Linking tax credits and the fiscal charter

I have made fun in the past about Labour politicians and supporters who in public trip up once the word borrowing is mentioned. An interviewer only has to ask ‘but if Labour reverses this cut it will mean more borrowing’ and the interviewee stumbles around in a way that shouts to anyone watching that Labour have a vulnerability here.

It is a vulnerability that helped lead to the disastrous decision under the interim leadership not to oppose Osborne’s cuts in tax credits, and to McDonnell’s embarrassing initial decision (now reversed) to support the charter. But now that Labour has sorted itself out on both issues, it needs to stop avoiding the borrowing question. Take this otherwise assured performance by Owen Smith on Newsnight last night (27 minutes in, HT Owen Jones).

Here is what Owen Smith should have said when asked whether reversing the cuts to tax credits would lead to more borrowing.

“The Chancellor has said he needs to cut tax credits to meet his new fiscal charter. Labour oppose this charter, because it makes no economic sense. Osborne cannot find a single economist who supports his plan. Imposing a work penalty to pay borrowing off more quickly is just counterproductive, because discouraging people from working makes the economy weaker. This was supposed to be a government that encouraged work, yet here is the Chancellor doing the opposite in order to meet a charter that only his MPs support.”

If the interviewer persists with “so you will borrow more”, say

“Labour would not need to cut tax credits because we would balance current income and spending, leaving room for the country to invest. Labour would borrow to invest, whereas Osborne is paying for the little public investment he is doing by cutting tax credits. What matters is government debt in relation to GDP, and our policy would mean that debt relative to GDP would fall under Labour.”

I am sure those skilled in spin could sharpen this, but you get the idea. The days when deficit fetishism gripped voters are coming to an end. Labour needs to change its rhetoric to reflect this, and paint Osborne into the ideological corner he occupies.  

The Corbyn Phenomenon

For readers not in the UK, some background. When Ed Miliband resigned as Labour leader after the 2015 election defeat, the election process for a new leader went like this. You needed 35 MPs (members of parliament) to nominate potential successors, and there would then be a contest over a few months before party members got to vote to choose one of the nominated candidates as leader. 3 people got the required number of MPs to nominate them, but the candidate from the left - Jeremy Corbyn - did not have enough MPs. Some MPs felt it would be good for balance to have someone from the left standing, so they switched their nominations in order that he too got the required 35.

From this you will gather that the left of the Labour party is pretty weak in parliament. It was also thought to be weak among Labour party members: the candidate of the left in the elections of 2010, Diane Abbott, received little support from the membership. So the general expectation was that Corbyn - who is not a particularly charismatic speaker - would also get little support this time. This expectation has proved completely wrong: polls put him in front, his meetings have been attracting growing audiences, and senior party figures are now panicking that he might actually win (in a similar manner to the reaction of Republican grandees to Trump winning their nomination).

Perhaps as a result, a few people have asked me to write about Corbyn’s macroeconomic policies - in some cases in the expectation that I would rubbish them, and in other cases in the hope that I would provide support. But the real question people should ask first is why is Corbyn proving to be so popular. It is nonsense to suggest that the Labour party membership has suddenly become markedly more left wing than it used to be. Corbyn’s popularity has much more to do with how the party in parliament has responded to both election defeats.

On issues like welfare, immigration, business or inequality, you can see Labour as having two impulses: one to go with its natural inclination, and another to try and woo the floating middle or working class voter whose views seem to be nearer those of the Daily Mail or Sun respectively (i.e. much more regressive). In terms of policy, this tended to produce either inoffensive emptiness, focusing on small differences from the government, or simple right wing appeasement. But perhaps more importantly, in terms of style it produced a kind of defensiveness where the chief goal of their leaders was to avoid anything that could be used against them by the right wing press. And not without reason: when Miliband gave a thoughtful speech where he talked about how you could have irresponsible capitalism that just went for the quick buck whatever the long term or social costs, he was forever after dubbed anti-business. This resulted in an opposition seemingly devoid of any clear policy message.

