Trump and the Economy

In a recent interview, I got a chance to pontificate about the recipe for growth and prosperity.

Free market capitalism revolutionized the western world, creating prosperity where there used to be deprivation.

But that observation is the easy part. Later in the interview, I was asked to give my two cents on whether Trump’s policies are helping or hurting.

As you can see, I discussed the benefits of pro-growth reforms, but also warned that monetary policy is the wild card and also admitted that economists are lousy forecasters.

That being said, I speculated that there might be a positive surprise for financial markets if Republicans held Congress and investors believed that might lead to some good policies. Especially spending restraint.

Though I should have mentioned – as I have on many occasions – that Trump is sabotaging himself with his protectionist policies.

Since we’re discussing politics and the economy, let’s look at the debate over Trump’s economic stewardship.

Professors Ed Prescott and Lee Ohanian recently opined in the Wall Street Journal about the positive impact of certain Trump policies.

The growth paths in a market economy depend on the quality of government policies and institutions. These affect the incentives to innovate, start a business, hire workers, and invest in physical and human capital. If policies are reformed to increase incentives for market economic activity—as many have been under President Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress—then investment and labor input expand as the economy rises to a higher growth path. …When policies change to depress these incentives, the economy moves onto a lower long-run growth path. That happened after the 2007-09 recession. …According to our calculations, the U.S. cumulatively lost about $18 trillion in income and output between 2007 and 2016. Everything suggested this shortfall would persist or even grow.

I fully agree that economic performance was anemic during the Obama years. Though I would also give Bush 43 part of the blame.

And I think Prescott and Ohanian are right when they explain that some of Trump’s policies are having a positive effect.

U.S. economic performance is the strongest in years. One policy driving this turnaround is the substantially lower corporate-tax rate, which has made the U.S. more competitive with other countries. Regulatory changes—such as the partial rollback of Dodd-Frank and new leadership within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—also have proved helpful, particularly for small businesses, which are benefiting from lower record-keeping and compliance costs. Meanwhile, the number of regulatory pages in the Federal Register has been cut by a third since President Obama’s last year in office. …the U.S. can expect above-normal growth in the coming months, possibly even years.

Moreover, they are correct that more trade is the right approach, not Trump’s myopic protectionism.

Growth rates could improve with further policy changes. One example is a reduction in trade barriers. Since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was signed 70 years ago, international commerce has expanded dramatically, hugely benefiting U.S. consumers by lowering prices and increasing the variety of available goods. The average household’s benefits from trade are greater than $10,000 a year… A second area for reform… The rise of health-care costs is the most important reason wages have not increased more for U.S. workers. The extra compensation is swallowed up by health-insurance premiums. Expanding medical savings accounts and decoupling health plans from employment would create incentives for both consumers and their health-care providers to economize on health-care spending. This would lower costs without compromising quality.

Good health reform would be very beneficial, though I would have explicitly pointed out that the main goal is to mitigate the problems of third-party payer.

Since the economy appears to be doing well, Richard Epstein of the Hoover Institution explores whether Obama deserves any of the credit.

…we easily praise or blame the sitting president for all the economic successes or failures that take place during his term in office. By that standard, President Trump seems to be riding a boom that eluded his predecessor, and that prospect distresses the legion of Trump critics who regard him as an unmitigated disaster. Accordingly, they hope to credit today’s good times to the work of President Obama. …It is well known that economic policies introduced in one year may well have effects long afterwards. …the key measure is whether a president promotes or frustrates competitive behavior. Under this standard, any protection of monopoly institutions is presumptively bad, while deregulation or tax reduction is presumptively good.

Using that benchmark, Obama gets a bad grade, starting with the faux stimulus but also including Dodd-Frank and other statist policies.

Unsound Obama policies help explain the abnormally low rate of economic growth during his eight-year tenure. …the 2009 stimulus package…left a long-term legacy of protectionist legislation for key businesses and labor unions. …Today’s economic successes come in the face of ARRA, not because of it. Obama pushed through three other major pieces of legislation during his first term, all net negatives. The 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) created an immense tangle because it incorporated into health-care insurance many unsustainable features—a rich package of mandatory minimum benefits, community rating, mandatory coverage of preexisting conditions, and poor integration of federal and state programs. …In 2010, …the Dodd-Frank legislation… On balance the legislation did more harm than good by concentrating too many assets in banks deemed too big to fail. It invited regulators to pursue an extended definition of a Systematically Important Financial Institution (SIFI) and with it the opportunity to expand the regulatory scope of Dodd-Frank. …I cannot think of a single mid-level Obama policy that counts as a pro-growth initiative.

Trump, by contrast, is a mix of good and bad.

Deregulation of labor and capital markets are not just a short-term shot in the arm, and the lower taxation of corporate income has worked to repatriate capital from overseas and to expand overall levels of investment. So long as these remain permanent features of the economy—a big “if” with an election coming up—private firms have the necessary time horizons to make much-needed long-term investments. That activity will in turn–as has begun to happen–rejuvenate labor markets. …serious Trump-created obstacles. President Trump is no fan of small domestic budgets, and he has run a perverse rearguard campaign to reverse the declining fortunes of the coal industry. Most importantly, he has waged a series of foolish trade wars against our long-term trading partners. His astounding ignorance on the principles of comparative advantage led Trump to unwisely pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

So what’s the net effect?

Here is the bottom line: the gains from Trump’s (imperfect) domestic program look enormous, given the large economic drag of his trade policies. From this assessment it’s clear that classical liberalism with strong property rights, freedom of contract, and free trade is the only engine to economic prosperity.

I fully agree with the last sentence of that excerpt and I hope the first sentence is true.

But if Trump goes really crazy with his protectionism (and he has lots of bad policies under consideration – dealing with NAFTA, auto trade, China, steel and aluminum, etc), then the net effect of his policies could go from positive to negative.

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The Hidden Tax of Cronyism

I don’t like it when poor people receive handouts from government, though not because I think they’re being grifters. I mostly view them as victims who are vulnerable to getting trapped in the quicksand of government dependency.

The people I despise are the rich people who manipulate the levers of power to get undeserved goodies. These well-heeled sleazeballs generally have the brains and ability to earn money honestly, but they decide it’s more lucrative to steal money from ordinary people, using government as the middleman.

That’s the moral argument for separation of business and state. But there’s also an economic argument against government cronyism.

There’s a very interesting new study from the World Bank that estimates the impact of government favoritism in Ukraine. Here’s how the authors define the problem.

Rent seeking is the manipulation of public institutions to obtain…income…without the creation of new wealth. …Rent seeking is sometimes legal. …In Ukraine, rent seeking includes the award of public resources to companies through tax exemptions, direct subsidies and procurement contracts to connected companies that cannot be justified in terms of the economic benefits to society as a whole. The rent seeking activities provide a basis for the existence of so-called “crony capitalism” ….Crony capitalism allows politically connected businesses to enjoy benefits that other companies cannot access. It allows politically connected businesses to create barriers to entry in those sectors where they operate. As a result, crony capitalism allocates resources inefficiently, restricts competition, increases economic costs and limits economic opportunity. …This paper estimates the economic cost of crony capitalism in Ukraine.

They start with the challenge of trying to measure cronyism.

If we are to assess the impact of crony capitalism in Ukraine, we must first define political connection and distinguish politically-connected firms from non-connected firms. …We use two approaches to identify politically connected firms. The first approach is based on publicly available information on the ownership and control of businesses by politically exposed persons. …A PEP is a person who has been entrusted with prominent public functions, including senior politicians and party officials, senior government, judicial or military officials, and senior executives of state-owned corporations. …The second approach is…to include companies that are not formally controlled by PEPs, but enjoy a political connection through an oligarch or a business group they belong to. …Between half a percent and 2 percent of the total number of firms in Ukraine are politically connected. However, politically connected firms controlled over 20 percent of the total turnover of all Ukrainian companies.

Here are some of their empirical results.

The economic performance of politically-connected firms in Ukraine is significantly different from that of their non-connected peers. …Politically-connected firms are larger than their non-connected peers. …Politically-connected firms pay a lower effective tax rate. …Politically-connected firms are less productive. Politically-connected firms have a negative Total Factor Productivity (TFP) gap compared to non-connected firms. …This indicates that there could be a potentially large pay-off from policies that promote competition. …Politically-connected firms grow slower than non-connected firms. …Such firms tend to have better access to rents and less incentives to compete. …The politically-connected firms reap the benefits from preferential treatment when interacting with the state and limiting market competition.

The bottom line, as illustrated by this chart, is that cronyism promotes and protects inefficiency. And when an economy is less productive, that results in lower incomes and diminished living standards.

Sadly, this isn’t just a problem in developing and transition nations.

Cronyism exists wherever governments have a lot of power, and that includes the United States.

The federal government has myriad policies that tilt the playing field in favor of connected companies. The purpose of policies such as ethanol handouts, the Export-Import Bank, protectionism, tax favoritism, bailouts, subsidies, and green energy is to provide unearned wealth to the friends of politicians.

Here’s a recent example of how Obamacare is a vehicle for cronyism, as explained by the Wall Street Journal.

Big business feasts on big government, and ObamaCare has been a bonanza for companies that have figured out how to exploit it. …Ohio contracts with five managed-care organizations (MCOs) to administer Medicaid benefits, four of which outsource their drug benefits management to CVS Caremark… CVS appears to be billing the state for far more than what it is paying pharmacies, driving up taxpayer costs. …CVS is also attempting to drive independent pharmacists out of business and expand its retail market share. …Ohio’s Medicaid enrollment has swelled by more than half to 21.4% of the state population, driven in large part by ObamaCare’s expansion to people earning up to 133% of the poverty line. …In the last three years, Ohio has lost 164 independent pharmacies while CVS has added 68. …States ostensibly have an incentive to curb their Medicaid spending… Yet many may be turning a blind eye because they can pass on the bills to the federal government, which picks up 63% of the costs for Ohio’s pre-ObamaCare population and 94% for the expansion population.

But cronyism isn’t just enabled by bad policies from Washington.

State governments also are guilty of favoritism, even when the feds aren’t involved. Consider the oleaginous handouts for Foxconn in Wisconsin.

…the Foxconn deal is a condemnable example of corporate welfare in its most egregious form. …Wisconsin could end up delivering $3 billion in tax credits to Foxconn. …If the jobs target of 13,000 is met, Wisconsin taxpayers will pay $219,000 per job. If only 3,000 jobs are created, they will pay $587,000 per job in the form of a $1.7 billion tax credit. …Who wins? The politicians. Who loses? Fiscal sanity and those footing the bill for political pet projects.

And the goodies for Foxconn are just the tip of the iceberg.

States and cities dole out billions of dollars every year to attract businesses through cash grants, tax breaks, and new infrastructure. …The search for Amazon’s second headquarters (HQ2), for instance, has left around 230 state and local governments genuflecting before the altar of the Seattle-based tech deity, offering tributes amounting, in several cases, to billions of dollars. …The cost of these kind of incentives is astoundingly high — there is little research that points to their success.

As I’ve previously argued, the pro-growth way for governments to compete is having low tax rates for everyone.

…the most effective solution is the simplest. New Hampshire is a dark horse candidate to receive HQ2, and its pitch is entirely reasonable: Low tax rates for every business, across the board. That approach removes the incentive to attract businesses through what amounts to legal, nonsensical bribery.

Let’s close with this visual from libertarian Reddit. It’s simple, but a very accurate summary of how the real world operates.

P.S. Elizabeth Warren wants to turn all big companies into cronyist entities.

P.P.S. American taxpayers are subsidizing cronyism in Ukraine.

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The Most-Free Economies in the Post-World War II Era

Whether I’m writing about a rich country or a poor country, my research starts with a visit to Economic Freedom of the World. Published by the Fraser Institute in Canada, EFW uses five major factors (fiscal, regulatory, monetary, trade, and quality of governance) to rank nations based on the overall amount of economic liberty.

The rankings go as far back as 1970, so you can see how a country has changed over time (and the good news is that scores have improved in most nations).

Today, let’s look at a history of the freest nations. We’ll start with the table from 1970.

Unsurprisingly, Hong Kong was at the very top. But who would have guessed that Luxembourg would be second? Canada ranked #3 and the United States was in 4th place, followed by Japan and four European nations.

Perhaps the most shocking bit of news is that Venezuela was ranked #10.

All the more reason that Venezuela’s last-place status in the most-recent edition is so depressing. That must be a record for the biggest-ever decline for a country.

If we look at the data for 1975, 1980, and 1985. Luxembourg continues to get very high scores, along with Hong Kong and the United States.

Panama and Guatemala ranked amazingly high in 1975, while the United Kingdom finally appears in 1985 (thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s reforms).

Here’s the data for 1990, 1995, and 2000. You’ll notice that New Zealand and Australia enter the top 10 while Luxembourg begins to drop (at least relatively speaking) and Singapore begins to climb.

Now let’s look at what has happened this century.

Hong Kong and Singapore have a lock on the top-two slots, with New Zealand and Switzerland controlling the third and fourth positions. Luxembourg, meanwhile, has vanished.

In 2010 and 2015, we see some nations appear from the developing world and the post-communist world. Most notably, Chile, Estonia, and Georgia.

For a policy wonk, these are fascinating numbers. I enjoy looking how relative rankings have changed, as well as what’s happening to absolute scores.

It’s such good source of data that I’ve always wished there were pre-1970 numbers as well.

Well, my wish has been granted. Ryan Murphy and Robert Lawson, two of the scholars who put together Economic Freedom or the World, have cranked out estimates for the entire post-World War II era.

Based on their retroactive assessment, they show that the United States had the world’s freest economy back in 1950.

Switzerland was in second place, followed by a bunch of European and Anglosphere nations.

If you want to understand why Luxembourg, Belgium, Norway, and Sweden are rich today, notice that they have a history of being among the world’s most pro-market nations.

Incidentally, due to inadequate data, Singapore wasn’t included in the retroactive data until 1960 and Hong Kong is complete absent from this historical dataset.

We don’t have top-10 lists for the other years, but the authors shared a table with all their numbers, so I created my own versions for 1955, 1960, and 1965.

As you can see, congratulations to Switzerland and Luxembourg (twice). The United States and Canada get very high marks. And Belgium and the Netherlands get good scores as well.

There are so many implications to this data, but I’ll close with three simple observations.

• First, these numbers help to explain why Europe is a relatively rich continent. European nations traditionally have dominated the top-10 rankings. It’s not a good continent for fiscal policy, but those countries dominate the scores in other policy areas.
• Second, you can fall behind by standing still. If you take a close look at data for Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, you’ll notice their absolute scores haven’t really changed. But all of those nations have dropped out of the top 10 because other countries improved.
• Third, global economic liberty is increasing. The top scores in the 1950s and 1960s wouldn’t get a country into the top 10 this century.

P.S. A Spanish academic also has produced some very interesting historical estimates for economic freedom, but his numbers are only averages for western nations.

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Trump Outs Himself as a Protectionist

Remember the big debate about whether Trump was a closet free trader or a crude protectionist?

Some people claimed he was imposing tariffs and threatening other nations in order to get them to reduce trade barriers.

