Category: Current Events

When I was in junior high learning about the rise of the European Union, it seemed like apocalyptic history in the making. It was a definitive step toward the evangelical’s eschatological future of one-world government. As such, I find it fascinating that in the last several months the threat of the EU’s collapse has grown from hushed whispered conjectures on economic blogs to front-page mainstream-media discussion across the world. I’ve gone from believing the world was on its way to political unification to believing that the main evidence for that belief was going to collapse any day now.

Continue reading Will the EU collapse or grow stronger?

I heard a frustrating interview on NPR yesterday on my drive home from work. Melissa Block was interviewing Michael Ward, CEO of the freight rail company CSX, about how his business was doing with the recession and everything (transcript here). She seemed rather concerned with the fact that even though the company’s business was picking up again, they were still hiring fewer employees than they had during their pre-recession peak:

Continue reading Are Productivity Increases Hurting the Job Market?

Just in time for my piece about Warren Buffet and the dangers of relying on high-income earners to pay all the taxes, the Wall Street Journal is out with an editorial analyzing some IRS data that reveals some interesting things:

In 2007, 390,000 tax filers reported adjusted gross income of $1 million or more and paid $309 billion in taxes. In 2009, there were only 237,000 such filers, a decline of 39%. Almost four of 10 millionaires vanished in two years, and the total taxes they paid in 2009 declined to $178 billion, a drop of 42%.

Those with $10 million or more in reported income fell to 8,274 from 18,394 in 2007, a 55% drop. As a result, their tax payments tanked by 51%. These disappearing millionaires go a long way toward explaining why federal tax revenues have sunk to 15% of GDP in recent years. The loss of millionaires accounts for at least $130 billion of the higher federal budget deficit in 2009.

Surprise, surprise. All those rich people that were earning money on their investments in the good years (and paying taxes on them) found themselves losing money in the bad years. This tells me a couple of things.

First, it supports the argument that it’s a bad idea to increase the government’s dependence on large but volatile incomes. If you balance your budget by taxing the rich what are you gonna do in a year when their tax payments drop 51%? As I said earlier,

The super-rich don’t make $100 million a year because they’re earning wages of $50,000 an hour doing constant work. They make that much because they invest money in the stock market along with various other complicated and volatile things that are taxed at different rates… the income of the super-rich is much less dependable than mine or yours – when the stock market crashed in 2008, so did the income of the super-rich. A lot of them even lost money. So the more you count on super-rich income to fund your government, the more you’re going to be hurting when super-rich income completely disappears for a year.

Second, it suggests that everybody like Warren Buffet can’t really be paying lower rates than their secretaries – how else could the government lose so much revenue if they weren’t paying very much to begin with?

Now the Wall Street Journal claims this article is based on “more detailed tax data” straight from the IRS, but they are often accused of cherry-picking data to fit their agenda. The reliable Media Matters makes such an accusation, picking apart the WSJ article with their own piece, which… isn’t very good. It hems and haws about how “millionaires” are usually defined by net worth, not income in a single year, and that millionaires have actually been going up. It references a recent WSJ article that talks about a new record number of millionaires. It talks about how silly it is to blame Obama for this and so on.

But Media Matters seems to be missing the entire point. When discussing government revenue, it doesn’t matter if the number of net-worth millionaires hasn’t gone down because we don’t tax net worth. We tax annual income. It doesn’t even matter if the number of annual-income millionaires came back up in 2010 or if it seems to be coming back up in 2011. The amount of government revenue from high-income earners still went down in 2009, and Media Matters does not seem to dispute this at all.

Clearly the years in questions (2007 vs. 2009) are a clever selection, as usually-high-income earners don’t have bad years like that all the time. But the point is that those kinds of years do happen, and if the top 0.2% are already paying more than 20% of the total income tax, how much more should we be relying on them to plug the gaps in our ever-expanding budget? With the stock market crashing again, the government might not collect very much money from “millionaires” in 2011, either.

