Is Labour’s economic plan credible?

Labour have a huge set of spending proposals, many of which are unequivocally good like extra spending on the NHS, some are open to debate like abolishing student loans, and only one that I think is foolish (keeping the state pension age at 66). It would be good if all the debate was about these spending pledges. However the standard excuse for why you cannot have these things has always been about paying for them.

There are actually two issues here. The first concerns current spending, around £80 billion each year or about 4% of GDP, and public investment, expected to rise by about £50 billion a year or over 2% of GDP. Labour's current spending increase is financed £ for £ mainly by higher taxes on corporations, capital gains and high earners, while the investment is financed through borrowing. Let me take each in order,

The figure for the increase in current spending and taxes is large. I personally would not call it colossal but it is large. I would argue that reflects the extent of the squeeze we have seen on the public sector since 2010. But what about the argument that it makes the share of government current spending in GDP the highest since the 1970s? A much better comparison is to look at other countries, as the Resolution Foundation has done here.

What Labour’s plans do is to move the UK from the bottom of the league table in terms of the size of the state to somewhere around the middle.

I think this is a key part of the Corbyn project. Under Thatcher, but particularly since Cameron and Osborne, the UK has pretended it can have a state only a bit bigger than the US. But of course the US does not have a universal health service free at the point of delivery. So a key goal of this manifesto is to move us from the bottom to the average in terms of size of states. Another way of putting it is that the UK will become closer to the European average, and further away from the US/Canada level.

The reason why comparisons with the UK’s past are misleading can be summed up with three letters: the NHS. For reasons I have talked about in the past, spending on health has been increasing as a share of GDP since WWII. Every time the Conservatives try to halt this we get growing waiting times. That means that the share of the state in GDP is bound to rise over time, unless there is some offsetting component of public spending. In the 90s there was - lower military spending following the end of the Cold War - but now there is nothing. So the size of the state is bound to rise over time.

Who is going to pay for getting us to the average of European countries. Under Labour’s plans it is the rich and corporations. I think Paul Johnson in his initial TV comments on the manifesto confused two things, and as a result said some things which were very open to misinterpretation. (Initial reactions to complex documents are often hard to get right,) There is no ‘black hole’ in Labour’s costings. The IFS say the corporation tax numbers are realistic, and I know Labour have tried hard to make them so. Johnson’s point is that companies are not people, and some people will pay this tax. The question is who.

On this issue it has to be said that there is no settled view from the empirical evidence. At one end you have the studies presented in a recent IPPR report (p11). This suggests that most of corporation tax changes fall on shareholders. Now some of those shareholders will indeed be pension funds, but that might influence those who hold those funds rather than those who hold none. Other evidence suggests a 50/50 split between shareholders and workers, and some suggest workers end up paying an even greater share. The honest answer is we do not know what the incidence will be.

There also seems to be a legitimate difference of opinion over the longer term impact of higher corporation tax. The IFS say it will reduce investment and therefore profits. My own view is that corporation tax plays a pretty small roll in investment decisions. The most important factor for investment in non-traded goods is the future level of demand, and here Labour’s strategy is very positive. For exporting firms that are more mobile, factors like the skill base, ease of exporting and political stability play a big role, which is why leaving the EU is so costly.

I have no doubt that a few of the tax increases proposed by Labour will not yield as much as they hope. But most analysis misses the elephant in the room, and that is Brexit. I think it is highly likely Brexit will not happen under Labour, and even if it did it would be far less costly than either the Tories plans, or the effects embodied in the OBR base numbers that many people use. For this reason the LibDems have talked about a ‘Remain bonus’ (in the incredible event they could form a majority government). Labour will also get this bonus.

As to the investment part of the programme, the key issue is once again whether the investment is needed and well spent. We should not be talking about whether it is safe to borrow it. There is virtually no chance that this money will not be available at low long term real interest rates. No one should be scared of investing in the future of our economy and the planet, whether its by adding 2% or more to the deficit.

Much more interesting than the ‘do the numbers add up’ question is thinking about the macroeconomic impact of Labour’s plans. If you read some people there will be an immediate run on sterling as capital takes its money out of the UK. Of course if enough people believe this nonsense it might happen, for a day or two. But the one area where Labour are not radical is macroeconomic policy design. We will have Bank of England independence and a solid state of the art fiscal rule. As soon as that becomes clear any depreciation will be more than reversed, and I suspect there will be an appreciation from day 1. Sterling will appreciate on the expectations of an end to a hard Brexit and rising interest rates.

Why will interest rates rise? The large increase in public investment alone represents a large fiscal expansion. So does the increase in current spending, because a lot of the tax increases will come out of personal or corporate savings. A big injection of demand in the economy will require an increase in interest rates to prevent inflation rising, although the appreciation in sterling will provide some temporary cushioning.

An appreciation in sterling is likely to raise the real wage of every worker in this country. Is an increase in interest rates a problem? For some it may be, but of course for every borrower there is also a saver. From a macroeconomic point of view an increase in interest rates is long overdue. It is a sign that that after a wasted decade we are finally getting the economy moving. You thought the economy was already strong? Just more Conservatives lies. 2010 to 2018 has been the weakest period in terms of growth in GDP per head since the 1950s.  

