PolicyMic

Benjamin Byron Typically, calls for centrist parties are characterized by a center-left progressive platform with varying degress of fiscal responsibility included. Most centrist arguments do not differ from platforms or positions that exist within the main parties...

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• 1 month ago

Benjamin Byron This is definitely not a time for anyone to become complacent about the trajectory of this election in particular or American politics in general. I think the process would be improved by more participation across the board. Those at the extreme tend...

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• 1 month ago

Benjamin Byron You can either argue that the projections aren't accurate, in which case everyone's projections would be called into question, and the point of all of this is moot. Or, you could claim that you instinctually trust Ron Paul more because o...

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• 3 months ago

Benjamin Byron More specifically, the CFRB's scoring specifies a section about closing the Federal Reserve system, which will never occur, but if we entertain this possibility, then we get about $430 billion in costs due to lost revenues. However, the CFRB ...

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• 3 months ago

Benjamin Byron For two reasons: 1) He doesn't specify where a substantial amount of the savings will come from and 2) He would have to be elected and pass this budget through the legislature. This is pure fantasy. I would take you're argument about �...

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• 3 months ago

Benjamin Byron Right, it would be interesting to sit in on the economists trying to figure out how to score something that eliminated $7.5 trillion from federal spending and almost the same in revenue in 10 years and basically eliminated the Fed. I wonder what econ...

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• 3 months ago

Benjamin Byron I concede that there are different measures to debt. Public debt is the most oft-cited measure. However, even in that case, Obama's budget still has more savings in it than the Republicans' (with the exception of Ron Paul's fantasy bud...

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• 3 months ago

Benjamin Byron You don't have to take my word for it. The fiscally conservative CRFB called Paul's cuts 'unspecified,' which is to say, he can promise to trim $1 trillion in medicaid, but its not clear how he would make that cut, from what part ...

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• 3 months ago

Benjamin Byron I did stipulate later in the article that RP did tie Obama for debt to GDP ratio, but he got there through trillions in unspecified cuts, whereas Obama has a substantially more complete budget agenda. Just saying, promising your way to 76% isn't...

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• 3 months ago

Benjamin Byron JC, Too often are people ready to make the 'well they must be lazy' argument about social mobility. There have always been barriers to social mobility in this country and now is no different. In fact, over the last ten years we have seen t...

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• 4 months ago

Benjamin Byron Douglas, My thesis is that due to many larger national and international economic trends, as well as a slide toward regressive taxation policies, workers in the middle and lower income levels have seen their incomes decline both in relative and nomi...

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• 4 months ago

Benjamin Byron From Bruce Bartlett: "During June and July, Small Business Majority asked 1,257 small-business owners to name the two biggest problems they face. Only 13 percent listed government regulation as one of them. Almost half said their biggest problem...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron I separate the two kinds of uncertainty because conservative pundits and politicians do on a regular basis in order to argue that taxes and regulation are killing job growth. If your point is true, that they can't be separated, then I would argu...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron You are putting the cart before the horse. You are saying first we need to create an environment in which businesses would be more prone to hire, which will (yada yada yada)...lead to more hiring. My point is that businesses hire (expand) when th...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron If what conservatives say about the regulatory and tax burden on hiring were true, why would anyone be hiring? If its so clear that its a bad investment to hire now considering what taxes and regulation could be in the future, why would anyone choose...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron A few more points: Interestingly enough, job creation was still negative over 2 years into the Bush Admin following the recession after the Tech bubble. The Bush tax cuts didn't do much to spur hiring. There is no evidence to suggest that ...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron All of the points made in the other article you cite above can fall in line with my points, namely that if the economy does not improve in the future, demand will remain low, and low consumer spending will remain a problem for businesses. Further...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron John can't go a day without a plug for Steve Wynn. So there are two kinds of uncertainty that are discussed today. One is "general economic uncertainty" which I believe means uneasy or pessimistic views about future economic growth....