It’s certainly a popular notion to tax the rich, and I’m open to ideas about simplifying tax schemes or rolling back some of the most recent tax cuts. But simply from an accounting perspective, I don’t think it’s a good idea to increase the part of your budget that is dependent on a revenue source that can go up or down by hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Am I missing something here?

It’s election season again, and you know what that means… Ron Paul is running for President and the media is completely ignoring him. Even Jon Stewart is noticing this time, and he’s put together a brilliant snapshot of the most recent ignorance:

 

This stuff leads to conspiracy theories by Paul fans about how the media wants to bring him down – why else would they talk more about Santorum and Huntsman? Or maybe they just simply don’t think he’s a serious candidate. But what’s fascinating to me in all of this is that Ron Paul arguably actually deserves some attention this time around.

At this time four years ago, he wasn’t even on the polling radar, and Paulbots were still complaining about his lack of coverage, or that the polls didn’t reflect his true popularity. Today Paul’s average is sitting at 8.8%, and his average only even peaked at 7.4% last time around. From the RealClearPolitics 2012 GOP poll collection, we learn that in the last two weeks Paul has even twice polled ahead of Michele Bachmann (you know, the candidate important enough for a Newsweek cover piece) for third place. He’s solidly ahead of Cain, Gingrich, Huntsman, and Santorum (that’s gotta be depressing for those guys).

Continue reading Ron Paul Already Polling Better Than Last Time

Warren Buffet is at it again. The super-rich investor thinks the super-rich should pay higher taxes. Liberals find this delightful because for some reason they usually can’t get the super-rich to agree to their plans to make them pay higher taxes. Here’s a kind rich man who’s not just another greedy good-for-nothing! He sees the truth! Conservatives find this annoying because the super-rich are supposed to hate paying taxes. They’re supposed to want to keep all their money so they can create jobs with it because they’re supposed to be better at spending it than the government. Buffet’s pro-tax-stance is almost as annoying to conservatives as Hermann Cain being a conservative black man is to liberals.

Continue reading Why Doesn’t Warren Buffet Just Pay More Taxes?

The LA Times has a good post conjecturing that Ron Paul is winning the Republican party even without actually winning anything simply by way of how much he has shaped the debate in the last few years.

It’s a pretty good piece – it doesn’t dismiss Paul outright but it doesn’t promote him like a Paulbot, and it’s got a good sense of humor. Four years ago, Paul was the only Republican candidate talking about reducing government spending – and now everyone in the federal government is talking about it. And some of the GOP these days are even sounding more open to things like legalizing marijuana or ending wars in the Middle East – small government positions that are typically thought of as anti-GOP. The left likes to dismiss the Tea Party as Koch-infused AstroTurf, but Ron Paul and his supporters were Tea Party before there was a Tea Party.

The post also talks about some classic Paul behavior that I hadn’t heard about:

Paul came up more than 1,000 delegates short of winning the nomination in…wait for it, St. Paul, but here’s what he did do: Talking fiscal discipline, he took his supporters’ donations (more than Mike Huckabee’s hand-clapping evangelicals ponied up, btw) and walked the fiscal walk.

Flying commercial and sleeping in Super 8’s, Paul paid all of his campaign bills. He ended up with a $5-million surplus, a word we don’t often hear associated with things Washington, unless it refers to empty words.

It doesn’t say what he did with the $5 million, but I believe that he did something very legal, moral, and fiscally sound with it. I just trust him – and I can’t say that about any other politician.

That’s one of the reasons I just like the guy. Even though I’ve learned enough about politics, economics, and the world in the last four years that I’m not as gung-ho about him as I was the last time around, he’s still probably closer to my beliefs than any other candidate out there. (Paul is already polling better than he did last time, for what it’s worth.) Sure, some of his positions and statements make me wince in uncertainty, but there’s no hypocrisy or corruption in them – all the other guys make me wince because their positions are worse and I can’t trust them anyway.