From the beginning, I was skeptical of this argument, but also acknowledged that we wouldn’t know for sure until we saw a Trump-negotiated deal.

Well, I point out in this interview that my skepticism was warranted. Trump unveiled a quasi-deal on NAFTA yesterday, and it unquestionably will reduce economic liberty.

There’s a lot we still don’t know. Especially about whether this new agreement will actually get approved.

But Claude Barfield of the American Enterprise Institute has a very succinct explanation of the good and bad. He agree with me that it’s good to remove uncertainty.

(1) The best thing about the agreement — if it holds — is that it will remove the extreme uncertainty for businesses in all three NAFTA economies.

And I’m guessing he also agrees that a weakened NAFTA is better than no NAFTA.

By the way, Administration officials have told me that there are a few good provisions, involving matters such as digital goods and property rights.

But Barfield’s list of bad provisions easily trumps (no pun intended) any positive changes.

(2) The tentative “rules of origin” provisions for autos are an abomination — so complex and anti-competitive that they invite endless litigation and corruption (rules of origin govern what percentage of a final product must come from the three NAFTA nations).

(3) The old NAFTA dispute settlement system for investors has been gutted, leaving US industry and Congress with a huge dilemma as to whether to support the new pact.

(4) The auto/labor provisions (forcing Mexico to pay workers $16/hour for a number of jobs in Mexican auto plants, or four times the average hourly pay in Mexico) is a terrible precedent for mandating changes in domestic policy through a trade agreement.

Point #4 is especially terrible. It basically seeks to set wage levels above productivity levels in Mexico, which is a recipe for more unemployment in that already shaky economy (by the way, someone should tell Trump this will lead to more illegal migration from Mexico to the U.S.).

This is the same theory that the French and Germans use when trying to undermine tax competition. It’s supposedly unfair, they argue, when other countries have lower tax rates.

The bottom line is that Trump is hurting America. NAFTA has been good news for the United States, producing more jobs, more exports, and higher living standards.

When grading Trump’s overall economic policy, we just got a big chunk of bad policy to offset some of the good policy.

Sad!

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Modern-Day Protectionism Enables Cronyism and Corruption

During America’s early history, trade taxes were the major source of government revenue, but they were “revenue tariffs” rather than “protectionist tariffs.”

Lawmakers didn’t necessarily want to block imports. This was before America was plagued by an income tax and some source of revenue was needed to finance the government.

And since the central government back then was very small, as the Founders envisioned, the first tariff was only 5 percent and it applied equally to all imports.

Compared to what we have today, that was a pretty good system. But it seems inevitable that politicians – sooner or later – will manipulate and abuse any power they have.

It didn’t take long for that original tariff of just 5 percent to climb higher. And it also was just a matter of time before politicians begin imposing special tariffs on selected imports in response to pleading (and goodies) from various interest groups.

Today, government’s power over trade enables some utterly disgusting and oleaginous examples of insider dealing and rank corruption.

For instance, the Wall Street Journal is reporting about an odious example of unjust enrichment thanks to protectionism.

…tariffs on imports of newsprint…have been cause for celebration at private-equity firm One Rock Capital Partners LLC. Government records show that a team from the New York-based firm approached the Commerce Department, including one meeting with Secretary Wilbur Ross, saying Canadian newsprint imports were hurting One Rock’s investment in North Pacific Paper Co., a paper mill also known as Norpac. Commerce responded to One Rock’s appeal by setting tariffs on Canadian imports, causing newsprint prices to jump by as much as 30%, significantly lifting Norpac’s business prospects.

Yes, your read correctly.

Some bigwigs bought a paper mill and then used their connections to undermine competition from Canadian paper mills.

They get rich, but only by manipulating the levers of power, not because they provide value to consumers.

…the price surge threatens the viability of small-town papers across the country, forcing reduced publication days, layoffs and other cut backs. Canadian mills have historically supplied a large portion of U.S. newsprint. “This whole play by Norpac basically disrupted an entire industry,” said Paul Boyle, senior vice president at the News Media Alliance… The tariffs represent a remarkable success by a relatively little-known private-equity firm at pulling the levers of power in Washington for advantage. …Canadian Ambassador David MacNaughton called Norpac a “rogue actor seeks to game American trade laws for its own short-term advantage, while putting thousands of U.S. and Canadian jobs at risk.”

The obvious takeaway from this story is that protectionism is bad for the U.S. economy. Yes, a few rich insiders pocket some undeserved profits and there will be a few more workers at one plant, but those results will be easily offset by the loss of jobs and income elsewhere in the economy because of the adverse impact on newspapers, advertising, and related sectors.

But I want to highlight another negative effect. I wrote back in 2011 that there are many well-meaning folks on the left that support class-warfare policies because they assume that rich people got their money illegitimately.

Well, this story is sad confirmation that this is often true.

I tell all my statist friends that punitive and destructive taxation is not the right response to this kind of sleaze. Instead, we need to get rid of protectionism (and subsidies, cronyism, and other forms of special favoritism). Make sure we have a system where people instead get rich by satisfying the needs and wants of consumers.

And I tell my Republican friends that if they don’t want crazies like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to wind up in charge of Washington, they need to stop playing footsie with special interests and instead fight for genuine free markets.

Sadly, neither group is taking my advice.

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Class-Warfare Taxes Are Most Harmful to Prosperity

When I write about the economics of fiscal policy and need to give people an easy-to-understand explanation on how government spending affects growth, I share my four-part video series.

But. other than a much-too-short primer on growth and taxation from 2016, I don’t have something similar for tax policy. So I have to direct people to various columns about marginal tax rates, double taxation, tax favoritism, tax reform, corporate taxation, and tax competition.

Today’s column isn’t going to be a comprehensive analysis of taxes and growth, but it is going to augment the 2016 primer by taking a close look at how some taxes are more destructive than others.

And what makes today’s column noteworthy is that I’ll be citing the work of left-leaning international bureaucracies.

Let’s look at a study from the OECD.

…taxes…affect the decisions of households to save, supply labour and invest in human capital, the decisions of firms to produce, create jobs, invest and innovate, as well as the choice of savings channels and assets by investors. What matters for these decisions is not only the level of taxes but also the way in which different tax instruments are designed and combined to generate revenues…investigating how tax structures could best be designed to promote economic growth is a key issue for tax policy making. … this study looks at consequences of taxes for both GDP per capita levels and their transitional growth rates.

For all intents and purposes, the economists at the OECD wanted to learn more about how taxes distort the quantity and quality of labor and capital, as illustrated by this flowchart from the report.

Here are the main findings (some of which I cited, in an incidental fashion, back in 2014).

The reviewed evidence and the empirical work suggests a “tax and growth ranking” with recurrent taxes on immovable property being the least distortive tax instrument in terms of reducing long-run GDP per capita, followed by consumption taxes (and other property taxes), personal income taxes and corporate income taxes. …relying less on corporate income relative to personal income taxes could increase efficiency. …Focusing on personal income taxation, there is also evidence that flattening the tax schedule could be beneficial for GDP per capita, notably by favouring entrepreneurship. …Estimates in this study point to adverse effects of highly progressive income tax schedules on GDP per capita through both lower labour utilisation and lower productivity… a reduction in the top marginal tax rate is found to raise productivity in industries with potentially high rates of enterprise creation. …Corporate income taxes appear to have a particularly negative impact on GDP per capita.”

Here’s how the study presented the findings. I might quibble with some of the conclusions, but it’s worth noting all the minuses in the columns for marginal tax, progressivity, top rates, dividends, capital gains, and corporate tax.

This is all based on data from relatively prosperous countries.

A new study from the International Monetary Fund, which looks at low-income nations rather than high-income nations, reaches the same conclusion.

The average tax to GDP ratio in low-income countries is 15% compared to that of 30% in advanced economies. Meanwhile, these countries are also those that are in most need of fiscal space for sustainable and inclusive growth. In the past two decades, low-income countries have made substantial efforts in strengthening revenue mobilization. …what is the most desirable tax instrument for fiscal consolidation that balances the efficiency and equity concerns. In this paper, we study quantitatively the macroeconomic and distributional impacts of different tax instruments for low-income countries.

It’s galling that the IMF report implies that there’s a “need for fiscal space” and refers to higher tax burdens as “strengthening revenue mobilization.”

But I assume some of that rhetoric was added at the direction of the political types.

The economists who crunched the numbers produced results that confirm some of the essential principles of supply-side economics.

…we conduct steady state comparison across revenue mobilization schemes where an additional tax revenues equal to 2% GDP in the benchmark economy are raised by VAT, PIT, and CIT respectively. Our quantitative results show that across the three taxes, VAT leads to the least output and consumption losses of respectively 1.8% and 4% due to its non-distorting feature… Overall, we find that among the three taxes, VAT incurs the lowest efficiency costs in terms of aggregate output and consumption, but it could be very regressive… CIT, on the other hand, though causes larger efficiency costs, but has considerable better inequality implications. PIT, however, deteriorates both the economic efficiency and equity, thus is the most detrimental instrument.

Here’s the most important chart from the study. It shows that all taxes undermine prosperity, but that personal income taxes (grey bar) and corporate income tax (white bar) do the most damage.

I’ll close with two observations.

First, these two studies are further confirmation of my observation that many – perhaps most – economists at international bureaucracies generate sensible analysis. They must be very frustrated that their advice is so frequently ignored by the political appointees who push for statist policies.

Second, some well-meaning people look at this type of research and conclude that it would be okay if politicians in America imposed a value-added tax. They overlook that a VAT is bad for growth and are naive if they think a VAT somehow will lead to lower income tax burdens.

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The Trump Administration’s Unfortunate Campaign to Weaken NAFTA

There’s a debate in Washington about what President Trump really thinks about trade. Is he a crude protectionist or closet free trader?

If we focus on actions rather than rhetoric, I fear Trump is in the anti-trade camp. That is certainly the case if we look at how the Administration wants to alter the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was interviewed yesterday and here’s what I said about Trump and NAFTA.

By the way, even though I’ve previously defended NAFTA, I would like to see changes to the deal. The pact, which drags on for 1700 pages, isn’t genuine free trade.

An ideal agreement would contain just one sentence: “Mexicans and Canadians are free to buy goods and services from Americans, and Americans are free to buy goods and services from Mexicans and Canadians.”

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration wants to modify NAFTA in the other direction.

Clark Packard of the R Street Institute discusses this problem in a column for National Review.

…the administration should resolve NAFTA quickly. But a toxic mix of political miscalculations and bad policy is threatening to push that goal out of reach. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer wants to remove the investor–state dispute-settlement process (ISDS) from NAFTA 2.0. ISDS provides neutral arbitration to settle disputes between private investors and governmental parties to NAFTA. For example, if the Mexican government expropriated an oil field owned by an American firm, ISDS would permit the American firm to seek compensation from the Mexican government in an arbitration process rather than seek redress in a Mexican court. …removing the process from NAFTA 2.0 would be a political miscalculation. …Another troublesome demand the United States is making in NAFTA negotiations is the inclusion of a so-called sunset clause that would terminate the agreement after five years unless all three countries affirmatively renew it. This is an unpopular idea on Capitol Hill and is a non-starter for Mexico and Canada, with good reason. Investment thrives in predictable environments. …the United States suggested lowering the regional-content threshold to 70 percent and requiring that 40 to 45 percent of an automobile must be produced by autoworkers making at least $16 per hour. …If manufacturers complied with this proposed requirement, their costs would skyrocket and consumers would face higher prices at the dealership. …manufacturers would forgo duty-free trading under NAFTA by sourcing parts from non-NAFTA countries and paying wages below $16 an hour, and then simply paying the small U.S. tariff on automobiles.

And here’s a good explanation, from Gary Clyde Hufbauer, of why NAFTA is a big plus for the American economy.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has benefited American consumers, workers and businesses since 1994. …Some 14 million US jobs depend on the agreement with our nation’s two largest export markets, Canada and Mexico. Together, these countries spend nearly $500 billion purchasing US exports annually. …The Peterson Institute’s research shows that overseas investment is an engine for American job creation. For example, case studies in Mexico show a win-win relationship from establishing research and development facilities outside the United States: Every 131 jobs added in Mexico lead to 333 jobs created here at home. …NAFTA has fostered robust growth in agricultural exports over the past 24 years.

The bottom line, as I’ve explained many times, is that Trump will be undermining the benefits of the good things he’s accomplished – such as last year’s tax plan – if he insists on imposing higher taxes on trade. Protectionism isn’t just bad for taxpayers, exporters, consumers, and manufacturers. It’s also a net job destroyer.

The process of NAFTA began under Reagan, negotiations finished under the first President Bush (one of the few good things he did), and the pact was approved under Clinton (one of the many good things that happened during his tenure).

Let’s hope it’s not wrecked under Trump.

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Trump and the Economy: How Strong and Who Gets Credit?

Stocks just set a new record for the longest “bull market” in history. If you’re an optimist, this is a reason to celebrate the relatively high level of economic freedom in the United States.

If you’re a pessimist, you might appreciate that there’s more economic liberty in America than most other places, but you still worry whether easy-money policies from the Fed have created a bubble in financial markets.

And if you’re fair, you admit that some of Trump’s policies are helping the economy and some are hurting the economy. Which was my message in this recent interview.

Simply stated, I like what Trump is doing on taxes and regulation, but I’m not a fan of what he’s doing on spending and trade.

Because he’s all over the map, it’s not easy to assign an overall grade to Trump’s economic policy (especially since it’s an open question whether Trump is trying to liberalize trade or restrict it).

Regardless, this discussion got me thinking of how best to explain the importance of various economic policies. Regular readers know I’m a huge fan of both the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World and the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.

At the risk of oversimplifying, both publications measure economic freedom by looking at a combination of fiscal policy, regulatory policy, trade policy, monetary policy, and quality of governance (encompassing factors such as the legal system and property rights).

Generally speaking, the various policies are equally weighted. Which, based on a lot of research, is correct. But I wonder if the various policies are equal in different ways. I sometimes use a simple analogy in speeches, equating economic policy with the soundness of a house.

• The quality of governance is akin to the foundation, because just as a very nice house won’t last long if built on a shaky foundation, good policies won’t generate much prosperity if the legal system is corrupt and property rights aren’t protected.
• Monetary policy is akin to the framework of the house because it is also systemically important. Most recessions (and the false booms that precede downturns) are caused by misguided central bank tinkering.
• Finally, as shown in my amateur drawing, trade policy, regulatory policy, and fiscal policy are the floors of the house. They determine the livability of the house, whereas monetary policy and quality of governance determine the structural soundness of the house.

To elaborate on this analogy, consider what I wrote a few days ago about Denmark. That house has a strong foundation and a solid framework, but the floor for fiscal policy is a total mess. Since I focus mostly on public finance, I get very agitated about that floor of the house. But as an economist, I nonetheless admit it’s still a nice place to live.

Conversely, Lebanon has one the best floors for fiscal policy, but the foundation is quicksand and the regulatory floor is a wreck. So that may not be an ideal place to live (notwithstanding compensating factors).

Anyhow, I’m looking for feedback. When I first proposed my Golden Rule, it was wordy and clunky. I got some great suggestions and eventually produced a much better version. I’d like to do the same for overall economic policy.

