This post is a more complete statement of my conclusions based on the analysis in Parts One and Two of this series. As I’ve explained in Part Two, there’s no reason in the Reinhart-Rogoff (R-R) data to believe that the debt-to-GDP ratio has a negative impact on growth. Ironically, that’s because their data set is terribly biased in its incompleteness, and was constructed to try to prove that there was a negative relationship between the debt-to-GDP ratio and economic growth. The interests supporting the RR work, both in its inception, and in disseminating its original results, were clearly trying to develop a basis for saying that since there is such a negative relationship, the right thing to do when the ratio gets too high (over 90%) is to implement a program of austerity aimed at deficit reduction, more or less drastic, depending on the individual case.

Of course, there may well be a relationship between debt-to-GDP ratios and economic growth in nations lacking non-convertible fiat currencies and floating exchange rates, and and/or having external debts in currencies they cannot issue. However, the R-R data set didn’t include those variables, so that analysis can’t be done without augmenting the data set. In such nations, MMT theory suggests that Government Budget Constraints (GBCs) on deficit spending, such as those we find in Eurozone nations would create a negative relationship between debt-to-GDP ratios and growth.

In fiat sovereign nations, such as the US, the UK, Australia, Japan, etc. we might also have the presence of an indirect relationship between variations in the debt-to-GDP ratio and economic growth through the actions of politicians who believe in austerity ideology pulling back on government deficit spending and consequently having a negative impact on economic growth through that mechanism. But to test for that self-fulfilling prophecy, and also for the negative relationship in nations subject to a GBC, someone will, again, have to augment the R-R data set and re-analyze it to include currency regime variables

In addition, we need to build on the biased and incomplete R-R data set to begin to test alternative hypotheses about the effects of austerity and different types of fiscal and monetary policy on different outcome variables and on feedback relationships from those outcome variables to economic growth and much more. When Matthew Berg and Brian Hartley say: “We suggest that simultaneous equations models may offer a way forward on the “frontier question” of causality,” they are also saying that other possible causes of both economic growth and debt-to-GDP ratios must be included in richer theories of economic dynamics, if we want to understand the place of both growth and debt in the broader context of what matters to people.

What matters to them are economic and social value gaps related to the idea of Public purpose like these:

– the gap between actual output and projected “full” output;

– High involuntary unemployment vs. full employment;

– Price stability vs. inflation or hyperinflation;

– Minimum wage vs. a living wage;

– No operative right to health care for everyone;

– social exclusion and the loss of personal freedom;

– skill deterioration due to unemployment;

– psychological harm such as sense of identity, self-respect, and sense of
empowerment;

– much greater ill health and reduced life expectancy than necessary;

– loss of motivation to live a full empowered life;

– deterioration of social relations, communities, social networks, and family life;

– increasing racial and gender inequality;

– increasing educational inequality;

– decreasing equality of opportunity;

– loss of social values and sense of individual responsibility;

– increasing economic inequality over time;

– increasing poverty;

– increasing crime rates including increasing use of control frauds by
important economic institutions;

– Failure to prosecute and punish people who commit control frauds;

– The collapse of real estate values and the destruction of the wealth of
working people after the crash of 2008;

– increasing anger against economic and political elites that get more and
more and more wealthy, and more and more immune to the rule of law;

– increasing political inequality undermining political, social, and economic democracy;

– increasing political unrest and threats of political violence both from the privileged and those seeking change.

– increasing environmental degradation;

– Increasing climate change/global warming.

– the gap between current energy foundations of our economy and new energy foundations based on renewables.

It will involve more of an effort to gather the necessary data in some of these areas than in others, and doing this kind of thing is a multi-year job. But it’s imperative that something like it gets done, because the kind of narrowly focused data set created by R-R is biased towards the concern of neoliberal ideology with debts, deficits, inflation, and economic growth, and its lack of concern with the impact of its favored economic policies on a range of outcomes important for most people. We need to be gathering data on those outcomes and analyzing the past, present, and likely impacts of alternative fiscal and monetary policies on them. In short, we need to be gathering data that allows us to test the impact of alternative fiscal policies on public purpose.

Finally, we must ask why there wasn’t a greater outcry from progressive activists and economists when the R-R study first appeared and they failed to make their data available for re-analysis and replication. After all, everyone who read their work and who knows even a little about quantitative analysis in the social sciences could see that it was based on a very superficial two-variable cross-country global data analysis, and that any result they reported had to present a false picture of causality.

This is true because you can’t provide a thorough analysis of causality between two cross-country variables without including additional variables and doing time series analysis at the national level to establish causal ordering and partial out spurious correlations. This has been well-known in the social sciences for at least 50 years.

MMT economist Randy Wray has called the R-R study “crap.” He’s right; for all the reasons just advanced, it was crap from the get-go. It presents an argument of partisan advocacy, not one of economic scientists making a conscientious effort to get at the truth.

So, the question is why has it been it challenged so little since 2010? It’s true that some economists provided critiques. But the discipline as a whole was respectful. The criticism was civil, when it should have expressed outrage. Everyone treated the critical exchanges as a matter of “he said, she said,” even though every economist who does any data analysis must have recognized the very simplistic level of R-R’s data analysis.

So, again I ask, why didn’t economists make ‘em prove it? And why did policy makers accept the findings so easily? You can’t tell me that the top economists in the Obama Administration, in the UK, and the Eurozone couldn’t see the nakedness of their co-emperors. They chose not to see.

I think there’s really no mystery here. Neoliberal elites wanted to believe in the austerity fairy tale for various reasons, including perhaps a desire to widen the wealth gap between the very rich and the middle class, and also a belief that belt-tightening in welfare states has moral value for the population subjected to that belt-tightening, though not for them, of course. For them, R-R was just window dressing for the financial sadism they wanted to implement anyway. If you doubt this characterization, then pay close attention to interviews of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson sometime. The are exhibit A.

But for the progressives, and others opposed to austerity, the R-R work should have immediately become a target of opportunity for educating the public about “junk” economic studies relied upon by politicians to justify their favored policies. Opposition to the study should have taken the form of telling people never to trust simplistic two variable analyses using cross-sectional rather than time series data to develop causal explanations. It should have taken the form of a demand for the economists and policy makers to prove what they say rather than just wave around a fig leaf that couldn’t possibly, and in the end did not, prove a thing about the desirability of austerity in modern economies.

But none of this occurred. And partly as result of this dog who never barked, millions around the world live with economic hardship lasting for years. Millions lost their homes. Millions went into bankruptcy, and many thousands needlessly died from lack of medical care and are still dying today.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives.)

In Part One, I asked whether the Carmen Reinhart/Kenneth Rogoff study and book didn’t show that, on average, nations experiencing debt-to-GDP ratios above 90% had negative rates of economic growth? And I said the answer to the question was “no.” But I didn’t explain why that was true. So, here goes.

The Fall

When Reinhart and Rogoff published their work they did not make their data set available to people to replicate, analyze, critique their findings, and augment to improve the data set. They ignored the scientific norm that you do that when you’re claiming that you’ve made an important empirical discovery. Other researchers wrote them and requested access to their data set in vain for at least the past three years.

Then a few weeks, ago, they finally yielded to a request for the data set made by Thomas Herndon, a Graduate Student in economics at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) in Amherst. Herndon tried to replicate their analysis and findings and could not do so. In fact he found errors. Here’s a summary from the paper he co-authored with two of his professors, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin, both of the economics department (hereafter called HAP).

RR has made significant errors in reaching the conclusion that countries facing public debt to GDP ratios above 90 percent will experience a major decline in GDP growth.9 The key identified errors in RR, including spreadsheet errors, omission of available data, weighting, and transcription, reduced the measured average GDP growth of countries in the high public debt category. The full extent of those errors transforms the reality of modestly diminished average GDP growth rates for countries carrying high levels of public debt into a false image that high public debt ratios inevitably entail sharp declines in GDP growth.

Moreover, as we show, there is a wide range of GDP growth performances at every level of public debt among the 20 advanced economies that RR survey.