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron If there is one thing to learn from recent democracies' responses to economic crisis, it is that leadership is often weak and ineffectual. Why should this be different under a Republican administration? Also, we have the benefit of Britain�...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron The element of the conservative/libertarian fantasy with the theoretical gains in austerity is that, if there is one thing those of the C/L persuasion agree upon, its the ineptitude of government to 'do economy right' at all. AND YET, they ...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron And after four years of this experiment, perhaps the Dems sweep the polls and come to the rescue with more borrowing and stimulus and spending anyway, when it is even more traumatic to the debt, more expensive to borrow (as Reps will pull back on FED...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron My concern is that the true austerity program that will heal us of what ails us is not politically practical to the point that Republicans will experiment with a little austerity here, a little there; more and more breaks to businesses little by litt...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron And I have a question for you: If we were to implement all of the spending cuts, tax reforms, and regulatory holidays/exemptions/repeals that Republicans want tomorrow, when should we expect to see job growth? How does the narrative progress that get...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron Gary, I don't think revenue-neutral tax reform as you've described is necessarily job-killing. But, I also don't think it is job-creating either. I'm for tax reform. But, I think there must be some (more) disambiguation here: ther...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron And to add to Tim's argument, 'not knowing' about future costs doesn't indicate any particular action, rather expectations of what those costs will be does. If your argument is "businesses don't know what the costs are y...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron I'm worried that the libertarians that are currently allied with the GOP would be as disappointed with their candidate as the more liberal elements of the Democratic party are with Obama. What's incredible is that the argument of "g...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron Correction: I meant "Measures show *consumer spending* is down and not rising fast enough to substantiate job growth nationally." Also, productivity is up, which means that demand would have to increase even further to generate more jobs, a...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron Unfortunately, this position is politically unsatisfying and voters will look to anyone who claims they can control the economy--look at all the 'job creation' plans from both sides--and the mandate upon entering office will always be to &#...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron I do not agree with your false dichotomy of increased rather than decreased policy any more than you would argue that if firms were certain about regulation they would immediately start hiring. There is a main reason why firms aren't hiring: low...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron At a minimum, I want to forward the argument that we cannot make sweeping claims about what is happening right now in the economy that isn't supported by evidence. It is evident that consumer spending is down and is not growing fast enough to su...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron If all emergent, but as of yet unspecified regulatory rules were written tomorrow, there would still be uncertainty, as a Republican could be elected and could quash them. The issue with your 'vagueness' argument is that policy uncertainty ...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron My concern is that this claim of regulatory and tax uncertainty as the main driver of low job growth leads people to assume the false corollary: that less regulation and less taxation necessarily increases jobs. Jobs grow based on demand. Unless dema...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron As long as we all agree that evidence exists that debunks the validity of the claim that tax and regulatory uncertainty *is the main driver of slow job growth nationally* then I have done my part. It is a contributing factor, but is not as significan...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron Ultimately, we are talking about two different but related measures: measures of economic activity, job growth, investment, and consumer spending; the other is a measure of the perceptions that businesses and consumers hold about what the first measu...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron I think Tim brings up a good point: expectations are more direct drivers of particular behavior--whether that behavior is to expand or reduce expenditure and investment--and that uncertainty, while a factor, offers a more nebulous connection to job g...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron Daniel: my apologies. The word count sometimes forces me to remove my relative value adjectives like "most" or "many" or "some." They, indeed, aren't monolithic.

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron Gary: There is are two ideas that I want to dispel, that current tax and regulatory regimes are dramatically more aggressive and burdensome than previous administrations, and that there is a dramatically different uncertainty problem today that is sl...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron Daniel: The issue is not whether some companies are making hiring decisions based on regulation and taxes, but rather if, as the conservatives and libertarians articulate, that regulation and taxes are the main drivers of national low job creation. T...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron Unfortunately, the headline for the article doesn't capture my argument. It is one thing to suggest that economic uncertainty plays a role in slow job growth, it is quite another thing to suggest that tax and regulatory uncertainty do. Economic ...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron It is a truism that we are uncertain about the future and that the potential for a broad range of measures to be implemented is below 100% and above 0%. However, my point in the article is that this does not adequately describe something particularly...

