The Great Debate

Editor’s note: This op-ed was originally published at the Financial Times in response to the recent piece by Lawrence Summers for Reuters. It has been republished, verbatim, with the FT‘s permission.

Larry Summers’ considerable intellect suggests that he would be an excellent contestant on the popular game show Jeopardy. Of course, on the show, the question offered by the contestant must match the answer on the board. Summers and I disagree on the answer that matches the question “What is President Obama’s budget?” Let’s see why.

I asked two questions in an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. (Neither question was addressed by Mr Summers, or in the simultaneous parallel critiques offered on the airwaves by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Austan Goolsbee). The first question was whether the tax increases on high-income individuals proposed by President Obama (the Buffett rule, higher taxes on dividends and capital gains, a higher top marginal rate, and so on) raised enough revenue to materially offset the country’s large budget gap or higher federal spending under President Obama. The answer, using revenue estimates from the Treasury Department and spending estimates from the President’s budget is ‘No’. The second question was what that spending growth implied for future tax rates. That is, if federal spending as a share of gross domestic product was to increase permanently as the president proposes, by how much would taxes need to rise? Answer: a lot and for everyone. This simple thought experiment presumes that we will not ratify permanently larger deficits.

Without addressing these questions, Mr Summers proposes a different one. President Obama’s budget is supposedly fiscally sound because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the budget would stabilise federal debt as a share of GDP for a short while. Yet, let’s look at what the CBO said. First, while the CBO shows the debt-to-GDP ratio stabilizing for a period of time – at an uncomfortably high level – in the budget window, it is not stable in the long run. Second and more importantly, in its April 20, 2012 report, the same CBO that Summers cites so selectively observed that the permanent deficits in the President’s budget would reduce the level of economic activity. By CBO’s estimate, under the President’s proposals, the CBO estimates for the 2018-2022 period, that the nation’s real output would be between 0.5 and 2.2 per cent lower compared to what would occur under current law. This adverse effect would grow in the future, as deficits continue to mount.

The President’s budget has met with little success in Congress. The 2013 budget was voted down in the House of Representatives, 414-0. The Senate did not bring the 2013 budget to the floor, though the 2012 budget was voted down in the Senate, 97-0.

By Robert H. Frank
The opinions expressed are his own.

Reuters invited leading economists to reply to Lawrence Summers’ op-ed on his reaction to the debt ceiling deal. We will be publishing the responses here. Below is Franks’s reply. Here are responses from Laura Tyson, Benn Steil, Russ Roberts, Donald Boudreaux and James Pethokoukis as well.

I’m in general agreement with Larry Summers’ piece. If it had been my column to write, I’d have been more emphatic about how much more important the unemployment problem is than the deficit problem. Deficits need to be reduced, yes, but not in the midst of a deep downturn. If we could put just half of the people who are either unemployed or underemployed back to work, for example, national income would be larger by more than ten times the interest we’re paying on the 2011 deficit. The extra income tax revenue alone would be enough to cover the interest on last year’s debt.

I’d also have hit harder on the claim by ostensible deficit hawks that extra spending right now would impoverish our grandchildren. Some of the most vivid and easily understood counterexamples involve infrastructure maintenance. According to the Nevada Department of Transportation, repairing a damaged 10-mile stretch of Interstate 80 would cost $6 million if we did the work today. But if we postpone repairs, weather and traffic will continue to damage the roadbed. If we wait just two years, the cost of bringing that same stretch of road up to par rises to $30 million. There are thousands of similar projects crying out to be done.