In the unlikely event of a majority Labour government a stimulus of this scale might lead to shortages of skilled labour that would mean some plans may be delayed. More realistically that problem would be less severe in a minority government where some of the manifesto might be blocked by coalition partners. But either way, a Labour government implementing all or the major part of this manifesto will mean the economy as a whole will end a decade of low output and wage growth that has stifled UK innovation and productivity growth.

We should ignore the tired old discourse about whether we can pay for it, and focus on the benefits each individual spending increase or investment project might bring, and on the revitalisation of the economy that this manifesto will generate.

Decreasing the size of the state is very unpopular

I last talked about this question from the British Social Attitudes survey in 2014. Here is the latest version of this longstanding survey question (source and exact question here).

A point I made in the last post was that the percentage of people wanting lower taxes and less spending has always been less than 10%. If you believe the survey, and I see no reason not to, there has since 1983 been no public appetite for reducing government spending in order to cut taxes.

All the action over time is between those who want things to stay as they are, and those who want higher spending and taxes. As public spending has been cut in recent years, so the number of people wanting more spending and higher taxes has increased. However that proportion is still not up to the level it was in the 1990s.

Does this survey suggest that half the population want a larger state, and hardly anyone wants a smaller state? That depends on what you mean by the state. The question actually asks about spending on “health, education and social benefits”, so it seems reasonable that this is what people are responding to. They are taking as given that the government in the UK provides these things, and are simply expressing their view about whether they want more of these goods and are prepared to pay for them. The question does not ask about whether these goods should be produced by the state or by private contractors working for the state.

When the public are asked about who should own and run various activities, there is clear support for more rather than less public involvement. (Chart source.)

These numbers are from last year, so the collapse of Carillion and the problems with the East Coast rail line are likely to push public opinion even further away from the privatisation ideal. Note that only about 10% want privatisation of the NHS, which has continued rapidly under this government. A government that reduces government spending and taxes, and pushes privatisation of the NHS, seems like a government of the few and not the many.

I remember being told how nervous the last Labour government was when they decided to raise NIC rates to fund an increase in NHS spending. They had committed to not raising the basic rate of income tax in order (they thought) to be able to win elections. Given the data above, you might wonder why. But then I remembered how the Labour PLP had decided that they had lost the 2015 election by being too left wing, again without any real evidence. Perhaps the lesson of these two poll results is that the gap between what people actually want and the received wisdom of the Westminster bubble is very large.

Austerity Confusion, or why the Tories are trapped by austerity

What do we mean by an end to austerity? There seem to be two meanings being used currently. The first, used by Conservative politicians in particular, is equivalent to what economists call fiscal consolidation: cutting spending (or raising taxes) in order to reduce the deficit (as a share of GDP). However when Labour say they will end austerity, I think they mean something even simpler: to stop (and reverse) cuts to government spending as a share of GDP.

The confusion has been compounded by two factors. First, Conservative Chancellors have mainly used cuts to spending rather than tax increases as part of their austerity programme. Second, they have also justified cuts to spending that were needed to finance tax cuts (corporation tax, inheritance tax etc) as austerity, which is a clearly not fiscal consolidation and is simply a reduction in the size of the state.

How do I know Labour do not mainly mean ending fiscal consolidation when they talk about ending austerity. Just look at their GE2017 manifesto. That involved various increases in current spending financed entirely by higher taxes (including corporation and inheritance taxes). This manifesto, which helped gain them such rapid popularity in the GE2017 campaign, was a proposal to increase the size of the state.

I explore in a shortcut piece for the London Review of Books how this ambiguity is a serious problem for the Conservatives. Even if they ended austerity completely (made no further attempts to reduce the deficit), Labour would be able to offer a much more attractive fiscal package to the voters because Labour are prepared to undo the tax cuts the Conservatives have made over the last seven years. 

How do I know such a package would be attractive? Here I reproduce my favourite chart from the latest Social Attitudes survey that I talk about in the LRB piece.

The ‘neoliberal’ line is in yellow at the bottom. In 2010 nearly 90% either wanted to keep the size of the state the same or increase it. It is why the Conservatives were forced to use what I call deficit deceit - pretending cuts to the size of the state were about cutting the deficit - to pursue neoliberal goals (see my last post). By using deficit deceit to reduce the size of the state, when concern about the deficit was bound to wane, the Conservatives have condemned themselves to current unpopularity as voters realise what they are losing.

Why didn't this stop the Conservatives winning the 2015 General Election? Here is a YouGov poll that explains why.

In 2015 more people blamed Labour that the Conservatives for spending cuts. This was translated into views about economic competence because the Conservatives, with the help of mediamacro, made reducing the deficit the key variable in judging economic policy. We are now in a period where this narrative still has an influence but it is no longer enough to win an election. The Conservatives dare not throw it away because many voters still believe it. They have become trapped by their own austerity policy and the reduction in the size of the state that went with it..

Austerity, the Treasury and Spending under Labour

Philip Stephens of the Financial Times lashes into George Osborne’s plans for more fiscal austerity over the next five years. He argues that cuts of the order of magnitude proposed, on top of previous cuts, can only harm public services that people want or need. He writes “The really intelligent thing to do, though, would be to defer or, better still, abandon his silly fiscal target.” Bravo to that.