The issue of austerity is indicative. Labour have never adopted a clear anti-austerity line, even during the 2010-11 period of acute cuts. This is because they knew that much of the press would label this as fiscal irresponsibility, and that the BBC follows the lead of the press and the financial markets on these things. Their actual proposals in the 2015 elections involved far fewer cuts than Osborne promised, but because they were desperate to appear to be ‘tough on the deficit’, they either gave out a confused message or tried to talk about other things. Crucially, they failed to defend their record in government. As a result of their 2015 defeat, many senior party figures are now suggesting it is best for Labour to essentially follow Osborne’s macro plans.

The reaction of most of the parliamentary party to the 2015 defeat seems to be that the pre-2015 strategy was right in principle but had just not focused enough in placating the marginal English voter, which they believe means more appeasement and shifting further to the right. The party membership seems to have reacted very differently to the 2015 defeat. The membership appears to believe that the pre-2015 strategy has clearly failed, and it is time to start talking with conviction about the issues you believe in. This is exactly what Jeremy Corbyn does: he is a conviction politician, who is not prepared to try and be someone else to win votes.

Does that mean the choice is between arguing for your convictions and losing or trying to appease the right wing press and maybe winning? No, there is a way through this dilemma, but it is a way that is alien to most of those in the Labour party, and that is to spend much more time thinking about political spin. Labour lost the election because they lost the battle of spin. Labour did not lose in 2015 because they were anti-business, but because they were perceived as anti-business. They did not lose in 2015 because they had been fiscally irresponsible in government, but because they were perceived to be. They did not lose Scotland because their policies were damaging to Scotland, but because they were perceived to be.

Again, lets use fiscal policy as an indicative example. Labour lost because they were perceived to have been, and perceived to continue to be, fiscally irresponsible. That perception did not just arise because of a biased press or bad luck, but also because of good political judgement by Osborne and bad judgement by Miliband and Balls. Before the financial crisis it was generally thought popular support for a higher level of public spending was too strong, which is why the Conservatives had pledged to match Labour’s spending plans. But Osborne was quick to see that the recession changed things, because he could attempt to blame Labour for the deficit that was bound to arise as a result of the recession, and use deficit reduction to achieve their political goal of a smaller state. Labour’s counter to this in the first few years of the coalition government was to focus on the stalled recovery, but that in contrast was poor political judgement because eventually the economy was bound to recover, and at that point Labour appeared weak. In addition by failing to effectively challenge the Osborne narrative about the past, Labour lost a crucial battle of political spin.

As I tried to argue here, if Labour is to have any hope in 2020 it has to start attacking Osborne’s unnecessary and obsessive austerity, as well as getting the past history straight. There are also reasons for thinking that the power of deficit fetishism for voters will steadily decline. In that sense, on this issue and perhaps others, Corbyn seems to have an advantage.

But, and it is a huge but, as I have also argued on the deficit, you can only successfully run an anti-austerity line if you have a clear and robust counter to the irresponsible borrowing charge. You do have to reassure enough marginal voters, and as a means to that the non-partisan political pundits that determine the political tone in a lot of the media. It is not clear that Corbyn will be able to do this. Firing up the base, as Corbyn clearly does, is only part of a successful winning strategy. There is a strong danger that he will lose credibility on the budget through overoptimistic claims on tax avoidance or misguided ideas about monetary financing. You will not shift the Overton window on austerity and other issues if your position is too easily discredited. Blair and Brown won in 1997 partly by imposing strong discipline on the party, which collectively gave out a clear set of messages to the electorate.

Part of Corbyn’s problem is not of his making (unless you take a long historical view), and that is his fellow MPs. It was their majority that chose not to oppose Osborne’s welfare bill, which epitomised the disastrous strategy that I have described above. It is very regrettable that two of the three other leadership candidates have refused to serve under him. If, following a Corbyn win, the party united around him in exchange for Corbyn parking some of his less popular policy positions, Labour could once again become an effective opposition. If instead his leadership is accompanied by constant public division within the party, there is a danger that this will overshadow everything else.

It seems very unlikely that Corbyn as leader could win the 2020 election. Perhaps the most optimistic yet still plausible outcome is that the period of a brief Corbyn leadership will be sufficient to shift the centre of political debate (the Overton window) to the left on a sufficient number of issues like austerity. He would then step down to allow a new candidate from the centre left to take over before 2020, and win enough popular support by appearing to be less of a risk and a more natural leader, while retaining key Corbyn positions like a strong anti-austerity line. Whether that would happen I have no idea. 

