We do requests:

“I’m leaving on vacation or I would do it, but can someone do an overlay chart of the post-WWII recessions and the subsequent recovery? I suspect we’ll see a pattern. Recessions tend to end after a certain number of months, depending on the depth of the recession, whether Congress spends money or not.” – FH

Frank is leaving and I am just getting back from vacation, so I’ll take the baton. The following screenshots are from a nifty tool on the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank website. The red line is the current recession.

Post-WWII Recessions Tracked by Changes in US Output:

“The graphic points out an interesting aspect of recessions. They all end. And, surprisingly, they didn’t all need a trillion dollar stimulus bill from the Feds to end them. In fact, all of them combined up to now did not need a trillion dollar stimulus to end.”

This is worth repeating. If you pass a stimulus bill, recessions end. If you don’t pass a stimulus bill, recessions end. If you pass a small stimulus bill, recessions end. If you pass a large stimulus bill, recessions end. Recessions end. Full stop.

In terms of US Output, the graphs show the 2007 recession to be comparable to the ’53, ’57, and ’81 recessions (slightly worse than ’81, not as bad than ’57). In terms of employment, this is the worst recession since WWII. By any measure, this recession is lasting longer than any recession since WWII.

In terms of output, the recovery is underway. In terms of employment, it is not. Justin asserts that “…credit needs to be given to [the administration] for helping turn our economy around in such a dramatic fashion.” I am not sure what is so dramatic about the longest recession and slowest recovery of any recession since WWII, nor am I sure why any administration would want credit for it. Still, Justin is the voice of moderation compared to the hero worshiping fantasy found in the comments.

Given that this is the slowest recovery from the deepest recession in the modern era, any argument on what impact the stimulus package or the Obama administration did or did not have on the duration or strength of the recovery can only be made on a counterfactual basis – “expressing what has not happened but could, would, or might under differing conditions”. Despite the massive expenditures, you cannot say this recovery is more robust than any that has gone before. The only case that can be made in defense of administration policy is speculation that the recovery would have been even more tepid without the stimulus.

Problem being, a case can also be made that the uncertainty created by this administration’s wild spending, insane deficits, threatened increases in health care taxes, likely increases in health care insurance premiums on employers, an energy tax (cap & trade), repeal of the Bush tax cuts, increases in the minimum wage, uncertainty created in the health care, financial, and energy industries with the imposition of radical government mandated top down changes in industrial policy – all contributed to increasing uncertainty in the private sector and made the recession worse.

Both are counterfactual scenarios. Neither can ever be proven with certainty.

There are statements about administration policy on the economy that can be made with certainty. Clearly, administration policy has cushioned the pain of the recession for many who were hit hardest. Realistically and practically, this is a legitimate and necessary function of the federal government. Another certainty is that only about one third of the stimulus package allocation has been spent, and a significant percentage of that was in the form of pork for congressional districts that was not focused on creating new jobs (but may have arguably saved government jobs at the expense of the private sector). Unsurprising, since the bill was written by Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives, slightly trimmed by the Senate, and rubber stamped by the President. Based on the percentage of the bill spent to date, it is unarguable that a focused bill 20-30% the size of the one that passed would have had the exact same effect of “turning the economy around in such a dramatic fashion” to this point – without further inflaming the deficit and currency fears the stimulus package produced.

So should we applaud the administration for the economic performance of a bloated, politics-as-usual, pork-filled stimulus package that passed a year ago on a strong-armed partisan vote? It did provide one valuable service. In a single stroke it disabused independents of any illusion that the Obama administration would be vaguely centrist, post-partisan, fiscally responsible, more transparent, or agents of change in Washington D.C. We were immediately back to old-style back-room dealing, partisan politics and favoritism pushed by a classic borrow, tax and spend liberal. It set the tone and became the template for everything that the administration has done since. Credit for turning the economy around? I remain unconvinced.

In my last post I detailed some of the roadblocks that have kept the Democratic leadership in Washington from finding a way to pass a major health care reform bill with a public option. They’ve whittled the cost of the bill down a few hundred billion dollars by negotiating concessions from drug companies and hospitals, as well as settling on a provision that would have employers pay a fee for each employee they do not already cover. The two main proposals to fill the budgetary gap have stalled, and are possibly dead in the water. So what other options are there?

Past the constant calls for saving money by eliminating wasteful spending, which never seem to materialize into actual legislation, we need to find new forms of income to pay for this bill. They seem to be failing at convincing enough senators to support taxing benefits and the more affluent, so what else is left?