He also says something else which I found interesting. He writes Osborne has “been egged on by a Treasury obsessed with expiating its sins of carelessness and hubris during the pre-crash years.” As I think I have said before, one of the interesting and as far as I know untold tales about UK austerity is the extent to which it is encouraged or discouraged by senior management in the Treasury. I raise this in ignorance of which it is: I have on a few occasions seen senior civil servants defend austerity, but that is their job, and I’m not a good enough mind reader to know whether their heart was in it.

I have, however, made a general point about finance ministries and independent central banks. Delegating macroeconomic stabilisation means that finance ministries no longer need to have so much in house expertise on how the macroeconomy works. Furthermore in the UK the establishment of the OBR, which took over responsibility from the Treasury for macro and aggregate fiscal forecasting, reduced the need for that expertise still further. This means that in any contest between controlling spending (which finance ministries always have to do) and looking after the broader economy, it has become more likely that the economy will lose out.

Which inclines me to the view that Treasury management had a more encouraging than discouraging role, but it would be interesting to know if this is right. I was also struck by the phrase “sins of carelessness and hubris during the pre-crash years.” At first sight this suggests that the Treasury allowed Labour to embark on a large increase in public spending as a share of output, much of which was waste that could be reduced by greater efficiency. This relates to another point you often hear, which is that 2010-2015 austerity was largely painless.

Let’s fact check the numbers. When Gordon Brown took over the Treasury, total spending was around 37% of GDP. By following existing plans this fell to about 36%, but by financial year 2007/8 it was 40% of GDP. That is where we should stop if we want to exclude the impact of the recession. An increase worth 3% of GDP certainly sounds significant. However public net investment in 1997 was unsustainably low at 0.5%. If we just look at current spending it shows an increase of only 2% of GDP between 1997 and 2007.

Was that increase waste and inefficiency? If we look at the share of NHS spending over that period, it rose by around 2.5%. In other words, the increased share of government spending was largely accounted for by higher NHS spending. That was not Treasury carelessness and hubris, but a deliberate policy decision.

One final point. There are two ways that you can squeeze the public sector without much visible pain, besides greater efficiency. First you can cut investment, which no one notices until much later (unless you are unlucky enough to have a lot of rain). Second, you can cut spending on groups who do not have a public voice. Those who find they are excluded or reassessed for benefits, or the elderly who have had their support from their local authority cut, would not call past austerity painless. It seems that painlessness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.      

The path from deficit concern to deficit deceit

I have always written that the arguments in 2010 for focusing fiscal policy on reducing debt were understandable. They were wrong, but you could understand why reasonable people might make those arguments. In particular at the time the problem of the recession appeared to be over, recovery was under way, and the Bank of England seemed confident in the power of unconventional monetary policy. It seemed reasonable to move attention to the deficit.

So when 20 economists and policy makers wrote in February 2010 apparently supporting George Osborne’s deficit reduction plans, I was not surprised. The majority of macroeconomists, like me, disagreed, and we were right, but I could understand where they were coming from. One of those signing that letter was Lord Turnbull, head of the Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary between 2002 and 2005. By August 2012 around half of those that signed the letter had the good sense and honesty to backtrack on what they had written. The Chancellor may also have (wisely) revised his original plan to end the current deficit within 5 years, but his zeal to bring down debt rapidly by cutting government spending had not disappeared. When he was re-elected in May, it was for a programme of renewed austerity.

But the story does not end there. A few days ago Lord Turnbull had the opportunity to question the Chancellor on his drive for further austerity. This is a part of what he said.

“I think what you are doing actually, is, the real argument is you want a smaller state and there are good arguments for that and some people don’t agree but you don’t tell people you are doing that. What you tell people is this story about the impoverishment of debt which is a smokescreen. The urgency of reducing debt, the extent, I just can’t see the justification for it.”

A former head of the civil service, who had initially supported Osborne on the deficit, was now accusing him of deliberate deceit. Big news you might have thought. And quite a turnaround in just 5 years.

Yet it is not surprising. Osborne’s fiscal plans really have no basis in economics. That leaves two alternatives. Either Osborne is just stupid and cannot take advice, or he has other motives. George Osborne is clearly not stupid, which leaves only the second possibility. It is therefore entirely logical that Lord Turnbull should come to agree with what some of us were saying some time ago.

What a strange world we are now in. The government goes for rapid deficit reduction as a smokescreen for reducing the size of the state. No less than a former cabinet secretary accuses the Chancellor of this deceit. Yet when a Labour leadership contender adopts an anti-austerity policy he is told it is extreme and committing electoral suicide. Is it any wonder that a quarter of a million Labour party members voted for change.

Speak for yourself, or why anti-Keynesian views survive

“The evidence for the Keynesian worldview is very mixed. Most economists come down in favor or against it because of their prior ideological beliefs. Krugman is a Keynesian because he wants bigger government. I’m an anti-Keynesian because I want smaller government.”

Statements like this tell us rather a lot about those who make them. As statements about why people hold macroeconomic views they are wide of the mark. Of course there is confirmation bias, and ideological bias, but as the term ‘bias’ suggests, it does not mean that evidence has no impact on the views of the majority of academics.