Specifically, “actual average real growth in the high public debt category is +2:2 percent per year compared to the -0.1 percent per year published in RR.” That change in the findings is very important because even though the new average growth level found is still less than in the 60% to 90% category, where the average growth found was 3.2% annually, the claim that there’s a sharp drop-off between these two categories isn’t supported since the 1 percent difference is not statistically significant. In addition, neither the 3.2% nor the 2,2% average growth rates are representative of their debt-to-GDP ratio level categories, since as HAP say just above there’s a wide range of GDP growth performance in all the categories.

So, that does it. That one finding shows that RR did not show that, on average, nations experiencing debt-to-GDP ratios above 90% had negative rates of economic growth, or even that they had an average rate of growth significantly different from the average in the 60 – 90 % category. Given this finding, what happens to the further inference that high debt levels cause lower growth?

In Part One, I showed that even assuming that the R-R finding was correct it still would not have provided any test of the inference that high debt levels cause lower growth. I stated three reasons. First, R-R committed the ecological fallacy in implying that the high level debt category group growth average could be extended to individual nations and times in each group. We can see from the conclusions of HAP, that there was good reason to be concerned about the ecological fallacy because the group growth average was not found to be representative of individual nations and times.

Second, I pointed out that R-R ignored currency regime variables, failing to include them in the analysis, when it is very likely that any association between the debt-to-GDP ratio and economic growth would vary with these variables. Since HAP end up showing that there is only a small difference between averages in the over 90% category and the 60 – 90% category, it is even more likely that including these variables would have washed out the small differences found, or even reversed the relationship claimed by R-R.

Third, I pointed out that control variables that might have shown that the relationship stated by R-R was spurious were not included in the study, so that possible causes of both a high level of debt-to-GDP and economic growth could not be tested. HAP has nothing to say on this score, but it does raise the question of causality and the failure of R-R to analyze it in any rigorous way, and it concludes by questioning the claim that the R-R findings support the view that high levels of debt inevitably cause low growth.

After the Fall Empirical Research

The HAP analysis and the new availability of the R-R data quickly led to three other analyses, all of which began to explore the question of causality, each one by using more rigorous and more sophisticated though not novel techniques of analysis, than used in the study by Reinhart and Rogoff. A question which immediately occurs is why R-R with all the resources they cold call upon didn’t pursue the same or similar analyses either before or after publication of their results in 2010. After all, those replicating their study only a took a few days to begin to explore questions of causality once they had the R-R data set, yet R-R with three years of opportunity or more to do the same or similar analyses of their own data sets, evidently never did anything of the kind. One simply has to ask whether they were afraid of what they would find if they took a deeper dive into their own data.

Dube’s Distributed Lag Cross-country Panel Analysis

The first of the three studies following on HAP was done by Arindrajit Dube in a guest post at Next New Deal entitled “Reinhart/Rogoff and Growth in a Time Before Debt.” Professor Dube is also in the economics department at UMass. Working on 20 OECD nation corrected panel data set of R-R produced by HAP, Dube used LOWESS regressions and distributed lag models. His results speak to the question of whether slow GDP growth causes higher debt-to-GDP ratios, or whether, as R-R opine, while alternately protesting that correlation isn’t causation, higher debt-to-GDP ratios cause relatively low or even negative growth. They suggest that the causation is more likely to run from growth to debt-to-GDP ratios, than from those ratios to growth. Dube also found that 1) any negative relationship between debt ratios and growth is strongest at lower levels of debt, rather than at higher levels as found by R-R, and 2) there is a stronger association between past economic growth, and current debt ratio levels than the association between current debt ratio levels and future economic growth.

Basu’s Time-Series Analysis of the US, Italy and Japan

The second new follow-on to the R-R and HAP studies was done by yet another UMass economics professor, Deepankar Basu and reported at Next New Deal. He addressed the question of causality by examining time series data in Italy, Japan, and the United States, using vector autoregression (VAR) models, accompanied by Granger non-causality tests and impulse response analysis. VAR analysis isn’t enough to determine causality without making additional assumptions about an underlying causal model. But in cases, where one is analyzing a two-variable relationship using time series data and one assumes that causality can only run way or another, or perhaps both ways, the VAR technique can produce evidence about which of the two variables, if any, is prior to the other. I’ll quote Basu’s summary of his results

To summarize, I find that the time series pattern of the dynamic relationship between public debt and economic growth in the postwar U.S., Italian, and Japanese economies is consistent with low growth causing high debt rather than the high debt causing low growth. I draw this conclusion from two types of analyses: Granger non-causality tests and an investigation of impulse response function plots.

Granger non-causality tests allow one to ask the following questions: (a) do debt levels in the past help in better predicting current economic growth, and (b) does economic growth in the past help in improving predictions of current debt levels? The evidence suggests that for the U.S., Italy, and Japan, the answer to the first question is a NO and the answer to the second is a YES.

Impulse response analysis allows one to address the following questions: (a) what is the impact of an unexpected increase in current debt levels on the future time path of economic growth, and (b) how does an unexpected decline in economic growth affect future levels of debt? The data suggests that an unexpected increase in debt levels has only a small effect on future economic growth but an unexpected decline in economic growth is associated with large and long-lasting increases in public debt levels.

So, Basu’s analysis further extends HAP’s suggestion that it’s more likely that growth causes debt than debt causes growth. Like Dube’s it falsifies the austerity conjecture that debt causes growth at least in the context of a two variable model.

Berg and Hartley’s 20 Nation Panel Study

Perhaps the most important of the recent analyses of the R-R data comes from Matthew Berg and Brian Hartley who are Graduate Students in the economics department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. They followed Dube in analyzing the R-R 20 nation panel data, used and corrected by HAP, using LOWESS regressions, and distributed lag with impulse response analysis.

First, they addressed the important question of whether the relationship between current debt-to-GDP levels and future growth is the same or at least similar across nations. They found (through an examination of individual “backwards/forwards” graphs) that this relationship varied widely across nations. That is, nations were heterogeneous, not homogeneous with respect to this key relationship. They say:

. . . Even if some sort of relationship between debt-to-GDP and growth can in fact be found in cross-country panel analysis, that relationship does not appear to hold up on the level of individual countries. Because economic policy is made on the level of individual countries, this heterogeneity appears to undercut the rationale for any given particular country to make important policy decisions on the basis of government debt-to-GDP ratios.

I’ve italicized their key point in the paragraph for emphasis. Any attempt to generalize across all the 20 nation panel data, such as the R-R attempt to say that a debt-to-GDP ratio above 90% leads to relatively low or negative economic growth contradicts what the data show at the individual nation level for the two key variables, and is therefore just a false inference.

Second, Berg and Hartley also say:

We find that the correlation between government debt-to-GDP ratios and future growth in Reinhart and Rogoff’s . . . dataset results from outliers which come from the country most suggestive of the hypothesis that slow growth causes high levels of government debt – Japan. . . .

That is, the Japanese data disproportionately distort the overall relationship and create a misleading picture, because of the unique history of Japan. But, nevertheless historical examination of both Japan and the other nations provide evidence consistent with the “reverse causation” causation hypothesis that growth causes debt to-GDP ratio levels rather than the alternative hypothesis of a debt-GDP ratio causal ordering priority. Berg and Hartley show this with distributed lag/impulse response analyses and LOWESS regressions with and without the Japanese data. The analysis, for all practical purposes, shows that there is no relationship between current year association between GDP growth and the debt-to-GDP ratio as claimed by R-R.

They also summarize:

. . . This evidence strengthens and reinforces criticisms recently made by Herndon, Ash, and Pollin . . . of research suggesting a negative relationship between government debt-to-GDP ratios and real GDP growth rates. . . . we . . . find evidence suggesting that correlation of government debt-to-GDP ratios and future growth are much more likely explained by “reverse” causation running from slow GDP growth to high government debt-to-GDP ratios than by “forward” causation running from high government debt-to-GDP ratios to slow growth. Furthermore, what little evidence there is for forward causation appears to stem almost entirely from Japanese outliers. Because – as economists generally recognize – Japan is the clearest of all cases of reverse causation, this considerably weakens the argument for forward causation. In addition, we find tremendous heterogeneity on the level of individual countries in the relationship between current government debt-to-GDP ratios and future growth. This suggests that even if substantial evidence for forward causation is eventually discovered in cross-country studies, the effect will likely be small in size and unreliable, and therefore not relevant to economic policy decisions in any particular individual country. Our findings are suggestive, but not conclusive, and more research is needed. We suggest that simultaneous equations models may offer a way forward on the “frontier question” of causality.