For the most part, we pay for our governmental services through income taxes (both individual and corporate), property taxes and consumption taxes. Property taxes are used for other things and rightfully shouldn’t be on the table here. The two proposals that were trotted out for discussion by the Democratic leadership were both taxes on types of income. What remains are consumption taxes.

In a way, consumption taxes are the most fair. For instance it makes perfect sense to tax gasoline and tires to pay for roads, as those driving on those roads need those things to do so. So doesn’t it make sense to tax those behaviors that create high health care costs? The American people seem to think so.

Kaiser Family Foundation poll

A poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, from back in April, found that reforming health care is one of the public’s highest priorities, that a majority of Democrats and Independents believe that we need reform now and that a majority support taxing unhealthy behaviors as an acceptable way to pay for some of these reforms. When asked it they would support raising taxes on “items that are thought to be unhealthy, such as soda, alcohol, junk food and cigarettes,” 61% approved (39% strongly favoring, with 22% somewhat favoring the idea). I’m a huge fan of proposals that kill two (or more) birds with one stone, and I think this is a textbook example of such.

To fund a health care program, it makes much more sense to tax behaviors that lead to health problems than it does to tax income in general. By doing so we can, in one fell swoop, put more of the costs of the system in the hands of those who are causing the most problems, lower the consumption of these products AND help pay for universal health care. We already have taxes on cigarettes, alcohol and items deemed luxuries like jewelry, hotel stays and amusement parks. So why not extend similar taxes to the most unhealthy ‘food’ items in the market? (I put food in quotes because one could argue that high fat and sugar content items like pop, potato chips and many fast food items can hardly be described as food)

First on the cutting block is alcohol, with 68% of respondents strongly or somewhat favoring raising taxes on it to help pay for health care reform. Smoking is more demonized in our country, but alcohol related health costs actually outweigh those related to smoking. The Marin Institute lists several alcohol related health care costs, among them $175.9 billion on alcohol related problems, also saying that they bring about “$184.6 billion dollars per year in health care, business and criminal justice costs, and cause more than 100,000 deaths.” This being the case, I see it as nothing but reasonable to levy a higher tax on alcohol, possibly in relation to which forms of it result in the worst outcomes, that is equal to the cost to society it incurs.

Still with a few hundred billion dollars to go, we come to tobacco. I was a bit surprised that a higher cigarette tax was supported by fewer than the increased alcohol tax, but this may be because tobacco products are already taxed at a high rate. Florida alone loses $20 billion dollars when you compare the taxes it collects to the money it pays out, amounting to nearly $7,000 per smoker. A study released by the CDC in 2002 showed that “For each of the approximately 22 billion packs sold in the U.S. in 1999, $3.45 was spent on medical care attributable to smoking, and $3.73 in productivity losses were incurred, for a total cost of $7.18 per pack.” These numbers are sure to have risen since then, and with somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 billion packs of cigarettes sold in the US last year, it seems more than fair to tack on at least another few dollars per pack.

Whether or not this fills the gap entirely, we also should look at taxing the most unhealthy food items. A study at University of Victoria (British Colombia) found that all income groups would benefit, although more so near the top of the economic spectrum, from a tax on junk foods that sent money towards health care programs. I would suggest that this disparity would be less pronounced in the US, where many people near the bottom of the economic spectrum have much more to gain from such an arrangement, given that it will help pay for health insurance that many of them currently do not have.

Put all of these together, and you might piece together enough to get over the hump. At the very least we could make it easier to pass one of the income tax ideas by lowering the amounts they’d have to raise through it.

One might argue that this would cause people to consume less of these products, thereby reducing the income from the levies. My response would be that we should then increase the taxes to keep up with the costs. This would hopefully create a cycle where more people would consume less, making the purchase of such products even more expensive, driving more out and lowering costs to treat those people over the long run. Herein lies the killing two birds with one stone situation.

One might also argue that this is a regressive tax. In effect it will be that way, at least at first. It is the lower end of the spectrum that spends a larger amount of their overall income on food. They also tend to eat less healthy foods. However, nobody forces them to choose to purchase these particular food items. Nobody should force them to quit, but if they want to continue to lead an unhealthy lifestyle, the rest of society should not be forced to subsidize it.

If people want to smoke, drink or eat themselves to death, then they can make a down payment on the hundreds of thousands of dollars the government will pay to take care of many of them during the last months of their lives. If we can save some of them from that fate by enacting the proposals mentioned above, thats even better.

Universal Health Care... How?

The Obama administration has managed to collect some concessions from hospital groups and drug companies, to the tune of over $200 billion in savings over ten years. This is nothing to sneeze at, but it still leaves the lion’s share of the proposed legislation searching for funding. Setting a requirement for employers to pay a fee to help cover uninsured employees takes another bite out, leaving hundreds of billions still to be found.