Whether Corbyn wins or loses, Labour MPs and associated politicos have to recognise that his popularity is not the result of entryism, or some strange flight of fancy by Labour’s quarter of a million plus members, but a consequence of the political strategy and style that lost the 2015 election. They should reflect that if they are so sure they know what will win elections, how come they failed to predict the Corbyn phenomenon. A large proportion of the membership believe that Labour will not win again by accepting the current political narrative on austerity or immigration or welfare or inequality and offering only marginal changes to current government policy. On economic policy in particular they need to offer reasons for voters to believe that there are alternatives to the current status quo of poor quality jobs, deteriorating public services and infrastructure, and growing poverty alongside gross inequality at the top. That means, whether he wins or loses, working with the Corbyn phenomenon rather than dismissing it.

Don’t ask what lost, ask what won

I took a short break after the election, so I managed to avoid most of the immediate post-election analysis. But I could not avoid seeing some Labour people complaining about how Labour’s defeat was because they vacated the centre ground and went for a core vote strategy. This seems very odd. In terms of ‘vacating the centre ground’, I thought it was pretty obvious that occupying it was the main Liberal Democrat strategy, and that didn’t go too well. In terms of a core vote strategy, it seems to me this applied at least as much to the Conservative campaign.

Rather than Labour and Liberal Democrat people asking what they did wrong, they should ask what the Conservatives did right. What they did right had very little to do with actual Conservative policies, beyond fiscal sweeteners mainly directed to their core voters. Instead it was about attacking their opponents in areas where - for whatever reason - their opponents failed to fight back.  

In terms of Labour, the Conservative campaign mainly focused on three themes: how inadequate Ed Miliband would be as Prime Minister, how bad Labour’s macroeconomic policies had been when they were last in government, and how Labour would be ‘held to ransom’ by the SNP. With all three of these, the arguments were not based on clear objective facts, but on political spin.

As Peter Oborne has observed, Miliband’s performance as Labour leader had indicated a number of positive qualities which suggest he could also have been a good Prime Minister. However he is no Cameron or Blair, and the Conservative machine managed to spin this unfamiliarity as a weakness. A minority Labour government backed by the SNP would have been unusual, but would it really have been so much more unstable as this government will be given how split it is on the EU? This question was never asked in the popular debate, which instead managed to galvanise English nationalism against an imagined threat from north of the border. The Labour line that there would be no deals was inherently defensive, as well as being unconvincing.       

The distortion on economic policy was perhaps the greatest of the three pieces of spin. In a post written before the election entitled ‘UK election: it was mediamacro wot won it’ I ended with the following line: “if the coalition government remains in power after this election (or if the Conservatives win outright), then the title of this post will have rather more justification than the Sun’s original headline.” Harvard historians writing macroeconomic nonsense in Financial Times op-eds after the election shows that the mediamacro problem is not about to disappear.  

What the Conservatives achieved was to turn at best half-truths into apparent facts, which then became the talking points of the media’s coverage of the campaign. The Conservatives won because their spin was so much better than their opponents. That is the lesson of the 2015 election, and not anything to do with actual policies.

To many Labour or Liberal Democrats supporters, this argument will be very unpalatable. They hate the idea of political spin, and all it represents. I have a lot of sympathy with that view, but I suspect it may help lose elections. In fact, it is probably much more important for the centre and left to think a great deal about political spin, because they have to overcome the spin machine that is much of the UK press, as well as the specific problems associated with mediamacro. Left leaning think tanks prefer to focus on policies rather than propaganda, a characteristic less evident in their right leaning counterparts, but in terms of winning an election that is a weakness.

A few of the post-mortems on Labour’s defeat that I have read suggested they should have tried to counter the myth of Labour profligacy much earlier than 2015. Having written for some time about this myth, I could hardly disagree. I suspect within the Labour hierarchy the view was to look forward rather than go over the past, but you cannot abandon the writing of history to your opponents. However that was not just one mistake among many successes: instead Labour's political spin appeared to be consistently amateur compared to their opponents. While over the next few months the debate will be about selecting a new leader who can recapture some of the Blair magic, the truth may be that the more important task is to employ a lot more people like Alastair Campbell.