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Elizabeth Warren Wants to Make Cronyism Great Again

Donald Trump wants to make protectionism great again. Bernie Sanders wants to make socialism great again.

And if we continue with sarcastic headlines, Elizabeth Warren wants to make cronyism great again.

She has a plan, which she explained in a column for the Wall Street Journal and also in this press release on her Senate website, that would give politicians and bureaucrats sweeping powers over large companies.

There’s a technical term for this system of private ownership/government control. It’s called fascism, though I prefer referring to it as corporatism or dirigisme to distinguish what Warren is doing from the racist and militaristic version of that ideology.

Or we can just call it crazy. Kevin Williamson summarizes this dangerous proposal for National Review.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has one-upped socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She proposes to nationalize every major business in the United States of America. If successful, it would constitute the largest seizure of private property in human history. …Senator Warren’s proposal entails the wholesale expropriation of private enterprise in the United States, and nothing less. It is unconstitutional, unethical, immoral, irresponsible, and — not to put too fine a point on it — utterly bonkers. …To propose such a thing for sincere reasons would be ghastly stupidity. …Politicians such as Senator Warren lack the courage to go to the American electorate and say: “We wish to provide these benefits, and they will cost an extra $3 trillion a year, which we will pay for by doubling taxes.” …It treats the productive capacity of the United States as a herd of dairy cows to be milked by Senator Warren et al. at their convenience. And, of course, Senator Warren and her colleagues get to decide how the milk gets distributed, too. …Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hugo Chávez, Huey Long: The rogues’ gallery of those who sought to fortify their political power by bullying businesses is long, and it is sickening. Senator Warren now nominates herself to that list

Professor Don Boudreaux of George Mason University exposes Warren’s economic illiteracy.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)…outlined her new bill that “would require corporations to answer to employees and other stakeholders as well.” …If this mandate is ever enacted, it would radically restructure corporate law, governance, and finance, which is especially frightening because seldom have I encountered so many fallacies…no company in a market economy can force anyone to buy its outputs or to supply it with labor and other inputs, every company, to survive, must continually make attractive offers to consumers, workers, and suppliers. The ability of consumers, workers, and suppliers to say no combines with the law of contract — which requires parties to honor whatever commitments they voluntarily make to each other — to guarantee that companies are fully accountable to everyone with whom they exchange. Companies therefore are fully accountable to their customers and to their workers… the senator offers absolutely no evidence — not even a single anecdote — that companies are unaccountable to consumers.

Not that we needed more evidence that she doesn’t understand economics.

Walter Olson points out that Warren’s legislation would expropriate wealth, presumably in violation of the Constitution’s taking clause.

Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has introduced legislation that would radically overhaul corporate governance in America, requiring that the largest (over $1 billion) companies obtain revocable charters from the federal government to do business, instituting rules reminiscent of German-style co-determination… Sen. Warren’s proposal would pull down three main pillars of U.S. corporate governance: shareholder primacy, director independence, and charter federalism. …Warren-style rules…would in effect confiscate at a stroke a large share of stockholder value, transferring it to some combination of worker and “community” interests. …This gigantic expropriation, of course, might be a Pyrrhic victory for many workers and retirees whose 401(k) values would take a huge hit… some early enthusiasts for the Warren plan are treating the collapse of shareholder value as a feature rather than a bug, arguing that it would reduce wealth inequality. …it would test the restraints the U.S. Constitution places on the taking of property without compensation.

Wow, it belies belief that some leftists support policies that will hurt everyone so long as rich people suffer the most. The ghost of Jonathan Swift is smiling.

Samuel Hammond of the Niskanen Center explains why Warren’s scheme would be devastating to fast-growing innovative companies.

The United States is home to 64 percent of the world’s billion-dollar privately held companies and a plurality of the world’s billion-dollar startups. Known in the industry as “unicorns,” they cover industries ranging from aerospace to biotechnology, and they are the reason America remains the engine of innovation for the entire world. Unless Elizabeth Warren gets her way. In a bill unveiled this week, the Massachusetts senator has put forward a proposal that threatens to force America’s unicorns into a corral and domesticate the American economy indefinitely. …the Accountable Capitalism Act is in many ways the most radical proposal advanced by a mainstream Democratic lawmaker to date. …Warren’s proposal is to fundamentally upend the way the most productive companies in the American economy work from the top down.

Writing for CapX, Oliver Wiseman wisely warns that Warren’s power-grab will undermine productivity.

…her federal charter system would make large firms accountable to politicians – not the people. And that, given the current occupant of the White House, it is surprising that someone from the left of the Democratic party cannot see how this isn’t just deeply illiberal but really rather dangerous. …much beyond the imposition of costly and inefficient box-ticking exercises. Firms will hold meetings with communities, conduct internal reviews and, in all likelihood, reach the same decision they would have reached anyway. Only more slowly and at greater expense. …If you are worried about stagnating wages, you should be preoccupied by one thing above all else: how to boost productivity. Warren’s vision for “accountable capitalism” not only has nothing to say on the issue, it would chip at way at the dynamism that has been the engine of America’s economic success. …The proposals in the Accountable Capitalism Act are drawn up by someone interested in how the pie is sliced up, not the size of the pie. …According to the economist William Nordhaus, innovators keep just 2 per cent of the social value of their innovations. The rest of us enjoy 98 per cent of the upside.

Amen. When there’s less innovation, investment, and productivity, that means lower wages for the rest of us.

Ryan Bourne highlights for the Weekly Standard how political meddling would create uncertainty and will harm both workers and shareholders.

While she might want businesses to notionally be private entities, the “Accountable Capitalism Act” she unveiled last week represents pure, unadulterated European corporatism… Warren’s proposal would establish in the Commerce Department an Office of United States Corporations to review and grant charters… This office is an almighty and arbitrary Damocles sword, with the politicians that control it able to hold companies in breach of charter for anything and everything they are thought not to have considered. …To say the Act would muddy the waters and create perverse incentives is an understatement. … A 1995-96 meta-analysis of 46 studies on worker participation by economist Chris Doucouliagos found that…co-determination laws were a drag. This all means lower wages for employed workers and huge losses for pension funds and other shareholders.

Last but not least, Barry Brownstein, in an article for FEE, is concerned about politicians holding the whip hand over the economy.

Senator Elizabeth Warren… Her ignorance is bold. …Under her proposed law, Warren and others in government will pretend to know much about that which they know nothing—running every large business in America. …In a few years, under a democratic socialist president—I almost wrote national socialist president—Warren’s dystopia could become a reality. …Imagine a major bear market and the resulting spike in fear. Then, it is not so hard to imagine a future president, with a mindset like that of Senator Warren, barnstorming the country dispensing field guidance. Is not President Trump managing trade via “bold ignorance” paving the way for more politicians like Senator Warren?

These seven articles do a great job of documenting the myriad flaws with Warren’s scheme.

So the only thing I’ll add is that we also need to realize that this plan, if ever enacted, would be a potent recipe for corruption.

We already have many examples of oleaginous interactions between big business and big government. Turbo-charging cronyism is hardly a step in the right direction.

Let’s wrap up. I used to have a schizophrenic view of Elizabeth Warren. Was she a laughable crank with a side order of sleazy ambition? Or was she a typical politician (i.e., a hypocrite and cronyist)?

Now I worry she’s something worse. Sort of a Kamala Harris on steroids.

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The Economics of Convergence

A key insight of international economics is that there should be “convergence” between rich countries and poor countries, which is just another way of saying that low-income nations – all other things being equal – should grow faster than high-income nations and eventually attain the same level of prosperity.

The theory is sound, but it’s very important to focus on the caveat about “all other things being equal.” As I explain in this interview from my last trip to Australia, countries with bad policy will grow slower than nations that follow the right policies.

When I discuss convergence, I often share the data on Hong Kong and Singapore because those jurisdictions have caught up to the United States. But I make sure to explain that the convergence was only possible because of good policy.

I also share the data showing that Europe was catching up to the United States after World War II, just as predicted by the theory, but then convergence ground to a halt once those nations imposed some bad policy – such as costly welfare states.

In other words, convergence is a choice, not destiny.

Countries with small government and laissez-faire markets are the ones that grow and converge. The nations with statist policy languish and suffer. Or even de-converge (with Argentina and Venezuela being depressing examples).

Let’s see what academics have to say about this issue.

We’ll start by looking at some research at VoxEU by Professor Linda Yueh. She wants to understand the characteristics that determine national prosperity.

It’s a long-standing economic question as to why more countries are not prosperous. …The World Bank estimates that of the 101 middle-income economies in 1960, just a dozen or so had become prosperous by 2008… But, hundreds of millions of people have joined the middle classes. …How has this been achieved? Possessing good institutions is what economists have come to focus on and the spread of such institutions seems to have been key…the father of New Institutional Economics…Douglass North…stressed that there was no reason why countries could not learn from more successful economies to better their own institutions. That finally happened in the 1990s.

I’m a fan of Douglass North since he – along with many other winners of the Nobel Prize – has endorsed tax competition.

In his case, the goal was for nations to face pressure to adopt good institutions.

And Professor Yueh explains that this means rule of law and free markets.

China, India, and Eastern Europe changed course. China and India re-oriented their economies outward to integrate with the world economy, while Eastern Europe shed the old communist institutions and adopted market economies. In other words, having tried central planning (in China and the former Soviet Union) and import substitution industrialisation (in India), these economies abandoned their old approaches and adopted as well as adapted the economic policies of more successful economies. For instance, China, which has accounted for the bulk of poverty reduction since 1990, undertook an ‘open door’ policy that sought to integrate into global production chains which increased competition into its economy that had been dominated by state-owned enterprises. India likewise abandoned its previous protectionist policies…in Central and Eastern Europe. Communism gave way to capitalism, with these nations adopting entirely new institutions that re-geared their economies toward the market.

All of this is good news, but not great news. Simply stated, partial liberalization can lift people out of poverty.

But it takes comprehensive liberalization for a nation to become genuinely rich.

As many of these economies, especially China, have become middle-income countries, their economic growth is slowing down. And they may slow down so far that they never become rich. But, their collective growth has lifted a billion people of out of extreme poverty.

Let’s now see what other scholars say about convergence.

Some new research from the St. Louis Federal Reserve examines this topic. Here’s the mystery they want to address.

Over the past half-century, world income disparities have widened. The gap in real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita relative to the United States between advanced and poor countries has increased. For example, the ratio of average real GDP per capita among the top 10 percent of countries to the bottom 10 percent has increased from less than 20 in 1960 to more than 40 in 1990, and to more than 50 since the turn of the new millennium… The main point to be addressed in this article is why the income disparities between fast-growing economies and development laggards have widened.

In other words, they want to understand why some nations converge and some don’t.

We select a set of 10 fast-growing economies. This set includes Asian countries and African economies that are perceived as better performing. In contrast, we select a set of 10 development laggards. Beyond the typical candidates of countries mired in the poverty trap, this set includes countries with similar or even better initial states than some of the fast-growing countries, but with divergent paths of development leading to worse macroeconomic outcomes. That is, among development laggards, we choose two subgroups, one consisting of trapped economies and another of lag-behind countries. …Using cross-country analysis, we find that a key factor for fast-growing countries to grow faster than the United States and for trapped economies to grow slower than the United States is the relative TFP… Overall, we find that institutional barriers have played the most important role, accounting for more than half the economic growth in fast-growing and trapped economies and for more than 100 percent of the economic growth in the lag-behind countries.

Here are their case studies, showing income relative to the United States (a 1.0 means the same degree of prosperity as America).

As you can see, some nations catch up and some fall further behind, while others have periods of convergence and de-convergence.

And what causes these changes?

The degree to which nations have good policy.

…we identify that unnecessary protectionism, government misallocation, corruption, and financial instability have been key institutional barriers causing countries to either fall into the poverty trap or lag behind without a sustainable growth engine. Such barriers have created frictions or distortions to capital markets, trade, and industrialization, subsequently preventing these countries from advancing. …By reviewing the previous country-specific details, one can see that the 10 fast-growing countries have all adopted an open policy… Their governments have undertaken serious reforms, particularly in both labor and financial markets. …Thus, the establishment of correct institutions and individual incentives for better access to capital markets, international trade, and industrialization can be viewed as crucial for a country to advance with sustained economic growth

Here’s a table from the report showing the policies that help and the policies that hurt. Needless to say, it would be good if the White House understood that protectionism is one of the factors that undermine growth.

Interestingly, the study from the St. Louis Federal Reserve includes some country-specific analysis.

Here’s what it said about India, which suffered during an era of statism but has enjoyed decent growth more recently thanks to partial liberalization.

During 1950-90, India’s per capita income grew at an average annual rate of only about 2 percent, a result due to the Indian government’s implementation of restrictive trade, financial, and industrial policies. The Indian state took control of major heavy industries, by including additional licensing requirements, capacity restrictions, and limits on the regulatory framework. …In the late 1970s, the Indian government opened the economy by liberalizing both international trade and the capital market, leading to rapid growth in the early 1990s. As argued by Rodrik and Subramanian (2005), the trigger for India’s economic growth was an attitudinal shift on the part of the national government in 1980 in favor of private businesses. …The final trigger of the major economic reform of Manmohan Singh in the 1990s was due to the well-known 1991 balance-of-payment crisis….This reform ended the protectionist policies followed by previous Indian governments and started the liberalization of the economy toward a free-market system. This event led to an average annual growth rate that exceeded 6 percent in per capita terms during 1990-2005.

For what it’s worth, I am semi-pessimistic about India. Simply stated, there’s hasn’t been enough reform.

We also have some discussion regarding Argentina, which is mostly a sad story of ever-expanding government.

Argentina is the third-largest economy in Latin America and was one of the richest countries in the world in the early twentieth century. However, after the Great Depression, import substitution generated a cost-push effect of high wages on inflation. During 1975-90, growing government spending, large wage increases, and inefficient production created chronic inflation that increased until the 1980s, and real per capita income fell by more than 20 percent. …In 1991, the government attempted to control inflation by pegging the peso to the U.S. dollar. In addition, it began to privatize state-run enterprises on a broader basis and stop the run of government debt. Unfortunately, lacking a full commitment, the economy continued to crumble slowly and eventually collapsed in 2001 when the Argentine government defaulted on its debt. Its GDP declined by nearly 20 percent in four years, unemployment reached 25 percent, and the peso depreciated by 70 percent after being devalued and floated.

But if we go to the other side of the Andes Mountains, we find some good news in Chile.

From the Second World War to 1970, real GDP per capita of Chile increased at an average annual rate of 1.6 percent, and its economic performance was behind those of Latin America’s large and medium-sized countries. Chile pursued an import-substitution strategy, which resulted in an acute overvaluation of its currency that intensified inflation. …Although most Latin American countries have practiced strong government intervention in the markets since the mid-1970s, Chile pursued free market reform. …The outcomes are as follows: Exports grew rapidly, per capita income took off, inflation declined to single digits, wages increased substantially, and the incidence of poverty plummeted (compare with Edwards and Edwards, 1991). Since the democratic administration of Patricio Aylwin in 1990, the economic reform has been accelerated and Chile has become one of the healthiest economies in Latin America.

