Every pundit agrees that President Obama did badly in the first debate.  But I can’t help wondering whether he (and VP Joe Biden) would have been able to come out swinging as freely as they have in the subsequent debates, if it were not for what happened in Denver.  Obama must have been afraid of sounding unpresidential.   But because his initial performance was so roundly criticized for passivity, he was licensed after that to argue aggressively:  “What you are saying is not true, Governor Romney.”  And it helps that he was right, each time.   (My morning-after talking-head comments can be viewed: “Re-cap of 1st Presidential Debate,” Oct.4; and “Re-cap” of 2nd Presidential Debate, Oct.17.)

Of all the areas where Romney’s assertions in the first debate were rebutted successfully in each of the subsequent debates, his tax “plan” is one of the most important.  The credibility of independent analysts and fact-checkers has helped here.   The main problem is not that Romney hasn’t announced a plan detailed enough to be worthy of the name.   The main problem is, rather, that no plan can achieve three simultaneous goals, each of which the Republican candidate has repeatedly promised:   (1) cutting tax rates 20%,  (2) avoiding loss of tax revenue by elimination of deductions, and yet  (3) preventing overall taxes from going up on those earning less than $200,000 a year.    Romney and Ryan have been conducting a shell game:  they show the public what is under two of the three shells, but not all three at any one time.  For example, Republicans will argue that the tax cut won’t raise the budget deficit by citing a study that cuts middle class benefits like the tax-deductibility of mortgage interest.  Then when reminded that they promised not to do that, they will cite a study that lets taxes go up on those earning $100,000-$200,000.

The 20% cut in tax rates would in itself cost $480 billion on revenue in 2015 or about $5 trillion over the next 10 years.  I don’t think there is disagreement about that.  (But Bruce Bartlett estimates $6 trillion:Tax Notes, 10/29/12, p.2.)   All the disagreement is whether Romney can make up the revenue by eliminating deductions as he claims.  Yet in the first debate, when Obama started to address this question, Romney tried to shut him down by saying that a $5 trillion tax cut wasn’t his complete plan, as if anyone had ever said it was.  Worse, in the Vice Presidential debate, Congressman Ryan claimed that the Obama deputy campaign manager had “stipulated” that they had been wrong, that the tax cut wasn’t really $5 trillion.  The media was fooled by this one, failing to note that she had only made the (accurate) statement that the question of controversy was not whether the overall loss of revenue would be the full $5 trillion, but whether Romney could make all of that up by eliminating deductions.  This is an elementary point and Obama was able to get it across effectively in the second and third debates, even to number-weary viewers.

Some pundits say that, if Romney’s weakness is that his budget numbers don’t add up, Obama’s weakness is that he hasn’t laid out a specific agenda for his second term.  (Either that, or that he didn’t get us out of the recession fast enough.)

What will happen after the election?   It is typical that fervently debated plans of the candidates become mostly irrelevant soon after the winner’s presidential term begins.  (My Oct.22 talking head comments on this are viewable, at the 26-min. mark.) They are overtaken by unexpected events, such as a market crash at home or an armed attack somewhere in the world.  In the present case, we have a good idea of the events that, soon after the election, will quickly replace the sound-bites of the campaign.   In economic policy, a renewed euro crisis within the next year is likely to have serious spillover effects.   But more urgent for the American president will be the Fiscal Cliff, which arrives January 2013.   Immediately after the election it will become the dominant question.  Yet neither candidate is talking about it.  The explanation for this silence is in part that no politician wants to talk about the specifics of budget-cutting pain; but it is also in part that the two candidates genuinely can’t know what they will do before they know how many supporters they would have in Congress to do it. By the way, I have a prediction regarding monetary policy.   If Romney were to be elected president, his position that monetary policy has been much too easy would turn around on a dime.   Like Nixon, Reagan and Bush before him, he would seek to push the Fed toward easing, not tightening.

Foreign policy was the focus of the third debate.  (Incidentally, why does Romney believe that Syria “is Iran’s path to the sea?”  That is a strange rendering of geography.  Four years ago, McCain thought that Afghanistan bordered Iraq.  GWB said that Africa was one nation.  Reagan mixed up Brazil and Bolivia. Anyone see a pattern? )

The pressing foreign policy issues for the next president will likely be the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the nuclear standoff with Iran, and territorial disputes over islands off the coast of Asia.  Instead of discussing realistically the sort of policy decisions that will need to be made, the candidates have been debating “who said what, when” after the killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi last month.   Despite that tragedy, Obama’s overall policy in Libya remains a success on net.  His actions helped remove Qaddafi, which is reminiscent to me of Bill Clinton’s interventions in Kosovo (helping remove Milosevic) and Haiti (Cédras).   Removing bad guys without US combat deaths.   Libya ranks behind two other major Obama foreign policy successes: withdrawal from Iraq and removal of bin Laden.   Contrast that to the 4,000 Americans who died in the Iraq war; the 3,000 in the World Trade Center; and the global damage done to American foreign policy more generally during those years.

Libyans have a new lease on life, a feeling that, at long last, they are the masters of their own fate. Perhaps Iraqis, after a decade of warfare, feel the same way. Both countries are oil producers, and there is widespread expectation among their citizens that that wealth will be a big advantage in rebuilding their societies.