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• 6 months ago

Benjamin Byron I concede that FED policies contributed to the problem. But this doesn't mean that there isn't a place for stimulus in this scenario. You're worried that if we don't semi-destroy the economy over the next few years, we might compl...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron So we want to course correct, allow the market to deflate, until we reach a market clearing price and then grow more naturally. Even if I disregard the potential for the downward spiral and over-correction, this is a horrible plan to address the size...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron But consumer debt will increase dramatically during this period, not to mention the increases in unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy. We will get to a point where consumers will start to spend again, but these will not be lower and middle class ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Yes, markets will clear "eventually." But it could take years for prices to clear and years more for them to rise organically to previous levels. During this period trillions in public and private debt would have crippled expenditure for a ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I guess the line I keep coming back to with disappointment is "more pain 'now' but less in the 'future.'" Such terms mean nothing as there is no telling how long "now" will last and no telling when the less pai...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron James, the logic of "once prices drop low enough" is theoretically sound, but in practice amounts to increasing real debt. My point is that there is so much debt in the system that asset prices might be forced to over-correct, sending t...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron During a market correction, consumers won't buy and banks won't lend if they expect prices to continue to fall. In my scenario above, there wouldn't be any price stabilization, which would mean lending and spending would not increase d...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron In a normal recession, it would be enough to restrict money from the market in order to allow deflation to occur until prices stabilized and consumers gradually increased spending. However, in the current scenario, debt deflation might trigger and &#...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I'm a little concerned we are spinning off into the ether. In an attempt to refocus: In a financial crisis, credit freezes, which means otherwise healthy, but cash-strapped businesses and consumers have to sell assets at (increasingly) lower ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron In economics, demand means the willingness and ability to buy a particular commodity at a particular time. So, demand absolutely falls when people have less money and relatively more debt (as occurs through debt deflation), or as occurs in aggregate ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron John, if businesses fear tax hikes they should be induced to spend more now to save future money. Surveys of small business owners show that their primary concerns are poor sales, with concerns about taxes and regulation lower than under Reagan2, Bus...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Darwin, couldn't have put it better myself.

