If
economists were better at economics, central banks in the United States and
Europe would have recognized the housing bubbles that were driving economies in
the last decade. They would have taken steps to rein them in before they grew
so large that their inevitable collapse would sink the world economy.
We recently
had the opportunity to see that economists are no better at moral philosophy
than economics. In a recent paper, Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw, the
former chief economist to President Bush and one of the country's most
prominent conservative economists, compared progressive taxation to forcefully
removing a person's kidney for a transplant.
That is
probably not how most people would view imposing a high tax rate on rich
people.
However, the
analogy is an interesting one; it just needs a bit more context.
First, we
have to realize all the sweet little things that the government does to make
the rich even richer. Everyone's favorite starts with the goodies we give to
the boys and girls on Wall Street. It takes lots of taxpayer dollars to keep
Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein in nice suits. According to an estimate from
Bloomberg News, the implicit subsidy from the government's too-big-to-fail
insurance policy is worth $83 billion a year, a bit more than the $76
billion annual cost of the food stamp program.
The wizards
of Wall Street also benefit from the fact that the financial industry is exempt
from many of the taxes that more pedestrian businesses face. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) suggested taxes on the
order of 0.2-0.3 percent of GDP ($35-$50 billion a year) to level the playing
field.
Then we have
the massive redistributions that go to the holders of government granted
patents and copyright monopolies. The former easily cost the economy several
hundred billion dollars a year. While patent monopolies can make drug companies
and tech companies very rich, these monopolies are an enormous drag on the economy, slowing
growth and reducing employment.
And we also
have the high-end professionals like doctors, dentists and lawyers, who can
often get very rich because they get to set the rules of the market. This
means, for example, that while trade pressure in general is designed to force
down workers' wages by putting them in competition with low-paid counterparts
in the developing world, these professionals are largely protected from such
competition. In addition, they get to restrict the number of people who can
become members of their profession in the United States. And they set rules
that can make it illegal for other, less highly compensated workers from doing
tasks for which they are entirely qualified.
But even if
we ignore these and other ways in which the rich use the government to
redistribute income upward, we still get to the basic issue of macroeconomic
policy. Currently the U.S. economy is close to 9 million jobs below its trend
level of employment. This means that if we had competent people running the Fed
back in 2002 - when the housing bubble first became evident to people who
follow the economy - and these competent people had taken the necessary
steps to stem the growth of the bubble, another 9 million people would have
jobs today.
Of course,
the impact on the labor market is even larger than just 9 million people
getting jobs. In addition, millions of people who could only find part-time
jobs would instead have full-time jobs. In 2006, 4 million people fell into this
involuntary part-time category. Currently, the number is close to 8 million.
In addition,
the tightness of the labor market directly affects the ability of large
segments of the workforce to secure wage gains. In my forthcoming book with
Jared Bernstein, we show that the ability of the bottom half of the labor force
to secure wage gains depends hugely on the level of unemployment. This means
that the economic mismanagement of the last decade has not only denied tens of
millions of workers jobs; it has also forced down the wages of tens of millions
more workers.
Now let's
get back to Greg Mankiw and the story of forced removal of kidneys. Not only
has the heavy hand of the government directly transferred trillions of dollars
to those at the top, it has deprived tens of millions of others of the ability
to earn a decent living in the economy.
In this
case, the economic mismanagement of the Greenspan gang has put large segments
of the population in the situation where the rich can tell them that if they
want to be able to eat, or let their kids have food to eat, then they will have
to work at bad jobs at low wages. And Mankiw and his ilk want us to believe
that this is fair. Needless to say, if policy became so bad that some workers
had to sell kidneys for food, Mankiw would consider this fair as well. In fact,
poor people sometimes do sell organs.
So, Mankiw
was onto something when he discussed the government forcing people to give up
kidneys. The discussion just needed a bit more context to set it right.
Dean Baker, Truthout | News Analysis
This article was originally
printed in Truth-Out.org:
It is posted here by permission of Dean
Baker, macro-economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.
Baker previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute
and an assistant professor at Bucknell University.
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