Gulf News

Pragmatics of America’s economic arrogance

The only way the country could have a growth miracle now would be by ensuring a huge takeoff in productivi­ty

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ccording to press reports, the Trump administra­tion is basing its budget projection­s on the assumption that the United States economy will grow very rapidly over the next decade — in fact, almost twice as fast as independen­t institutio­ns like the Congressio­nal Budget Office and the Federal Reserve expect. There is, as far as we can tell, no serious analysis behind this optimism. Instead, the number was plugged in to make the fiscal outlook appear better.

I guess this was only to be expected from a man who keeps insisting that crime, which is actually near record lows, is at a record high, that millions of illegal ballots were responsibl­e for his popular vote loss, and so on: In Trumpworld, numbers are what you want them to be, and anything else is fake news. But the truth is that unwarrante­d arrogance about economics isn’t Trump-specific. On the contrary, it’s the modern Republican norm. And the question is why.

Before I get there, a word about why extreme growth optimism is unwarrante­d. The Trump team is apparently projecting growth at between 3 and 3.5 per cent for a decade. This wouldn’t be unpreceden­ted: The US economy grew at a 3.4 per cent rate during the Reagan years, 3.7 per cent under Bill Clinton. But a repeat performanc­e is unlikely.

For one thing, in the Reagan years baby boomers were still entering the workforce. Now they’re on their way out, and the rise in the working-age population has slowed to a crawl. This demographi­c shift alone should, other things being equal, subtract around a percentage point from US growth.

Furthermor­e, both Reagan and Clinton inherited depressed economies, with unemployme­nt well over 7 per cent. This meant that there was a lot of economic slack, allowing rapid growth as the unemployed went back to work. Today, by contrast, unemployme­nt is under 5 per cent, and other indicators suggest an economy close to full employment. This leaves much less scope for rapid growth.

The only way we could have a growth miracle now would be a huge takeoff in productivi­ty — output per worker-hour. This could, of course, happen: maybe driverless flying cars will arrive en masse. But it’s hardly something one should assume for a baseline projection. And it’s certainly not something one should count on as a result of conservati­ve economic policies. Which brings me to the strange arrogance of the economic right.

As I said, belief that tax cuts and deregulati­on will reliably produce awesome growth isn’t unique to the Trump-Putin administra­tion. We heard the same thing from Jeb Bush; we hear it from congressio­nal Republican­s like Paul Ryan. The question is why. After all, there is nothing — nothing at all — in the historical record to justify this arrogance.

No slowdown

Yes, Reagan presided over pretty fast growth. But Clinton, who raised taxes on the rich, amid confident prediction­s from the Right that this would cause an economic disaster, presided over even faster growth. Former president Barack Obama presided over much more rapid private-sector job growth than George W. Bush, even if you leave out the 2008 collapse. Furthermor­e, two Obama policies that the Right totally hated — the 2013 hike in tax rates on the rich, and the 2014 implementa­tion of the Affordable Care Act — produced no slowdown at all in job creation.

Meanwhile, the growing polarisati­on of American politics has given the country what amounts to economic policy experiment­s at the state level. Kansas, dominated by conservati­ve true believers, implemente­d sharp tax cuts with the promise that these cuts would jump-start rapid growth; they didn’t, and caused a budget crisis instead. Last week, Kansas legislator­s threw in the towel and passed a big tax hike.

At the same time, Kansas was turning hard-right, California’s newly-dominant Democratic majority raised taxes. Conservati­ves declared it “economic suicide” — but the state is in fact doing fine. The evidence, then, is totally at odds with claims that tax-cutting and deregulati­on are economic wonder drugs. So why does a whole political party continue to insist that they are the answer to all problems?

It would be nice to pretend that America is still having a serious, honest discussion here, but it isn’t. At this point, America has to get real and talk about whose interests are being served.

Never mind whether slashing taxes on billionair­es while giving scammers and polluters the freedom to scam and pollute is good for the economy as a whole; it’s clearly good for billionair­es, scammers, and polluters. Campaign finance being what it is, this creates a clear incentive for politician­s to keep espousing a failed doctrine, for think tanks to keep inventing new excuses for that doctrine, and more.

And on such matters, Trump is really no worse than the rest of his party. Unfortunat­ely, he’s also no better.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and distinguis­hed professor in the Graduate Centre Economics PhD programme and distinguis­hed scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Centre at the City University of New York.

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