Not only has Chile become the richest nation in Latin America, it also has enjoyed significant convergence with the United States. About 40 years ago, according to the Maddison database, per-capita GDP in Chile was only about 20 percent of U.S. levels. Now it is 40 percent.

I’ll close with a chart, based on the Maddison numbers, showing how Hong Kong, Singapore, and Switzerland have converged with the United States. These are the only nations that have ranked in the top-10 for economic freedom ever since the rankings began. As you can see, their reward is prosperity.

The bottom line is that there is a recipe for growth and prosperity. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that very few nations follow the recipe since economic liberty means restricting the power of special interests and the political elite.

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The IMF Proposes (again) to Sabotage China’s Economy

The good news about China is that economic liberalization has produced impressive growth in recent decades, which has helped bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

The bad news is that China started from such a low position that per-capita income is still quite low compared to rich nations.

So what does the economic future hold? Will China continue its upward trajectory?

That’s certainly possible, but it depends on the Chinese government. Will there be additional liberalization, giving the economy more “breathing room” to grow?

Not if the government listens to the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund. I wrote three years ago about an IMF study that recommended huge tax increases in China.

And now there’s another IMF report pushing for big tax hikes. Only instead of arguing that higher taxes somehow will produce more growth by financing a bigger burden of government (which – no joke – was the core argument in the 2105 study), this new report claims higher taxes will produce more growth by reducing inequality.

Here’s the basic premise of the paper.

…economic growth has not benefited all segments of the population equally or at the same pace, causing income disparities to grow, resulting in a large increase in income inequality… This is especially of concern as the recent literature has found that elevated levels of inequality are harmful for the pace and sustainability of growth… The paper discusses what additional policies can be deployed to improve equity in opportunities and outcomes, with particular focus on the role for fiscal policy.

But a key part of the premise – the blanket assertion that inequality undermines growth – is junk.

As I noted in 2015 when debunking a different IMF study, “..they never differentiate between bad Greek-style inequality that is caused by cronyism and good Hong Kong-style inequality that is caused by some people getting richer faster than other people getting richer in a free market.”

Let’s dig into the details of this new IMF study.

Here’s the problem, at least according to the bureaucrats.

Income inequality in China today, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is among the highest in the world. …Furthermore, the Gini coefficient has rapidly increased over the last two decades, by a total of about 15 Gini points since 1990.

And here’s the chart that supposedly should cause angst. It shows that inequality began to rise as China shifted toward capitalism.

But why is this inequality a bad thing, assuming rich people earned their money honestly?

When markets are allowed to function, people become rich by providing value to the rest of us. In other words, it’s not a zero-sum game.

Ironically, the IMF study actually makes my point.

…much of China’s population has experienced rising real incomes. …even for the bottom 10 percent incomes rose by as much as 63 percent between 1980 and 2015… This has implied that China reduced the share of people living in poverty immensely. Measured by the headcount ratio, the population in poverty decreased by 86 percentage points from 1980 to 2013 (see figure 6), the most rapid reduction in history.

And here’s the aforementioned Figure 6, which is the data worth celebrating.

Any normal person will look at this chart and conclude that China should do more liberalization.

But not the bureaucrats at the IMF. With their zero-sum mentality, they fixate on the inequality chart.

Which leads them to make horrifyingly bad recommendations.

…several reforms could be envisaged to make fiscal policy more inclusive, both on the tax and expenditure side. …revenues from PIT contribute only around 5 percent of total revenues, a much lower share than the OECD average of 25 percent. Increasing the reliance on PIT, which more easily accommodates a progressive structure, could allow China to improve redistribution through the tax system. …While the PIT in China already embeds a progressive schedule with marginal rates increasing with income from 3 to 45 percent, …redesigning the tax brackets would ensure that middle and high income households with higher ability to pay contribute more to financing the national budget… Property and wealth taxes remain limited in China. Such taxes are broadly viewed as progressive, because high-income households usually tend also to have more property and wealth. …Consideration should therefore be given to adopt a recurrent market-value based property tax.

And why do IMF bureaucrats want all these additional growth-stifling taxes?

To finance a larger burden of government spending.

China still lags other emerging economies and OECD countries in public spending on education, health and social assistance. …social expenditure will need to be boosted.

In other words, the IMF is suggesting that China should copy welfare states such as Italy and France.

Except those nations at least enjoyed a lengthy period before World War II when government was very small. That’s when they became relatively rich.

The IMF wants China to adopt big government today, which is a recipe to short-circuit prosperity.

P.S. I don’t think the IMF is motivated by animus towards China. The bureaucrats are equal-opportunity dispensers of bad advice.

P.P.S. The OECD also is trying to undermine growth in China.

P.P.P.S. There are some senior-level Chinese officials who understand the downsides of a welfare state.

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Paul Krugman Is Learning the Wrong Lesson from Denmark

Paul Krugman has butchered numbers when writing about fiscal policy in nations such as France, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Today, we’re going to peruse his writings on Denmark.

Here’s some of what he wrote earlier this month.

Denmark can teach us…about the possibilities of creating a decent society. …Denmark, where tax receipts are 46 percent of GDP compared with 26 percent in the U.S., is arguably the most social-democratic country in the world. According to conservative doctrine, the combination of high taxes and aid to “takers” must really destroy incentives both to create jobs and to take them in any case. …what Denmark shows is that you can run a welfare state far more generous than we do – beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives – and still have a highly successful economy. Indeed, while GDP per capita in Denmark is lower than in the U.S. – basically because of shorter work hours.

And here’s what he wrote a couple of days ago.

American politics has been dominated by a crusade against big government; Denmark has embraced an expansive government role, with public spending more than half of G.D.P. American politicians fear talk about redistribution of income from the rich to the less well-off; Denmark engages in such redistribution on a scale unimaginable here. …Conservative ideology says that Denmark’s policy choices should be disastrous, that grass should be growing in the streets of Copenhagen. …But if Denmark is a hellhole, it’s doing a very good job of hiding that fact: I was just there, and it looks awfully prosperous. …The simple fact is that life is better for most Danes than it is for their U.S. counterparts.

Interestingly, Krugman acknowledges that Denmark isn’t really socialist. Instead, it simply has a big welfare state.

But is Denmark socialist? …Denmark doesn’t at all fit the classic definition of socialism, which involves government ownership of the means of production. It is, instead, social-democratic: a market economy where the downsides of capitalism are mitigated by government action, including a very strong social safety net. …The simple fact is that there is far more misery in America than there needs to be. Every other advanced country has universal health care and a much stronger social safety net than we do.

He thinks that is a good thing, of course, and was making the same argument (using the same headline) in 2015.

…the Danes get a lot of things right, and in so doing refute just about everything U.S. conservatives say about economics. …Denmark maintains a welfare state — a set of government programs designed to provide economic security — that is beyond the wildest dreams of American liberals. …working-age families receive more than three times as much aid, as a share of G.D.P., as their U.S. counterparts. To pay for these programs, Denmark collects a lot of taxes. …Overall, Denmark’s tax take is almost half of national income, compared with 25 percent in the United States. …It’s hard to imagine a better refutation of anti-tax, anti-government economic doctrine, which insists that a system like Denmark’s would be completely unworkable.

As far as I can tell, all his numbers about Denmark are accurate, but his analysis is wrong.

He wants readers to believe that the lesson from Denmark is that there are no adverse economic consequences when nations impose a big welfare state and high taxes.

But that’s not what Danish economic history tells us. As with other Nordic nations, Denmark became a rich nation when government was relatively small and taxes were modest.

And we know from historical data that economic performance significantly weakened after the fiscal burden of government was increased.

Moreover, lawmakers are now trying to restrain government spending.

A Danish economist, Otto Brøns-Petersen, has a superb description of Denmark’s economic history.

The first thing to realize is that Denmark, as are the other Nordic countries, quite free markets, apart from their welfare state transfers and high government consumption. They tend to get rather high rankings on measures of the most free economies in the World. …Protection of property rights and the integrity of the legal system are very high by international standards, as is the soundness of the monetary system… Denmark has a long tradition for free trade… Credit markets are among the less regulated internationally. During the recent financial crisis, tax payers did not have to subsidize banks, and some banks were allowed to fail. The Danish labor market is very flexible: There is no legislated minimum wage, and there are few restrictions on hiring and firing.

Here’s the part that is a must-read.

Denmark did not become a rich country recently. …Danish per capita GDP relative to other countries reached a maximum 40-60 years ago… Denmark caught up to and overtook “old Europe” in the fifties, while it narrowed its gap to the US and other Western offsprings until the early 1970s, when the process of catching up came to a hold. …At the time Denmark became rich relative to the rest of the World, it was not a welfare state. In fact, Denmark has historically been a low tax country by international standards. Until the 1960s, the Danish tax revenue to GDP ratio was at the same level as the US, and lower than the British.

Unfortunately, policy veered in the wrong direction in the late 1960s, with very adverse consequences.

The sharp divergence in the Danish tax level really occurred in the second half of the 1960s, when first a left wing coalition government and then a right wing one increased the tax to GDP ratio by some ten percentage points. …government spending was to a large extent driven by increases in tax revenue stemming from the introduction of VAT and withholding taxes on wage income. …the welfare state attracted new clients and new programs were added, the economic crisis lead to increasing unemployment… By the early 1980s the economy was in very bad shape, with high unemployment, an inflationary deflation spiral, a huge and widening government deficit.

I can’t help but call your attention to Otto’s observation about how the VAT enabled a far larger burden of government.

But let’s not get sidetracked.

This chart shows how the tax burden in Denmark diverged from the United States.

So what’s the bottom line?

Denmark first became rich, and then introduced the programs, which make up the welfare state. The huge increase in government spending has been accompanied by deep structural problems, which has made it necessary to reform the Danish economy and welfare state ever since. It can hardly be claimed that introducing the welfare state made Denmark rich; rather it was the other way around. Denmark first became rich, and then authorities began to redistribute some of the wealth.

Amen. I made the same point back in 2011.

Writing for PJ Media, Tyler O’Neil reviews the good and bad in Denmark and also echoes Otto’s analysis.

A deeper look at the history and current affairs of Denmark and the surrounding countries tells a different story, however. These countries’ benefits arguably spring from their free-market pasts, not their brief dalliance with big government. …During the early 1900s and following the Great Depression, Scandinavia’s small government and free markets fostered a culture of hard work that paid huge dividends in terms of prosperity.

Unfortunately, starting about 50 years ago, Denmark (like many other nations in the region) adopted an expensive welfare state. With bad results.

…the 1960s – 1990s expansion of welfare states actually held the Nordic countries back. After their experiment with socialistic welfare states, “Nordic citizens now have unusually high levels of sickness absence (despite being healthy societies), high youth unemployment and a poor record for integrating migrants into the labour force,” Sanandaji explains. Big government has weakened the strong culture which enabled welfare states in the first place… In 2013, roughly 240,000 people — nine percent of the potential work force — were receiving disability checks, and about 33,500 of them were under 40.

I fully agree. Denmark’s welfare state has created a problem. Simply stated, there are too many people who depend on government compared to the number of taxpayers who finance government.

I sometimes use the example of how many people are pulling the wagon compared to the number of people riding in the wagon. The Danish version uses Viking ships.

Fortunately, now there’s an effort to move back in the right direction.

Denmark now outranks even the United States as a good place to do business. …In 2013, it reduced early-retirement plans, and cut the term for unemployment benefits from four years to two. …In recent years, all the Nordic countries have decreased their corporate tax rates — each one is lower than in the United States. They also support free trade, unlike American Socialists.

Let’s look at some specific examples of how Denmark is trying to undo the damage of excessive government.

Bloomberg reported last year about the ongoing effort to reduce the nation’s fiscal burden.

When a European government raises the pension age and makes cuts to welfare programs, it’s usually because of dire finances. In Denmark’s case, it’s because of ideology. …Driving the new government’s push is a desire to finance a major round of income tax cuts. “We want to promote a society in which it is easier to support yourself and your family before you hand over a large share of your income to fund the costs of society,” the government of Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen wrote in its manifesto. It’s all part of a Danish drift toward the political right… Reforms introduced by successive governments over the years have already ensured that Denmark’s expensive welfare state is sustainable for years to come, says Torben M. Andersen, a professor of economics at the University of Aarhus and a former government adviser. These include raising the retirement age to 67 years from 65 years by 2025.

Denmark is also cutting back on college subsidies.

As one of a handful of countries that offers free tuition to college students, Denmark grants students enormous freedom… But some Danes, especially older citizens already in the labor force, say the extra freedom can eliminate a crucial sense of urgency for 20-somethings to become adults. The country now deals with “eternity students” — people who stick around at college for six years or more without any plans of graduating, solely because they don’t have any financial incentive to leave. …The country has made some headway to counter eternity students. In 2015, the Danish government proposed and passed an amendment to the Study Progress Reform… Jakobsen said the amendment has definitely reduced the trend of eternity students.

Now let’s get to my contribution to this discussion.

A few years ago, I created a “statism spectrum” to show how countries differ when looking at total economic freedom (fiscal policy, trade policy, regulatory policy, monetary policy, and quality of governance).

And I pointed out that nations with onerous fiscal burdens can still rank relatively high if they have a very pro-market approach in other areas.

But I have to confess that my spectrum was a back-of-the-envelope exercise. I simply drew a line and then added six countries.

Time for some rigor. I downloaded the latest scores from the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World and created this chart showing the relative ranking of all the countries (divided by category). As you can see, the United States and Denmark are both in the top category and they both have very similar levels of overall economic liberty.

And to put those numbers in context, here’s the same chart, but also showing France, Greece, and Venezuela.

In other words, there’s a lot to admire about Denmark. Yes, taxes are onerous and the burden of spending is still too high, but it’s nonetheless one of the most market-oriented countries in the world because of laissez-faire policies in other areas.

My bottom line is that Paul Krugman is right to praise Denmark.

My only gripe is that he likes the one thing that they’re doing wrong and overlooks all the things that make the country a relative success.

Moreover, he ignores all the recent efforts to reduce the fiscal burden of government, probably because that would require him to acknowledge that large public sectors are bad for growth.

P.S. Denmark is way ahead of the United States in its market-friendly, savings-based approach to retirement.

P.P.S. Denmark also ranks above America in protecting the right of private property.

P.P.P.S. But the United States does rank above Denmark when all policies are part of the equation, which presumably helps to explain why Americans are richer. And that also is probably why Danes in America earn a lot more than Danes in Denmark.

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Socialism Humor

A few days ago, I posted an interview about the supposed resurgence of socialism and pointed out that Bernie Sanders isn’t really a socialist. At least if we use the technical definition of that unsavory form of statism.

Based on reader reaction, though, what people most liked about that column were the links at the end to various examples of anti-socialism humor.

I’m happy to cater to those preferences since I like mocking statist ideologies, so let’s enjoy a new edition of socialism humor.

I’ve previously posted a column that summarizes socialism in three pictures. Well, here’s the four-picture version.

By the way, left-wing friends have nit-picked by arguing that some of these photos don’t depict actual socialism.

I tell them that they’re being too literal. That’s not how humor works. Moreover, if they want to have a debate on the real-world consequences of socialism, I’m happy to do that.