The big/small government idea makes no theoretical sense. Why would wanting a larger state make someone a Keynesian? Many Keynesians, and most New Keynesians, nowadays acknowledge that monetary policy should be used to manage demand when it can. They also know that any fiscal stimulus only works, or at least works best, if it involves temporary increases in government spending. So being a Keynesian is not a very effective way of getting a larger state.

It is also obviously false empirically. In the UK and US a large majority of economists appear to hold Keynesian views. I think it rather unlikely that a similar majority want a large state, and I can think of some notable Keynesians who clearly do not. Central bank models are typically Keynesian. Does that mean central banks want a larger state? No, it means the evidence suggests Keynesian economics works.

Russ Roberts says more recently:

“The evidence is a mess leaving each of us free to cherry-pick what sustains our worldview be it ideological or philosophical or just consistent with our flavor of economics.”

Ryan Bourne of the Institute of Economic Affairs goes further:

“when the facts change, the Keynesians don’t change their minds.”

To illustrate their belief that Keynesians ignore awkward facts both the authors above use the example of US growth following the 2013 sequester. (In my experience anti-Keynesians tend to shy away from data series, and especially econometrics, and prefer evidence of the ‘they said this, and it didn’t happen’ kind - particularly if ‘they’ happens to be Paul Krugman.) The problem is that this episode actually illustrates the opposite: that anti-Keynesians are so keen to grasp anything that appears to conflict with Keynesian ideas that they fail to do simple analysis and ignore others that do.

In this post I just looked at the data and did some simple arithmetic to show that this episode was quite consistent with Keynesian fiscal policy analysis. I’m sure others have done the same. But such analysis just gets ignored: they have a superficially good story, and that is all that matters. (Read this post to see how Scott Sumner in response to my work dug himself an even deeper hole.)

Why do we have to go over, yet again, that the clear majority of studies show that Obama’s stimulus worked. Why do we have to keep going over why UK growth in 2013 does not prove austerity works? Why do these people never mention the meta studies that confirm basic Keynesian analysis of fiscal policy? Because they want to believe that the “evidence is a mess” so they can carry on holding their anti-Keynesian views.

Parts of the political right have always had a deep ideological problem with Keynesian analysis. As Colander and Landreth describe, the first US Keynesian textbook was banned. New Classical economists, for all the many positive contributions they brought to macro (in the view of most mainstream Keynesians), also tried to overthrow Keynesian analysis and they failed. 

When anti-Keynesians tell you that support or otherwise for Keynesian macroeconomics depends on belief about the size of the state, they are telling something about where their own views come from. When they tell you everyone ignores evidence that conflicts with their views, they are telling you how they treat evidence. And the fact that some on the right take this position tells you why anti-Keynesian views continue to survive despite overwhelming evidence in favour of Keynesian theory.

Destroying the state is no accident

In a discussion of George Osborne’s plans for the deficit, I suggested that - if we were to take them seriously - they could only be rationalised as an attempt to fundamentally reduce the size of the state. Chris Dillow, following Rick and Giles, seems to prefer the cock-up theory, whereby the destruction of the state is an accidental result of an obsession with the deficit. I’m afraid they are wrong - this is no accident.

I suspect we would not be having this discussion if we were talking about the US. Indeed, Brad DeLong, in commenting on a different post where I ask why some academics so dislike fiscal stimulus, says I’m trying so hard to be fair that I lose sight of the ball. He asks “how can you not think it is all ideology on the other side ..”. That was a discussion about academics, who you might hope were more objective and less politically strategic than politicians.

So why do I think the sharp reduction in the size of the state in the UK is no accident? The most obvious piece of evidence is how the deficit has been reduced. Osborne originally planned an 80/20 split between cuts in spending and increases in taxes. In practice, as Giles pointed out at the Resolution Foundation’s meeting, deficit reduction has almost all been about spending cuts, with almost nothing net on taxation (largely because of the LibDem inspired increases in the personal allowance). If it really is all just about the deficit, why the imbalance? As one time European Commissioner Olli Rehn put it, in complaining that (initially) France was trying to comply with Eurozone deficit rules by putting up taxes: “Budgetary discipline must come from a reduction in public spending and not from new taxes”.

The argument I use in my earlier post is that there is no sound macroeconomic case for a rapid reduction in the share of debt to GDP at a time when interest rates are still at or near their lower bound and there are risks to the recovery. So, if the macroeconomic argument for deficit reduction is unsound, there has to be another motive. Chris turns that on its head. He says: “whereas the arguments for austerity are plain daft - talk of the "nation's credit card" is sub-literate drivel - arguments for shrinking the state are at least reasonable.” Why use daft arguments rather than reasonable arguments? If they want to reduce the size of the state, why not just argue for that? Why use the deficit as a cover?

Before I answer that, let me raise another question which frequently arises. Why on earth has Ed Balls come to accept the austerity case? As Tony Yates tweeted to him today: “why are you reluctant to point out that we *need* deficit stimulus while monetary policy is limited by the zlb [etc]?” [Subsequent post here.] As Bill Keegan reminds us, this is the same Ed Balls that in 2010, while acknowledging that there should be a deficit reduction plan, said “but only once growth is fully secured and over a markedly longer period than George Osborne is currently planning …Just think if Clement Attlee’s government at the end of the second world war had decided that the first priority was to reduce the debts built up during the war – there would have been no money to fund the creation of the NHS, no money to rebuild the railways and housing destroyed in the blitz, no money to fund the expansion of the welfare state.”

