, rather than the large trade deficits we saw develop following the East Asian financial crisis in 1997.

While Brad is right, the government could maintain full employment by running much larger budget deficits, as he is well aware, that does not appear to be politically feasible. Even among Democrats, very few are willing to say that we should have larger budget deficits to bring the economy to full employment and some even insist on balanced budgets. There is no need to talk about Republican ideas on stimulus here.

It's also worth noting that the costs of being below full employment are disproportionately borne by disadvantaged groups in the labor market, especially African Americans and Hispanics.

Yep, the senator from Oklahoma says it is good in a Washington Post column. Most of Senator Lankford's confusions are pretty standard, but he does come up with an original one.

"For starters, a powerful economy such as ours often runs a trade deficit because of the immense buying power of its people. Mexico’s average net per capita income is roughly $13,000, while the average U.S. household brings in more than $41,000 each year. Americans have a far greater capacity to buy goods than do consumers in Mexico. It should come as no surprise that we do exactly that."

Okay, we have a trade deficit simply because we are a rich country. I suppose someone forgot to tell Germany that it is a rich country since it has a massive trade surplus of more than 8 percent of GDP (roughly $1.6 trillion in the U.S. economy.)

He then tells us that our imports frrom Mexico will help it to grow and eventually make Mexico a better market for U.S. products. While this is true, Mexico's economy has actually grown less rapidly on a per person basis than the U.S. since NAFTA went into effect in 1994. While NAFTA may not be the cause of weak growth in Mexico, it apparently has not prevented the two economies from diverging further.

Then we get some of the standard confusion pushed by denialists:

"Foreign investment also tilts the trade-balance calculation. Because we have the world’s largest economy and the strongest currency, more money comes into the United States than goes out. This surplus of investment adds to our trade deficit, even though this foreign cash stimulus is a positive for our economy.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney had a Wall Street Journal column highlighting the benefits of “MAGAnomics.” The piece can best be described as a combination of Groundhog Day and outright lies.

In terms of Groundhog Day, we have actually tried MAGAnomics twice before and it didn’t work. We had huge cuts in taxes and regulation under both President Reagan and George W. Bush. In neither case, was there any huge uptick in growth and investment. In fact, the Bush years were striking for the weak growth in the economy and especially the labor market. We saw what was at the time the longest period without net job growth since the Great Depression. And of course, his policy of giving finance free rein gave us the housing bubble and the Great Recession.

The story of the 1980s was somewhat better but hardly follows the MAGAnomics script. The economy did bounce back in 1983, following a steep recession in 1981–1982. That is generally what economies do following steep recessions that were not caused by collapsed asset bubbles. Furthermore, the bounceback was based on increased consumption, not investment as the MAGAnomics folks claim. In fact, investment in the late 1980s fell to extraordinarily low levels. It is also worth pointing out that following both tax cuts, the deficit exploded, just as conventional economics predicts.

There has been a strange debate among many liberals and progressives since the election as to whether they should have empathy for the people who voted for Donald Trump. After all, Trump is a pretty reprehensible character who has pledged to do some pretty awful things in the White House. Is there a reason that people should have empathy for the voters who put him there?

Whatever answer you pick to that question, there is another set of questions that should be simpler for progressives to answer. What are the right economic policies to be pursuing for the working class? This is a question of designing policies that may help people who voted for Trump, but will also help tens of millions of people, largely people of color, who did not vote for Trump. Progressive economic policy has to place the interests of ordinary workers, and those unable to work, at the top of the agenda.

One item that should be laid out at the beginning of this discussion is that government policy, and specifically its trade policy, did in fact screw millions of workers and their families in the last decade. It is very fashionable to pretend the massive loss in manufacturing jobs was due to automation -- the natural march of technology, not trade. That is a lie.

Last week, Representative Peter DeFazio reintroduced his financial transactions tax (FTT) proposal. The bill would impose a tax 0.03 percent on trades of stock, bonds, options, and other derivative instruments. (That's 3 cents on $100 of trades.) This can be thought of as the equivalent of a sales tax imposed on financial transactions, which are now largely untaxed.

According to the Joint Tax Committee, this tax would raise roughly $400 billion over a 10-year budget horizon. This translates into 0.2 percent of GDP. That would cover about 60 percent of the annual food stamp budget.

The tax would also dampen speculative trading on Wall Street. Many trades that involve flipping assets in a matter of minutes or even seconds would become unprofitable with even this small tax. This could make financial markets more stable.

But the really neat aspect of this tax is that it all comes out of the hide of Wall Street, rather than ordinary investors. Considerable research shows that trading volume declines roughly in proportion to the increase in trading costs.

This means that if the DeFazio proposal would raise trading costs by one-third, then trading volume would fall by roughly one-third. Investors will pay one third more on each trade, but they will carry out one-third fewer trades. This means their total cost of trading with the tax will be no larger than it was without the tax. (The Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brooking Institution actually assumed that trading volume fall by 25 percent more than the percentage increase in trading costs, meaning that total trading costs would fall as a result of the tax.)

It really is amazing how much effort elite types expend denying that trade has cost us manufacturing jobs. The latest entry is from Robert Samuelson who tells us that it isn't true that manufacturing jobs have been lost to trade. Samuelson's main source on this is Brad DeLong, who is actually a very good economist and surely knows better.

