Here it is the afternoon and I'm just getting around to some articles and blogs for your attention.
Senator Avoids Trap: First, Senator Chuck Schumer, to his great credit, understands the tax reform trap. Here at OTE, we're always warning folks to be aware that when politicians talk about a "grand bargain" on taxes that lowers the rates and broadens the base, you've got to be extremely vigilant about not getting stuck with a lot of the former and a little of the latter.
"Rate cuts" sound good to everyone and "base broadening" sounds harmless enough. But the way these debates go, your loophole is my prized "job-creating investment incentive." Just ask candidate Romney, who's very specific about those rate cuts--20% across the board!--but completely silent on the base broadeners.
So I was happy to see Sen Schumer say this about that:
If upfront rate cuts are the starting point for negotiations on tax reform, it will box us in on what else we can achieve. Certain conservatives will pocket the rate reductions and never follow through on finding enough revenue elsewhere in the code to reduce the deficit. Or, if they do, it will almost certainly come out of the pockets of middle-income earners.
An Economist I Like Denounces Austerity Measure: Jan Hatzius is the chief economist at Goldman Sachs. That may alienate some readers but in his case, it should not. He's someone who understands the economy's moving parts as well as anyone and he's just as unhappy as I am about the persistent slack in the economy.
As Matt Yglesias notes here, Jan doesn't get why both parties are so ready and willing to allow the payroll tax cut to expire at the end of this year when unemployment is still so elevated. That 2% cut to take home pay that aggregates up to $120 billion, contributing to precisely the fiscal contraction you see in the second figure in this post (see the black parts of the bars).
I know that some people worry that this tax cut diverts money from the Social Security trust fund, and in doing so, provides great comfort to those who would destroy social insurance, and does so in the name of progressive, Keynesian stimulus, which is pretty diabolical, actually. I hear them and understand their concern--I know how much the enemies of Social Security would love to weaken the trust fund.
But the law specifies that any and all diverted dollars must be replenished by general revenues. A few months back I even identified the ledger within the government accounts that specifies the transfers, and they were, in fact, being made in accordance with the law.
Why is no one fighting to preserve this important stimulus right now? I'm not sure but I wonder if part of the reason, and not an unreasonable part, is that little evidence has been brought to bear showing its impact. The results that Hatzius and others, including myself, tout are based on plugging the stimulus into economic models that map the extra pay onto growth and jobs, but it might help to have some empirical evidence about the actual impact of the cut (I know...there I go again thinking that facts matter).
The problem in working up such evidence is statistical...the payroll tax cut went to so many people that it's hard to think of a control group against which to gauge its impact. One idea to use the fact that some state and local workers don't get Social Security benefits so don't pay into the system and thus didn't benefit from the cut. If there are geographical areas where a lot of those folks live, that might be a useful source of variation.
What to Make of Mitt's Pivot: I liked Jon Cohn's take on Gov Romney's etch-a-sketch moment, and Jon's cataloging of Mitt's flips and flops is useful. I'd like to add another dimension.
I'm constantly struck and always struggling with the implications of what I view as a large and serious problem here. At least since Reagan ran against government, too many people are ready and willing to believe that most politicians are liars who will say whatever it takes to win and that government is a corrupt institution that just doles out the goodies to the privileged who've bribed their way in, with said goodies coming from the middle class.
A deeply obfuscating performance, like Mitt's the other night, very much feeds into that narrative. Jon and I and others are left to try to straighten things out the next day, but by then, it's onto the playoffs or something.
Moreover, this dynamic is just a cousin of the even more noxious one I'm always going on about around here: the conservative politicians who run for office on a platform that "government is broken" and then, when they get elected, makes sure it stays broken.
Again, what's so pernicious about these dynamics is that they create a negative feedback loop, and the damage done by that loop is not random: it hurts those of us who believe facts matter and that government must play a significant role in advanced economies, and conversely, it helps the YOYOs.
All of which is to say, we've got a lot of work to do to get out butts back on the path of enlightenment.
This post originally appeared at Jared Bernstein's On The Economy blog.