Conclusion: You Can’t Generalize Across All Nations and Times About the Impact of the Debt-to-GDP Ratio on Economic Growth

Actually, I think the findings of Berg and Hartley following on and taking into account the findings of HAP, Dube, and Basu are pretty conclusive and not just suggestive. What they say is that the data included in the two-variable analyses flatly contradict the idea that the debt-to-GDP ratio causes economic growth in the individual nations comprising the 20 nation OECD panel. If anything, the evidence is much more consistent with the idea that it is growth that impacts the debt-to-GDP ratio.

I think there has hardly ever been a clearer finding in the Social Sciences than this one. After all, it took HAP, Dube, Basu, and Berg and Hartley only a matter of days to arrive at it. The only way R-R could have missed it is if they weren’t looking for it. It’s as if they just weren’t looking for the truth; but were only looking for an argument that could be used to justify the austerity policies they favored. That’s not economic science. It’s bias, pure and simple.

In Part Three, I’ll end this series on the R-R affair with a retrospective.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives.)

OK, austerity has always been about the causality. The people who are trying their best to get us to cut more and more spending, somewhat less than their best to get us to raise taxes, and who are doing nothing to fix our fraud-laden financial system, or the worst period of dis-employment we’ve experienced since the Great Depression, have been making other people (never themselves) suffer, because they believe the theory that excessive public debt hurts economic growth, and that to get rid of it we must follow a plan of long-term deficit reduction. And I’m being very charitable when I opine that they believe in this theory, because the alternative is that they don’t believe it, but are just using it as an excuse to make other people suffer, and widen the wealth gap between themselves and the rest of the population.

Either way it’s important for the rest of us to demand that before we do anything more based on that theory, they should be forced to prove that it is the best theory out there about the causal relationship between public debt and economy growth. Actually, we should have made them prove that before we allowed Congress and President Obama to start playing austerity games with us way back in 2009 – 2010, because there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then, including continuing very high disemployment, thousands and thousands of people dying due to lack of health insurance, suicide, depression-related illnesses, crime that need not have occurred, and all the effects of hopelessness that afflict the poor and the middle class during bad economic times. And now, our wonderful leaders have managed to inflict the sequestration upon us, while planning to inflict entitlement cuts on the old and the sick.

Lately, of course, the armor of the austerians, and their claims of empirical support for their view that high levels of the debt-to-GDP ratio are associated with and/or cause very low or even negative rates of economic growth has suffered repeated blows from Economics Graduate Students and Professors at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Missouri at Kansas City, in recent papers. I’ll review those studies in Part Two. In the rest of this part, I’ll evaluate the proof austerians had for their policies before this new research work appeared.

What Proof Did They Have?

So, what proof did they have, before the recent research appeared, that austerity is the best course to follow? Well, it’s been practiced all over Europe for years now, and what are the results? Only record unemployment, shrinking economies, increasing public debt, crime, public unrest, increasing suicide rates, damaged health care systems denying care to people who need them, no improvement to speak of in the economic outlook, and immense dissatisfaction all over the continent.

How about here? A stagnant economy, three steps forward, two steps back, high youth unemployment, no jobs for college graduates, layoffs in the public sector and declining services, low wages, recovery limited to the financial sector and the stock market — the kinds of results that in not so many years will produce a plutocracy, if one doesn’t exist already.

Everywhere austerity is being practiced we see a slowed economy. In some places, like Japan, we see short periods of it followed by some backing off, producing stagnation for close to a quarter of a century. In other places, like Australia and Canada we’ve seen enough of it that the prosperity they could have enjoyed is beyond their grasp.

Sure, Germany, hasn’t hit real hard times yet because their export-led economy gives them more policy space to run surpluses, but most of the nations of the Eurozone can’t run a trade surplus, so for them, continuing government austerity results in private sector losses, year after year, absent a change in rules by the Eurozone. Even the German economy has been slowing as its neighbors can afford less and less German goods, and France is seeing more than 10% unemployment and is rapidly becoming another basket case, creating the need for changing the well known Eurozone acronym to the PFIIGS. Is there an unambiguous success for austerity since the Second World War in a country running a trade deficit? I don’t know of one.

So, what about the work of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff? Didn’t it show that, on average, nations experiencing debt-to-GDP ratios above 90% had negative rates of economic growth? And doesn’t this provide evidence that excessive debt does cause low economic growth and even economic contraction, so that if we value economic growth, we must reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio to a much lower level than 90% before we try to use deficit spending to try again to grow?

Well, the answer to these questions is no, and no. I’ll explain the second “no” first, and consider the first “no” later on in Part Two.

Common Fallacies: First, Reinhart and Rogoff never claimed that the findings of their analysis of their very extensive cross-national, historical database supported causal inference. It’s true that after they wrote their paper and published their book reporting on their data and analysis, they recommended austerity policies and either referred to their work in that context, or have been identified by others hosting an appearance or publishing an article as having done that work to support their “expertise.” So, they talked out of both sides of their mouths; but in their work itself they acknowledge that correlation isn’t causation, and that they hadn’t proved cause and effect. And they urged further research to explore cause-and-effect relationships.

In addition, critics of their work have long emphasized that the reported association between high debt-to-GDP levels and low economic growth for all nations, had nothing to say about cause and effect in individual nations and therefore could not serve as the basis for a fiscal policy of austerity, or for Reinhart and Rogoff’s mere opinions that such a policy, expressed in other contexts should be implemented. One problem is that the association between debt-to-GDP and economic growth at levels of debt-to-GDP above 90% doesn’t apply to every instance in every nation. It’s an average, a mean or a median which is reported.

So, the association is ecological across all instances. It is the well-known ecological fallacy of social science to conclude that it applies to all or even most instances in the high debt-to-GDP category. To go on from there, and then suggest that the association is causally relevant in individual systems, is to compound the ecological fallacy with the correlation is causation fallacy. To do that is just terrible social science.

Currency Regime Variables: Read the rest of this entry →

Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett’s recent op-ed in the New York Times is making a stir because it calls for a minimum tax on high incomes above $One million annually. But I was much more interested in some deficit targeting he proposes which exposes his ignorance about the sectoral financial balances model of macro-economics, and reveals him as a deficit hawk whose advice, if followed would be unsustainable and lead the United States into another deep recession. I’ll comment on a couple of paragraphs in Buffett’s op-ed.

Our government’s goal should be to bring in revenues of 18.5 percent of G.D.P. and spend about 21 percent of G.D.P. — levels that have been attained over extended periods in the past and can clearly be reached again. As the math makes clear, this won’t stem our budget deficits; in fact, it will continue them. But assuming even conservative projections about inflation and economic growth, this ratio of revenue to spending will keep America’s debt stable in relation to the country’s economic output.

So, our goal ought to be running deficits of 2.5% and this is Warren Buffett’s idea of fiscal responsibility. Now here’s an accounting identity from macroeconomics, called the Sectoral Financial Balances (SFB) model in which the economy is divided into three sectors, and in all the balances are financial flows over a period of time:

Domestic Private Balance + Domestic Government Balance + Foreign Balance = 0.

There’s plenty of empirical evidence showing that the real world interpretation of this identity works. But, there’s NO negative evidence refuting it.

Now, let’s say that the income of the private sector exceeds the amount it pays to the other two sectors by 6% of GDP, so that the private sector has a surplus. And let’s say that the income of the foreign sector in dollars exceeds what it spends on US goods and services by 4% of US GDP, leaving it with a surplus, and the US with a current account (trade) deficit, then what does the formula say MUST happen to the Government balance?

Government spending will have to exceed its income from taxation by 10%. That is, it will have to run a deficit of 10% to support the foreign surplus and the domestic savings. i.e. 6% + 4% + (-10%) = 0.

Now, what happens if we refuse to let the deficit be 10% of GDP, and that we either cut Gov spending or raise taxes to make that happen? Let’s say we want to hit Warren Buffett’s target, so that we try to force that -10% to become Buffett’s – 2.5% of GDP. Then we have choices.

We can force a zero trade balance, by refusing to import more than we export. But that still leaves us with the need to DECREASE the private balance surplus from 6% to 2.5% of GDP to get the Federal budget to a deficit 2.5%. This is a decline of 3.5% of GDP in savings the private sector might have had, if Mr. Buffett’s deficit target was, say, – 6% of GDP.

