After a month of high drama the Senate at high noon today voted to pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling.    How to evaluate this outcome?    If I must give a one-word verdict, it would be “good.”   If I can expand to two words, it would be “not good.”   If I can elaborate to 20 words: “The legislation confirms the sorry state of our public deliberations, but it is probably the best that could be hoped for,” given where the negotiations were as the big hand on the clock approached twelve.

            In what sense was the outcome to the debt ceiling standoff good?   It was much better than a number of alternatives that could have easily happened.  After the pin had been pulled out of the hand grenade, Washington managed to put it back in.   Specifically, it is good that:

• 1. Those who favored a US default — in some cases deliberately, not just as a bargaining tactic — did not prevail.
• 2. Those who sought to force the Congress and White House to go through the madness of voting on the debt ceiling every few months between now and the next presidential election did not prevail.
• 3. The bill’s 10 years of spending cuts are not front-loaded. Frontloading would have substantially raised the chances of going back into a new recession. (So would have default or an uncertainty-maximizing short-term fix.)
• 4. The bill has a mechanism that just might in November demonstrate to the arithmetically innumerate that it is literally impossible to eliminate the budget deficit if the cuts are to come primarily in discretionary non-security spending.  Instead, military spending, entitlements, and tax revenues will have to be part of the eventual solution — as also favored by the American people in polls, even a majority of Republicans. This epiphany on the part of the people who are described as die-hard fiscal conservatives is needed before we can break the political log-jam.  A solution is not possible so long as the extremists are under the mistaken belief that the deficit can be eliminated with cuts concentrated in domestic discretionary spending and so long as they have veto power in the eyes of the Republican leaders.

            The mechanism is to force Congress to confront an unpleasant but clear choice between (i) on the one hand, deep automatic cuts that hit defense, which are anathema to most Republicans, and Medicare, which are anathema to Democrats, and (ii) on the other hand, the more thoughtful recommendations of a bi-partisan Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which would certainly spread out the pain more to include increased tax revenues, anathema to Republicans, and other entitlement cuts, anathema to Democrats.  The 12-member panel is to report its recommendations in late November, and the Congress is to vote on them in December.  This mechanism is of course crude, but may be just the sort of thing we need to force individual congressmen to confront arithmetic.     
            Some have asked how this panel will differ from the ill-fated Simpson-Bowles commission.   A critical difference is the requirement that the Congress must vote up-or-down on the recommendations.   (This was also a feature of the original version of what became the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform; but the provision was voted down by Senate Republicans, including some who had sponsored the proposal until President Obama came out in favor of it in January 2010.)

            In what sense was today’s outcome to the debt ceiling stand-off “not good?”   It would have been better if:

• 1. The Republicans had agreed to some of President Obama’s various compromise proposals over the last year and a half; or
• 2. The showdown had at the last minute forced a “$4 trillion” Grand Bargain in which all sides had ceded ground in order to adopt a workable and credible plan to get back to fiscal responsibility gradually over the coming decade, rather than subsisting on political rhetoric.
• 3. The outcome had included something to help the current faltering recovery.
• 4. President Obama had come off looking like Gary Cooper.

           [Comments can be posted at SeekingAlpha.]

President Obama proposes allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire next year — as they are scheduled to do if nothing is changed — for those earning more than $250,000, but changing the law so as to extend the tax cuts for those earning less than that amount.   Republican politicians are opposing the proposal.    I don’t understand what they are thinking.  Their position doesn’t make sense to me, regardless whether they are thinking about short-term stimulus, long-term fiscal conservatism, good economics, or even pure politics.   

Start with the pure politics.   What is the end-game?   Are congressional Republicans prepared to block the Obama proposal extending the tax cuts for those making less than $250,000 and to let them expire as in the original legislation proposed by President Bush and passed by the Congress in 2001-03?   More than 95 % of Americans make less than $250,000.   Their taxes will go up on January 1 as a direct result if Republicans block the Obama proposal.  How are they going to explain their position to the voters when the current law takes effect?    Will it be: “To address budget deficits we need to let taxes go up on most Americans”?   That doesn’t sound like them.   Or: “Minimizing taxes for the rich is so important that we are willing to let taxes go up on everyone else”?     When it comes down to the wire, surely they would have to back down.  So why aren’t they thinking ahead?  

The same goes for the estate tax, which under the original Bush legislation is scheduled in January 2011 to bounce back from oblivion (beneficiaries of any rich people who die in 2010 don’t have to pay a dime of tax) to the old system of taxing estates worth over a million dollars at 45%.  The White House proposal is to exempt in future years all estates under $ 3 ½ million, $7 million for couples, and to tax only the largest estates.  If the Republicans are going to continue to oppose Obama, how are they going to explain this to the electorate?   That the only benefits that matter are those for the tiny minority of super-rich?

Now let’s move to economics.  If you were going after stimulus because the recovery is still weak, and if you believed that only tax cuts created stimulus, the priority should be in other areas like extending the Making Work Pay provisions for low-income workers, which are also set to expire.   This proposition holds regardless whether
(i) your idea of stimulus is Keynesian demand expansion (the lower-income workers have a higher marginal propensity to consume), OR even if
(ii) your idea of stimulus is purely enhanced incentives to work.  (Lower income workers face overall effective marginal tax rates that are often higher than the rich face, when one factors in payroll taxes, etc.)    Alec Phillips of GS US Global ECS Research points out that the amount of revenue (and stimulus) that is at stake in the expiration of Making Work Pay is greater than in the expiration of tax cuts for those over $250,000, and yet the latter question is getting all the attention and the former question is getting no attention.

Fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax is another sensible policy that qualifies as a tax cut relative to existing legislation, and should be part of any fiscal package.

If we want to achieve short-term fiscal stimulus from the viewpoint of good economics, then we should realize that well-chosen spending programs give far more bang-for-the-buck than most tax cuts.   (”Bang for the buck” means a high ratio of short-term fiscal stimulus to long-term damage to the national debt.  It’s the opposite of how the Bush fiscal program was designed in 2001-03.)    Examples of well-chosen spending programs include aid to the states (which Republican congressmen have been voting down) so that the hard-pressed states don’t have to lay off firemen, policemen, bus drivers, teachers and road workers.     Examples of tax cuts with much less bang for the buck include not just those for the rich (e.g., the abolition of the estate tax), but even garden-variety income tax cuts, because they are partly saved.    Don’t take my word for it.   Martin Feldstein (whose work on taxes and incentives led to the supply side revolution, and who was the Chairman of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers) argues that almost all of the income tax cut that was passed n response to the recession in 2008 was saved by households rather than spent, and predictably so, and that government spending would bring more short-term stimulus.

Of course good economics would mean not just short-term fiscal stimulus, but equal emphasis on measures to bring the budget deficit under control in the long run.   The best proposals are the least popular, as so often.   Fixing social security would be a huge step toward long-term fiscal responsibility, without endangering the current recovery.   A good package would combine all these measures. 

 
Every two years, Harvard Kennedy School hosts the newly elected Members of Congress for a three-day “briefing” on a wide variety of topics.   We had an excellent turnout this week: 40 of the 50 new congresspeople, from both parties.    I participated in a panel titled “Understanding the Economic Crisis,”  along with Greg Mankiw, Elizabeth Warren and Robert Lawrence  (on video).    

Trying to explain the origins of the financial crisis and recession in ten minutes, even to the extent any of us understands it, was a tall order.    But I tried to cram it all into a single slide.     Here it is: