Debt and taxes

from David Ruccio

As federal deficits and debt grow, they end up receiving,
not paying for, a larger and larger share of federal expenditures.

Tax cuts and spending increases enacted by Republicans over the past four months will lead to wider than previously expected budget deficits, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The federal budget deficit would total $804 billion this year, 43 percent higher than it had projected last summer, and exceed $1 trillion a year starting in 2020.

Larger deficits will, of course, add to the national debt: debt held by the public will hit $28.7 trillion at the end of fiscal 2028, or 96.2 percent of gross domestic product, up from 78 percent of GDP in 2018.

Those estimates assume current law will remain in effect, meaning Congress would allow some tax cuts to expire and spending caps to take effect again in the coming years. If Congress extends the tax cuts, as many Republicans want to do, the CBO predicted higher deficits and publicly held debt of about 105 percent of GDP by the end of 2028—a level exceeded only once in U.S. history, in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

So, what do these escalating deficit and debt numbers mean?

Clearly, in the first instance, the Republican deficit hawks have gone the way of moderate Republicans and all other extinct species of politicians and other mammals. They existed for decades, always in an attempt to cut entitlement programs and other public expenditures for poor and working-class Americans. But once it was possible to pass massive tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals and boost military spending, the deficit hawks on the Republican side of the aisle simply disappeared into the walls of Congress.* 

Ten years after the crash (8 charts)

from David Ruccio     

“. . . ten years on, U.S. capitalism has created the conditions for
renewed instability and another, dramatic crash.”

The economic crises that came to a head in 2008 and the massive response—by the U.S. government and corporations themselves—reshaped the world we live in.* Although sectors of the U.S. economy are still in one of their longest expansions, most people recognize that the recovery has been profoundly uneven and the economic gains have not been fairly distributed.

The question is, what has changed—and, equally significant, what hasn’t—during the past decade?

Let’s start with U.S. stock markets, which over the course of less than 18 months, from October 2007 to March 2009, dropped by more than half. And since then? As is clear from the chart above, stocks (as measured by the Dow Jones Composite Average) have rebounded spectacularly, quadrupling in value (until the most recent sell-off). One of the reasons behind the extraordinary bull market has been monetary policy, which through normal means and extraordinary measures has transferred debt and put a great deal of inexpensive money in the hands of banks, corporations, and wealth investors. 

“Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor”

from David Ruccio

50 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, just days after joining a march of thousands of African-American protestors down Beale Street, one of the major commercial thoroughfares in Memphis, Tennessee. King and the other marchers were demonstrating their support for 1300 striking sanitation workers, many of whom held placards that proclaimed, “Union Justice Now!” and “I Am a Man.” 

Privatization of public education

from David Ruccio

For the first time in American history, students in more than half of all U.S. states are paying more in tuition to attend public colleges or universities than the government contributes.

The privatization of public education has been under way for decades but this inflection point was hastened by deep cuts states made to their higher-education appropriations in the midst of the Second Great Depression.

Millennials’ retirement plan: socialism?

from David Ruccio

Millennials may be the largest, best educated, and most diverse generation in U.S. history. But they’re also generation screwed. As a result, they’re more likely than their elders to think of themselves as working-class and less likely to identify as middle-class.  

Utopia and epistemology

from David Ruccio

It was Paul Samuelson who, in 1997, declared with morbid optimism that “Funeral by funeral, economics does make progress.”*

What Samuelson presumed is that, over time, wrong ideas would be killed and laid to rest and better ideas would flourish, thus creating the foundation for progress in economic thought.

That’s what I consider to be the epistemological utopianism of mainstream economic thought: using the correct scientific methods, the work that economists do gets closer and closer to the Truth—the singular, incontestable, capital-t truth. It used to be the case (for Samuelson and many others, such as fellow Nobel laureates Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu, and Paul Krugman) that mathematical models represented the best way of making progress (inspired by a particular conception of nineteenth-century physics).** The current fad is to rely on randomized experiments and big data as evidence that economics is finally becoming a real, empirical science (akin to biology and medicine).

