Republicans, Democrats, and Jobs

"Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism…."

John Maynard Keynes

John Buell
is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book is Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age.

“It is a jobless recovery, if it's a recovery at all,” said Romney on NBC of the latest employment data. “It really doesn't look like a recovery. If this president's re-elected you're going to see chronic high unemployment continue for another four years or longer.” 
  If it is a jobless recovery, much of the credit will surely go to Republicans, who have done everything in their power to cripple the current recovery, not out of intellectual;/ideological conviction that government is powerless in the face of a major recession but merely in order to maintain or even worsen the adverse circumstances in which Obama is running. 

Congressional Republicans almost to a person voted against President Obama’s American Jobs Act. Yet surprisingly, economists for both business and labor groups argued that this proposal, which included school repairs, rehiring laid off teachers and first responders, and extended emergency unemployment insurance, would have cut the unemployment rate to nearly 7%. As Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytic put it: “If fully implemented, the Obama jobs plan would increase real GDP growth in 2012 by 2 percentage points, add 1.9 million jobs, and reduce the unemployment rate by a full percentage point, compared with current fiscal policy.”

Congressional Republicans maintain that whatever the views of labor and business economists, they are sure that “government does not create jobs.” Yet there is good reason to believe that they don’t accept this mantra. The same party that steadfastly rejects government spending for school repairs also defends increased spending for the military on grounds that it creates jobs. Paul Krugman nicely summarizes this case by quoting Romney against Romney: “ Obama’s trillion dollar cuts to our military will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, and also put our security at greater risk;…And his trillion-dollar deficits will slow our economy, restrain employment, and cause wages to stall.”
  OK, so deficit spending hurts the economy — unless it’s spending on the military (or on the medical-industrial complex), in which case cutting spending destroys jobs..”
  The agenda here is transparently political. The same intellectual/academic tools used to justify the job creation potential of military spending are also applicable to domestic infrastructure. Republicans have not even attempted to explain why money spend on tanks creates US jobs whereas money for urban transit does not.

 But rather than explain this obvious contradiction, they turn to another favorite conservative line, that fear of future regulations and taxes is deterring new corporate investment. Conjuring up visions of today’s fearful corporate execs may be good strategy. It distracts from talk about the failures of deregulation and tax cuts under George W Bush to deliver solid growth even before the Lehman Brothers collapse. Just as tellingly, current corporate behavior as well as surveys of corporate CEOs do not reflect such purported concerns. Dean Baker points out: “If the story that regulation was impeding job growth were true, then there should be evidence to support it. For example, we should see firms increasing average hours as a way to avoid hiring workers. We don't: Average weekly hours are still below their pre-recession level. We should be seeing firms hiring temps as a way to avoid hiring more permanent workers. We don't see this, either. Temp employment is still down by almost 20 percent from its pre-recession level….We might also expect that businesses would blame regulation for limited growth when they are asked. They don't. The National Federation of Independent Businesses' survey of its members show little change in the percent of businesses that list regulation as a major obstacle from the Bush or Reagan years.”

 If the Republicans’ current agenda is simply to trot out any argument or policy response to defeat Obama, they also have a longer- term focus. Years of high unemployment coupled with trashing all domestic job creation and regulatory initiatives lay the groundwork for fierce implementation of the neoliberal agenda. Military spending will be ratcheted up and financial regulation, inadequate as it is, will be scaled back. In the face of the continuing unemployment, look for restoration of more Depression era mantras, such as the “natural rate of unemployment,” the notion that markets tend toward a natural rate of unemployment and any effort to boost jobs by government policy only increases inflation.
 More crudely, unemployment will be viewed as a voluntary choice only worsened by unemployment compensation, a notion recently articulated by Casey Mulligan. Dean Baker thoroughly dismisses this logic:

 “Unfortunately Mulligan provides no evidence to back up his version of reality. By contrast, Jesse Rothstein, an economist at Berkeley, looked at the behavior of unemployed workers. He found that at most, the supply-side effect from the extended duration of unemployment benefits in this downturn increased measured unemployment by 0.1-0.5 percentage points. Furthermore, most of this increase was due to keeping workers looking for work and therefore being counted as unemployed. (When a worker stops looking for work, they are no longer counted as being unemployed.){In addition}, since the benefits gave workers tens of billions of dollars that they would not have otherwise, they undoubtedly had a large demand side effect. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the multiplier for unemployment benefits as being 1.6, meaning that the $40 billion a year in extended benefits (roughly the amount at stake) would lead to an increase in GDP of $64 billion or more than 0.4 percent of GDP. If the increase in employment is proportionate, it would imply 560,000 additional jobs. This would swamp the negative supply side effect that Rothstein found in his research.”

A Jobless Future? Bank on it.
 President Obama has been smart both economically and politically in pushing his modest job agenda. Nonetheless, he is not without fault, especially in his neglect of the role investment banks have played in the current crisis.  Though staunch Republican opposition explains the relative parsimony and poor targeting of the initial job creation package, the President’s premature proclamation of victory and conversion to deficit hawk cast suspicion on his subsequent efforts.  Worse still, the President continues to shy away from the role that banks played in the crisis and the problems private debt pose for any future recovery.