Meanwhile, in Africa, Ghana has begun pumping oil for the first time, and Uganda is about to do so as well. Indeed, from West Africa to Mongolia, countries are experiencing windfalls from new sources of oil and mineral wealth. Adding to the euphoria are the historic highs that oil and mineral prices have reached on world markets over the last four years.

Many countries have been in this position before, exhilarated by natural-resource bonanzas, only to see the boom end in disappointment and the opportunity squandered with little payoff in terms of a better quality of life for their people. But, whether in Libya or Ghana, these countries’ current leaders have an advantage: most are well aware of history, and want to know how to avoid the infamous natural-resource “curse.”

To prescribe a cure, one must first diagnose the illness. Why do oil riches turn out to be a curse as often as they are a blessing?

Economists have identified six pitfalls that can afflict natural-resource exporters: commodity-price volatility, crowding out of manufacturing, “Dutch disease” (a booming export industry causes rapid currency appreciation , which undermines other exporters’ competitiveness), excessively rapid resource depletion, inhibition of institutional development, and civil war.

Oil prices are especially volatile, as the large swings over the last five years remind us. The recent oil boom could easily turn to bust, especially if global economic activity slows.

Volatility itself is costly, leaving economies unable to respond effectively to price signals. Temporary commodity booms typically pull workers, capital, and land away from fledgling manufacturing sectors and production of other internationally traded goods. This reallocation can damage long-term economic development if those sectors are the ones that nurture learning by doing and fuel broader productivity gains.

The problem is not just that workers, capital, and land are sucked into the booming commodity sector. They also are frequently lured away from manufacturing by booms in construction and other non-tradable goods and services. The pattern also includes an exuberant expansion of government spending, which can result in bloated public payrolls and large infrastructure projects, both of which are found to be unsustainable when oil prices fall. If the manufacturing sector has been “hollowed out” in the meantime, so much the worse.

Another pitfall is excessively rapid depletion of oil or mineral deposits, in violation of optimal rates of saving, let alone preservation of the environment.   

Even if high oil revenues turn out to be permanent, pitfalls nonetheless abound. Governments that can finance themselves simply by retaining physical control over the oil or mineral deposits located within their borders often fail in the long run to develop institutions that are conducive to economic development.  Such countries evolve a hierarchical authoritarian society where the only incentive is to compete for privileged access to commodity rents. In the extreme case, this competition can take the form of civil war. In a country without resource wealth, by contrast, elites have little alternative but to nurture a decentralized economy in which individuals have incentives to work and save. These are the economies that industrialize.

What can countries do to ensure that natural resources are a blessing rather than a curse?  Some policies and institutions have been tried and failed. These include, in particular, attempts to suppress artificially the fluctuations of the global marketplace by imposing price controls, export controls, marketing boards, and cartels.

But some countries have succeeded, and their strategies could be useful models for Libya, Iraq, Ghana, Mongolia, and others to emulate. These include: hedging export earnings - for example, via the oil options market, as Mexico does; ensuring countercyclical fiscal policy - for example via Chile’s kind of structural budget rule; and delegating sovereign wealth funds to professional managers, as Botswana’s Pula Fund does.

Finally, some promising ideas have virtually never been tried at all: linking bonds to oil prices instead of dollars, to protect against the risk of a price decline; choosing Product Price Targeting as an alternative to either inflation targeting or exchange-rate targeting, to play the role of anchor for monetary policy; and distributing oil revenues on a nationwide per capita basis, to ensure that they do not wind up in elites’ Swiss bank accounts.

Leaders have free will. Oil exporters need not be prisoners of a curse that has befallen others. Countries can choose to use their resource bonanzas for the long-term economic advancement of their peoples.

[This column originally appeared at Project Syndicate.  Comments can be posted there.]

At the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq, estimates of its long-run cost range from $1.2-$1.7 trillion by my former colleague Peter Orszag, now Director of the Congressional Budget Office, to $2 - 3 trillion by my current colleague Linda Bilmes with another former colleague Joe Stiglitz (in a book that is appropriately getting lots of attention, including for example from John Cusack). The important point is that the costs far exceed the $50-$60 billion that the White House predicted ahead of time.

A story in today’s New York Times proclaims “Estimates of Iraqi War Cost Were Not Close to Ballpark.” It turns out that the pre-war estimates they are talking about are those that came from the Bush Administration. At the very end, the article finally mentions “Only one economist, William D. Nordhaus of Yale, seems to have come close. In a paper in December 2002, he offered a worst-case scenario of $1.9 trillion, ‘if the war drags on, occupation is lengthy, nation building is costly.’” You might not guess from the NYT story that Bill Nordhaus’s study was the only thorough independent professional attempt to estimate the cost of invading Iraq ahead of time. (At least it is the only one that I was aware of.)

The question is why the media did not give more attention to the Nordhaus estimates, and less attention to the Administration’s crazily over-optimistic forecasts, while there was still time for the nation to make an intelligent policy choice. The media’s omission was all the more conspicuous in that by December 2002 the White House’s crazily over-optimistic forecasts of the federal budget overall had already become apparent. And they are all still at it.