There are other options here of course. We could leave the foreign sector balance where it is at 4% of GDP, and decrease the private sector balance to -1.5%, of GDP, actually increasing the private sector’s debt by 1.5% of GDP. But, do we really want to do either of these first two options or anything in between?

I really don’t think so. Do you? Why would we want a policy that would impoverish the private sector over time, or minimize its accumulation of nominal wealth? Is this really consistent with the public purpose?

Read the rest of this entry →

Obama for America, the campaign apparatus with the very large e-mailing list and great segmentation techniques that exploited Romney’s weaknesses to help the President to eke out (yes, I know the electoral vote involved no “eking out,” but the popular vote was something else again) his re-election victory, is now trying to mobilize people who voted for the President to work against their own interests by supporting his deficit/debt cutting activities. So, I couldn’t resist the following commentary on their mobilization e-mail.

From the graphic:

Right now, President Obama is working with leaders of both parties in Washington to reduce the deficit in a balanced way so we can lay the foundation for long-term middle-class job growth and prevent your taxes from going up.

This is just one sentence. But it has more errors in it than a whole book written by some economists. First, it assumes that we should “reduce the deficit.” But:

– It’s fiscally irresponsible to frame and follow a long – term deficit reduction plan (limited austerity) when, as now, both a trade deficit and an output gap between the economy’s potential and its actual results exist. Such a plan is one that must remove more net financial assets, specifically reserves, from the private sector than would otherwise be the case, every year the plan is pursued. Banks can compensate for these reserves by creating new ones when they make loans. But, loans create both assets and liabilities in equal measure and no new net financial assets.

So eventually, if deficit reduction is pursued for long enough, a declining rate of addition to private net financial assets will exacerbate the output gap by lowering aggregate demand and causing both labor and capital to deteriorate. This will eventually dig the US’s economic grave by reducing the productive capacity of the economy, and the Government’s ability to sustain greater levels of deficit spending, producing outputs of real social value, without triggering inflation. Oh, well, President Obama, Timothy Geithner, Jack Lew, Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson, Alice Rivlin, Pete Peterson, and the rest of us will be able to find consolation by reminding ourselves that our collective trip to the poorhouse was in the service of the neoliberal notion that fiscal responsibility is all about containing the rise of the debt-to-GDP ratio.

– REAL fiscal responsibility is a pattern of fiscal policy intended to achieve public purposes (such as full employment, price stability, a first class educational system, Medicare for All, etc.), while also maintaining or increasing fiscal sustainability, viewed as the extent to which patterns of Government spending do not undermine the capability of the Government to continue to spend to achieve our public purposes. Read the rest of this entry →

Robert Reich has been writing a series on “the Grand Bargain” and the “fiscal cliff.” In this post, I’ll do a commentary on his “The President’s Opening Bid on a Grand Bargain (II): Put a Trigger Mechanism in the Legislation”, because I think it’s a good example of self-defeating progressivism or “loser liberalism. Take your choice of epithet.

Reich begins:

When he meets with Congressional leaders this Friday to begin discussions about avoiding the upcoming “fiscal cliff,” the President should make crystal clear that America faces two big economic challenges ahead: getting the economy back on track, and getting the budget deficit under control. But the two require opposite strategies. We get the economy back on track by boosting demand through low taxes on the middle class and more government spending. We get the budget deficit under control by raising taxes and reducing government spending. (Taxes can be raised on the wealthy in the short term without harming the economy because the wealthy already spend as much as they want – that’s what it means to be rich.)

So, the good “progressive” defines the problem pretty much the same way as the rest of the Washington mainstream does. And he just assumes everyone agrees on that, especially on the idea that the budget deficit is out of control and that we need to reduce deficits by raising taxes and reducing government spending. So he gives away half the game by agreeing on essentials with the deficit hawks. But why does he agree that the deficit has to be brought “under control,” implying that the deficit is a problem? Why are WE just expected to accept that? Why isn’t there an explanation? When are we going to make these “progressives” explain exactly why the deficit, debt, debt-to-GDP ratio is such a problem for them?

After all, Robert Reich has been around long enough to know that the Government of the United States is a currency issuer and that no deficit it may incur is beyond its power just to make more money? So why do they think it’s a problem? Let’s go on and see if we get a hint of what the explanation for Reich’s concern with “the deficit problem” comes from.

But before we do that, let’s briefly note that Reich’s easy comment that taxing the rich more won’t harm the economy, isn’t quite true since since for every dollar taxed away GDP does decline by about $.30. Of course, that can easily be fixed by spending an equivalent amount to the amount taxed on something more productive than tax cuts for the rich. But since we can easily spend that amount of money on that more productive thing if we want to, anyway, there’s no reason to tax the rich more arising out of any imagined shortage of dollars. Of course, there are many more reasons to tax them, like justice, fairness, the desire to make them pay for ill-gotten gains, etc. But the need for money in order for the Government to spend on other things is just not one of them.

It all boils down to timing and sequencing: First, get the economy back on track. Then tackle the budget deficit.

Get the economy back on track, indeed. But, again, why is the deficit something that has to be “tackled”?

If we do too much deficit reduction too soon, we’re in trouble. That’s why the fiscal cliff is so dangerous. The Congressional Budget Office and most independent economists say it will suck so much demand out of the economy that it will push us back into recession. That’s the austerity trap of low growth, high unemployment, and falling government revenues Europe finds itself in. We don’t want to go there.

We certainly don’t want to go where Europe has been going lately. They’re a great example of how NOT to manage your way out of a Great Financial Crash. But what makes Reich and other progressives think they can avoid the fate of the Eurozone nations by planning for deficit reduction later ,or at all? The assumption here is that there must and will be a time when we can reduce the deficit without harming the economy. But what if there’s no such time? What if any substantial deficit reduction to under 4% of GDP, a figure envisioned in most of the deficit reduction plans being offered, means making the private sector poorer in the aggregate?

That’s not just a theoretical question. Right now, the US imports more than it exports in an amount greater than 4% of GDP. If we continue to do so, and the Government deficit is forced down to a number below 4% of GDP, then a private sector surplus in the aggregate will be literally impossible to attain, and, if we continue with such a policy, year after year, the private sector will lose more and more of its net financial assets as the Government eats the private economy in a fit of fiscal irresponsibility, that since it’s now way past 1984, the austerity advocates label fiscal responsibility.

Although the U.S. economy is picking up and unemployment trending downward, we’re still not out of the woods. So in the foreseeable future — the next six months to a year, at least — the government has to continue to spend, and the vast middle class has to keep spending as well, unimpeded by any tax increase.

Of course, that’s true, but the “vast middle class” can be impeded from consuming by cuts in discretionary Government spending and in social safety net spending equally effectively, and deficit reduction, without raising taxes on the middle class, is likely to involve a good bit of those kinds of cuts, if there’s any compromise at all with the deficit hawks on the budget.

But waiting too long to reduce the deficit will also harm the economy – spooking creditors and causing interest rates to rise.

Now we’re getting an inkling of what Reich’s problem is. He’s afraid of the “bond vigilantes” and their supposed power to raise interest rates and leave us with a great big interest bill that will further increase the deficit. So, all this concern over a “deficit problem” is due to fear of the markets and, perhaps, Reich would have no problem with running continuous deficits if he thought that the Fed, along with the Treasury, control interest rate targets, and that the bond markets are powerless to impose their will on Mr. Bernanke and the Treasury Secretary if they want to keep rates near zero, or at any other level of interest they would like the US to pay? Well, if that’s true, then let me assure Professor Reich that the bond markets and the ratings agencies are powerless to drive up interest rates against the combined determination of the Fed and the Treasury to keep them low.

We can see this if we imagine what would happen if the Fed continues to target overnight rates at close to zero, and the Treasury issued mostly 3 month debt. We know that short-term debt tends strongly to the overnight rate, and that there’s nothing the markets can do about that. So, if the Fed targets that rate at say 0.25%, and if the Treasury issues only short-term debt, the result will be that the markets cannot drive the rates much higher than that even if Moody’s is follish enough to downgrade US debt to below Japan’s rating.