I’m not even sure this next item, from libertarian Reddit, makes sense. But I confess I laughed when I first saw it.

Maybe it’s just because both only math-challenged people are drawn to Bernienomics and this “special.”

This next cartoon, also from libertarian Reddit, is self-explanatory.

Very similar to the last cartoon in this collection.

Let’s shift from images to an article. I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, but I’ve sometimes wondered whether all the feature articles in the establishment press about ant colonies and bee hives is a subliminal effort to promote socialism. With that in mind, this satire from Babylon Bee is spot on.

It was a socialist paradise. Everyone working together in harmony and equally sharing in the labor. But then disaster struck. Disaster in the form of seven-year-old Timmy Gunderson. …he shook his older sister’s ant farm as if trying to reset an Etch A Sketch. Until then, the ant farm had been a model of true socialism. No markets. No capitalists growing rich off the labor of others. Just everyone sharing in the noble work of digging tunnels and harvesting the seeds and sugar water provided daily by eleven-year-old Molly Gunderson. …“The right might seize on the collapse of yet another socialist society,” said professor Clinton Morris. “But it’s important to note that what happened was not a failure of socialism. What caused its failure were outside forces, namely little Timmy.” …measures have been taken to prevent the same disaster from happening again, namely placing the ant farm high up on a bookshelf. Perhaps this time socialism’s promise of a perfect society will be fulfilled.

But maybe socialist society won’t be so perfect for Fido and Rover.

I’ll close with another item that showed up in my inbox.

Given what’s happening in Venezuela, we probably shouldn’t laugh.

P.S. To make my life simpler (adding a long collection of hyperlinks is a pain in the butt), I’ve created a special page for all of my socialism and communism humor.

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The Pernicious Impact of Government Intervention in Healthcare, Captured in a Chart

America’s healthcare system is a mess, largely because government intervention (Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and the tax code’s healthcare exclusion) have produced a system where consumers almost never directly pay for their medical services.

This “third-party payer” system basically means market forces are absent. Consumers have very little reason to focus on cost, after all, if taxpayers or insurance companies are picking up the tab for nearly 90 percent of expenses.

As a result, we get ever-higher prices.

But we also get a lot of featherbedding and inefficiency because providers want to take advantage of this system.

Athenahealth offered some sobering analysis on the system last year.

The number of physicians in the United States grew 150 percent between 1975 and 2010, roughly in keeping with population growth, while the number of healthcare administrators increased 3,200 percent for the same time period. Yes, that’s 3,200 percent in 35 years…the growing number of administrators is…driven by…ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009.) Critics say the army of administrators does little to relieve the documentation burden on clinicians, while creating layers of high-salaried bureaucratic bloat in healthcare organizations.

And here’s the chart that succinctly captures so much of what is wrong with America’s government-distorted healthcare regime.

By the way, the chart implies that the rising number of administrators is driven by additional regulations from Washington. I certainly won’t disagree with the notion that more red tape is counterproductive, but I suspect that third-party payer is the primary cause of the problem.

Third-party payer is what causes prices to climb, and then the government and insurance companies respond with various cost-control measures that require lots of paperwork and monitoring. Hence, more administrators.

In other words, third-party payer is the problem and regulations and administrators are both symptoms.

I’ll close by noting that I shared a version of this chart last year and warned that the numbers might be exaggerated. But there’s no question about the trend of more bureaucracy, red tape, and inefficiency.

P.S. Because it’s so important to fix the third-party payer problem, I’ve actually defended one small provision of Obamacare.

P.P.S. Here’s how genuine free markets result in lower costs for healthcare.

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Tariffs and America’s Early Economic History: A Primer for President Trump

There’s an ongoing debate about Trump’s endgame on trade. Is he simply a crude protectionist, or is he disrupting the status quo in order to force other nations to reduce their protectionist barriers?

I hope it’s the latter, though I fear it’s the former.

But one thing I can state with certainty is that the President misreads early American history. Here’s a tweet that he recently sent about how America became a strong and rich country during an era when the federal government relied on tariffs to generate revenue.

Our Country was built on Tariffs, and Tariffs are now leading us to great new Trade Deals – as opposed to the horrible and unfair Trade Deals that I inherited as your President. Other Countries should not be allowed to come in and steal the wealth of our great U.S.A. No longer!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 15, 2018

Trump is partially right. The United States became a rich country in the 1800s when tariffs were a primary source of revenue.

But I have argued that America became rich because of other policies.

• The federal government was very small, with the budget consuming on average less than 3 percent of the economy’s output.
• Prior to that awful day in 1913, there was no income tax, no payroll tax, no capital gains tax, no death tax, and no corporate tax.
• There was no sprawling and intrusive administrative state imposing costly regulations that hinder the private sector.

No, the United States was not a laissez-faire paradise in the 1800s. I’m simply making the case that the economy had more than enough “breathing room” to generate ever-higher levels of national prosperity.

Meaning the economy grew, not because of tariffs, but because other bad policies didn’t exist.

And I’m not the only with this perspective. Eric Boehm’s article in Reason concludes with an offer to trade the income tax for a modest tariff.

After the ratification of the Constitution, the very first law passed by the new Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789. It imposed an 8 percent tax on pretty much all imports into the United States, with the revenue from the tariffs used to fund the new national government and to pay down debts accumulated during the Revolutionary War. …those early tariffs did solve a very practical revenue problem for the early United States government. In those days before H&R Block (indeed, before income taxes) collecting taxes was a difficult prospect. It was much easier to post-up customs officials at every port and collect taxes on the physical stuff that came ashore than to send tax collectors to every town and borough across 13 states to collect taxes from the populace—especially since many of those would-be taxpayers weren’t entirely sold on the idea of a powerful central government, and had a recent history of armed rebellion against excessive taxation. …If Trump wants to make the argument that America should use tariffs to raise revenue, like we did in the 1790s, he better have a plan to abolish all federal taxes on income, investments, and labor. If he wants to have that discussion, well, I’ll listen.

Brian Domitrovic, writing for Forbes, hits the nail on the head. He starts by agreeing with Trump’s assertion about strong growth in the era of tariffs.

…there is a general sense, among the American public, that previously in history, when the American economy really grew at great rates in the extensive stretch of time before the era of free-trade ideology after 1945, we had tariffs. Tariffs and American prosperity went together. Why not try to get that mix again? …This country’s economy regularly grew at rates double ours today, when the tariff was in force from 1789 until early in the 20^th century.

But he points out that other factors deserve the credit. Especially the absence of any type of taxation on income.

…there was a condition that obtained in these years that is absent today. That condition is that the tariff was in the main the only form of federal taxation. There was no income or profits tax, no wage tax, no tax on investment gains… When the American economy really boomed under the tariff, over the first half of our history, financiers and entrepreneurs plowed money, energy, and ideas into businesses knowing that all receipts were available to recover costs and make a profit. …A company’s pay rates did not have to exceed the wage needs of the employees so as to cover their income and payroll tax obligations, as today. The money left to a company from sales after costs faced no corporate tax. And there was no inheritance tax.

And I’ll add one additional point. One of the good things about tariffs is that they are inherently self-limiting because of the Laffer Curve. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out, the government gets less revenue if trade taxes get too high.

Anyhow, the moral of today’s story is that tariffs are bad, but they are less bad than the modern welfare/administrative state.

But here’s the challenge.

If we want to solve the problems caused by the western world’s second-most-depressing chart, we’ll need to figure out how to reverse all the bad policies that produced the western world’s most-depressing chart.

Unfortunately, Trump has been making government even bigger, so the likelihood of returning to a tariff-only tax system has dropped from 0.00005 percent to 0.00001 percent.

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Can Bernie Sanders Make Socialism Great Again?

When Crazy Bernie became a national political phenomenon back in 2015, I pointed out that the Vermont Senator isn’t actually a socialist.

As I remarked in this brief interview with Melissa Francis, the technical definition of socialism involves government ownership and control over the “means of production.” In other words, policies such as collective farms and government factories.

It’s possible that Bernie Sanders secretly supports those policies, but his public positions are conventional statism – i.e., lots of redistribution, cronyism, and intervention.

Those policies are destructive and harmful, to be sure. Just think about basket-case economies such as Greece and Venezuela.

But not all left-wing economic policies are socialism. Which was the point I made two years ago when I put together this diagram.

As you can see, I think Sen. Sanders belongs on the far left, but he represents a different strand of statism. At least when compared to conventional socialists or totalitarian socialists.

And I categorize the Nordic nations as “rational leftists” to provide a benchmark (even though those countries are very pro-market by global standards, thanks to their laissez-faire approaches to trade, regulation, etc).

I”ll close by acknowledging that language does evolve. So perhaps I’m being pedantic by drawing a distinction between ordinary Bernie-style leftism and socialism. After all, I doubt 57 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans actually favor collective farms and government-run companies (at least I hope not).

P.S. Modern leftists don’t want to end private ownership, but they do want the government to control the economy. That approach was given a test last century.

P.P.S. For examples of socialism humor, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

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The Link Between Economic Liberty and National Prosperity

With the possible exception of a few extreme environmentalists, everyone agrees that robust long-run growth is a key to a better society.

An unprecedented jump in growth, for instance, is what enabled the western world to escape poverty, resulting in the famous “hockey stick” of modern prosperity.

Maintaining growth is an ongoing challenge for developed countries, to be sure, and it’s also vitally important to help developing nations grow and prosper.

Which is why policymakers should focus on the policies that generate good outcomes.

Libek, a think tank in Serbia, has released a study on this topic. They start by pointing out that we now have some good measures of economic liberty in various nations.

…the Economic Freedom in the World Index in 1996 by the Fraser Institute…was the first methodological tool that measured intrusion in functioning of the market process by government entities, either directly through government intervention or indirectly though regulation and market institutions. A similar index, Index of Economic Freedom, produced by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation soon followed… Since this very successful tool was invented, it has been widely employed in empirical studies…, the most important were concerning the role of economic freedom in fostering economic growth. …empirical studies mostly concluded that there is a significant connection between economic freedom and economic growth.

Since I’m always citing the Fraser Index and the Heritage Index, I agree that these are very helpful sources of data.

And lots of academics also use those numbers.

So Libek took a close look at this wealth of empirical research.

Libek conducted a metastudy regarding economic freedom in December 2017, with the aim to reexamine the connection between economic freedom and economic growth in published empirical studies. …Using Google scholar mechanism…92 studies…consider the connection between economic freedom and economic growth. Out of these, a predominant majority of 86 studies (93.5%) finds a positive correlation or connection between them, while only 6 studies (6.5%) have less positive results. …This metastudy shows that empirical studies have predominantly found that economic freedom is associated with higher economic growth rates, while there is only one study claim otherwise and results of other 5 are less conclusive. This high rate of concurrence between economists is highly unusual, given the fact that economist tend to often disagree even among theoretically more accepted topics. Therefore, it is conclusively shown that higher level of economic freedom, ceteris paribus, leads to higher economic growth.

The folks at Libek have a big incentive to care about these issues because Serbia is a reform laggard.

Here’s a chart comparing economic freedom in Serbia with other European regions.

And here is why economic reform is so vitally important for the people of Serbia.

Serbia remains one of the poorest countries in Europe, measured by GDP, with just 5 000 euros per capita. These low growth rates do not provide a possibility for development and closing the gap with more advanced European economies. …A study estimated future economic gains through higher economic freedom (Gwartney and Lawson 2004) reporting that 1-point increase in economic freedom (measured on a 1 to 10 scale) would increase long term rate of economic growth for 1.24% of GDP. Therefore, if Serbia would increase its score from the current 6.75 to 7.75 points – the approximately current level of Austria or Germany, Serbian long-term growth rate would increase from the envisaged 2% in 2017 (and estimated by the IMF to stand at 3.5% in 2018 and 2019) to 5.25% in 2020 and afterwards. This growth rate would enable a fast income convergence with other European countries, with GDP level per capita doubling in 14 years.

Amen. Serbia has the capacity to “converge,” but that won’t happen without economic liberalization.

For non-Serbians, the parts of the Libek report that will be of greatest interest deal with examples of nations that are out-performing their neighbors.

The importance of economic freedom is well shown by the most important case studies from different continents: Chile (South America), Singapore and Korea (East Asia), and Botswana (Africa). In all these prominent cases, economic freedom propelled these societies to a high and sustainable economic growth which led them to prosperity, compared to their neighbors.

The report specifically looks at the long-run data for countries that have sharply diverged from regional competitors.

Let’s start by comparing Chile with the rest of South America. As you can see, Chile’s dramatic economic liberalization led to far higher levels of national prosperity.

Now let’s compare Botswana to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa.

I did something similar back in 2015 and also earlier this year, so this remarkable data is impressive but not surprising.

Last but not least, let’s compare Singapore and South Korea to their neighbors.

Once again, we see a compelling link between economic liberty and economic outcomes.

This is dramatically evident when comparing South Korea and North Korea, but you also see remarkable numbers when comparing Singapore with the United States.

The lesson is not that nations need perfect policy (even Hong Kong has some statism). Instead, the message is that governments should strive to increase economic liberty – hopefully in big ways but even small reforms are helpful – so that there’s more “breathing room” for the economy’s productive sector.

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Harley-Davidson Is Right and Trump Is Wrong

It’s no secret that I’m a critic of Trump’s protectionism. He doesn’t understand the benefits of trade, misinterprets trade data, and – to coin a phrase – he’s “making cronyism great again.”

But, as shown in this interview, even I’m shocked that he’s “blaming the victim” by going after Harley-Davidson.

I’m disappointed, though, that I only made part of the argument.

Harley-Davidson is being hurt by government because Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs have raised the prices of inputs. But the company also is being hurt because other countries have responded to Trump’s protectionism with tariffs that will penalize the company.

Here’s some background on the story, as reported by CNN.

President Donald Trump said it’s “great” that consumers might boycott Harley-Davidson if it moves some motorcycle production overseas. …Trump’s remark came after the President hosted “Bikers for Trump” supporters at his golf club in Bedminister, New Jersey, over the weekend. …Tensions between the administration and Harley-Davidson have brewed for months. It started when Trump imposed hefty tariffs on steel and aluminum imports earlier this year in an effort to bolster domestic manufacturing. The European Union responded by pledging to raise tariffs on a list of goods that are imported from the United States, including Harley motorcycles. …Harley said it stands to lose as much as $100 million a year, and the company pledged to shift some of its production abroad so that it could avoid the added tariffs on motorcycles sold in the EU. …moving more production overseas was the “only sustainable option” in the face of a trade war.

Not that this is a sudden revelation.

The U.K.-based Financial Times reported back in June that the company was put in a bad position because Trump’s tariffs led to retaliatory tariffs from the European Union.

…Harley-Davidson announced it would move some manufacturing out of the US to avoid EU tariffs and Brussels prepared further retaliatory measures in case of new White House duties. The motorcycle maker is the first US manufacturer to scale down domestic production in response to the EU tariffs, which were imposed on Friday against $3.3bn in American imports as retaliation for US steel and aluminium duties.  Harley-Davidson’s decision illustrates why many pro-trade members of President Donald Trump’s own Republican party have raised concerns about the potential economic consequences of the multiple fronts he has opened in his trade offensive.

