2016 Autumn Statement

Got back from a trip to London to give my lecture (pics above: thanks to everyone at SPERI and New Statesman, plus Beth Rigby for chairing and everyone else for coming) looking forward to not thinking about economics for the rest of the day, only to find the Chancellor had given an Autumn Statement. Luckily the whole thing appears to be a damp squib compared to the expectations raised beforehand, so here are just a few points. On helping the so-called just about managing, see the ever excellent Ben Chu.

Public investment

Remember all the talk beforehand about substantial increases in public investment? What we got is increases of 0.3% or 0.4% of GDP in each of the financial years from 2017 to 2020. These increases give us figures that are slightly above the numbers we saw from the Labour government in the years immediately before the financial crisis. We should be spending much, much more when interest rates are so low.

Fiscal rules

There was also much speculation that we might return to more sensible fiscal rules, now that Osborne’s had been busted. Instead the new Charter for Budget Responsibility is honestly not worth the paper it is written on. We have a target for the total cyclically adjusted deficit (including investment) for a fixed year. Whatever the number involved, this makes two mistakes: having a fixed rather than rolling date, and by including public investment in that target. It is a recipe for panic cuts in public investment a year or two before the target date.

There is also a target of a falling debt to GDP ratio by the same date. I’m at a loss to understand why you need a target for this as well as a target for the deficit. The change in the debt to GDP ratio is after all just the change in debt (which is the deficit) and the change in GDP. So targeting the change in the debt to GDP ratio just adds to the deficit target some things that you cannot control: GDP growth and your position in the business cycle. I knew there would be no zero lower bound knock out, because that would be a clear admission that 2010 austerity was a mistake. But I did hope for something more intelligent than this.

I fear George Osborne has totally discredited the idea of a fiscal rule. Remember that Labour stuck to its fiscal rules for 10 years, before they inevitably fell victim to the largest recession since the 1930s. Yes there was fiddling at the margin, but the important point was that they did have a strong influence on what the Chancellor did. I now suspect that, by breaking a whole series of rules within a shorter period of years, whatever a Conservative Chancellor says has become pretty worthless.

The fuel duty fiddle

There is this great chart in the OBR’s autumn statement document.

It shows how Conservative Chancellors keep postponing rises in fuel duty. One obvious question is why. But the OBR is also concerned about whether this makes a mockery of its forecasts. Each year they are obliged by parliament to continue to assume that in all subsequent years the government will raise fuel duty after each ‘one-off’ cut. And almost each time the Chancellor announces a ‘give away’ for motorists: they will postpone any increase ‘just for this year’. You can see why they do it: it allows the papers to write favourable headlines. But if they really are going to go on doing this, it means that really their policy is to have no increases in fuel duty. Fiscal forecasts based on the assumption that they will increase fuel duty will be much too optimistic. The government is fooling parliament and the public, but the OBR cannot do anything about it because of the restrictive rules it is forced to operate under.

The cost of Brexit

The big news was of course the higher levels of borrowing. As this table shows, a significant part of that is due to the fiscal costs of Brexit.

Surprise surprise - there will actually be less money available for the NHS and other public services after leaving, rather than more. It is as if that red Leave bus just crashed and rolled over so it is now upside down. The two big factors are lower productivity growth and lower immigration. The OBR has, unsurprisingly, followed their own previous analysis (immigration) and the consensus economist view (productivity growth).

I can almost guarantee that the Sun and Mail will make no mention of this - or if they do it will only be to rubbish the OBR. So, following the theme of my lecture, I really hope that the broadcasters’ nightly news programmes pick this up. Channel 4 news did do so, but I didn’t watch the others (let me know in comments).

The NHS and squeezing the public sector

Not a penny more for an NHS in crisis. Make no mistake, as this blog has shown before, the current crisis in the NHS is simply because it has been starved of resources for the last six years. I really wish Labour (it has to be them, because they are the only party who the media will take any notice of) would run a campaign that busted the myth of a ‘protected’ NHS. But what Hammond’s refusal to do anything about this shows is that this government is continuing the squeeze of the public sector begun by the Coalition. Here is the relevant chart from the OBR. 