So I’m perfectly happy to watch him continue to influence the debate in Washington even if he doesn’t actually win a national election (although his son did win the Kentucky Senate, one of the many previously unthinkable things that have happened in the world in the last few years). I’m not convinced, for instance, that a gold standard would work anymore in our complicated global economy, but our excess-driven debt-ridden fiat system is getting so bad, compounded by government overreach and corruption, that any attempt to pull back in the other direction is, I think, a net improvement from where we are now.

So keep it up, Paul, and good luck at that silly Ames straw poll.

Yesterday Politico reported that the Obama campaign’s political strategy right now for 2012 is to assume Romney will be the nominee and attack him for being “weird”:

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent…

Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

Now, look, I don’t like Romney myself and I think he’s probably inauthentic, unprincipled, and maybe even weird, but there are three reasons this admission by Obama’s political campaign strategists is much weirder.

Continue reading Obama To Campaign On Romney’s Weirdness

I don’t think the US deserves a AAA rating on its debt anymore because I think its financial situation is far worse than the official forecasts suggest. I base this notion on the fact that forecasts ten years ago actually thought the debt would be lower today than it was then, when it ended up over three times larger.

Whoever was making those forecasts may have overestimated the growth of the economy, or underestimated the growth of government spending, or (from my bias) underestimated the negative effect of government growth on the private economy. Less abstractly, whoever was making those forecasts was probably not expecting 9/11 or two unfunded wars or a housing bubble and bust or a global financial crisis or even things like Hurricane Katrina or the BP oil spill. Unexpected things happened, and as a result we are sitting under a debt pile of $14.3 trillion instead of less than four.

At least now “they” expect the deficit to be higher ten years from now, but when “they” say $7-10 trillion higher I laugh at the underlying assumptions. We might not come anywhere near the expected growth of those forecasts, and that’s before any number of unexpected “black swan” events occur – and the rest of this decade will certainly have some. I believe the forecasts to be off by so many trillions that it’s irrelevant whether or not S&P made a $2 trillion math error in their downgrade – they’re all off by so much that doesn’t even matter.

And yet, I must remember that the uncertainty goes both ways. If we go back ten more years, we find that the early 90’s had some ominous warnings about the growing U.S. debt load, and there were estimates that by 2000 the debt would have doubled, when it actually ended the decade almost where it started thanks to some surpluses during the Clinton years that nobody saw coming.

I’m too young to remember any of those details, but I definitely remember the financial crashes of 2007-2009, when, among other things, the stock market lost half its value. Through the lens of my newfound economic knowledge and libertarian philosophies I saw this crash as the result of decades of horrible government intervention. I worked at the Apple Store at the time and sold my few shares of company stock because I didn’t know if the world would ever recover and I wanted to at least get back the amount I had invested instead of waiting to see if everything would drop by half again.

Of course, today Apple shares are pushing through all-time highs that are about five times the amount that I sold back in early 2009. The world economy doesn’t seem that much better, and certainly not more stable, than it was two years ago, but the crash did not continue. I was overly pessimistic, and I paid for that pessimism. (At least my naive doom-and-gloom investment strategies weren’t a total loss. The twenty or so ounces of silver that I slowly accumulated in that time period for $15-$20 an ounce are currently the best-performing thing I own.)

So just because I think the forecasters are overly optimistic, I don’t want to be overly pessimistic. The rest of this decade will have nasty surprises, but it could have nice ones too. Who knows what amazing things will be invented, what new things will be discovered, what unpredictable things will be done by any one of the seven billion people breathing on this planet?

Despite all the vast increases in knowledge in the last hundred years, we are living in a largely unpredictable world. Tyler Cowen points to a post by Brad DeLong admitting, “If You Had Told Me a Year Ago That on August 5, 2011 S&P Would Downgrade the U.S, and the 10-Yr Treasury Would Yield 2.5%… I would have laughed at you.” We think we understand trends and causes and effects in the economy but are still baffled on a regular basis when reality doesn’t match what we expected. History is full of experts who were too confident about the future, and it’s easy to forget that we are the “experts” that the bloggers of the future will mock for our own overconfidence and lack of knowledge.