This is why any “grand bargain” to avert the fiscal cliff should contain a starting trigger that begins spending cuts and any middle-class tax increases only when the economy is strong enough. I’d make that trigger two consecutive quarters of 6 percent unemployment and 3 percent economic growth.

Triggers are a really bad idea, and I’d hate to be among those 6% on the U-3 measure of unemployment, or the likely 12% on the U-6 measure, when the spending cuts and tax increases specified in the trigger mechanism occur, because those levels aren’t ones associated with a booming economy or one that is anywhere prosperous enough to stand against years of reduced Government spending at a deficit level below that necessary to compensate for the loss of aggregate demand due to our trade deficit. A trigger like this would take an already fragile economy, operating at way less than full employment, and would make unemployment higher, while it reduces private sector net financial assets during the years of deficit reduction triggered by such a plan. Depending on the details of the trigger, and assuming there’s no private sector credit bubble putting off the day of reckoning, a recession is a sure thing within an unpredictable, but relatively short space of time.

And keep in mind please, that this notion of Reich’s is a proposal for Obama’s opening bid, which presumably is open to compromise. So, perhaps Reich would be willing to set the deficit reduction at a compromise level of 7% U-3 unemployment? What a “loser liberal”!

But the real mistake here is in having any “trigger” at all. The whole idea is really dumb from an economic point of view. Fiscal policy needs to be guided by our expectations about its likely effects on real outcomes; not by some scheme that assumes that deficits are “bad” and must be minimized. We no longer live under the gold standard Professor Reich! A deficit is nothing more than the amount that Government spending exceeds tax revenue. It’s just a number!

To assess its appropriateness we have to place it in the context of what the private sector wants to save, and how much it wants to import, assuming the willingness of other nations to export to the US. The best fiscal policy is one that spends what the US needs to spend to solve its serious problems and achieve public purposes, and at the same time lets the deficit float as it will given such spending.

Of course, too much deficit spending can cause demand-pull inflation. But the proper remedy for that is to raise specific taxes and lower specific spending in such a way that price stability and full employment, as well as other good outcome result from fiscal policy. The size of the deficit or surplus is not a proxy for such real outcomes, and responsible fiscal policy should not be attempting to maximize, minimize or optimize either deficits or surpluses, rather than the real outcomes of government fiscal policy. In other words, run fiscal policy in accordance with expected real outcomes, and forget about deficits and surpluses per se. They should be treated as insignificant side effects, not as as centerpieces for fiscal responsibility, as they were under the gold standard.

To make sure this doesn’t become a means of avoiding deficit reduction altogether, that trigger should be built right into any “grand bargain” legislation – irrevocable unless two-thirds of the House and Senate agree, and the President signs on.

Please, no more foolish legislation that tries to constrain the freedom of action of future Congresses! The context of fiscal policy is always changing, and the Government must be adaptive to changing conditions. Future governments have to take into account things that have gone or are likely to go wrong. We should not, and really cannot bind them to “triggers” that can’t take into account the future conditions that may present themselves.

The fiscal cliff is itself an example of this principle. The “cliff”, after all, results from the sequestration trigger. And now, after agreeing to it, how’s that working for Congress and the rest of us? It’s made Congress look really, really stupid, and has only made it more obvious that the only crisis is what Congress has manufactured, and now refuses to fix in any way that won’t hurt the economy. And it has put the nation in a bind and subjected Congress to an immediate high pressure situation and the people to more “shock doctrine.” The agreement producing it was the last thing we needed. But we’ve got it, because people resorted to a “trigger.”

Now Reich wants to turn to another kind of trigger. But what we need instead is a return to real fiscal responsibility, and some education about what it means to have a non-convertible fiat currency, a floating exchange rate, and no debts in a currency not our own.

The trigger would reassure creditors we’re serious about getting our fiscal house in order. And it would allow us to achieve our two goals in the right sequence – getting the economy back on track, and then getting the budget deficit under control. It’s sensible and do-able. But will Congress and the President do it?

If the main reason for the trigger is to stop the creditors from reacting badly to attempts to create an economy that produces full employment at a living wage and prosperity for all Americans, as well as a modern economy that fulfills our health care, educational, infrastructure, education, energy, climate change, and environmental needs, then I say let’s stop issuing debt and get the bond markets out of the Treasuries business entirely. That will certainly stop our interest costs from getting out of control and also render the bond vigilantes irrelevant to the finances of the US. Then neither Professor Reich, nor anyone else will have to give a moment’s thought to what “our creditors” think about our deficits, our national debt, or anything else we do.

Last time I looked, comparatively few of the bond market investors were actual American voters. So, why should they have any influence over what we choose to do anyway?

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives.)

so-called cliff

Like many others, I’m not worried about the so-called fiscal “cliff,” and the ravages to the economy that are likely to occur if Congress doesn’t do something about it before the end of the year. That’s because a lot of the impact can be cushioned in the short run by Executive Branch manipulations while negotiations continue to go on. But if measures aren’t taken to reverse the contractionary effect of the sequestration-induced changes, we’re looking at deficit cuts of $487 Billion over 9 months of the fiscal year.

By comparison, the American Recovery and Reinvestment (ARRA) of 2009 produced only $350 B in stimulus during its first year. And, if the full sequestration were allowed to proceed unmodified, then it would result in a “claw-back” of about 60% of the total ARRA stimulus.

Fortunately, if we do go over the “cliff” heavy pressure will then be on both parties to reintroduce the middle class tax cuts, and make them retroactive, and to restore some of the other cuts as well, so it may be possible to mitigate much, if not most, of the damage, if the Democrats are aggressive enough in pushing the negotiation advantages they appear to have now. So, the real danger of the manufactured “fiscal cliff” is more long-term.

That danger is the constant bleating from both deficit hawks and “progressives” that we have to do something long-term about the deficit/debt problem. So, they put up these long-term plans to delay deficit cutting for a year or two and then want to cut even more down the road to ‘stabilize’ the debt-to-GDP ratio. This is a non-existent problem, and any plan providing for deliberate polices to force deficit reduction by constraining Government spending to some arbitrary level is bound to damage the economy seriously when the prescribed spending cuts and increased taxes for lowering deficits take effect.

People have to come to accept reality, which is: if we want to import more than we export; and also want the private sector as a whole to save money (i.e. bank savings, pensions, other savings) then there is no alternative to having the Government deficit spend. Further, how much the deficit ought to be, without incurring the penalty of demand-pull inflation is dictated by how much we want the private sector to save, and how much of a trade deficit we want to continue to run. If we want to have a trade deficit at 4% of GDP, and we want to save 7% of GDP, then we must allow the Government to run a deficit of approximately 11% of GDP. And we must do that year after year after year, for as long as we want to save that much and import that much.

Do I need to point out that our deficits are not now anywhere near 11%? And that as a result we not only have high unemployment, an output gap of more than $3 Trillion annually in GDP, but also less in both savings (financial wealth being accumulated) and imports (real wealth being accumulated) then we otherwise would have? What will happen if even the “liberal” Center On Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) hits the economy with its proposed total of $3.7 Trillion (the $1.7 Trillion already agreed to last year and the additional $2 Trillion it is proposing) in deficit reduction? That is an average of $370 Billion per year in enforced deficit reduction which will come right out of savings and imports. That, in the absence of credit bubbles creating unsustainable demand, will condemn us to a stagnant economy as far as the eye can see.

We don’t have to run those 11% of GDP deficits, and also have them drive 11% of GDP further debt accumulation. Deficits and debt accumulation are not the same things, and can be decoupled. We can have the deficits and use Proof Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PPCS) to underwrite the deficit spending; or we can change the rules preventing the Fed from monetizing deficit spending by just creating the necessary credits for spending Congressional deficit appropriations and placing them in the Treasury General Account (TGA) when needed. So having the increased debt along with the continuing deficits isn’t necessary. And if we don’t like the debt, then we can get rid of it.

But, again, if we want the imports and if we want the savings, then we must have the deficits, and we must never have deficit reduction unless we also have savings reduction and/or trade deficit reduction. So the bottom line here is: We need to have the “loser liberal” message we’re hearing from Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, The Center On Budget and Policy Priorities, and various “progressive” pundits and organizations, just stop!

