Economic Fairy Tales and other Bed time stories

One of the things that grew out of the Reagan years was a set of myths. Primary among them were economic myths. The first one was that the country was overtaxed. The second was that there was no particular useful role for government. The third was a revival of our country’s Puritan ethos. None of these were particularly helpful and all of them were put to death–in short order–during the Clinton years by theory and empirics. Well, they were put to death by every one but those that rely on faith and ideology rather than theory and data. I see a revival of these myths in the signs of tea partiers. The tea party folks realize we’re losing our way of life. The problem is they are so angry they are looking to Reagan Fairy tales for answers. Republicans and Blue dawgs are playing those fears like magical harps. Fairy tales calm children’s fears, but they do not solve real problems.

A really good example of a stupid hypothesis in Reagan’s VooDoo economics that was soundly put to death by empirics was the Laffer curve.(That was the basis of the argument that we’re overtaxed.) However, I do know some one that has to rely on old articles to bring this ‘view point’ into his classroom. No matter how many ways I insist that it’s not our job to bring failed hypotheses to students he still keeps clapping for this very dead Tinkerbell. He wants to believe he’s over taxed no matter what the data says and I haven’t seen him for awhile but I have no doubt he’s participating in whatever passes for a tea party up in his rural part of Washington.

Paul Krugman’s hair is on fire about the Austerity Myth today. He’s not the only one. Here’s something from The Economist with the same urgency on the international scale called the Austerity Alarm. These articles seem even more prescient given the news about unemployment today. The U.S. economy is not creating jobs. It’s still losing them in large numbers. The economy lost 125,000  jobs last month. The previous dips in the unemployment rate seem to have come from part time Census worker jobs. This one comes from people giving up so they’re not counted. I warned 1 1/2 years ago that the Porkulus bill was not concentrating spending on the right things and too full of useless tax cuts. Surprise! Surprise! Job creation remains elusive. Mortgage rates are at record lows and without bribes to first time buyers, the housing market–perhaps the most central element of the American Dream Fairy tale–looks like a lost market. So, the best our leaders can do in response to all of this is reheat policies that failed during the Hoover Administration.

As Krugman points out, the U.S. and nearly all the world’s economies remain in a deep recession, so why are all the leaders talking about austerity programs and acting like the big issue is that some imaginary set of investors will treat them like Greece if they act responsibly? Why are they repeating the policies that made the Great Depression worse to begin with and then the policies that turned the recovery of the mid thirties into a double dip depression?

Krugman suggests that it’s the power of the village that keeps churning out the myth. It’s not the village economists that embrace this fairy tale. It is our village idiots and unfortunately, they seem to be in charge of economic policy these days. This is not to deny that the U.S. has long term budget problems. Demographics are presenting serious problems to both Social Security and Medicare. Both need to be revamped to meet future commitments. Revamping, however, does not mean tearing down all the buildings in the village to stop one fire from spreading.

So the next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation.

So Krugman is a liberal and of course, the argument against him is that all we liberals believe is that the our big daddy government will get us out of trouble. So, why is the same argument coming from The Economist whose subtitle to their op-ed piece reads “Both sides in the row over stimulus v austerity exaggerate, but the austerity lobby is the more dangerous”. They are hardly a bastion of liberal thinkers and they call the austerity hawkers dangerous.

The austerity fad is also distorting politicians’ priorities. Many European governments, for instance, are fixated on cutting their deficits, when they should also be trying harder to shake up their labour and product markets. A new analysis by the IMF suggests that fiscal austerity coupled with structural reforms would yield far higher growth than austerity alone. In America the new deficit-focused climate is preventing politicians from passing a temporary (and sensible) fiscal stimulus package without inducing them to tackle the sources of the country’s huge medium-term deficit by, for instance, reforming social security. The result probably won’t be another Hooveresque Depression. But it could be a recovery that is weaker and slower than it should have been.

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