Kevin Williamson, writing for National Review, explained what’s really happening.

Harley-Davidson already operates facilities in Brazil, India, and Australia, and it has plans for a factory in Thailand. Avoiding protectionist measures drives some of that, but so do other factors, including proximity to customers — which is why Mercedes-Benz manufactures SUVs in the United States, where most of them are sold. Indians buy nearly 17 million motorcycles and scooters a year, and Harley-Davidson covets a larger share of that market. …its executives calculate that the Trump administration’s anti-trade policies will cost it as much as $100 million a year in the EU market alone. …What is Harley-Davidson supposed to do? Lose a few hundred million dollars while it waits for the Trump administration to get it right on trade? Because that day probably is not coming.

I’m not being a Trump basher, by the way. I noted in the interview that he’s also pushed through some policies that are good for both companies and competitiveness, such as targeted deregulation and lower tax rates.

But, as also noted in this Washington Post column, what’s frustrating is that the harm caused by Trump’s protectionism will offset the benefits of those good policies.

President Trump’s top economist defended the White House’s increasingly aggressive trade policies Tuesday, calling Harley-Davidson’s decision to move some operations overseas an exception to a broader trend of renewed corporate investment within the United States. Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said foreign direct investment on American soil “has skyrocketed” in the year’s first quarter, a trend he attributed to a cut in the corporate tax rate that Trump signed into law last year. …Former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, who resigned shortly after Trump  announced the tariffs, cautioned earlier this month that a trade war could wipe out the economic gains of the GOP tax law.

Let’s close by highlighting the oft-overlooked fact that the retaliatory tariffs against Harley-Davidson are not trivial.

Here are some excerpts from a Wall Street Journal editorial.

The company considers the EU a “critical market,” and last year it sold nearly 40,000 bikes to European consumers. But in retaliation for Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, the European Union raised its tax on American-exported Harleys to 31% from 6%, effective last Friday. That amounts to a $2,200 tax on each motorcycle exported from the U.S. to the EU. …Harley said “the tremendous cost increase, if passed on to its dealers and retail customers, would have an immediate and lasting detrimental impact to its business in the region, reducing customer access to Harley-Davidson products and negatively impacting the sustainability of its dealers’ businesses.” Translation for Mr. Trump: Unlike real estate, cars and motorcycles are a global market.

All of which underscores the main point from the interview, Harley-Davidson is the victim.

I mentioned in the interview that some people think Trump is playing a clever game to force other countries to lower trade barriers. Since other nations generally have higher trade barriers than the United States, he’s right to have that as a goal. Assuming, of course, that really is his goal. I’m skeptical, but would love to be proved wrong.

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Do Voters Reward Pro-Market Politicians?

A few days ago, I shared some academic research investigating whether economic crises lead to more liberalization (Naomi Klein’s hypothesis) or more statism (Robert Higgs’ hypothesis).

Given the dismal long-run outlook for the United States and most other developed nations, this is not just a theoretical issue.

Well, the good news is that the evidence shows that economic turmoil appears to be associated with pro-market reforms. At least with regard to regulatory policy.

Today, I’m going to share more good news. We now have some empirical research from two Danish economists showing that voters like good policy.

Here’s what Niclas Berggren and Christian Bjørnskov wanted to ascertain in their research

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. While the stated motivation for these reforms has usually been to increase economic efficiency, some critics have instead inferred ulterior motives…with the claim that many of the reforms have been undertaken during different crises so as to bypass potential opponents, suggests that people will dislike the reforms and even be less satisfied with democracy as such. We test this hypothesis empirically, using panel data from 30 European countries in the period 1993–2015. The dependent variable is the average satisfaction with democracy, while the reform measures are constructed as distinct changes in four policy areas: government size, the rule of law, openness and regulation. …We moreover include a set of control variables, capturing economic circumstances, political institutions and features of politics.

In other words, we’ve seen considerable liberalization over the past 20-plus years. Were voters happy or unhappy as a result?

Here’s a way of visualizing what they investigated.

For what it’s worth, I’ve argued that Reagan showed good policy is good politics.

And the good news is that this research reaches a similar conclusion. Here are their main results.

Our results indicate that while reforms of government size are not robustly related to satisfaction with democracy, reforms of the other three kinds are – and in a way that runs counter to the anti-liberalization claims. Reforms that reduce economic freedom are generally related to satisfaction with democracy in a negative way, while reforms that increase economic freedom are positively associated with satisfaction with democracy. Voters also react more negatively to left-wing governments introducing reforms that de-liberalize. …the hypothesis of a general negative reaction towards liberalizing reforms taking the form of reduced satisfaction with democracy does not stand up to empirical scrutiny, at least not in our European sample.

Wonky readers may want to spend some time with this table, which shows the results of the statistical analysis

I’ll close with a couple of specific observations from the research, all of which deal with whether some reforms are more popular than others.

The good news is that voters are most satisfied when there’s less protectionism.

It turns out that the most immediately important type of reform here is liberalizations that increase market openness, such as reductions in protectionism and removal of obstacles to capital movements.

(Methinks the folks in the White House may want to reconsider their protectionist policies. It seems people understand that trade wars cause blowback.)

The bad news is that voters don’t seem to get excited about reforms to restrain government spending, whereas other types of pro-market reforms are popular.

Reforms that involve government size are rarely statistically significant; reforms that involve the other three reform areas typically are.

Though voters sometimes aren’t happy when government gets bigger, so I guess that’s partial good news.

Crises only seem to matter when government size increases, and then they make the effect on satisfaction with democracy much more negative.

Perhaps this is evidence that people recognize Keynesian “stimulus” schemes aren’t a good idea? I hope that’s the right interpretation. Heck, maybe this is yet another reason to stop sending tax dollars to subsidize the OECD.

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A Court Case that Tells You Everything You Need to Know about Government

In June 2017, I shared an image and made the bold claim that it told us everything we needed to know about government.

In July 2017, I shared a story and similarly asserted that it told us everything we needed to know about government.

In that grand tradition of rhetorical exaggeration, here’s a court case that tells us everything we need to know about government.

…a lawsuit arguing that Detroit students were being denied an education had been dismissed. …With the help of a public interest law firm, a handful of Detroit students charged in federal court that educational officials in Michigan — including Gov. Rick Snyder — denied them access to an education of any quality. …Student cannot be expected to learn when they are simply “warehoused for seven hours a day” in “an unsafe, degrading, and chaotic environment” that is a school “in name only.” …almost 99 percent of the students are unable to achieve proficiency in state-mandated subjects. Last year, the state moved for dismissal, arguing that the 14th Amendment contains no reference to literacy. …U.S. District Judge Stephen Murphy III agreed with the state. Literacy is important, the judge noted. But students enjoy no right to access to being taught literacy. All the state has to do is make sure schools run. If they are unable to educate their students, that’s a shame, but court rulings have not established that “access to literacy” is “a fundamental right.”

I’m not a lawyer, so maybe the judge made the right decision. Indeed, I suspect it probably was the right outcome since a decision in favor of the suit may have resulted in some sort of judicial mandate to squander more money on failed government schools. And we have lots of evidence that additional funding would mean throwing good money after bad.

But I still feel great sympathy for the students and their parents. They are stuck with rotten schools that cost a lot of money.

They have been betrayed by government incompetence. Both Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have explained how the system is rigged to benefit teacher unions rather than kids.

And even though most of the victimized children are minorities, the NAACP sides with the unions. Shame. The failed government school monopoly serves the interests of insiders, not students.

The only solution is school choice, as explained in this video.

P.S. Needless to say, the federal government shouldn’t play a role. Bush’s no-bureaucrat-left-behind plan didn’t work, and neither did Obama’s Common Core boondoggle. The best thing that could happen in Washington would be the abolition of the Department of Education.

P.P.S. There’s a lot we could learn about school choice and private schooling from Sweden, Chile, India, Canada, and the Netherlands.

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The Most Uplifting Chart of the 21st Century

Two months ago, I shared some data on private gun ownership in the United States and declared that those numbers generated “The Most Enjoyable Graph of 2018.”

Now I have something even better because it confirms my hypothesis about tax competition being the most effective way of constraining greedy politicians.

To set the stage, check out these excerpts from a heartwarming story in the Wall Street Journal.

Last year’s corporate tax cut is reducing U.S. tax collections, as expected. But that change is likely to ripple far beyond the country’s borders in the years ahead, shrinking other countries’ tax revenue… The U.S. tax law will reduce what other countries collect from multinational corporations by 1.6% to 13.5%… Companies will be more likely to put profits and real investment in the U.S. than they were before the U.S. lowered its corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, according to the paper. That will leave fewer corporate profits for other countries to tax. And as that happens, other countries are likely to chase the U.S. by lowering their corporate tax rates, too, creating the potential for what critics have called a race to the bottom. …Mexico, Japan and the U.K. rank near the top of the paper’s list of countries likely to lose revenue… Corporate tax rates steadily declined over the past few decades as countries competed to attract investment.

Amen. This was one of my main arguments last year for the Trump tax plan. Lower tax rates in America will lead to lower taxes elsewhere.

For instance, look at what’s now happening in Germany.

Ever since Donald Trump last year unveiled deep tax cuts for companies in America, German industry has been wracked with fears over the economic fallout. …“In the long term, Germany cannot afford to have a higher tax burden than other countries,” warned Monika Wünnemann, a tax specialist at German business federation BDI. …the BDI urges Berlin to cut the overall tax burden, including corporate and trade levies, to a maximum 25 percent, compared to 26 percent in the US. …tax competition has clearly heated up within the European Union: France plans to reduce its top corporate rate to 25 percent by 2022 from 34 percent. The UK wants to cut its rate to 17 percent by 2021 from 20 percent today. If it fails to take action, Germany will be stuck with the heaviest corporate tax burden among industrialized countries.

Now let’s peruse a recent study from the International Monetary Fund.

Tax competition and declining corporate income tax (CIT) rates are not new phenomena. However, over the past 30 years, the United States has been an outlier in not reducing tax rates Combined with the worldwide system of taxation, this is widely regarded as having served as an anchor to world CIT rates. Now the United States has cut its rate by 14 percentage points to 26 percent (21 percent excluding state taxes), which is close to the OECD member average of 24 percent (Figure 1). Combined with the (partial) shift toward territoriality, this may intensify tax competition. …Given the combination of highly mobile capital and source-based corporate income taxation, pressures on tax systems are not surprising. …The most clear-cut, and possibly largest, spillovers are still likely to be caused by the cut in the tax rate. …Depending on parameter assumptions, we find that reform will lead to average revenue losses of between 1.5 and 13.5 percent of the MNE tax base. …The paper has also discussed the likely policy reactions of other countries. …tax rates elsewhere also fall (by on average around 4 percentage points based on tentative estimates).

And here’s the chart from the IMF report that sends a thrill up my leg.

As you can see, corporate tax rates have plunged by half since 1980.

And the reason this fills me with joy is two-fold. First, we get more growth, more jobs, and higher wages when corporate rates fall.

Second, I’m delighted because I know politicians hate to lower tax rates. Indeed, they’ve tasked the OECD with trying to block corporate tax competition (fortunately the bureaucrats haven’t been very successful).

And I could add a third reason. The IMF confesses that we have even more evidence of the Laffer Curve.

So far, despite falling tax rates, CIT revenues have held up relatively well.

Game, set, match.

I’m very irked by what Trump is doing on trade, government spending, and cronyism, but I give credit where credit is due. I suspect none of the other Republicans who ran in 2016 would have brought the federal corporate tax rate all the way down to 21 percent. And I’m immensely enjoying how politicians in other nations feel pressure to do likewise.

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Paul Krugman, Supply-Side Economist

I’ve been writing about the Laffer Curve for decades, making the simple point that there’s not a linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenue.

To help people understand, I ask them to imagine that they owned a restaurant and decided to double prices. Would they expect twice as much revenue?

Of course not, because people respond. Customers would go to other restaurants, or decide to eat at home. Depending on how customers reacted, the restaurant might even wind up with less revenue.

Well, that’s how the Laffer Curve works. When tax rates change, that alters incentives to engage in productive behavior (i.e., how much income they earn). In other words, to figure out tax revenue, you have to look at taxable income in addition to tax rates.

For some odd reason, this is a controversial issue.

My wayward buddy Bruce Bartlett posted a video on Facebook from Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal show. The goal was to mock the Laffer Curve, and here’s the part of the video featuring economists dismissing the concept as a “joke.”

Wow, that’s pretty damning. Economists from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Chicago are on the other side of the issue.

Should I give up and retract all my writings and analysis?

Fortunately, that won’t be necessary since I have an unexpected ally. As shown in this excerpt from the video, Paul Krugman agrees with me about the Laffer Curve.

And Krugman’s not alone. Many other left-leaning economists also admit there is a Laffer Curve.

To be sure, as Krugman noted, there is considerable disagreement about the revenue-maximizing tax rate. Folks on the left often say tax rates could be 70 percent while folks on the right think the revenue-maximizing rate is much lower.

I have two thoughts about this debate. First, if the revenue-maximizing rate is 70 percent, then why did the IRS collect so much additional revenue from upper-income taxpayers when Reagan lowered the top rate from 70 percent to 28 percent?

Second, I don’t want to maximize revenue for government. That’s why I always make sure my depictions of the Laffer Curve show both the revenue-maximizing point and the growth-maximizing point. At the risk of stating the obvious, I prefer the growth-maximizing point.

The bottom line is that I think the revenue-maximizing point is probably closer to 30 percent, as shown in my chart. Especially in the long run.

But I wouldn’t care if the revenue-maximizing rate was actually 50 percent. Politicians should only collect the relatively small amount of revenue that is needed to finance the growth-maximizing level of government spending.

P.S. As tax rates get closer and closer to the revenue-maximizing point, that means an increasing amount of economic damage per dollar collected.

P.P.S. Paul Krugman is also right that value-added taxes are not good for exports.

Addendum: This post was updated on August 12 to add the clip of selected economists mocking the Laffer Curve.

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Do Economic Crises Produce Liberalization or More Statism?

When I give speeches about modern welfare states, I’ll often cite grim data from the IMF, BIS, and OECD about the very depressing fiscal consequences of ever-expanding government.

And if I really want to worry an audience, I’ll augment those numbers by talking about the erosion of societal capital and explain it’s very hard to adopt necessary reforms once the work ethic and self-reliance have been replaced by a culture of dependency and entitlement.

I basically warn people that many western nations (including the United States) are doomed to suffer Greek-style fiscal collapse. Depending on the type of speech, this is where I sometimes share a slide suggesting that there are two possible outcomes once an economic crisis occurs.

• Does a crisis caused by bad government lead to even more bad government, which is the pessimistic hypothesis in Robert Higgs’ classic, Crisis and Leviathan?
• Or does an economic crisis force politicians to actually scale back the size and scope of government, which is the hypothesis in Naomi Klein’s The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

I’ve generally sided with Higgs, though there obviously are cases – such as Chile – where bad statist policies were followed by sweeping economic liberalization.