The reason for this about turn is of course mediamacro, which is why I go on about it so much. When the entire media jumps on your leader because he forgot the bit of his speech where he mentions the deficit, as a politician you are bound to conclude that the battle has been lost. It is not that journalists were wrong to point out the omission - the problem was the presumption shared by nearly everyone that this was a gaff because the deficit is in reality all important. And please don’t say politicians who bow to this media pressure ‘lack courage’ - a politician’s job is to win elections.

The cock-up argument could respond that somehow the government has got trapped by its own rhetoric. It used the deficit line as an obvious stick with which to beat the opposition, but it has somehow got out of control. Except of course that Osborne did slow down/stop deficit reduction when it looked like the recovery might not come before the election. He did not feel trapped then.

Chris asks why there has been no media campaign to promote the idea of a smaller state. He writes: “I'd encourage sympathetic journalists - of which Osborne has many - to write about excessive or wasteful spending. I'd commission management consultants and civil servants to show how to improve the efficiency of each government department. And I'd find some economists to show that a smaller state tends to promote growth.” But this misses a key point I have often made about mediamacro. I do not believe (despite what some commentators on my posts imagine) that the media can persuade people of anything. In particular, they would find it very difficult to persuade people we need a smaller state.

As I showed here, seven times as many people want higher taxes and spending than want lower taxes and spending. People like their NHS, they want resources put into state education, and pensions are also popular, which is why these items tend to be protected or ring-fenced. It would be very hard to get traction arguing that we should reduce spending on these items. As Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph, wrote: “The bottom line is that you can only really make serious inroads into the size of the state during an economic crisis. This may be pro-cyclical, but there is never any appetite for it in the good times; it can only be done in the bad.”

While people are clear about their preferences for public goods, they are not experts on macroeconomics. So when they are told that the deficit has to be reduced - painful though that will be - then they think about their own budgets and it makes sense. They remember the Eurozone crisis which involved governments not being able to sell their debt. Media myths have to come from half-truths.

Nor is it the case that the right has not helped prepare the ground for replacing the state with the private sector where it can. The neoliberal line is that the state is always slow and inefficient and the private sector is always dynamic and innovative. It is a meme that is so pervasive that it came as a shock to many when Mariana Mazzucato pointed out how much innovations like the iphone depended on state funded research. Rather than being bureaucratic and conservative, the state was often where the high risk innovation took place. Equally welfare fraud happens and it offends people a lot, but that has been shamelessly exploited in some quarters, a trend encouraged by the Chancellor himself.

The neoliberal force is strong with this government, and I see no reason to believe that does not also apply to their Chancellor and his macroeconomic policy.

A campaign to mislead

This week UK taxpayers are starting to receive letters which detail where their money goes. It is a George Osborne initiative designed, supposedly, to increase transparency about how taxes are spent. Here is what taxpayers will see.

It shows that a quarter of state spending (including debt interest) goes on welfare. And everyone knows what welfare involves - welfare payments to the unemployed, the poor and disabled etc. 

Except that this is not how welfare is defined here. As the IFS point out, welfare in this figure includes pension payments for those employed by the state, like nurses and teachers. Why the welfare total should include these pension payments, while the state pension itself is separated out, is inexplicable. The IFS also point out that this welfare total includes spending on social care, which is not a cash transfer, and which would be more logically included under health. The IFS also show how it would be quite easy to break this welfare total down into more meaningful parts.

So the way the chart aggregates welfare spending appears not only wrong, but also strange if the idea is to inform the public. But of course that is not the aim. This presentation is part of the Chancellor’s election campaign to convince voters that there is plenty of scope to cut public spending further by reducing this huge welfare bill. The idea is that many of those receiving this information will assume welfare involves all those state handouts to scroungers that their newspapers are always providing examples of.

The background to all this is straightforward. When people are asked whether they want higher, the same or lower taxes and government spending, about 35% say they want higher taxes and spending, while about 7% want lower taxes and spending. For a Conservative party committed to reducing the size of the state, this is a serious problem. The solution is two-fold. First suggest, mainly through a constant stream of newspaper articles but occasionally backed up by TV and the Chancellor himself, that some part of public spending is wasted on transfers to the undeserving poor. Second, label that ‘welfare’ and exaggerate its size as much as possible, using in this case public funds to do so. This is not about transparency, and it is not even about spin. It is about giving a distorted view of reality to produce a political outcome that only a small minority of people appear to actually want.

Postscript (6/11/14) A number of people have written about how misleading the government's presentation is, although most do not put the background in quite as stark a way as I do. To see why this matters, here is a nice poll from YouGov, which shows how opinions are influenced by better information. Which, of course, George Osborne knows full well. 

UK attitudes on the size of the state

This is a follow up to my post on shrinking the state, but actually it is about something I found when thinking about the Scottish independence referendum, so let me start there. If Scotland votes for independence, it will be because enough Labour voters voted Yes despite Labour’s support for the Union. It seems quite clear from the Scottish Nationalists’ pitch in these closing weeks that the appeal to these voters is that by voting for independence you can ensure you never again have a Conservative government.

