Mankiw Keeps Chipping Away

Harvard Economist Gregory Mankiw-a former advisor to Gov. Mitt Romney's Presidential bid-continues to push the oh-so-popular Republican economic policies.

In today's New York Times, the professor has some advice to President-elect Obama. Had he simply copied one of the memos he sent to Romney and-from the looks of the policy proposals-the McCain campaign, he could have saved some ink.

His list is quick: embrace McCain's health care tax rebate, look at shrinking Social Security and Medicare in order to increase available funds, and support the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (which he includes in his "Recognize Past Mistakes" category).

Yet his laundry list excludes any explanation why these golden ideas have failed to gain real traction.

The first of several straw men is Obama's supposed opposition to "Senator John McCain’s proposal to reform the tax code to include a refundable health insurance tax credit". As anyone who remembers the Presidential campaign we just went through might mention is that Obama opposed McCain's decision to tax health benefits provided to employees by their employers. The tax credit-which would only have covered a portion of what the employee would have to pay for an equivalent policy in the individual market-was merely the sugar coating a poison pill. The real point of the plan, of course, is not to provide better coverage, but to eliminate employer-provided health care. 

The second piece of advice is to tackle Social Security and Medicare before the Baby Boomers strain it to breaking. He apparently has forgotten President Bush's bruising run-in with that train. Much of that "crisis" is as phony as the proposed Republican solution-privatization. Certainly some tweaking-either increasing the tax, increasing the retirement age, or reducing payouts-will help ensure the solvency, but given that the predicting tipping-point seems to recede into the distance every year, there are far more useful expenditures of political capital.

The third is actually a purposeful misrepresentation of Obama's, and other Democrats, opposition to the Dominical-Republic Central American Free Trade Agreement. Democrats have tried for years to ensure stronger labor and environmental rules are included in the agreements. Rules the Republican party has refused to support.

Certainly different economists will disagree on how to best tackle the economic issue facing the country, but like anything else it doesn't benefit anyone to simply drop a few tid-bits while keeping the real detains cloaked. 

- Murphy

A Little Bit Of Context

Floyd Norris of The New York Times tonight on Charlie Rose just noted that in today's stock collapse $1.2 trillion of value disappeared.  One of the largest dollar-figure drops in history.

That collapse occurred due to the market's reaction to the failure of the rescue package.

The number bandied about since Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's proposed package has been circling $700 billion.

The great protectors of the market, a.k.a. the House Republican, balked at signing off on a plan that had a $700 billion tag laid on it, a figure no one could really verify, pin down or stand behind. As a result, $1.2 trillion in value vanished in a matter of hours.

Had the bill passed, the normal legislative and executive process would take over and things would have continued, the market would have likely responded positively and the process of trying to untangle this gordian knot would proceed. The $700 billion figure is a fixation, but the final figures are unknowable at this point. A steady, but slow, accumulation of selected assets through this bill may have allowed the private investors to return in confidence, thus reducing the need for government intervention. 

Now, however, we are perhaps worse off that we were had there been no vote at all. How many of the Republican members' assets were part of that $1.2 trillion that evaporated thanks to their inaction?

- Murphy

Whip It Good

Missouri's own Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Springfield) blamed Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) speech today for turning key Republican votes against the financial rescue package. Even the 12 members he thought he had whipped in line bailed on the bill.

It's worth noting that Blunt is the Republican whip in the house, charged with bringing members in-line when the leadership (of which he is a part) decides to press an issue.

An issue, perhaps, like the package President George W. Bush, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) all promised would pass with the support of their Republican colleagues in the House. 

Sen. McCain went so far this morning as to remind voters that he went so far as to suspend his campaign for President, in order to go back to Washington and help hammer out a deal (which he believed in taking credit for this morning, but since the vote has been incommunicado on the subject).

After two-thirds of the Republicans in the House bailed on the bill, Boehner and others tried to place the blame squarely on Pelosi whose speech (read the transcript here) emphasized the role deregulation and Republican support for pulling economic oversight played in the economic catastrophe before us. It was a rebuke to Republican policies, to be sure. And even perhaps badly timed (it couldn't have hurt to wait until after the vote?). 

Yet if the Republican members had been serious about supporting the bill, in the belief it was the correct move, than it certainly should not have dissuaded them.