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron There are those proposing 'real austerity.' Austerity is "a policy of deficit-cutting, lower spending, and a reduction in the amount of benefits and public services provided" (Wikipedia). In proportion to the overall debt, 1.3T is...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Your first point is well taken. I only wanted to show that stimulus under Obama has been less than "trillions" and the most demonized measures of stimulus, those of actual market intervention in the form of allocating labor and other resour...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I'm not sure how else to explain the lack of hiring, even when businesses are investing in equipment, software, &etc. My argument here is predicated on two points: 1. The economic is in rough shape, characterized by high household de...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Also, Japan followed the (flawed) Rooseveltian instinct to enact austerity too early. From: http://nyti.ms/tdMRr9 "After years of heavy spending in the first half of the 1990s, economists say, Japan’s leaders grew concerned about growing...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Nearly $300b of the stimulus was in tax benefits. The two other sections, CGnLs (Contracts, Grants, and Loans) and Entitlements benefits, each amounted to about $212b, or about $425b total. Of the CGnL spending, 31.3b went to 'Transportation...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron From: http://bit.ly/9RWXPi Following imposition of austerity regime under FDR: "From the fall of 1937 to the summer of 1938, industrial production declined by 33 percent; wages by 35 percent; national income by 13 percent; and not surprisi...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Your (A) and (B) are related, in that an increased savings rate will further reduce spending, which limits the prospects for business growth and inhibits hiring. Businesses *are* sitting on huge amounts of cash, but they are not investing that money ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron You missed the point a bit. Perhaps the statement is confusing. I am not suggesting that nat'l govs that spend the most offer the most attractive domestic investment opportunities. With this statement, I am referring to a transfer of money, o...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Hmm. (A) The private sector isn't hiring and there isn't any reason to assume it will. Demand is low, which means consumers are spending less, which means businesses are selling less, which means they cut their payroll in order to afford of...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I agree with your argument, but would structure it a little differently. We must handle the debt issue, but the current economic plight is not defined by government debt, but rather by high household debt, low demand, and high unemployment. These are...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron There are structural and frictional problems for businesses to merely meet this new clearing price, which means they must operate at a higher than market clearing price, selling to less than optimal numbers of consumers that are still willing to pay ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron In macroeconomics, aggregate demand is the total demand for final goods and services in the economy at a given time and price level (Wikipedia). The fact that consumers are willing to buy anything if the price is low enough is not a statement about t...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I agree with you point on taxes and regulation, and based concerns expressed in the survey, they affect it less than concerns over poor sales now and less than the tax and regulatory concerns during the economic boom under Clinton. Thus, tax and regu...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron The quote was not meant as a partisan barb, but rather to show that business leaders, those who make decisions regarding hiring, are more significantly concerned about poor sales, rather than the regulatory or tax environment. Uncertainty is a proble...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron This is not a normal recession. More tax cuts will be saved by households and/or used to pay down debt or as a hedge against job loss and further economic downturn. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it is not a good policy for the current do...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron My goal here was not to develop an argument for any particular program, tho I believe but spending and revenues should increase over the next few years. My intent with this series of articles is to offer perspective with regard to conservative argume...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron From the report cited above: "It turns out that small businesses have always complained about regulation and taxes and not especially so under Obama. For instance, the share concerned about regulation under Obama (13.9 percent) is not substan...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron My argument isn't new, but that does not mean it isn't valid. Austerity is bad for short term growth, but this is especially true during an economic downturn. The government is in a unique position to allocate (or misallocate depending on y...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron The study you linked is interesting, but not particularly indicative. One of the elements of their index is "the freq of news media references to economic policy uncertainty." I would recommend checking out this article: http://www.epi.o...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron James, there is an intellectual counter-argument to the ideas I have put forth in my article and you come close to articulating clear points on it. However, I would focus less on comments such as "anyone possessing a sliver of a brain knows...&q...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron 1) Your analogy is a bit off. The stats aren't representative of gains and a percentage of decline, but rather as an expression of job creation. Your argument says the fact that more jobs were lost in 2008/9, there was a greater opportunity for ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron 5) The government is never "unemployed." It is always receiving revenue and has a different relationship with credit than the individual. Governments can take on massive amounts of debt and remain solvent for many years. I agree that we nee...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron 2)...'Uncertainty' is the concern that there will be increased taxes and stronger regulatory rules on business activity. However, if this fear were true, we should see businesses induced to spending more and further developing activity now ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron 1) My point was, for all the mildness of the recession, Bush's rather significant tax cuts didn't induce hiring even 2.5 years after the recession. And numbers have to be "derived from the same circumstances"? This seems like an o...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron 4)Perhaps barely was too strong. It is low, focusing on equip, software, and productivity gains as opposed to labor. I would co-opt your "political reality" argument to suggest that government interference will always prevent the market fro...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron 1) No, but lack of employment growth was an issue. Even after growth returned following the 2001 recession, jobs continued to disappear, resulting in what many called the "jobless recovery." Even 25 months into the recovery, private sector ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron 4) There is barely any private spending now, and there is no prospect for it to increase in the future, especially as we enter the already-legislated limited austerity in the coming years. I prefer inefficient spending to no or negative investment (a...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron 1) In this hypothetical, the tax code is rationalized, which initially lower rates across the board by eliminating loopholes, exemptions, etc... Rates are then raised gradually, mostly in the last two years of the plan. Tax rates on 'job creator...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron This plan is bereft of many specifics, but this is the basic structuring of a increased spending, increased revenue regime, which should both 'push and pull' expenditures over the next three years in both public and private sectors, while i...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I'm not entirely sure how we get to the "even more unemployment down the line." Hypothetically speaking, the government enacts legislation that will spend 1.2 trillion over the next five years in public/private partnerships on infr...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron My argument isn't that government debt is awesome and the more, the merrier. But rather that, on the topic of addressing the current economic downturn, expansionary fiscal policy is preferable to contractionary. Household debt is 'worse&...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron High household debt precludes consumers from spending, as they are most concerned with saving and paying down debt, which is bad for biz and econ growth. High government debt is an issue, but not one that needs to be addressed now, during an econ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron The brief temporal nature of low interest rates should be a reason to borrow now as they can only get worse in the future, as opposed to the borrowing that will and must continue to happen in the future, because tax revenues are not set to increase (...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron And your analogy of national debt and household debt misses the mark. Investors are willing to lose money bc gov debt is such a low risk. Households are never in that situation, nor do households have the space to investment large sums of money with ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron ...and to lay the ground work through public and private investment for the next big drivers of economic growth. You may be right, and we may come out of a painful austerity program with a relative more sound structuring of the economy. But, to use y...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Inadvertent 'mic'ing. Debt servicing is an important issue, but it is not the most urgently needed policy action. I realize talking about 'future' debt servicing inevitably sounds like kicking the can down the road (it is, but the...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I'm still not sure on which side I ultimately fall in this discussion, but I am intrigued by Phil's argument about individual rights. It allows the logic of the individual choices of the collective, something that Tim has pointed to (we are...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Gary, I understand your point (I think). However, I'm not arguing that we merely came just a dollar amount short of proper success. Rather, I argue that what amounts to the perceived failure of the stimulus falls short of a proper assessment. ...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Your assessment has to weighed against things that we cannot know. Would it have been worse without the stimulus? This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to judge the degree of success or failure of the stimulus. My main argument here is...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron Not to mention that oftentimes individuals can act in ways that are illogical, are at least unpredictable. Furthermore, not all economic outcomes are intuitive. Engineering GDP growth in a complex economic system is not easy, or cheap for that matter...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron There is plenty of evidence that suggests the stimulus had a positive effect. What I wanted to address with this article is the perception that because it didn't propel us into significant, sustained levels of GDP growth and significantly reduce...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron One of the issues here is that the economy began to rebound from its negative growth rate before any of the stimulus money was spent. This can be connected to the signal that the stimulus sent to consumers and businesses, but it is not easily proven....