Abusing economic analysis: UK Treasury edition

For US readers, this is about the misuse of dynamic scoring in analysing tax changes

Ask most people if they think a particular tax - like fuel duty - should be reduced, and they will say yes. If you ask people do you think income taxes should be raised to pay for a cut in fuel duty, you will get a rather different response. So just asking people if they would like one particular tax to be cut without saying how it will be paid for is pretty meaningless. Unless of course your aim is to provide ‘evidence’ that taxes are too high, and you are not too worried about the nature of that evidence.

There is a slightly more sophisticated version of this trick, and the UK Treasury have just played it. Each individual tax potentially distorts the pattern of economic activity. If that pattern without any taxes is near some ideal, then we can call taxes ‘distortionary’. If we taxed apples and used this money to subsidise the production of pears, people would eat too many pears and not enough apples. However there is one tax that is not distortionary, because it does not influence incentives and therefore this pattern of economic activity. It is a poll tax - a tax levied on each individual independent of their income, wealth or what they spend their money on. Economists call this a lump sum tax. So cutting any distortionary tax, and paying for this by raising a poll tax, is bound to produce beneficial results in terms of reducing distortions.

There is only one problem with paying for a particular tax cut by raising a lump sum tax - in the UK we do not have a poll tax. We did very briefly - it was not very popular, because people care about fairness as well as the distortionary impact of taxes. For this reason, you should not expect to find a government department like the Treasury modelling the benefits of cutting fuel duty by assuming it was paid for by raising a poll tax. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has been done in a Treasury/HMRC report released this week

George Osborne is not planning to reintroduce a poll tax - veneration of a past Conservative Prime Minister would not go that far. I think the argument the Treasury would use to justify what they have done is simplicity. If you pay for a cut in fuel duty by, say, raising income taxes, you have to model the impact of two taxes on economic behaviour rather than just one. I don’t think that is a very good excuse, but even if we think it has some validity it has a direct implication: an individual study of this kind is meaningless on its own. It can only be used in conjunction with other studies that look at the impact of raising other taxes. Will Treasury officials therefore stop their masters using the numbers from this exercise to justify cuts in fuel duty? No prizes for guessing the answer. (They might if they could but they don’t have that degree of influence.)

So what could have been the beginning of an intelligent discussion of the costs and benefits of particular taxes (as in the Mirrlees review, for example) has been turned into a simple propaganda exercise.

Unfortunately it gets worse. Fuel duty is particularly ‘distortionary’ because its rate is high (see Chart 2.1 of the Treasury paper). There might be a good reason for that. The tax could be high because it is trying to offset damage that is not prevented by the market: road congestion, pollution and of course climate change. In terms of the language of economics it is (at least in part) a Pigouvian tax designed to offset externalities. In that case the tax is not distortionary at all: a world without fuel tax would not be ideal, and imposing a fuel tax gets us nearer that ideal. As Chart 3.1 from the paper indicates, these beneficial impacts of fuel duty are not modelled by the Treasury’s CGE model. (This is why, as John McDermott notes, this kind of partial dynamic modelling tends to be attractive to right wing outfits. Is it significant that the paper does not actually include the words ‘climate change’, and just uses the vaguer term environmental damage?)

So what the Treasury have done is modelled all the benefits of cutting the tax, but ignored all the costs. If this was but one stage in a process that would subsequently look at the cost of these externalities, and would realistically model how these tax cuts were paid for, fine. As a stand alone exercise, I’m afraid the Treasury study is worthless.

As Chris Giles notes in an excellent report, this is really part of a political exercise to build the case for tax cuts. It has two unfortunate side effects. First, it just encourages the suspicion among many that anything coming out of the UK Treasury at the moment is worthless propaganda. Second, it encourages those on the left who think that mainstream economics is inherently biased. But if you saw an opinion poll that asked people if they thought a particular tax was too high, without also asking what tax they would increase to balance the books, you would not say that this shows opinion polls are inherently biased. Instead you would just conclude that the person commissioning the poll had a political agenda. You might also ask whether the polling company should have accepted the commission.