In fact, it looks more likely that a majority of Republican members were not happy with the bill and after not convincing their leadership that their alternative (assuming they had a practical one and not simply the "insurance" plan) was preferable to amended Bush-Paulson proposal, they decided to deep-six the entire deal.

Where does that leave the markets and the American voters? With the greatest one-day point drop in stock market history and greater uncertainty for the workers and business owners who are wondering where their retirement funds went and whether they will be able to maintain the lines of credit necessary to allow their businesses to continue.

There was an unattributed comment circulated late last week that said, essentially, "better to risk a Great Depression, than sacrifice the 'free market'". I guess we can chalk it up to the Republican members of the 110th Congress.

- Murphy

McCain May Want To Look Away

Despite the general consensus that the debate was "soporific" draw, it is hard to look back at it and not see it as a win for Sen. Barack Obama.

While it did not provide the fireworks many were hoping for, on both the substantive and stylistic fronts, the meeting explained much.

Much of the McCain campaign has been about defining Obama as unserious, unprepared and inexperienced. In fact, after stripping away McCain's own confusing mix of proposals and rants, his entire campaign is based around attacking Obama on those terms.

Last night Obama deftly dealt with those attacks, excepting the experience issue. Yet even there he deflected those attacks by again raising the question of judgment.

The inexperience issue may still be "operative" but as conservative commentator George Will wrote in a column criticizing McCain's tempestuous temperament and questioning his fitness to be President, "Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?"

McCain pushed his experience and tried to deflect Republican-fatigue by wrapping himself in the "Maverick" flag-even calling himself a Maverick, violating rule one of being a Maverick-but can that overcome a steady effort by the Obama campaign to highlight McCain's record of supporting President George W. Bush (a.k.a. He Who Will Not Be Named) 90% of the time?

Last night Obama looked composed, prepared, respectful and ready. In a word, he showed the voters he was "Presidential" material. The voters seemed to respond positively: CNN, CBS.

- Murphy

Fannie and Freddie Frozen?

(via Washington Monthly) The New York Times is reporting that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae  have been put on notice that the government intends to take control of the two mortgage giants soon. The head of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and Treasury Secretary Paulson, Jr., have apparently decided they had given the companies enough time to clean up their books and restore investor confidence.

Effectively, the government is putting them into bankruptcy and cleaning house. The heads of both companies and their boards will all be replaced. The investors will see their stocks dwindle to nothing. The taxpayers, meanwhile, will be pickup up the tab as the companies are rebuilt; and hopefully confidence in the institutions will be rebuilt as well.

This is one of those "oh, nuts", moments economists were worried about. Why? Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee approximately 50% of the mortgage market, almost $6 trillion. While they are hamstrung by their efforts to rescue what is left of the company, they have not been performing their role of adding liquidity to the mortgage market, their appointed role since their inception (Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970). Less liquidity means fewer loans which results in slower growth.

This move, one of the largest takeovers in history, is far from an example of an economy that is "fundamentally sound", as Sen. John McCain recently said.

Currently the economy is not providing a better life for most Americans. Productivity is up, but wages are stagnant, and job loses are growing. 

Whoever occupies the Oval Office, they will have to confront the shaky economic reality that many families struggle with every day. So far, McCain's comments on the economy do no relate to the world most people see; perhaps reflecting his admitted ignorance of economics. 

There are no perfect fixes, but reducing the burden on those making less, creating a more fair health care system, finding ways to encourage businesses to expand and hire more workers in this country, and not pretending their is no problem would be a good place to start.

- Murphy

Gramm: You're not a whiner...

....you're economically illiterate and a whiner.

Just when Sen. McCain must have felt he might be getting a bit of distance from the remarks of his economic advisor Sen. Phil Gramm (Gramm is no longer the campaign co-chair, but is still an unofficial advisor), Gramm reanimates his homage to the strength of the American public. 

``If you're sitting here today, you're not economically illiterate and you're not a whiner, so I'm not worried about who you're going to vote for,'' the former Texas senator told attendees at a Financial Services Roundtable event in Minneapolis on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention.

Gramm originally stepped down as the McCain campaign co-chair after telling the Washington Times in an interview that the current recession was "a mental recession" and that the country had become a nation of "whiners" in the wake of the slowdown.

On the bright side, for McCain, the slow-motion crash that is the Palin-for-VP pick is drawing most of the air in the room. But if it doesn't, since Gramm has already officially stepped into the shadows, where else can he go?

- Murphy