In the first case, rationalism is the reigning theory of knowledge; in the second case, it’s empiricism. However, both theories represent two sides of the same epistemological coin, defined by a radical separation between theory and reality and some sort of correspondence between them. In other words, both rationalism and empiricism are foundationalist theories of knowledge according to which the gap between theory and reality is eventually—”funeral by funeral”—closed. 

Buyback this!

from David Ruccio

I have been arguing, since 2016 (e.g., here, here, and here), that one of the likely outcomes of the kind of corporate tax cuts Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have supported—and, as we saw, eventually rammed through—would be an increase in inequality. That’s because corporations would likely use a portion of their higher profits to engage in stock buybacks, leading to an increase in stock prices. And stock ownership in the United States is already grotesquely unequal. Therefore, the rise in equity prices would disproportionately benefit the small group at the top of the wealth pyramid. 

Utopia and healthcare—2

from David Ruccio

The dystopia of the American healthcare system certainly invites a utopian response—a ruthless criticism as well as a vision of an alternative.

As I showed last week, the left-wing response involves a critique of the conditions and consequences of the capitalist organization of U.S. healthcare and the fashioning of a radical alternative. Single-payer, which uses tax revenues to finance the purchase of adequate healthcare services for everyone, is one possibility. On top of that, it is necessary to expand the diversity of healthcare providers, which would include more democratic, cooperative or worker-owned healthcare enterprises.

That’s how activists, educators, and policymakers informed by heterodox economics can begin to rethink the U.S. healthcare system. What about mainstream economics?

Given the persistent attacks on and attempts to replace Obamacare by Republican legislators—against a “government takeover” of healthcare in the name of “free markets”—one would expect mainstream economists to provide a theoretical justification based on their usual utopianism—of an efficient allocation of scarce resources in an economy characterized by private property and individual decisions in unregulated markets.

However, as it turns out, they can’t. And that’s all because of Kenneth Arrow.

Consider, for example, the 2017 New York Times column by Greg Mankiw. 

Whose sweet spot?

from David Ruccio

Economic journalists, like Neil Irwin, are falling all over themselves celebrating the strength of the current economic recovery. 

Utopia and healthcare—1

from David Ruccio

This is the first in a series of blog posts on the utopian dimensions of healthcare.

I’ve written quite a bit about the U.S. healthcare dystopia over the years—including a seven-part series back in 2016.* But I haven’t yet addressed the utopian dimensions of healthcare reform.

The appearance of the new issue of Jacobin Magazine, titled “The Health of Nations,”  is a good occasion to start that discussion. Adam Gaffney starts with much the same question that provoked my own series of blog posts: “if American health care used to be so much worse, why is it in crisis now?”

In part because, despite such wide-ranging reform, the system’s injustices remain unresolved, pervasive, and deadly.

The figures tell the story. Even without Republican rollbacks, twenty-eight million have no insurance, and, according to the Commonwealth Fund, some forty-one million are underinsured. A substantial portion of the nation—predominantly those of low and middle income and disproportionately people of color—cannot afford to see doctors, pay for medicine, or go to the emergency room.

Families who bought silver plans on the Obamacare marketplace still have $8,292 deductibles, but less than half of American households can cover even a $4,000 deductible. Patients take twice-a-day medications only once, skip doses, or fail to ll their prescriptions to save on co-payments. And of course, people die — tens of thousands of people a year—because they lack coverage.

But the crisis in American health care isn’t simply that the ACA didn’t go far enough: it’s that there’s no ACA 2.0 available to finish the job. Real progress has been made, but the incremental reforms left us with a deeply inhumane system.

The problem, as Gaffney sees it, is that 

“If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets”

from David Ruccio

Chris Rock may be right. Still, Americans are well aware that economic inequality in their country is obscene, even though they often underestimate the growing gap between the poor and the rich. 

Utopia and trade

from David Ruccio

Donald Trump’s decision to impose import tariffs—on solar panels and washing machines now, and perhaps on steel and aluminum down the line—has once again opened up the war concerning international trade.

It’s not a trade war per se (although Trump’s free-trade opponents have invoked that specter, that the governments of other countries may retaliate with their import duties against U.S.-made products), but a battle over theories of international trade. And those different theories are related to—as they inform and are informed by—different utopian visions.