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I agree. Businesses are investing in equipment and software, but not hiring, with conservatives claiming that hiring isn't happening is due to 'uncertainty.' This would be a fine argument if equipment and software weren't sunk cos...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron The Bureau of Economic Analysis is non-partisan and, in any event, their first report on the Q4 2008 GDP contraction was published before Obama took office. While we can be suspicious of why the numbers were so far off, I think the time it took to ge...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron The title is a little misleading, as my aim here is not to prove that the stimulus eased the recession, but rather to debunk the myth that the stimulus 'failed.' Conservatives point to the expectations of the stimulus and argue that, becaus...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I agree. There is a narrative of successive policy direction failures, both by the Obama Admin and by the Democratic Congress. The absence of more aggressive measures to tackle household debt was a significant failure early on, which has persisted un...

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• 7 months ago

Benjamin Byron I agree that incentivized hiring has to be a part of it. But I don't believe in a silver bullet policy lever. Without growth in demand, even with incentives to hire, businesses won't be able to expand enough to substantially shrink the un- ...

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• 9 months ago

Benjamin Byron I see three issues the government has to tackle: market confidence, household debt, and high corporate and bank cash reserves. You are probably right that QE wouldn't be enough on its own to generate the conditions needed to spur demand. It woul...

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• 10 months ago

Benjamin Byron Well, I would argue that the consumer model can be sustainable and has been for most of the capitalist experiment. A few perversions of demand have caused problems though these tend to be manufactured by speculators, wall street, and governments. You...

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• 10 months ago