But, based on new research from the International Monetary Fund, it may be that Klein has a stronger argument (which would be a depressing outcome for her, since she favors bigger government).

Here are some of the issues that the authors investigated.

Relying on a new database of major past labor and product market reforms in advanced countries, we test a large set of variables for robust correlation with reform in each area. …structural reforms are notoriously difficult to implement…one of the most prominent hypotheses put forward in the literature, namely that crisis induces reform… we attempt to minimize value judgements and measurement error by employing a newly constructed “narrative” dataset of major reforms in four areas namely product market regulation (PMR) in network industries, EPL for regular workers, EPL for temporary workers, and unemployment benefit systems. … The large welfare costs of economic or financial crisis can break the deadlock over welfare-enhancing measures that could not be adopted otherwise due to conflict over their distributional consequences.

In short, they wanted to find out whether bad economic news (as captured by data on “GDP growth, deep recession, unemployment, crisis”) leads to pro-market reforms.

The answer is yes.

Our main result supports some form of the crisis-induces-reform hypothesis across all four reform areas. High unemployment, recession and/or an open economic crisis tend to be associated with a greater likelihood of reform. The effect is economically significant. For example, an increase of 10 percentage points in unemployment (as seen in several European economies in the aftermath of the Great Recession) is associated with an increase in the probability to undertake a major EPL reform for regular contract of about 5 percentage points — that is, about twice the average probability in the sample.

Here’s a chart from the report showing a big spike in deregulation in late 1990s/early 2000s.

And here’s a chart showing nations that took steps to cut back on unemployment subsidies.

Keep in mind, by the way, that some nations (such as Austria) may not have reformed because they never adopted bad policies in the first place.

Kudos to Denmark for implementing so much reform. And Greece wins a Booby Prize for failing to adopt desperately needed reforms.

I was also happy to see some results that bolster my argument in favor of jurisdictional competition as a tool to encourage better policy.

We also find evidence that outside pressure increases the likelihood of reform in certain areas. Reforms are more likely when other countries also undertake them.

Interestingly, it doesn’t appear that ideology plays a major role.

…we do not find any evidence for an ideological bias—there is no robust difference between left- and right-of-center governments’ propensity to undertake reform. …In the context of labor and product market reforms, while a reforming right-of-center government may face the combined resistance of the leftwing electorate, trade unions and other civil society groups, a left-of-center government will be less likely to be accused of pushing through reforms on ideological grounds and may therefore be more likely to succeed.

My two cents is that ideology can play a role (think Reagan and Thatcher, for instance), but that there are plenty of instances of putative right-of-center politicians making government bigger (Nixon and Bush, to cite US examples) and several instances of supposed left-of-center politicians overseeing pro-market reforms (Bill Clinton being the obvious example from America).

I’ll close with a very important caveat. The IMF study looked at regulatory policy. There are no lessons to be learned from this research about whether crises produce better fiscal policy.

For what it’s worth, based on all the post-financial-crisis tax increases that were imposed in Europe, I suspect that the Higgs hypothesis is still very relevant.

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Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, What Nations Protect Property Rights Best of All?

My favorite annual publication is the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World, which measures the amount of economic liberty that exists in 159 nations. The rankings are based on five equally weighted categories, though I’ve always viewed “Legal System and Property Rights” as being the most important because even low taxes and light regulation won’t produce much growth if investors and entrepreneurs have no faith in the rule of law or the quality of governance.

This is why the annual International Property Rights Index is another one of my favorite publications. It provides a detailed look at why the right to own, utilize, and trade property is essential to a free society.

Property rights are accepted as a linchpin for human beings’ liberty, acting as a catalyst for economic and societal growth , and as a defense against authoritarian temptations. …Property is the basis of the freedom to contract, which is simply liberty in action. Without freedom to exchange, a third party, generally the government, intervenes through the political-bureaucratic ruling class. Freedom is more than the right to own property or the right to make transactions, to exchange, to buy and sell. Once citizens lose the right to own, they lose the ability to control their own lives. …This Index was developed to serve as a barometer of the state of property rights in all countries of the world.

Here’s the methodology of the Index. There are three main categories, each of which is comprised of several indices.

Now let’s get to the rankings.

As you might expect, Nordic nations and Anglosphere jurisdictions dominate, along with a smattering of other European countries.

…the top 15 countries for this year’s IPRI edition. Finland leads the 2018 IPRI (8.6924)… New Zealand ranks second (8.6322)… Next come Switzerland (8.6183), Norway (8.4504), Singapore (8.4049), Sweden (8.3970), Australia (8.3295), Netherlands (8.3252), Luxembourg (8.2978), Canada (8.2947), Japan (8.2315), Denmark (8.1640), United Kingdom (8.1413), United States of America (8.1243), and Austria (8.0050).

Congratulations to Finland, New Zealand, and Switzerland for winning the gold, silver, and bronze medals.

If you peruse the full rankings below, you’ll see that the United States is #14 (the same as last year).

Haiti is in last place, below even Venezuela.

It’s also worth noting that Chile is the highest-ranked Latin American nation.

Now let’s look at the nations with the biggest movement in the right direction and wrong direction. It’s easy to make a big jump for nations that are ranked very low, so Cyprus (which is now near the top of the 3rd quintile) probably deserves the most applause.

This year, five countries show the highest absolute improvement in their IPRI score: Azerbaijan (1.09), Ukraine (0.86), Russia (0.85), Moldova (0.82), and Cyprus (0.79); while the ones with highest decreases in their 2018 IPRI scores were South Africa (-0.65), Ethiopia (-0.3), Liberia (-0.27), Uganda (-0.25), and Uruguay (-0.22).

And South Africa’s decline is very tragic since it historically has been one of the best African nations.

By the way, if you want to know why property rights are so important, this chart is all the evidence you need.

And we’ll close today’s column with a bit of good news.

We don’t have decades of data, but the numbers that do exist show continuous improvement.

And since we also have evidence that overall global economic liberty is increasing, there are reasons for optimism.

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What Will Cause the Next Recession?

I often discuss the importance of long-run growth and I pontificate endlessly about the policies that will produce better economic performance.

But what about short-term fluctuations? Where are we in the so-called business cycle? I don’t think economists are good at forecasting the ups and downs of the economy, but I did mention the factors that might contribute to a downturn in this interview with Dana Loesch.

Dana isn’t the only one interested in this topic.

The New York Times opined today about the state of the economy.

…the American economy has a lot more power…, and it’s making a lot of noise. …While Mr. Trump praised himself effusively…the stock market seemed unimpressed. …That’s because if you look down the line, there are few clear reasons to be so enthusiastic.

I suspect the editors at the NYT are somewhat motivated by a desire to make Trump look bad, but I don’t necessarily disagree with some of their analysis.

Though I think they are wrong on tax policy, which is the best thing that’s happened since Trump took office.

…the initial jolt of the Republicans’ $1.5 trillion tax cuts, mostly for corporations and the wealthy, is wearing off. Corporations have bought back $437 billion of their own shares, which leaves them that much less to invest in new production, or wages.

By the way, there’s nothing wrong with stock buybacks. It’s a way for companies to return profits to shareholders. And those shareholders generally then reinvest the money, so the NYT screwed up on that bit of analysis.

But they raise a very legitimate issue when looking at the impact of monetary policy.

Then there’s the flattening yield curve, which the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s president, James Bullard, warns could invert late this year if current conditions persist. That means short-term rates, such as those for two-year Treasury bonds, run higher than long-term rates, like the 10-year bond, a sign of pessimism that is a well-known red flag.

Though I would add that we wouldn’t be in the position of having to raise rates if the Fed hadn’t pushed rates artificially low in the first place (the same mistake they made last decade, by the way).

In other words, the best way of avoiding “tight money” is to not engage in periods of “easy money.”

The NYT editorial also looks at consumer spending, which is fine if the goal is to see whether retailers are happy. But if the issue is whether the economy is doing well, it’s much more important to see whether personal income is rising or falling.

Consumers were in a spending mood this spring, an attitude that won’t necessarily continue. …A recent Reuters analysis found that the bottom 60 percent of income-earners have been fueling their spending, and thus the economy’s, by using their savings or credit cards. They almost have to, because wage growth is expanding at a disappointing 2.7 percent annual clip.

I fully agree with this excerpt about trade. Assuming he wants to run for reelection, Trump is being very foolish to push for more protectionism.

…consider the administration’s effort to apply the sledgehammer to the economy’s toes via a trade war and ensuing tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, among other products. …Not only have the tariffs contributed to $1 billion in higher costs for General Motors, they are now contributing to rising prices of everything from Cokes to vacuum cleaners as companies pass along those costs to consumers.

Last but not least, I don’t necessarily agree that expansion have to end. After all, the economy is largely capable of self-correcting.

But a “business cycle” is probably inevitable so long as government has so much power to intervene.

None of these issues by themselves will put the brakes on an economy that is powering along with a 3.9 percent unemployment rate. But the friction is building. …economic expansions — and this one is in its 10th year — eventually run out of gas. …Mr. President, while you like to take credit for positive economic trends that are well beyond your control, you will own the downside, too.

For what it’s worth, I think misguided monetary policy usually deserves blame for short-run economic instability.

I mentioned in the interview that the central bank is trying to “normalize” interest rates. I hope the Fed is successful, though I worry that financial markets (and housing markets) have become dependent on easy money and will take a hit.

I’ll close by pointing out that the pundit class is focusing on whether the economy is growing faster under Trump than it grew under Obama.

I don’t care about that contest. I’m much more interested in whether we can get the kind of free market-driven prosperity we enjoyed under Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.

We didn’t get that growth during the Obama years.

And given Trump’s schizophrenic approach to policy, I don’t have high hopes we’ll average 3 percent-plus growth during his tenure.

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Denmark’s Successful Transition from Tax-Financed Old-Age Payments to Private Retirement Accounts

The United States has a bankrupt Social Security system.

According to the most recent Trustees Report, the cash-flow deficit is approaching $44 trillion. And that’s after adjusting for inflation.

Even by DC standards of profligacy, that’s a big number.

Yet all that spending (and future red ink) doesn’t even provide a lavish retirement. Workers would enjoy a much more comfortable future if they had the freedom to shift payroll taxes to personal retirement accounts.

This is why I periodically point out that other nations are surpassing America by creating retirement systems based on private savings. Here are some examples of countries with “funded” systems (as compared to the “pay-as-you-go” regime in the United States).

• Australia
• Chile
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Hong Kong
• Netherlands
• Faroe Islands

Now it’s time to add Denmark to this list.

Here’s how the OECD describes the Danish system.

There is…a mandatory occupation pension scheme based on lump-sum contributions (ATP). In addition, compulsory occupational pension schemes negotiated as part of collective agreements or similar cover about 90% of the employed work force. …Pension rights with ATP and with occupational pension schemes are accrued on a what-you-pay-iswhat-you-get basis. The longer the working career, the higher the employment rate, the longer contribution record and the higher the contribution level, the greater the pension benefits. …ATP covers all wage earners and almost all recipients of social security benefits. ATP membership is voluntary for the self-employed. ATP covers almost the entire population and comes close to absolute universality. …The occupational pension schemes are fully funded defined-contribution schemes… Some 90% of the employed work force is covered… The coverage ratio has increased from some 35% in the mid-1980s to the current level… Contribution rates range between 12% and 18%.

A Danish academic described the system in a recent report.

As labour market pensions mature, they will challenge the people’s pension as the backbone The fully funded pensions provide the state with large income tax revenues from future pension payments which will also relieve the state quite a bit from future increases in pension expenditures. Alongside positive demographic prospects this makes the Danish system economically sustainable. … a main driver was the state’s interest in higher savings… Initially, savings was also the government motive for announcing in 1984 that it would welcome an extension of occupational pensions to the entire labour market. … Initially, contributions were low, but the social partners set a target of 9 per cent, later 12 per cent, which was reached by 2009. …it is formally a private system. Pensions are fully funded, and savings are secured in pensions funds. …It is also worth noting that the capital accumulated is huge. Adding together pensions in private insurance companies, banks, and labour market pension funds (some of which are organized as private pension insurance companies), the total amount by the end of 2015 was 4.083 bill.DKK, that is, 201 per cent of GDP.

Denmark’s government also is cutting back on the taxpayer-financed system.

… the state has also sought to reduce costs of ageing by raising the pension age. In the 2006 “Welfare Reform”, it was decided to index retirement age with life expectancy… Moreover, the voluntary early retirement scheme was reduced from 5 to 3 years and made so economically unattractive that it is de facto phased out. Pension age is gradually raised from 65 to 67 years in 2019-22, to 68 years in 2030, to 69 in 2035 and to 70 in 2040… These reforms are extremely radical: The earliest possible time of retirement increases from 60 years for those born in 1953 to 70 years for those born in 1970. But the challenge of ageing is basically solved.

Those “socialist” Danes obviously are more to the right than many American politicians.

The Social Security Administration has noticed that Denmark is responding to demographic change.

The Danish government recently implemented two policy changes that will delay the transition from work to retirement for many of its residents. On December 29, 2015, the statutory retirement age increased from age 67 to 68 for younger Danish residents. Three days later, on January 1, 2016, a reform went into effect that prohibits the long-standing practice of including mandatory retirement ages in employment contracts.

And here’s some additional analysis from the OECD.

…pension reforms are expected to compensate the impact of ageing on the labour force… To maintain its sustainability…, major reforms have been legislated, including the indexation of retirement age to life expectancy gains from 2030 onwards. …a person entering the labour market at 20 in 2014 will reach the legal retirement age at 73.5. This would make the Danish pension age the highest among OECD countries. …As private pension schemes introduced in the 1990s mature, public spending on pension is projected to decline from around 10% of GDP in 2013 to 7% towards 2060.

Wow. Government spending on pensions will decline even though the population is getting older. Too bad that’s not what’s happening in America.

Last but not least, here are some excerpts from some Danish research.

Denmark has also developed a funded, private pension system, which is based on mandatory, occupational pension (OP) schemes… The projected development of the occupational schemes will have a substantial effect on the Danish economy’s ability to cope with the demographic changes. …the risks of generational conflicts seem smaller in Denmark than in many other countries. …Overall, the Danish OP schemes are thus widely regarded as highly successful: they have contributed substantially to restoring fiscal sustainability, helped averting chronic imbalances on the current account and reduced poverty among the elderly.

This table is remarkable, showing the very high levels of pension assets in Denmark.

To be sure, the Danish system is not a libertarian fantasy. Government still provides a substantial chunk of retirement income, and that will still be true when the private portion of the system is fully mature. And even if the private system provided 99 percent of retirement income, it’s based on compulsion, so “libertarian” is probably not the right description.

But it is safe to say that Denmark’s system is far more market-oriented (and sustainable) than America’s tax-and-transfer Social Security system.

So the next time I hear Bernie Sanders say that the United States should be more like Denmark. I’ll be (selectively) cheering.

P.S. The good news isn’t limited to pension reform. Having reached (and probably surpassed) the revenue-maximizing point on the Laffer Curve, Denmark is taking some modest steps to restrain the burden of government spending. Combined with very laissez-faire policies on other policies such as trade and regulation, this helps to explain why Denmark is actually one of the 20-most capitalist nations in the world.