The Democratic leadership has brought up two major ideas fill that gap:

1. taxing the medical benefits of higher earners
2. a surtax on those who make more than $280,000 a year.

After some early indications otherwise, the proposal to tax medical benefits seems to be dead in the water. Support in the Senate dissolved when several polls put the opposition to such an idea among the public at around 59%. Unions, many of whom have negotiated higher benefits in lieu of higher pay over the last few years, were especially vocal in their opposition, which assured the proposal would lose enough support among democrats to block its passage.

It’s unclear whether the surtax proposal has enough support to make it through the senate either. Polls show people’s potential opposition of higher taxes to fund better coverage has been mixed. However, about 60% of those polled are for taxing those making over $280,000 a year to fund reform, lending weight to the surtax proposal. Charlie Rangel, who proposed the surtax plan, is expected to introduce the legislation Monday, but comments by several influential Senate Democrats suggest its chances of passage may be slim.

Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate (and Obama’s Blackberry buddy), has come out saying that the proposal is unlikely to pass. Kent Conrad, prominent member of a moderate group of Democratic Senators that would have to support any proposal entirely to block a filibuster, has said that he thinks the senate is heading in a direction other than controversial ideas like these two proposals. If these two senators are correct, and no other major solutions are being offered, then what options are left?

Passing a reform bill of this magnitude was not expected to be a walk in the park. Reforming a massive and labyrinthine system – with interests holding considerable clout and an opposition bent on stopping a public option – would be difficult even if the Democrats had a few more seats in the Senate. So far, Obama has been fairly hands off in his approach to working with congressional leaders on legislation. He seems to favor dealing out broad strokes of what he’d like to see in a bill that he would sign. This time he’s going to have to put more skin in the game and put some of that political capital to the test. If he can’t push either of these two funding proposals pushed through the Senate, he will have to explore other options.

Read on about some of those options in my next post, How TO pay for Health Care Reform.

Thanks to Justin and company for welcoming me on here as a regular contributor. I will be posting on a number of issues, but one area you can expect that I will regularly be tracking is technology related developments and how they interact with the political world and policy. I also live less than ten miles from the Nebraska/Iowa border, so I’ll try to keep an eye on 2012 developments as the contenders test the waters there as well, on top of other interests like election reform, social issues, polling analysis and any number of things that I come across while skimming the hundreds of tweets and RSS feeds I go through every day. I hope you enjoy it, and now… on with the show!

We’ve been hearing about cellulosic ethanol for several years now, generally with the caveat that were at least a few years, and a few scientific breakthroughs, away from it coming to market and helping wean us from foreign oil. Unlike corn, which breaks down into the sugars necessary to be processed into ethanol relatively easily, cellulose is a hardy material that takes time and energy to break down. Its upside is that there happens to be more cellulose present than any other organic molecule on the planet. This is why millions upon millions of dollars has been poured into cellulosic ethanol research, genetically modifying naturally occurring enzymes to break it down faster and looking for ways to bring the price per gallon down closer to the price of gasoline.

Unlike corn, which takes land out of food production, is inefficient as far as how much energy it takes to produce and is a high maintenance crop, finding raw material for a cellulosic plant is easy. Wood chips from sawmills, the kudzu scourge spreading through the hot and humid Southeast, agricultural waste and even up to 80 percent of what ends up in our landfills could be used to make cellulosic ethanol.  Thankfully, the millions of dollars in research and development have begun to bear fruit.

A gas station near Ottawa is the first in the world to begin selling a cellulosic blend, called CE-10, to the public. Iogen, the company behind the demonstration plant that produced the fuel, plans to build its first full scale cellulosic ethanol plant in Saskatchewan. It has reached an agreement with the local government and Royal Dutch Shell to convert an old Mill site to their purposes, with the government even agreeing to purchase any green energy produced at the site. The running demonstration plant only has the capacity to produce about 3 million liters of ethanol each year, using wheat straw agricultural waste, while the new plant will be able to pump out about 75 million liters. It will make use of a more diverse feed stock, including agricultural waste from other crops, grasses native to nearby areas and even wood chips from area mills.

The march of progress continues, with a number of large companies making big investments into these technologies. Last year GM purchased a large share of Coskata, a big player in the emerging cellulosic ethanol industry, who claims to have developed a process that simplefies the complex and costly process of breaking down cellulose and brings the cost of production down to being competitive with gasoline. There are as many as two dozen companies with plans to build plants similar to Iogen’s, but the economic downturn is effecting their ability to finance these projects. Coskata is hoping to get some stimulus money, in the form of loan guarantees, to help finance its plant, with an estimated production of 50-100 million gallons a year.