Yet there is a puzzle here. England and Scotland are not so different in terms of political attitudes. This is true across a wide range of issues: Scots are only a little more to the left than the English. Furthermore, as John Curtice and Rachel Ormston show here, this difference has not noticeably increased over the last ten years. Let’s focus on the specific issue of the size of the state. Here is the proportion of people who thought taxes should rise to increase spending on health, education and social benefits in each country.

The proportion is generally higher in Scotland, but not by much, and it has been falling in both countries over the last ten years.

When I saw this data, I wondered about what was missing from the chart. Respondents were given two alternative responses: the level of taxation should be less, or it should stay about the same. Here is the same question for the UK as a whole (source: British Social Attitudes survey).

The interesting result is how few people want lower taxes - always below 10%. The changes involve shifts between more spending and taxes to no change, rather than to lower spending and taxes.

In terms of movements over time, it is interesting to compare this with data on the levels of UK government spending and taxes, over a longer period than I gave in my previous post.

 If you think about the turn of the millennium as being the end of the Thatcher era, then the Thatcher years saw a reduction in the size of the state, whether measured in terms of taxes or spending. From the previous chart, it looks like this was against popular opinion at the time, because we saw a sustained rise in the proportion of people wanting a larger state in the 1980s. This proportion started falling over the same period that Labour were increasing the level of public spending, which again makes sense. So there is little evidence of a change in public attitudes here: the state was too small in the 1980s and 1990s, and it began to move towards a level the majority desired during the last Labour government. There is absolutely no public mandate for any renewed shrinking of the state.

Which prompted this thought. As public attitudes either side of the border are not so very different, and given these particular attitudes about the size of the state, perhaps the relevant question is not why the Conservatives and UKIP are so weak in Scotland, but why are they so strong in England? As John Ruddy notes here, in the mid 1950s the Conservatives won over 50% of the Scottish vote. What happened since then was not a collapse at the expense of Labour, but at the expense of the SNP and Liberals.

Perhaps a better way to start thinking about what has been happening is as follows. The big change over time has not involved public attitudes, but the political position on economic issues of the Conservative Party. Just like the Republicans in the US, it has moved substantially to the right, beginning with Thatcher, and continuing under Cameron. Just as with the Tea Party in the US, there is a sizeable minority that wants to go further. However this rightward shift does not reflect majority opinion, and so when enough alternatives exist - as in Scotland - votes have drifted away from the Conservatives to more moderate centre right parties. In a two party system like the US, or with a voting system that favours the two main incumbent parties like the UK, that cannot happen.

Shrinking the State

More on George Osborne’s plans, courtesy of the OBR’s latest publication. (Campaigning for a UK Fiscal Council was one of my better calls - just imagine if you had to rely on today’s government for this kind of information.)

Consider three points in time: 2001/2 (when the UK budget was last in balance, and still largely reflecting the actions of the previous Conservative government), 2007/8 (pre-recession, under Labour), and 2018/9, when George Osborne also intends us to be back in balance. The first chart actually comes from the OBR’s historical database, which only covers the broad aggregates. (It would be fantastic if this database could include more disaggregated information.)

This shows total government receipts (taxes) and expenditure (spending) as a percent of GDP. The two lines meet at the start and end. In 2007/8 we had a budget deficit of 2.6% of GDP. At the time that seemed a bit on the high side: something between 1.5% and 2% would have kept the debt to GDP ratio constant. (Budget balance implies a falling debt to GDP ratio.) For this post the point to note was that the Labour government chose to use this fiscal loosening to increase spending rather than cut taxes.

The Conservative government plans to do the reverse. So does that mean that it is just trying to undo the increase that occurred under Labour? The answer is no, and this is where the OBR’s latest report comes into its own.

Their chart shows how we get from the deficit of 2007/8 to the small surplus of 2018/9. (There is, as I note here, no good macroeconomic reason to aim for a surplus.) The cuts in spending are not just the size of the 2007/8 deficit - they are much larger for two main reasons: higher debt interest and higher ‘welfare’ spending. The reason for the higher debt interest is straightforward: debt is much higher because of the recession (and to a small extent the fiscal stimulus in 2009). Although academics often assume that higher debt interest is paid for by raising taxes, a more ‘neutral’ approach would be to raise taxes and cut government spending. Osborne plans to just cut spending.

The increase in welfare payments is probably not what you might think it is. The report’s Table 5.7 shows it is not higher unemployment benefits or income support: by 2018/9 unemployment benefit is the same as in 2007/8, and income support is 0.5% lower as a share of GDP (which is the main reason why poverty will increase over the next five years). Housing benefit is 0.3% higher as a share of GDP (partly reflecting depressed real earnings), but the main reason is the state pension, which is almost 1% higher as a share of GDP. This represents both an increased ‘caseload’ (more pensioners) and a more generous value of pensions themselves. Although the numbers suggest that here too Osborne plans to pay for this additional spending by cutting the size of government, he has indicated that he hopes to reduce this increase in welfare payments by some, as yet undeclared, means.