Keynes’s idea that a fiscally responsible nation incurs deficit/debt in bad times, and pays it back in good times with surpluses, is wrong in the context of fiat currency nations. The gold standard’s been gone since 1971. Nations have much more fiscal space. Some nations want to run trade surpluses all the time, and accumulate nominal financial wealth, and others want to accommodate them and accumulate the real wealth of their imports instead.

So, this makes it impossible for those others to have both aggregate private sector savings and full employment, without Government deficits compensating for the demand leakages. The accommodating nations need to run permanent deficits to serve their own populations. And, if other nations, object to that, then they need simply to stop having export-led economies.

We have no national debt, or debt-to-GDP ratio problem, because we are a nation with a non-convertible fiat currency, a floating exchange rate, and debts in currencies not our own. This means we can always generate new currency to pay our obligations using the methods I just mentioned. And it also means that 1) our levels of debt and debt-to-GDP ratio have no impact on the fiscal sustainability of our fiscal policy; and 2) fiscal responsibility can’t mean targeting fiscal policy at particular levels of the national debt, or the debt-to-GDP ratio.

Nor can the bond markets create rising interest rates on US public debt because “we,” that is the Fed and the Treasury together, control those rates and can keep them as low as they want to even if every ratings agencies downgrades US paper to its lowest rating. Put simply, our creditors have zero power over our interest rates. Reich’s talk about persuading our creditors that we’re serious about getting our fiscal house in order is just errant nonsense. What we really need to do about them is to use PPCS to fill the public purse, repay our debt instruments as they come due, and take their bond market in USD away from them entirely. It’s only a source of “welfare” payments to rich people and foreign nations anyway. What do we need it for, anyway?

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives.)

Photo by tbennett under Creative Commons license.

Many MMT posts and other writings on fiscal responsibility, including my own, focus on the myths of neoliberalism, pointing out why they are myths and developing an alternative MMT perspective in some detail. Off hand, and I may have forgotten something, I couldn’t think of a brief positive MMT narrative related to fiscal responsibility containing primarily the truths, rather than the myths.

So, here’s my version, revised, a second time, after calling for and receiving comments from readers at New Economic Perspectives, Correntewire, FireDogLake, DailyKos, and ourfuture.org, a second time. Thanks to Tadit Anderson, Mitch Shapiro, Devin Smith, Dan Kervick, Nihat, James M., MRW, Marvin Sussman, joebhed, Clonal Antibody, Calgacus, Ed Seedhouse, JonF, Lyle, Thornton Parker, Sean, Golfer1john, Rodger Malcolm Mitchell, econobuzz, Charles Yaker, Lambert Strether, maltheopia, Ian S., Tyler Healy, PG, for contributing significantly to the critical evaluation of the earlier versions.

More comments, criticisms, recasting in more effective form, are all welcome. But this will be my last round of crowd-sourced revision. I hope all readers will feel free to use this version as they think is best to spread the MMT message about fiscal responsibility. To boil that message down: fiscal responsibility is about the impact of fiscal policy on people; it’s not about the old time religion of its impact on a supposedly limited supply of gold standard-based money.

The Narrative

The first four points in the narrative offer some conclusions

– Austerity requiring budget surpluses cannot work in the United States economy, because surpluses, defined as tax revenue exceeding spending, destroy money in the private sector. Unless these financial assets are replaced through revenues acquired by running a trade surplus; the continuous loss of financial assets by the private sector is unsustainable, eventually leading to credit bubbles, recession or depression, and the return of deficit spending. It is mathematically IMPOSSIBLE for the USA to simultaneously run a government surplus, have a trade deficit and increase aggregate private sector wealth! (h/t Ian S.)

– It is fiscally irresponsible to frame and follow a long – term deficit reduction plan (limited austerity) when both a trade deficit and an output gap exists, because by definition, such a plan is one that must remove more money from the economy than would otherwise be the case every year the plan is pursued. Eventually, if pursued for long enough, a declining rate of addition to financial assets will exacerbate the output gap by lowering aggregate demand and causing both labor and capital to deteriorate, thus reducing the productive capacity of the economy, and the Government’s ability to sustain greater levels of deficit spending producing outputs of real social value without triggering inflation.

– REAL fiscal responsibility is a pattern of fiscal policy intended to achieve public purposes (such as full employment, price stability, a first class educational system, Medicare for All, etc.), while also maintaining or increasing fiscal sustainability, viewed as the extent to which patterns of Government spending do not undermine the capability of the Government to continue to spend to achieve its public purposes.

– REAL fiscally responsible policy, if it works generally as expected, creates greater real benefits than real costs for people! It has nothing to do with conforming to some standard simple measure like an acceptable debt-to-GDP ratio that has only a questionable theoretical connection to the actual well-being of people. It is political malpractice to give greater priority to that kind of abstraction than to full employment, price stability, a strong social safety net, and Government programs that will help us solve the many outstanding problems of our nation. Let’s put an end to the domination of Washington by that kind of malpractice. Let’s put an end to the current misguided fiscally irresponsible campaign to promote a “Grand Bargain” that is sure to do nothing but destroy more private sector money and jobs than would be the case if we either did nothing or increased the deficit and created a full employment budget.

– Social Security has no solvency or “running out of money” problems. The SS crisis is a phoney one. No solution to this “fiscal crisis,” bipartisan or partisan, is needed. What is needed is a solution to the political problem of getting SS’s funding guaranteed in perpetuity by Congress, just the way it guarantees funding for Medicare Parts B and D.

– The same applies to the so-called Medicare crisis. It too is phoney, and can be solved easily by Congress guaranteeing funding in perpetuity to Medicare Parts A and C.

– More generally, there is no entitlement funding crisis in the United States, except a political crisis where US politicians are determined to ignore their constituents and cut back on an already inadequate safety net either because they believe in, or want others to believe in false ideas about fiscal responsibility and nature of the Government as a giant household.

And the rest of it provides the reasoning underlying them.

– The US Government can’t involuntarily run out of its own fiat money (USD), since it has the constitutional authority to create it without limit. Congress constrains and regulates this ability. But its existence is still a stubborn fact!

– Greece and Ireland are users of the Euro, not issuers of it. So, their supply is always limited and that’s why they can run out of Euros. The US is the issuer of Dollars; so it’s supply of dollars is limited only by its desire to create them, and its ability to mark up private accounts, and that’s why it can’t become Greece, Ireland, or any other Eurozone nation.

– In addition to taxing and borrowing money, the Government (including the combined activities of the Congress, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve) has an unlimited capacity to create it. When it taxes and borrows, the Government removes money from the private sector, and destroys it. When it creates money, it adds it to the private sector. A deficit is the net amount of money creation minus the amount of destruction due to taxation. A surplus is the net amount of money destruction minus the amount of creation due to Government spending. (h/t Golfer1john)

– Since this is the case, it’s clear that present proposals to reduce the deficit by an average of $400 Billion/year over the next 10 years are sure to remove money or Treasury securities (assuming deficit spending is accompanied by issuing debt) from the private sector that otherwise would have been created there in the absence of deficit reduction.

– The Government of the United States offers the functional equivalent of interest-bearing savings accounts to investors, usually wealthy individuals, large corporations, and foreign nations. The savings accounts are usually called US Treasury securities, and the sum of their face values is called the debt-subject-to-the-limit; or more colloquially, the national debt, even though comparable savings accounts in banks, are for some reason, not called bank debt. (h/t PG)

– The Treasury can keep accepting deposits (“borrowing money”) and issuing securities if we want it to. There’s no limit on this Government “credit card,” just as there is no limit to the deposits a bank can accept, except the one imposed arbitrarily by Congress in the form of the amount of debt-subject-to-the-limit, otherwise known as the debt ceiling. So, if the US does run out of money, due to a failure to raise the debt ceiling between now and March 31, 2013, it will clearly be the fault of the Congress for refusing to grant further authority to the Treasury to elicit and accept further deposits, also known as refusing to raise the debt ceiling!

– Even though it may seem that foreign nations can place a limit on “the credit card” by refusing to buy Treasury securities at auction, foreign nations holding dollars basically have a choice between continuing to hold them and earning no income, or earning interest on them by buying securities. So, as long as other nations are exporting to the US and accepting dollars as payment; those dollars are likely to be invested in the interest-bearing “savings accounts” known as Treasury securities.