In one sense, Trump and his supporters are right. Capitalist free trade has destroyed cities, regions, livelihoods, and industries. The international trade deals the United States has signed in recent decades have been rigged for the wealthy and have cheated workers. They are replete with marketing scams, hustles, and shady deals, to the advantage of large corporations and a small group of individuals at the top.

But Trump, like all right-wing populists, as I explained recently, offers a utopian vision that looks backward, conjuring up and then offering a return to a time that is conceived to be better. For Trump, that time is the 1950s, when a much larger share of U.S. workers was employed in manufacturing and American industry successfully competed against businesses in other countries. The turn to import tariffs is a way of invoking that nostalgia, the selective vision of a utopia that was exceptional, in terms of both U.S. and world history, and that conveniently conceals or overlooks many other aspects of that lost time, such as worker exploitation, Jim Crow racism, and widespread patriarchy inside and outside households. 

Where have all the workers gone?

from David Ruccio

U.S. capitalism has a real problem: there don’t seem to be enough workers to keep the economy growing.

And it has another problem: capitalists themselves are to blame for the missing workers.

As is clear from the chart above, the employment-population ratio (the blue line) has collapsed from a high of 64.4 in 2000 to 59 in 2014 (and had risen to only 60.1 by the end of 2017).* During the same period, the average real incomes of the bottom 90 percent of Americans have stagnated—barely increasing from $37,541 to $37,886.

Utopia and inequality

from David Ruccio

Economic inequality is arguably the crucial issue facing contemporary capitalism—especially in the United States but also across the entire world economy.  

What, us worry?

David Ruccio

Ed Wolff is right:

For the vast majority of Americans, fluctuations in the stock market have relatively little effect on their wealth, or well-being, for that matter.

We’re #2! – Financial Secrecy Index 2018

from David Ruccio

According to the Tax Justice Network, the United States ranks second in the 2018 Financial Secrecy Index. This is based on a secrecy score of 59.8, which is practically unchanged from 2015. The only country ahead of the United States is Switzerland, with a secrecy score of 76. The rise of the United States continues a long-term trend, as the country was one of the few to increase their secrecy score in the 2015 index.  

Utopia and the economics of control

from David Ruccio

I have often argued—in lectures, talks, and publications—that every economic theory has a utopian dimension. Economists don’t explicitly talk about utopia but, my argument goes, they can’t do what they do without some utopian horizon.

The issue of utopia is there, at least in the background, in every area of economics—perhaps especially on the topic of control.

Consider, for example, the theory of the firm (which I have written about many times over the years), which is the focus of University of Chicago finance professor Luigi Zingales’s lecture honoring Oliver Hart, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for economics, at this year’s Allied Social Science Association meeting.

One of the many merits of Oliver’s contribution is to have brought back the concept of power inside economics. This is a concept pervasive in political science and sociology, and pervasive in Marxian economics, but completely absent from neoclassical economics. In fact, Oliver’s view of the firm is very reminiscent of the Marxian view, but where Marx sees exploitation, Oliver sees an efficient allocation.

What goes up. . .

from David Ruccio

Must come down. . .

I’m not referring to karma or the application of Newton’s law of universal gravitation. No, it’s just the way capitalism works.

Take the stock market, for example. Last Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 666 points, or 2.5 percent, its biggest percentage decline since the Brexit turmoil in June 2016 and the steepest point decline since the 2008 financial crisis. 

Utopia and populism

from David Ruccio

Much has been made of the rise of populism in recent years and the threat it poses to liberal democracy.

My view is that liberal critics of populism, standing on their heads, get it wrong. If made to stand on their feet, they’d have to admit that populism actually represents the failure of liberal democracy.

Populism has experienced a resurgence of late—in Hungary, Britain, France, Turkey, the United States, and elsewhere—especially the form of populism variously characterized as right-wing, nationalist, or authoritarian. It has attracted increasing support and achieved notable political victories within the institutions and procedures of liberal democracy.

The problem is that liberal democracy has failed to confront, much less solve, the problems that have led to the rise of populism in the first place.

Dystopia and global poverty

from David Ruccio