Samuelson tells readers:

"Contrary to popular opinion, trade is not a major cause of job loss. It’s true that U.S. manufacturing has suffered a dramatic long-term employment erosion, sliding from roughly one-third of nonfarm jobs in 1950 to a quarter of jobs in the early 1970s to a little less than 9 percent now, according to economist J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California at Berkeley in an essay posted on Vox. But the main cause is automation."

The cheap trick here is going back to 1950. Yes, we have lost lots of manufacturing jobs to automation and over a 70 year period that does swamp the impact of the jobs lost due to trade, but this is really a dishonest way to present the issue. Manufacturing was declining as a share of total employment even in the 1950s and 1960s, but the pace was modest enough and we were creating enough jobs in other sectors that the job loss still allowed for real wage growth in both manufacturing and the economy as a whole.

What is at issue is the rate of decline, not the fact that manufacturing employment is dropping. The graph below shows the number of manufacturing jobs in the economy since 1970.

You need not be a fan of Donald Trump to say that trade has had a big impact on manufacturing jobs, you really just need to be someone in the reality-based community. Unfortunately, a lot of people who should, and probably do, know better are insisting that trade is not a big deal. The story is that we lost the jobs due to productivity growth, not trade.

There are three points worth making here. The first is a simple logical one, we have a trade deficit of around $500 billion a year, a bit less than 3.0 percent of GDP. This is basically all due to a deficit in manufactured goods (we have a surplus on services). Does anyone believe that the extra imports associated with the trade deficit are not associated with jobs? Can $500 billion worth of manufactured goods be produced without hiring people? (This matters much more in a context where we face secular stagnation, meaning there is not enough overall demand in the economy.)

The second point is that our trade deficit has not always been this large. Our deficits had been around 1.0 percent of GDP through most of the period from the late 1970s until the East Asian crisis in 1997. Following the crisis, the value of the dollar soared and the trade deficit did also. It eventually peaked at almost 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005–2006. (I should be giving the non-oil deficit, but I'm too lazy to look that up just now.)

Anyhow, this explosion in the trade deficit coincided with a sharp decline in manufacturing employment.

It's hard to resist a good challenge and the Washington Post gave us one this morning in an editorial pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The editorial criticized TPP opponents and praised President Obama for continuing to push the deal. It tells readers:

"Mr. Obama refused to back down on the merits of the issues, noting that other countries, not the United States, would do most of the market-opening under the TPP and challenging opponents to explain how 'existing trading rules are better for issues like labor rights and environmental rights than they would be if we got TPP passed.'"

Okay, here's how we are better off with existing trade rules than the largely unenforceable provisions on labor and environmental standards in the TPP.

1) The TPP creates an extra-judicial process (investor-state dispute settlement [ISDS] tribunals) whereby foreign investors can sue governments for imposing environmental, health and safety, and even labor regulations. Under the TPP, these tribunals are supposed to follow the far-right wing doctrine of compensating for regulating takings. This means, for example, that if a state or county restricts fracking for environmental reasons, they would have to compensate a foreign company for profits that it lost as a result of not being allowed to frack or the additional expense resulting from the standards imposed. The ISDS tribunals are not bound by precedent, nor are their decisions subject to appeal.

2) The TPP imposes stronger and longer patent and copyright protection. These protectionist measures are likely to do far more to raise barriers to trade (patent and copyright monopolies are interventions in the free market, even if the Washington Post likes them) than the other measures in the TPP do to reduce them. In addition to the enormous economic distortions associated with barriers that are often equivalent to tariffs of 1000 percent or even 10,000 percent (e.g. raising the price of a patented drug to 100 times the generic price), TPP rules may make it more difficult for millions of people to get essential medicines.

In an article that reports on plans by a new coalition to challenge the financial industry, the Washington Post implied that the financial transaction tax (FTT) supported by the coalition would hurt ordinary investors. The piece told readers:

"The proposed so-called transaction tax has already raised concerns among some on Wall Street. Such a tax would also effect pension funds or other large investors who sometimes trade thousands of stocks a day, they say.

"'While some politicians claim this tax is directed at high frequency trading, the truth is that it would directly hit the pension funds of hard-working teachers, nurses and teamsters,' said Bill Harts, chief executive of Modern Markets Initiative, which represents high frequency trading firms.

"'We don’t understand why unions would support something that would so clearly hurt their membership’s pension funds.'"

Why are none of the “free trade” members of Congress pushing to change the regulations that require doctors go through a U.S. residency program to be able to practice medicine in the United States? Obviously, they are all protectionist Neanderthals.

Will the media ever stop the ridiculous charade of pretending that the path of globalization that we are on is somehow natural and that it is the outcome of a “free” market? Are longer and stronger patent and copyright monopolies the results of a free market?

The New York Times should up its game in this respect. It had a good piece on the devastation to millions of working class people and their communities from the flood of imports of manufactured goods in the last decade, but then it turns to hand-wringing nonsense about how it was all a necessary part of globalization. Actually, none of it was a necessary part of free trade.

First, the huge trade deficits were the direct result of the decision of China and other developing countries to buy massive amounts of U.S. dollars to hold as reserves in this period. This raised the value of the dollar and made our goods and services less competitive internationally. This problem of a seriously overvalued dollar stems from the bungling of the East Asian bailout by the Clinton Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund.

If we had a more competent team in place, that didn’t botch the workings of the international financial system, then we would have expected the dollar to drop as more imports entered the U.S. market. This would have moved the U.S. trade deficit toward balance and prevented the massive loss of manufacturing jobs we saw in the last decade.