I think the United States is not going to be a pretty place ten years from now, but there’s a tiny little skeptical, optimistic part of me that won’t be surprised if we’re somehow running trillion-dollar surpluses with very low unemployment. OK, I would still be surprised. But if the last ten years – nay, the last five years – is any indication, I’m not willing to put any money down on what the price of oil will look like in 2021, or the price of gold, or the level of the stock market, or the yields on Treasuries, or the deficit, or unemployment, or anything, really. I will expect things as best I can, and try to prepare for them accordingly, but I will always remember the uncertainty.

Well, everybody’s offering their thoughts on the S&P downgrade, so I might as well mention some of the reactions and offer my own.

Remember, earlier this year the ratings agencies said they were thinking about downgrading the U.S. if they didn’t come up with a plan to get their deficits in line. There was lip service in Washington about the need to reduce the debt, and Obama even appointed a commission to come up with ways to fix things, but no one ever did anything about their recommendations (known as the Bowles-Simpson plan), probably because the solutions were so balanced that both political parties found them unacceptable. But Republicans took the agency warnings as proof that they needed to cut spending before they raised the debt ceiling again. Of course, when the debt ceiling got closer and no agreement was being reached, the ratings agencies then warned that if they didn’t reach a deal they might downgrade the country, too. Then they warned that even if they reached a deal, if the cuts weren’t big enough, they might still downgrade us:

The major credit rating agencies have warned that if a big enough deficit-reduction plan of about $4 trillion is not agreed on — even if the debt limit is raised — they could still downgrade America’s coveted triple-A rating.

We only came up with a plan to cut $2-something trillion. The agencies wanted 4, we gave them 2, boom, they downgraded. Simple as that. Naturally, Republicans are using this as proof that we need to reduce the deficit even more. Of course, to them that only means cutting spending, and no tax increases at all. Tyler Cowen thinks the GOP will regret their stance, because they could have had $4 trillion with Obama’s “grand bargain” that was mostly spending cuts but still had some tax increases. But Cowen doesn’t think the markets will care too much, as “the facts on the ground did not change today… Still, years from now today may well be seen as a turning point of significance.” Megan McArdle thinks the GOP will take the share of the blame for this too, and she also wonders if the stock market was dropping all week due to rumors of the downgrade. (I think I side with Arnold Kling’s theory that the markets were dropping on concerns of the economy anyway, and the debt ceiling deal just accelerated the flight to Treasury bonds by making investors less nervous about holding Treasuries.)

Continue reading Thoughts on the S&P Downgrade

There are a lot of analogies out there about how the American economy is a train headed for a cliff and Congress is arguing about how to stop it from going off the cliff. I think I’ve got a better one.

Once upon a time there was a train. It had two conductors, Ronny and Donny, and every now and then the passengers would change their minds about which one of them should be guiding the train. Now the train was climbing a mountain, because it seemed that this led to (ahem) a higher standard of living then if it remained on the ground. (The farther up they went, the more wood from trees it took to keep the train going, but they just kept going farther up the mountain to get more trees.) Soon the train was very, very far up the mountain. The air was foggy, and they couldn’t tell how much higher the mountain went, but they knew that eventually they would get to the top and that the train tracks ended there, and there the train would crash. So the passengers built a catapult on top of the engine, and had Ronny and Donny launch a big boulder that landed somewhere ahead on the tracks, figuring that they would stop the train when they got to the boulder.

Sooner or later the train approached the big boulder. The passengers told Ronny and Donny that they wanted to keep going up the mountain for now, so they chose one of them to pick up the boulder and launch it farther along the tracks. This continued on for several years, and sometimes the passengers would change their minds about who should be in charge of kicking the boulder along the tracks, too.

One day while Donny was conducting the train and Ronny was in charge of the boulder, the train got close to the boulder again.

“Go move the boulder, Ronny,” Donny said.

Continue reading A Tale of Two Train Conductors