– Bond markets don’t control US interest rates; the Federal Reserve Bank does by exercising its authority to meet its target interest rates. Bond vigilantes have no power against the Fed. If they fight against its interest rate targets by trying to bid them up; then they will “die” in the flood of reserves the Fed can unleash to drive the interest rates down to its chosen target. The Fed can’t control the money supply. But it does control the price of it with its interest rate targeting.

– The bond markets will buy US debt as long as we keep issuing it; but if one insists on considering the hypothetical case where the markets won’t, the US would still not be forced into insolvency; because the Government can always create the money needed to meet all US obligations.

– The US is obligated by the 14th Amendment to pay all its debts as they come due. Nevertheless, our national debt cannot be a burden on our grandchildren; unless they wish to make it so by stupidly taxing more than they spend. This is true because, assuming the debt ceiling is raised when needed, or repealed, we have an unlimited credit card to incur new debt at interest rates of our choosing. So, we can “roll over” our national debt indefinitely. Or, alternatively, we can create all the money we need to pay off the debt-subject-to-the-limit, without ever incurring any more debt. One way to do this is through Proof Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PPCS). A second way is through subordinating the Fed to Treasury and then using the Fed’s ability to create money out of thin air to pay back all debt instruments (“savings account balance”) when they fall due. The first way is legal now. The second is constitutional, but would require politically unlikely action by Congress to authorize it.

– A fiscal policy that measures its success or failure in reducing deficits, rather than by its impacts on public purpose, is fiscally irresponsible and unsustainable. The deficit is a meaningless measure because the US Government has no limits on its authority to create/spend money other than self-imposed ones, so neither the level of the national debt, nor the debt-to-GDP ratio can affect the Government’s capacity to spend Congressional Appropriations at all. Also, a deficit/debt oriented fiscal policy ignores real outcomes relating to employment, price stability, economic growth, environmental impact, crime rates, etc. which actually can affect fiscal sustainability by strengthening or weakening the underlying economy, and, with it the legitimacy of the Government and its fiat currency. In short, responsible fiscal policy is not about its impact on Government debt. It’s about its impact on people!

– The Federal Government is not like a household! Households can’t make their own currency and require that people use that currency to pay taxes! So, their supply of dollars is always limited; while the Government’s supply is a matter of its decisions alone.

– However large the Federal Debt becomes, it cannot be a “crushing burden” on our Government, because Federal spending is virtually costless to the Government, if it wants it to be.

Conclusion

Current claims that we have a fiscal crisis, must debate the debt, must fix the debt, and must immediately embark on a long-term deficit reduction program to bring the debt-to-GDP ratio under control, all misconceive the fiscal situation, and smack of a campaign to create hysteria among the public. They are based on the idea that fiscal responsibility is about developing a plan to bring the debt-to-GDP ratio “under control,” when it is really about using Government spending to achieve outputs that fulfill “public purpose.” There is no fiscal crisis that will require “a Grand Bargain” including cuts to popular discretionary spending and entitlement programs. It is a phoney crisis!.

The only real crises is one of a failing economy and growing economic inequality in which only the needs of the few are served, and also one of lack of political desire or will to solve these real problems. MMT policies can help to bring an end to the first economic crisis; but not if progressives, and others continue to believe in false ideas about fiscal sustainability and responsibility, and the similarity of their Government to a household. To begin to solve our problems, we need to reject the neoliberal narrative and embrace the MMT narrative about the meaning of fiscal responsibility. That will lead us to the political action we need to solve the political crisis and eventually toward fiscal policies that achieve public purpose and away from policies that prolong economic stagnation and the ravages of austerity.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives.)

Many Modern Monetary Theory posts and other writings on fiscal responsibility, including my own, focus on the myths of neoliberalism, pointing out why they are myths and developing an alternative MMT perspective in some detail. Off hand, and I may have forgotten something, I couldn’t think of a brief positive MMT narrative related to fiscal responsibility containing primarily the truths, rather than the myths.

So, here’s my version, revised after calling for and receiving comments from readers at New Economic Perspectives, Correntewire, FireDogLake, DailyKos, and ourfuture.org. Thanks to Tadit Anderson, Mitch Shapiro, Nihat, James M., Marvin Sussman, joebhed, Clonal Antibody, Ed Seedhouse, JonF, Lyle, Thornton Parker, Sean, Golfer1john, Rodger Malcolm Mitchell, econobuzz, Lambert Strether, maltheopia, Ian S., for contributing significantly to the critical evaluation of the earlier version.

More comments, criticisms, recasting in more effective form, are all welcome.

The Narrative

– The US Government can’t involuntarily run out of fiat money, since it has the constitutional authority to create it without limit. Congress constrains and regulates this ability. But its existence is still a stubborn fact!

– In addition to taxing and borrowing money, the Government (including the combined activities of the Congress, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve) has an unlimited capacity to create it. When it taxes and borrows, the Government removes money from the private sector. When it creates money, over and above what it taxes or borrows, it adds it to the private sector. Since this is the case, it’s clear that present proposals to reduce the deficit by an average of $400 Billion over the next ten years are sure to remove net financial assets from the private sector.

–The Treasury can keep borrowing money if we want it to. There’s no limit on the Government credit card except the one imposed arbitrarily by Congress in the form of the amount of debt-subject-to-the-limit, otherwise known as the debt ceiling. So, if the US does run out of money due to a failure to raise the debt ceiling between now and March 31, 2013 it will clearly be the fault of the Congress for refusing to raise the debt ceiling!

– Even though it may seem that foreign nations can place a limit on “the credit card” by refusing to buy Treasury securities at auction, foreign nations holding dollars basically have a choice between continuing to hold them and earning no income, or earning interest on securities. So, as long as other nations are exporting to the US and accepting dollars as payment; those dollars are likely to be invested in Treasury securities.

– Bond markets don’t control US interest rates; the Federal Reserve Bank does by exercising its authority to meet its target interest rates. Bond vigilantes have no power against the Fed. If they fight against its interest rate targets by trying to bid them up; then they will “die” in the flood of reserves the Fed can unleash to drive the interest rates down to its chosen target. The Fed can’t control the money supply. But it does control the price of it with its interest rate targeting.

– The bond markets will buy US debt as long as we keep issuing it; but if one insists on considering the hypothetical case where the markets won’t, the US would still not be forced into insolvency; because the Government can always create the money needed to meet all US obligations.

– The US is obligated by the 14th Amendment to pay all its debts as they come due. Nevertheless, our national debt cannot be a burden on our grandchildren; unless they wish to make it so by stupidly taxing more than they spend. This is true because, assuming the debt ceiling is raised when needed, or repealed, we have an unlimited credit card to incur new debt at interest rates of our choosing. So, we can “roll over” our national debt indefinitely. Or, alternatively, we can create all the money we need to pay off the debt-subject-to-the-limit, without ever incurring any more debt;

– A fiscal policy that measures its success or failure in reducing deficits, rather than by its impacts on public purpose, is fiscally irresponsible and unsustainable. The deficit is a meaningless measure because the US Government has no limits on its authority to create/spend money other than self-imposed ones, so neither the level of the national debt, nor the debt-to-GDP ratio can affect the Government’s capacity to spend Congressional Appropriations at all. Also, a deficit/debt oriented fiscal policy ignores real outcomes relating to employment, price stability, economic growth, environmental impact, crime rates, etc. which actually can affect fiscal sustainability by strengthening or weakening the underlying economy, and, with it the legitimacy of the Government and its fiat currency.

– The Federal Government is not like a household! Households can’t make their own currency and require that people use that currency to pay taxes! So, their supply of dollars is always limited; while the Government’s supply is a matter of its decisions alone.

– Social Security has no solvency or “running out of money” problems. The SS crisis is a phoney one. No solution to this “fiscal crisis,” bipartisan or partisan, is needed. What is needed is a solution to the political problem of getting SS’s funding guaranteed in perpetuity by Congress, just the way it guarantees funding for Medicare Parts B and D. The same applies to the so-called Medicare crisis. It too is phoney, and can be solved easily by Congress guaranteeing funding in perpetuity to Medicare Parts A and C.

– However large the Federal Debt becomes, it cannot be a “crushing burden” on our Government, because Federal spending is virtually costless to the Government, if it wants it to be.

