Where will growth come from, as the stimulus money runs out? – though the construction portion will keep being shoveled out for months to come. The dollar is weak against the Canadian dollar, the yen and the yuan, but not against the euro and has strengthened against the Mexican peso. So exports? – not likely. And exports simply aren't a big enough slice of our economy (about 10%) and are more sensitive to foreign incomes. Good for exports to China, but not otherwise. It keeps US imports low, too, but that's a reflection of bad news, not a source of good news.
What of the consumer? Unemployment remains high, and long-term unemployment is at record levels. Job losses remain high, so there's uncertainty. For the rich, who tend to save, capital gains and dividends and corporate bonuses remain low.
Investment still faces a housing and now a commercial real estate slump. We have, at least for a couple more years, too many houses and too many strip malls and office buildings for our population and income. Manufacturing is ticking upwards, but from a very low base; car sales may be 20% above their bottom in 2008-9, but remain 30% below peak levels.
Then there's government. The city across the valley from me is likely to go into receivership, lose its charter and revert to town status. Northern Michigan, which I just left, remains depressed. The local marina, which for years provided a big boost to city income, has almost no seasonal slips rented; there used to be a waiting list. Transient rentals and fuel sales were nil on some days the past two weeks. And over everything hangs the fiscal situation of California and Illinois. State and local government continue to lay off employees, even as the Federal government has stopped hiring.
So how do you like your cone? We're an obese society; we had an obese economy. Double-dip goes without asking. But there is a triple-dip crowd. You have to beg for a single dip, and we're not doing that.
Part II
Congress seems to be (wrongly) spooked by deficit hawks, and may go into reverse mode. Ironically, by prolonging the recession(s), that will leave us in a worse fiscal position, because most of our current deficit is the result of slow growth – falling revenues – and not a burst of expenditures.
Unfortunately post-banking-bubble recoveries tend to be slow, because it is structural distortions (too many houses) that have to be unwound, and short of buying up and bulldozing new developments, there's no quick way to do that. (We also have a growing population, so we will eventually have demand, and when retiring baby boomers can sell their houses, that will spill over even into such examples of excess as Las Vegas.)
A new working paper by M. Miyazaki from the International Monetary Fund makes the (with hindsight!) obvious point that the news is worse than that: revenues tend to grow with the economy, not faster than the economy, and so are very slow to recover to earlier levels. (See In Search of Lost Revenue, which is at the non-technical end of the spectrum of IMF working papers: you don't need an economics PhD to read it.)
Now it's conceivable that we could cut expenditures to speed the process. But we seem to have a proclivity for war, and for getting older. While I'd like to see us change the former, I have a vested interest in the latter, as does everyone reading this. And demand for most of the rest of what the government does, federal, state, and local, is a function of population. The US has a small government, in international comparison, so it's hard to find ways to significantly cut expenditures. Plus the last time I looked, we could cut all non-defense, non-aging related expenditures at the Federal level and still have a deficit.
Let's not kid ourselves: if revenue doesn't recover on its own and since expenditures can't be cut, then at some point we need to enhance revenues. A lot. My preferred alternative would be a national value added tax.
But demagoguery aside, there's no urgency; interest rates remain at record lows, and not just on short-term debt. However, we can't wait a decade before doing so. Hence even if Obama does not do so – it's hard to see that happening – the next president must. It will be a disaster if the radical right trumps conservative sensibility and precludes that presidential campaign from being over how to raise taxes, not whether to raise them.
Mike Smitka
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