August 8 addendum: Here’s a chart from a report by the European Commission showing that private pension income is growing while government-provided retirement benefits are falling (both measured as a share of GDP).

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Trump Slams the Brakes on Obama’s CAFE Mandate

I don’t like the tribal nature of American politics, in part because I get criticized for not playing the game.

• The pro-Trump crowd goes after me when I condemn the President’s protectionism and wasteful spending.
• And the anti-Trump crowd goes after me when I applaud the President’s tax cut and regulatory reform.

I tell both groups that I care about public policy rather than personal or partisan loyalty. Not that this explanation makes either group happy.

Today, I’m going to give a “thumbs up” to the President for what he’s doing about car mileage regulations. Which means the first group will be happy and the second group will be irritated.

To be more specific, the Trump Administration is proposing to ease up on the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) rules. The Obama Administration, working with California environmentalists, proposed to make these regulations far more costly. Trump’s people basically want to freeze the car mileage mandate at the current 37-miles-per-gallon level.

Here’s a look at the history of the CAFE standards.

Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute explained earlier this year why these regulation impose high costs. And deadly costs.

The federal government’s auto fuel economy standards have for decades posed a simple problem: They kill people. Worse, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has covered this up. …To call it a coverup isn’t hyperbole. CAFE kills people by causing cars to be made smaller and lighter. While these downsized cars are more fuel-efficient, they are also less crashworthy. …A 1989 Harvard-Brookings study estimated the death toll at between 2,200 and 3,900 a year. Similarly, a 2002 National Academy of Sciences study estimated that CAFE had contributed to up to 2,600 fatalities in 1993. …The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which closely monitors crashworthiness, still provides the same advice it has been giving for years: “Bigger, heavier vehicles are safer.”

The Trump Administration apparently was listening to Sam, and has decided to block future increases in the CAFE mandate.

Environmentalists are predictably upset, but the Wall Street Journal opined on this topic a couple of days ago and explained why it is good news.

The Trump Administration’s deregulation is improving consumer choice and reducing costs… Its proposed revisions Thursday to fuel economy rules continue this trend to the benefit of car buyers… Obama bureaucrats were acutely blind—perhaps willfully so—to economic and technological trends in 2012 when they set a fleetwide average benchmark of 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025. …Americans prefer bigger cars, which makes it harder for automakers to meet the escalating Cafe targets. …As prices rise to meet the new standards, consumers would also wait longer to replace their cars. The average age of a car is approaching 12 years, up from about 8.5 in 1995. Newer cars are more efficient and safer, so longer vehicle turnover could result in more traffic fatalities… Thursday’s Trump Administration proposal to freeze—not roll back—fuel economy standards at the current 2020 target of 37 miles a gallon. …Automakers also want to duck a prolonged legal tussle with California, which received a waiver from the Obama Administration under the Clean Air Act in 2013 to establish its own emissions standards and electric-car mandate. The proposed Trump standards would apply nationally.

Holman Jenkins of the WSJ also weighed in on the issue, pointing out that undoing Obama’s expansion of CAFE mandates will have no impact on the earth’s climate.

…the effect on climate change would be zero. The Obama White House at the time exaggerated by a factor of two the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate of the effect on total emissions over the lifetime of the cars involved. It doesn’t matter. Two times nothing is still nothing. …Let’s remember the truth of Mr. Obama’s fuel-economy rules. He did not wander the balconies of the White House gazing far into the future when he drafted the 2021-25 fuel economy target of 54.5 miles a gallon. His flunkies, as documented in a House investigation, simply were looking for a impressive-sounding number to serve the administration’s political interests at the time. …in undoing Mr. Obama’s policies, Mr. Trump is doing nothing to hurt the climate.

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute also wrote on the topic and noted that Trump’s policy will save about 1,000 lives each year.

…the administration has struck a blow for consumer choice that will be good news for drivers planning or hoping to buy a new car in the next decade. That’s because the mileage mandate is one of the main causes of rapidly rising vehicle prices. …Meeting ever more stringent fuel economy standards is driving up new vehicle prices. Sticker shock is thereby causing a lot of people to hang on to their current cars. The average age of all cars on the road is now at an all-time high of over 11-1/2 years. …Freezing CAFE standards will make new cars more affordable for millions of Americans and also allow many of them to buy bigger and hence even safer new models. How much safer will be hotly debated. The Transportation Department concludes that the proposed changes will prevent about 1,000 traffic fatalities a year. …For many people, fuel economy will still be the most important factor in choosing a new car. The good news for them is that the Trump administration’s action will in no way prevent them from buying a model that gets great gas mileage. The good news for everyone else is that the choice of models will be much wider than if the CAFE standard remained 54.5 mpg.

By the way, this isn’t simply a matter of saving lives.

After all, we theoretically could save thousands of lives by simply banning automobiles. In the world of sensible public policy, we make trade-offs, deciding if achieving a certain goal is worthwhile when looking at all the costs and all the benefits.

So it’s theoretically possible that a policy that leads to more premature deaths might be acceptable.

But CAFE fails even on that basis. As Marlo Lewis explained a few years ago, the policy both kills people and imposes net financial costs.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump just improved his grade on regulation.

Back in April, I gave him a B+ on regulation. But then he did something foolish in June that (if I recalculated) would have dropped him to a B. Now he’s probably back at a B+ because of the change to the CAFE rules.

Given what he’s doing on trade, he needs to boost his other grades as much as possible!

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Virtue Signaling, Plastic Straws, and Political Humor

Since I focus on public finance, I think California is crazy because of punitive taxes and reckless spending policies.

But I can understand why other people think California is crazy, period.

This is a state, after all, where politicians come up with bizarre ideas such as regulating babysitting and banning Happy Meals.

Not to mention banning other things as well.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that the Golden State is leading the way in attacking the horrible scourge of plastic straws.

Plastic straws are quickly becoming a takeout taboo. Starbucks has vowed to get its iconic green sippers completely off store shelves by 2020, while Seattle banned all plastic utensils, including straws, from bars and businesses city-wide earlier this month. San Francisco quickly followed suit this week and passed an ordinance that, once approved, will ban plastic straws beginning in July of 2019… It may seem as though the quarter-of-an-inch diameter drinking straw is the least of our worries. But environmentalists say the fight’s got to start somewhere. “We look at straws as one of the gateway issues to help people start thinking about the global plastic pollution problem,” Plastic Pollution Coalition CEO Dianna Cohen told Business Insider.

If I’m willing to claim earmarks are the gateway drug for big spending, then I can’t complain when other people come up with imaginative claims about other types of “gateways.”

In any event, there is a legitimate reason to be concerned about plastic.

Some straws drift out to sea, becoming just one more piece of the 79 thousand-ton colossal floating iceberg of trash called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Scientists who’ve studied the patch, a trash heap wider than two whole Texases that bobs somewhere between Hawaii and California, have discovered it’s essentially a watery pit of litter and illegal dumps that’s trapped in the ocean currents, and it is basically all plastic. …The anti-straw movement may have first picked up steam because…Texas A&M graduate student Christine Figgener…noticed something encrusted in the nose of one of the male turtles. …The team soon figured out it was actually a “plastic straw stuck in his nose,” and removed it, hoping the extraction might help give him some more breathing time on Earth.

But the people on the left side of the country are not actually solving this problem.

Plastic pollution is basically a problem caused by developing countries.

So the politicians in Seattle and San Francisco are making the Nanny State more intrusive without achieving anything.

A classic case of virtue signaling.

But look at the bright side. It’s already generated some great political satire.

Starting with this little girl.

I imagine the plastic straw will be a gateway for operating an unlicensed lemonade stand!

And if SWAT teams run out of harmless pot smokers to harass, they now have new target to justify their budgets.

And the gun grabbers will appreciate the importance of dealing with high-capacity straw dispensers.

Though it’s unclear how the left will deal with the danger of concealed straws.

Especially since some of those straw nuts will become dealers.

I’ve saved the best for last. For those old enough to remember OJ Simpson and the white Bronco, this image of a renegade toddler will bring back memories.

Remember, if you outlaw straws, only outlaws will have straws.

Next thing you know, they’ll try to outlaw tanks.

It’s a slippery slope!

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The Non-Relationship Between Welfare Spending and Poverty Reduction in the Western World

Last September, I shared some very encouraging data showing how extreme poverty dramatically has declined in the developing world.

And I noted that this progress happened during a time when the “Washington Consensus” was resulting in “neoliberal” policies (meaning “classical liberal“) in those nations (confirmed by data from Economic Freedom of the World).

In other words, pro-market policies were the recipe for poverty reduction, not foreign aid or big government.

Sadly, the Washington Consensus has been supplanted. Bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are now pushing a statist agenda based on the bizarre theory that higher taxes and more spending somehow produce prosperity.

To add insult to injury, some people now want to rewrite history and argue that free markets don’t deserve credit for the poverty reduction that already has occurred.

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, writing for Our World in Data, wants readers to conclude that redistribution programs deserve credit.

…the share of people living in extreme poverty around the world has fallen continuously over the last two centuries. …many often say that globalization in the form of ‘free-market capitalism’ is the main force to be thanked for such remarkable historical achievement. …this focus on ‘free-market capitalism’ alone is misguided. …Governments around the world have dramatically increased their potential to collect revenues in order to redistribute resources through social transfers… The reach of governments has grown substantially over the last century: the share of total output that governments control is much larger today than a century ago.

And for evidence, Mr. Ortiz-Ospina included this chart.

I shared a version of this data back in June, asserting that the explosion of social welfare spending made this “the western world’s most depressing chart.”

So does Ortiz-Ospina have a compelling argument? Does poverty go down as welfare spending goes up?

Nope. Johan Norberg points out that there is a gaping flaw in this argument. An enormous, gigantic hole.

Wow. This isn’t just a flaw. It’s malpractice. It’s absurd to argue that welfare spending in developed nations somehow led to poverty reduction in developing countries.

I hope Mr. Ortiz-Ospina is just an inexperienced intern, because if he really understands the data, one might be forced to conclude that he’s dishonest.

But let’s set that issue aside. Johan closes his video by explaining that poverty in rich nations declined before modern welfare states. I want to expand on that point.

Johan cited Martin Ravallion, so I tracked down his work. And here’s the chart he put together, which I’ve modified to show (outlined in red) that extreme poverty basically disappeared between 1820 and 1930.

And guess what?

That was the period when there was no welfare state. Not only is that apparent from Our World in Data, it’s also what we see in Vito Tanzi’s numbers.

Here’s Tanzi’s table, which I first shared five years ago. And I’ve circled in red the 1880-1930 data to underscore that there was virtually no redistribution during the years poverty was declining.

The bottom line is that poverty in the western world fell during the period of small government. Yet some people want to put the cart before the horse. They’re making the absurd argument that post-1950s welfare spending somehow reduced poverty before the 1930s.

That’s as absurd as Paul Krugman blaming a 2008 recession in Estonia on spending cuts that took place in 2009.

P.S. For those who want U.S.-specific data, it’s worth noting that dramatic reductions in American poverty all occurred before Washington launched the so-called “War on Poverty.”

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Using the Tax Code to Increase Rents and Enrich Landlords

There’s a problem in California. No, I’m not referring to the punitive tax laws. Nor am I talking about the massive unfunded liabilities for bureaucrat pension.

Those are big problems, to be sure, but today’s topic is the state’s government-created housing crisis. The population keeps expanding, but local governments use zoning laws to restrict development of new homes and apartments.

And guess what happens when supply is constrained and demand keeps climbing? Even a remedial student in Economics 101 will probably understand that this is a recipe for ever-rising prices.

The solution, of course, is to expand the housing stock. Build more homes, apartments, and condos.

But local governments don’t like that option because existing homeowners (who vote) benefit from scarcity-induced increases in home values. And environmentalists also don’t like any development because of ideology.

Moreover, why fix the problem when politicians in Washington are willing to promote crackpot ideas. And that’s a very apt description of Senator Kamala Harris’ scheme to subsidize rental payments.

Under the Rent Relief Act, anyone who spends more than 30% of their income on rent would be eligible for a federal tax credit. What would you do with that extra money in your pocket?

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 28, 2018

Why is this a crackpot idea? Because prices go up in every sector of the economy that is subsidized. This is why health care keeps getting more expensive. It’s why higher education keeps getting more expensive.

And if Washington politicians decide to subsidize rent, the same thing will happen.

Writing for National Review, Jibran Khan explains why Harris has the wrong solution for the wrong problem. He starts by explaining why there’s a housing shortage.

Harris’s subsidy won’t improve the situation, and could even make things worse by drawing attention away from actual solutions. The Bay Area’s rent crisis is driven by a drastic shortage in housing. Strict rent control in San Francisco and “NIMBY” (not in my backyard) zoning policies have ensured that the area constructs only a fraction of the housing it needs. The San Francisco metro area added 373,000 new jobs between 2012 and 2017, but it allowed the construction of only 58,000 new units of housing. …Per Lawrence Yun, an economist who studies housing trends, the norm is for one housing unit to be built for every two jobs created. In the San Francisco area, there is less than one unit built for every six jobs created. …under Harris’s proposal, the currently homeless would remain homeless, while renters would receive some very short-term relief at the cost of other taxpayers.

He then explains why a subsidy will lead to higher rents, and a windfall for landlords.

Why would the relief be short-term? Because as landlords become aware that renters are receiving a subsidy, they will simply raise rents by the amount of the subsidy. The cost will be the same for the renters — who today are lining up for a chance to rent, showing that they are willing to pay it. In the end, then, this would be an effective subsidy for landlords, not renters.

Which, as mentioned above, is exactly what’s happened in other sectors that have received subsidies.

It’s not just libertarians who understand that Harris will make a bad situation worse.

Matt Yglesias is hardly a small-government zealot. He’s accused me, for example, of being insane and irrational because of my libertarian views. But we both agree that the real problem in California is government rules that limit development.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1024652902344941568

And I assume he also would agree that Harris’ plan will wind up enriching landlords rather than helping renters.

So why, then, is Harris proposing such a destructive policy?

There are three possible answers.

1. She’s ignorant, and her staff is ignorant. Simply stated, there’s no understanding of indirect effects. Bastiat would be very disappointed.
2. She’s malicious. In other words, she’s smart enough to realize the policy is bad, but she doesn’t care. Call this the Venezuela approach.
3. She’s ambitious. In this scenario, she has no intention of pushing a bad idea, but she thinks it’s a good way of getting votes from renters.

I assume #3 is the right answer.

Regardless of her motives, she’s doing the wrong thing.

I’ve shared this chart on many occasions because it does a great job of showing that subsidized sectors are characterized by rising prices.

Give politicians enough leeway and maybe the entire economy can be dysfunctional!

P.S. I’m not being partisan. Republicans are quite capable of supporting very stupid policies in exchange for votes or campaign contributions. Just look at the GOPers who support the Export-Import Bank, Fannie-Freddie subsidies, or ethanol handouts.

P.P.S. Needless to say, I also object to the Harris scheme because it would make the tax code an even bigger mess. I realize it’s unlikely that I’ll ever see a simple and fair flat tax, but is it too much to ask for politicians not to make the system even worse?

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