– Greece and Ireland are users of the Euro, not issuers of it. So, their supply is always limited and that’s why they can run out of Euros. The US is the issuer of Dollars; so it’s supply of dollars is limited only by its desire to create them, and its ability to mark up private accounts, and that’s why it can’t become Greece, Ireland, or any other Eurozone nation.

– Austerity requiring budget surpluses cannot work in the United States economy because surpluses, defined as tax revenue exceeding spending, destroy net financial assets in the private sector. Unless these financial assets are replaced through revenues acquired by running a trade surplus; the continuous loss in net financial assets by the private sector is unsustainable, eventually leading to credit bubbles, recession or depression, and the return of deficit spending. It is mathematically IMPOSSIBLE for the USA to simultaneously run a government surplus, have a trade deficit and increase aggregate private sector wealth! (h/t Ian S.)

– It is fiscally irresponsible to frame and follow a long – term deficit reduction plan (limited austerity) when both a trade deficit and an output gap exists, because by definition, such a plan is one that must remove more net financial assets from the economy than would otherwise be the case every year the plan is pursued. Eventually, if pursued for long enough, declining rate of addition to financial assets will exacerbate the output gap by lowering aggregate demand and causing both labor and capital to deteriorate, thus reducing the productive capacity of the economy, and the Government’s ability to sustain deficit spending producing outputs of real social value.

– REAL fiscal responsibility is a pattern of fiscal policy intended to achieve public purposes (such as full employment, price stability, a first class educational system, Medicare for All, etc.), while also maintaining or increasing fiscal sustainability, viewed as the extent to which patterns of Government spending do not undermine the capability of the Government to continue to spend to achieve its public purposes. REAL fiscal responsibility is Government fiscal policy creating greater real benefits than real costs for people! It has nothing to do with conforming to some standard simple measure like an acceptable debt-to-GDP ratio that has only a questionable theoretical connection to the actual well-being of people. It’s political malpractice to give greater priority to that kind of abstraction than to full employment, price stability, a strong social safety net, and Government programs that will help us solve the many outstanding problems of our nation. Let’s put an end to the domination of Washington by that kind of malpractice.

Conclusion

Current claims that we have a fiscal crisis, must debate the debt, must fix the debt, and must immediately embark on a long-term deficit reduction program to bring the debt-to-GDP ratio under control, all misconceive the fiscal situation. They are based on the idea that fiscal responsibility is about developing a plan to bring the debt-to-GDP ratio “under control,” when it is really about using Government spending to achieve outputs that fulfill “public purpose.” There is no fiscal crisis that will require “a Grand Bargain” including cuts to popular discretionary spending and entitlement programs. It is a phoney crisis!.

The only real crisis is a crisis of a failing economy and growing economic inequality in which only the needs of the few are served. MMT policies can help to bring an end to that crisis; but not if progressives, and others continue to believe in false ideas about fiscal sustainability and responsibility, and the similarity of their Government to a household. To begin to solve our problems, we need to reject the neoliberal narrative and embrace the MMT narrative about the meaning of fiscal responsibility. That will lead us to fiscal policies that achieve public purpose and away from policies that prolong economic stagnation and the ravages of austerity.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives.)

Photo by Evan-Amos under Creative Commons license.

Many MMT posts and other writings on fiscal responsibility, including my own, focus on the myths of neoliberalism, pointing out why they are myths and developing an alternative MMT perspective in some detail. Off hand, and I may have forgotten something, I couldn’t think of a brief positive MMT narrative containing primarily the truths, rather than the myths. So, here’s my version. Comments, criticisms, recasting in more effective form, are all welcome.

– The US Government can’t involuntarily run out of fiat money because it has the constitutional authority to create it without limit. Congress constrains and regulates this ability; but its existence is still a stubborn fact!

– In addition to taxing and borrowing money and, most importantly, the Government has an unlimited capacity to create it. When it taxes and borrows, it removes it from the private sector. When it creates it, over and above what it taxes or borrows, it adds it to the private sector.

–The Treasury can keep borrowing money if we want it to. There’s no limit on the Government credit card except the one imposed arbitrarily by Congress.

– Bond markets don’t control US interest rates; the Federal Reserve Bank does by exercising its authority to meet its target interest rates. Bond vigilantes have no power against the Fed. If they fight against its interest rate targets; then they “die.”

– The bond markets will most probably buy US debt for the foreseeable future; but if they don’t, then the US won’t be forced into insolvency; because the Government can always create the money needed to meet US obligations.

– We’re obligated to pay all US debts as they come due. Nevertheless, our national debt cannot be a burden for our grandchildren; since we have an unlimited credit card to incur new debt at interest rates of our choosing, or, alternatively can create all the money we need to pay off debt subject to the limit, without incurring any more debt; unless they wish to make it so by stupidly taxing more than they spend.

– Since the US Government has no limits on its authority to create/spend money other than self-imposed ones, neither the level of the national debt, nor the debt-to-GDP ratio can affect the Government’s capacity to spend Congressional Appropriations at all. That’s why a fiscal policy that measures its success, not by its policy impacts, but by its success or failure in reducing deficits isn’t fiscally responsible, or likely to be sustainable.

– The Federal Government is not like a household! Households can’t make their own currency and require that people use that currency to pay taxes! So, their supply of dollars is always limited; while the Government’s supply is a matter of its decisions alone.

– Social Security has no solvency or “running out of money” problems. The SS crisis is a phoney one. So, no solution to this “fiscal crisis,” bipartisan or partisan is needed. What is needed is a solution to the political problem of getting SS’s funding guaranteed in perpetuity by Congress, just the way it guarantees funding for Medicare Parts B and D.

– However large the Federal Debt becomes it cannot be a “crushing burden” on our Government, because federal spending is virtually costless to the Government, if it wants it to be.

– Greece and Ireland are users of the Euro, not issuers of it. So, their supply is always limited and that’s why they can run out of Euros. The US is the issuer of Dollars; so it’s supply of dollars is limited only by its desire to create them, and that’s why it can’t become Greece, Ireland, or any other Eurozone nation.

– Austerity cannot work in the United States economy because budget surpluses, defined as tax revenue exceeding spending, destroy net financial assets in the private sector. Unless, these financial assets are replaced through revenues acquired by running a trade surplus; the continuous loss in net financial assets by the private sector is unsustainable, eventually leading to credit bubbles, recession or depression, and the return of deficit spending. For a Government and economy like the US, with both a trade deficit and a substantial output gap, evidenced by high unemployment and under-employment, a policy of deficit reduction aiming toward budget surpluses (austerity) is destructive and will only push the economy further into recession or depression.

– REAL Fiscal Responsibility is a pattern of fiscal policy intended to achieve public purposes, while also maintaining or increasing fiscal sustainability viewed as the extent to which patterns of Government spending do not undermine the capability of the Government to continue to spend to achieve its public purposes.

– It is fiscally irresponsible to frame and follow a deficit reduction plan when both a trade deficit and an output gap exists, because by definition, such a plan is one that must remove net financial assets from the private sector every year the plan is pursued. Eventually, if pursued for long enough, declining financial assets will exacerbate the output gap by lowering aggregate demand and causing both labor and capital to deteriorate, thus reducing the productive capacity of the economy and the Government’s ability to sustain productive deficit spending producing outputs of real social value.

So, current claims that we have a fiscal crisis, must debate the debt, must fix the debt, and must immediately embark on a long-term deficit reduction program to bring the debt-to-GDP ratio under control, all misconceive the fiscal situation because they are based on the idea that fiscal responsibility is about developing a plan to bring the debt-to-GDP ratio “under control,” when it is really about using Government spending to achieve outputs that fulfill “public purpose.” There is no fiscal crisis that will require “a Grand Bargain” and cuts to popular discretionary spending and entitlement programs. It is a phoney issue.

The only real crisis is a crisis of a failing economy and growing economic inequality in which only the needs of the few are served. MMT policies can help to bring an end to that crisis; but not if progressives, and others continue to believe in false ideas about fiscal sustainability and responsibility, and the similarity of their Government to a household. To begin to solve our problems, we need to reject the neoliberal narrative and embrace the MMT narrative about the meaning of fiscal responsibility. That will lead us to fiscal policies that achieve public purpose and away from policies that prolong economic stagnation and the ravages of austerity.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives.)