Australian economist Steve Keen believes that a modern capitalist economy is intrinsically unstable, that banks and debt creation are the most powerful fingers of instability. There are limits to our ability to predict the course of the economy and we must therefore take steps to build firewalls to limit the range of outcomes the system can generate.
  Keen agrees that a Keynesian stimulus is a good short- term response to depression. Keeping teachers, police, fire fighters on board surely clips the unemployment rate and their spending is likely to stimulate some other jobs. But how good is this temporary job creation in the long term and will it produce a self-sustaining recovery? And how accurately can our models tell us what will happen?
  Most of the models, even those used by liberal economists, assume that markets basically work and move toward equilibrium at optimal price and quantity points. Conservatives see the process of adjustment to external shocks as automatic. Liberals argue that because some market are not perfectly competitive, the system must be juiced occasionally but will then move easily to smooth growth.

Keen argues that Keynes had a more profound and compelling view. Uncertainty is at the center of economic life. A new stimulus puts money in the hands of teachers and firefighters who would otherwise be fired. But money also trickles into the banking system and levels of debt remain high. What banks will do with the money and when individuals or entrepreneurs will begin to borrow again even for productive investment remains a question.

  Predictions make the most sense when they are short term, based on recently observed empirical regularities, are done with a mindset to monitor their progress continually, and cover domains less subject to volatility. Entrepreneurial investment and new borrowing for consumer durables are areas more subject to volatility than is ordinary consumer spending. Business leaders face an uncertain future.  They are trying to guess what consumers and their competitors will do and the latter are busy trying to predict business. In such a climate, a herd mentality easily emerges and is itself highly volatile. With the large private debt overhang, small ups and downs in business hiring make a big difference. If wages and prices fall, the debt burden in real, inflation-adjusted terms becomes greater, leading to further cuts in spending, and panic sale of other assets. A virtual avalanche results.  

Debt per se is not the problem, but its level and purposes are the issue.  Debt has played a key role in the emergence of capitalism and has spurred productive investment. Entrepreneurs with innovative product and production processes but limited means have approached banks to request that their efforts funded. But the very growth of the economy often leads banks to move beyond funding such projects to investment in ponzi schemes where interest on loans can only be paid by finding another bank willing to loan at an even higher price.  A reform agenda true to Keynes’s recognition of the role of the debt burden currently in economic life would thus also move to reduce that burden and put some structural limits on debt creation in ways that might blunt future volatility.

There would have been no housing bubble had banks not made exorbitant sums through the rapid issuance and securitization of loans. Borrowers, however, could meet their obligations only by selling the asset at a higher price to the next purchaser, a process that could not go on forever.  The Fed’s easy money and lax lending standards did allow private debt to grew to 300% of GNP and debt still stands at 130% of GNP. Private debt to GDP was 45% coming out of Great Depression. The Economist reports: “America has begun to pare its debt burden, although the drop is small compared with the build-up in 2000-08." As long as that is the case, private investment—even in productive activities-- and new consumer borrowing and demand will remain far from optimal. Banks may sit on new deposits or QE injections from the Fed or worse still invest in new ponzi schemes. Even modest rebounds may soon be followed by setbacks. Unemployment is likely to remain high for another decade as bankruptcies wind their way through the system. This is especially unfortunate since current definitions of unemployment underplay the depth of the economic crisis. In the mid nineties, the US government changed its statistics on discouraged workers and no longer counts someone unemployed for more than a year as part of the labor force. Shadowstats estimates that if these workers were counted as labor force participants, unemployment would be over 20%.

The media may blame irresponsible borrowers, but for every such reprobate there was an incautious or avaricious bank eager to loan and then dump the security. Those banks have been bailed out but not their victims.
  That private debt is an issue whose time has come may be seen in growing protests around the country. Occupy Wall Street inspired a working group that has assembled a detailed handbook of how to resist burdensome debt collection. Debt relief has been ridiculed in the corporate media as another form of welfare to the undeserving. (Remember  CNBC’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange correspondent Rick Santelli’s rant inspiring the birth of the Tea Party. He condemned help to insolvent householders on the grounds such assistance would be financed by taxing their thrifty but also squeezed neighbors.)  One of the new OWS handbook’s great strengths is the wide range of debts addressed, from mortgages, to student, credit card, medical bills etc. By broadening the scope of debts addressed and by the willingness of debtors to stand and speak for themselves, demonization of debtors becomes more difficult. See debt resistance statement--A QE for ordinary citizens would be both good politics and good economics. Keen recommends a cash infusion for all citizens, borrowers as well as net savers, on the condition that the cash first be used to pay down their debts. By its universal scope, it would reduce the potential demonization of suspect groups.
  In addition, Keen’s proposal would reduce banks income from fees and interest payments and the size of the financial sector without fostering the insolvencies that simple debt default occasions.  The size of the financial sector and its ability freely to expand and contract the money supply, the circulatory system for the whole economy, adds a degree of unpredictable instability to world capitalism, even apart from outside shocks to the system. 

  Federal job creation is urgent. Direct job creation initiatives are necessary and need our support. But Obama’s mistakes and a relentless Republican assault make their promotion a difficult task. It is time both to call Republican obstructionism for what it is and to demand of the President and the Democrats in Congress a broader counterattack.