As President Obama often says, if we intend to be a leader in the green energy industry of tomorrow, we need to move boldly in that direction today. Now is not the time to let companies who wish to lead us in there falter because of financing problems. Some are talking about a new stimulus bill, which most people reasonably see as a terrible idea, that would focus on these kinds of projects and job creation. The first should have done so, and I have little confidence that a new one would make it through congress without being similarly unfocused and pork laden.

We don’t get too many of these chances, where we can kill three birds with one stone. Job creation, independence from foreign oil and environmental progress can all be had with some smart funding priorities. Lets hope the administration recognizes this in time.

As every American in financial trouble knows, it’s never good when your creditors start asking questions. Well, today, the United State’s biggest creditor grumbled about our current spending.

China’s premier didn’t say it in so many words, but the implied warning to Washington was blunt: Don’t devalue the dollar through reckless spending.

Premier Wen Jiabao’s message is unlikely to be misunderstood at the White House. It is counting on Beijing to help pay for its stimulus package by buying U.S. bonds. China already is Washington’s biggest foreign creditor, with an estimated $1 trillion in U.S. government debt. A weaker dollar would erode the value of those assets.

“Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I’m a little bit worried,” Wen said at a news conference Friday after the closing of China’s annual legislative session. “I would like to call on the United States to honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.”

This reminds us of a very real fact behind the stimulus: we won’t get many, if any, do-overs if the package doesn’t work. Before we even hit this crisis, our debt was astronomical. As China is hinting, we shouldn’t count on being able to push that debt much further.

Sometimes I worry that politicians on both sides see our national debt as nothing more than an accounting nuisance. They never seem to concern themselves with how much of our future GDP will be sacrificed to nations like China once our debts become due. But those debts will become due and, as China reminded us today, our creditors are keeping a close eye on our financial strength. Let’s hope we’ll pull out of this recession stronger than ever so that the debt in which we’ve put ourselves never becomes an insurmountable problem.

 

Thanks to the powerful stand taken by two Democrats, Evan Bayh, a centrist after my own heart, and Russ Feingold, a staunch, principled liberal, both of whom will vote against the $410-billion spending bill as long as it contains 9,000 earmarks, the Senate leadership came up one vote short on moving the bill forward.

 

Congress is now giving itself another five days to pry the needed vote, probably from the Republicans, many of whom want their own earmarks to pass although they are stalling for the moment to embarass the Democrats.  But some other Republicans, led by John McCain, are leading the charge against this unconscionable waste at a time when federal dollars are needed for more important things.

 

Throughout his campaign last year, President Obama promised repeatedly to change the tired ways of Washington, reform the “old politics,” and specifically go “line by line” through the federal budget to restrain wasteful spending. In his inauguration address and other speeches since January 20, he has again and again struck the same rhetorical notes of change, reform and fiscal responsibility.

 

Now, he has the perfect opportunity to make good on his words.  Reform-minded Democrats and Republicans have exposed this especially smelly bit of old-style Washington politics and slowed down its enactment.  By announcing that he would veto the bill unless it is stripped of earmarks, the President could guarantee that the House and Senate leadership would do just that and present him with a clean bill.  They would have no choice, since they would not be able to muster the two thirds majorities of both Houses to override his veto.  In any case, the Democratic leadership would not have the stomach to engage in battle with their own party’s new, very popular President. 

 

President Obama would not only fulfill the spirit and letter of his campaign promises. He would gain enormous respect among voters and opinion makers throughout the country and across the political spectrum, opening up new opportunities for genuine post-partisan cooperation on other, pressing issues.  And not incidentally, it would also be good policy — good for the nation and good for all Americans.

 

So why is he calling this ”old business” and doing his best to duck the issue?  Why won’t he take a stand?  Alas, the answer is that the old politics of Washington against which he campaigned to eloquently is alive and well.  Key Congressional committee chairs and ranking members, along with many of their colleagues, regard pork projects as theirs by right and will never part with them without a fight.  No doubt, Obama fears that these powerful people on Capitol Hill will retaliate against him in many less-than-public ways if he screws them out of their earmarks.

 

No doubt some will try to do that. But did we not expect that Obama would at least try to rise above these political considerations and show some courage in bringing “change we can believe in” to Washington?  

If he does, he will be able to count on even stronger popular support to offset any fallout among Congressional grandees.  If he doesn’t, he will fully deserve to face the consequences of further public disappointment and gathering opposition.  It’s up to him.

 

What are your thoughts?  Post a comment.

 

(Visit me at The Purple Center)