So this is why the reduction in the size of the state planned for 2018/9 is much more than reversing Labour’s increase: in fact, if welfare cannot be cut further, to decrease its size to “probably to the lowest share of GDP since 1938” (p128). In this particular respect, therefore, this government plans to go well beyond anything Margaret Thatcher ever attempted. I suspect when some people write that this Conservative party is more right wing than any since the war, many reading think this is hyperbole. On this metric at least, it is simply fact.  

The state, corporations and markets

I have written in the past that I have no idea how large the state should be, so this issue has no bearing on my views about austerity or fiscal stimulus. In this post I explain why I have no idea. My argument is that the optimal private/public split will depend on a number of particular and highly contextual issues, about which economics will have a lot to say but where it is unlikely to generally point in one direction. It seems worth making this - I hope uncontroversial - point when the current UK government seems keen to privatise or outsource by one means or another so much of the public sector.

There are two claims about government often associated with those who argue in favour of privatisation. One is that markets provide a better allocation system (e.g. here, and follow-ups here and here). For many activities this is undoubtedly true, particularly where markets involve a large number of buyers and sellers, and information problems are small. However much public sector activity is in areas where market imperfections and informational problems of various kinds are endemic. In that situation, market based systems may perform worse than alternatives: a comparison of health systems in the UK and US is an obvious example (e.g. here).

The simple fact that large corporations exist could illustrate potential problems with markets as an allocation mechanism. Large corporations may exist because they find it more efficient to organise activity in a non-market (often hierarchical) manner, or they may exist because markets can be circumvented by rent seeking, or they may exist because of increasing returns. This means markets can be fragile or inefficient. Economics is not a discipline that tells us market allocation is always best, but one that tells us when it may work well and when it may not.

In reality privatisation or contracting out often involves relocating some activity from government bureaucracies to corporate bureaucracies. George Monbiot argues that we are seeing power gradually shift from the former to the latter. The second general argument in favour of this shift is that the profit motive provides an effective incentive system for ensuring efficiency. Yet this argument alone is not enough. It is perfectly possible to run parts of government like a company, where the explicit aim is to maximise profits. Take the East Coast mainline rail company in the UK, for example. It has been running as a publically owned company since 2009, after the private company running the franchise got into difficulties. It appears to have been run very successfully under public ownership, but the government wants to return it to the private sector. The motive does not appear to be pressure from the public or customers.

The complete argument for preferring private sector rather than public sector bureaucracies is that shareholders are better at ensuring managers maximise profits (and therefore efficiency) than politicians. In fact the argument has to be stronger than this: the gain in profitability has to exceed the cost of diverting some of those profits from the public to shareholders. Again I think in many cases this will be true, particularly if checks within government are poor and corruption widespread.

However, control by shareholders may be far from ideal, as the recent debate in the UK about the proposed takeover of AstraZeneca by Pfizer has illustrated: see this article by Martin Wolf for example. One argument that has been made in this debate is that shareholders may be unable to prevent managers focusing too much on the short term, because that enables them to expropriate a share of the surplus in excess of their marginal product. Shareholders’ ability to directly control managers appears weak, and the takeover mechanism itself seems highly ineffective at punishing inefficiency. Martin Wolf argues that the real purpose of shareholders is to provide insurance against unexpected shocks that could otherwise lead to bankruptcy.

The process of tendering for the outsourcing of services paid for by the public sector allows periodic pressures for efficiency. However often the contracts involved are very complex, and so they also provide an opportunity for firms to exploit the inexperience of the civil servants who represent the public. Finally if we want those undertaking public activities to be accountable as well as efficient, then it is not obvious that outsourcing is helpful.

What this all suggests to me is that the costs and benefits of privatisation will vary from case to case, and that this is an area where microeconomic analysis will be central. (For example, see this book by Massimo Florio which looked at the results of the Thatcher privatisations.) In such cases, an ideology that says that the private sector is always better (or worse) is not only unhelpful but dangerous. For example, an ideology that says that private sector provision is always better can be exploited by rent seeking firms. It can lead governments to privatise on unfavourable (to the public) terms, or with inadequate mechanisms in place to ensure value for money and prevent exploitation. At worst, rent seeking firms may be able to exert sufficient control over the political process to make this happen.

Given that my area of expertise lies elsewhere, you might have expected me to consider a macro argument that is sometimes made for privatisation, which is that it can help bring down public debt. This is either a terrible argument all the time, or just most of the time, but which will have to wait for a later post.

The scandal of the austerity deception

I have been on holiday somewhere with understandably limited internet access, so I missed this post from assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph, Jeremy Warner. Forget most of the text, which comments on some recent posts by Paul Krugman and myself, and head to the last two paragraphs. The penultimate starts with this:

“In the end, you are either a big-state person, or a small-state person, and what big-state people hate about austerity is that its primary purpose is to shrink the size of government spending.”

And the final paragraph starts:

“The bottom line is that you can only really make serious inroads into the size of the state during an economic crisis. This may be pro-cyclical, but there is never any appetite for it in the good times; it can only be done in the bad.”

There is the old joke that there are just two kinds of people in the world, those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't. The trouble with following an ideology is that you tend to make this ‘with us or against us’ division on what is seen as fundamental. In these terms I am a non-person, because I have no idea what the ideal size of the state should be (although I suspect within an ideology that defines itself by the virtues of a small state that makes me ‘one of them’). For me the intellectual case against austerity has nothing to do with the size of the state. The key argument I and others are making for those who want a smaller state is that it is folly to try to achieve it in a recession when interest rates are at the zero lower bound.

The problem for ‘small state people’ like Warner is that “there is never any appetite for it in the good times”. I can only interpret this as meaning that in good times people appear to be quite content with the size of the state they have, and will not elect a government which aims to reduce the size of the state. So why are things different in a crisis? Do people’s preferences over the size of the state relative to GDP really change when we are in recession? Or could it be that in the current crisis people are told that government debt is ‘out of control’, and that a reduction in government spending is necessary to bring the nation’s finances to order. Cuts in government spending are being justified by the need to reduce debt and not because of the virtues of a small state.

Reducing the size of the state temporarily to reduce debt, and reducing it permanently are rather different things. There is apparently no appetite for the latter, so why not push for the former as a way of achieving the latter? As a political ruse it sounds very clever, and it is currently working in the Eurozone, US and UK. But it remains a ruse: a giant deception played on electorates across the globe.

So no wonder Jeremy Warner is tired of the austerity debate. As he says “if you attempt to rip big chunks of government demand out of the economy, it is bound to have negative short term consequences.” Seeing the government you support trying to avoid making this admission must be painful. It would have been much more honest to say that the loss of output was worth it for the long term benefits that a small state would (allegedly) bring, but that is not the argument that governments are making – instead it was all about a ‘debt crisis’. This becomes even more painful when the intellectual basis for the debt crisis argument falls away.

Surely this deception is scandalous. The Telegraph played a major role in the MPs expenses affair. Many UK MPs had been overinflating their expenses because they believed their salaries were unjustifiably low because the public never had the appetite to increase them. So the end justified the means. The Telegraph quite rightly exposed this practice, and those MPs were held to account. Yet in financial terms the cost of the austerity deception is infinitely greater. To some the end (a smaller state) justifies both the cost (percentages of output lost) and the means (telling people it is all about a debt crisis). Yet it involves deceiving electorates around the world, which is why no government politician is ever going to be as honest as Jeremy Warner has been.

Annoying Anti-Fiscal Stimulus Arguments Nos. 3 and 4

For numbers 1 and 2, see this post.

Number 3. We must reduce the size of the state.

This argument is often there but unstated, because to say it explicitly involves a deception. Instead it sometimes goes by the euphemism of ‘structural’ or ‘supply side’ reform. (No, I’m not saying there are no genuinely useful structural reforms out there, but just what some people mean when they use this term.) But as those making the case for austerity get more desperate, I have seen this argument a few times recently.

It involves a deception, because reducing the size of the state has nothing in principle to do with austerity and stimulus. I personally have no strong views about what the size of the state should be: some things are clearly done better by the private sector, while others are done better by the state, and how this eventually pans out for the aggregate I have no idea. But this has almost nothing to do with the need to increase demand when interest rates are at the zero lower bound. The deception comes when austerity mainly involves cutting spending (as in the UK), because it is anticipated that it will be very easy to cut taxes later on once austerity is over.

When I say it has almost nothing to do with stimulating demand, this is why I say almost. A long established and theoretically robust method of stimulating demand is a balanced budget fiscal expansion, where you temporarily increase government spending by temporarily raising taxes. However as it need involve nothing more than bringing investment projects forward in time (e.g. repairing roads and schools before they completely fall apart), it is not really increasing the size of the state. The idea that what is temporary is bound to become permanent does not stand up.

4. We must think of the children

This is annoying not because it is wrong in principle. Instead it is wrong because it either ignores who suffers the costs of austerity, or because it is not genuine. The argument that is right in principle is that, by increasing debt, we are ceteris paribus redistributing money from future generations to the current generation. There may be a complete offset if that increase in debt avoids hysteresis effects (or enables investment with beneficial supply side effects). Yet even leaving that aside, there are often very good reasons to redistribute income. When a country suffers a natural disaster, both governments and individuals freely give money to help those involved. We can think about the recession as a similar disaster.

If that does not convince you, ask who is bearing the brunt of this recession. All around the world, youth unemployment has risen by more than unemployment in general. If you asked those who cannot find a job after leaving school or college whether they would be willing to pay higher future taxes in order to get a job today, what do you think their answer would be?

Why do I suspect that this argument is sometimes not genuine? Because some of those who make this case also argue against measures to tackle climate change. Now even if you are sceptical about the science, the potential costs of you being wrong and 98% of scientists being right are so great that if you really cared about future generations you would support measures to reduce carbon emissions. (See Martin Wolf here or Martin Weitzman here.) So when, for example, a recent Wall Street Journal article argued that “we need an exclusive focus on supply-side reform [reducing the size of the state] to promote growth. Luxuries such as family-friendly employment legislation or green initiatives such as the carbon taxes are no longer affordable in the age of austerity” you know something is not right. The biggest risk to the well being of future generations right now is climate change, so what is the point of increasing future growth if the cost is doing nothing to reduce that risk. Of course that combination might make sense if you only care about what happens in the next few decades, but if that is your view then don’t tell me we should avoid a short run increase in debt for the sake of future generations.