The UK’s macroeconomic battleground to come

The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ (IFS) analysis of the specific measures in the Autumn Statement shows a certain degree of frustration. From their (economists) perspective, there seems no unifying theme or direction. For example transferable allowances for married couples adds a complication to the income tax system, without providing a major incentive. Free school meals for all children in the first 3 years of primary school benefits better off parents, as those on low incomes can already claim.

And then there is the continuing squeeze on the size of the state. The government has already reduced the share of government consumption in GDP, but that is nothing compared to its plans for the next five years, as I note here. It is pretty clear that both the IFS and the OBR regard this plan as incredible - it just will not happen. So what is the point in putting forward a plan for an unrealistically massive cut in the size of the state?

I am sure both organisations know why, but cannot say. It is, as ever with this Chancellor, all about the politics. For example, when it comes to the specific measures, the married couples allowance is an attempt to neutralise the impact on some conservative supporters of the Prime Minister’s support of gay marriage! Other popular tax giveaways are funded by ‘cracking down’ on tax avoidance - a win-win combination in political terms, even if the numbers might be unrealistic. In terms of the big picture, the Chancellor wants to ensure that Labour cannot pledge to match his spending, tax and deficit plans. As a result, he will be able to go into the next election accusing the opposition of either being dangerously imprudent, or planning tax increases.

Is this not a dangerous hostage to fortune? If the Conservatives win the next election, will this mean that they will have to admit their previous plans were hopelessly unrealistic? Perhaps, but I suspect the OBR’s assumptions about the output gap will be too pessimistic, and so economic growth will bring larger than expected falls in the debt to GDP ratio. So even if the Chancellor does not achieve cuts in government spending on the scale planned, deficit targets might still be met.

In a rational world (i.e. one where the economics made sense) the opposition could argue that the government’s plans aimed to cut debt too fast. But the ‘too far, too fast’ argument has already been judged to have failed by the political class, which has swallowed the myth that Labour’s fiscal policy played a large part in creating our present problems. So Osborne hopes that his unrealistic plans will paint Labour into a difficult corner, and the LibDems for that matter.

Yet it is far from obvious that this trick will work this time. Labour can take these numbers at face value, and say that they can only be achieved by cutting funding to the NHS, or education (see Declan Gaffney here - HT Alex Marsh). While government austerity may (perversely) be accepted in bad times, when the economy is growing it may be more difficult to argue that we cannot afford to maintain existing levels of public spending.

The government’s attempts to gain political advantage where none should lie also tie its hands. Labour’s major theme at the next election will be the decline in living standards for most income groups. This in turn is largely down to the UK productivity puzzle. It is not obvious that this decline in productivity growth is the result of government actions. Yet, as I note in this Free Exchange piece on the Autumn Statement, the government’s attempts to claim credit for growth in employment means that they cannot publicly address the subject of the productivity puzzle, still less argue that it is none of their doing. Here is a slightly amended graphic from my Free Exchange commentary that might look good on a Labour Party election billboard.

Conservative Lessons in Lost Output

So the battleground for the next election is set out. Labour will argue that living standards have shown an unprecedented decline (true), and the fault for this can be laid at the government’s door (half true at best). The Conservatives will argue that austerity has enabled the economy to grow again (false), and that continuing growth requires yet more austerity (completely false). Which will win out will be fascinating if you are interested in political spin, but it will all be pretty excruciating for any macroeconomist.

Avoiding the B word

As I briefly listened to the radio the other morning, I heard the new head of the TUC (Trades Union Congress) talking about macroeconomic policy. She said the government’s policy of austerity has failed, and we need more investment in jobs. The interviewer asked whether this would mean more borrowing by the government. She avoided answering the question.

Unfortunately I have heard exactly the same from many UK public figures who are critical of austerity. It is as if a memo has gone round with the following instruction: whatever you do, do not say your alternative policy will involve more government borrowing. The writer of this memo presumably thinks that the general public believes additional borrowing is bad, and so it is best to avoid any admission that a policy might require it, even if this borrowing is temporary and at very low interest rates. Following Polly Toynbee, the paradox of thrift is too paradoxical for the public.

As some may have noticed, I have an unhealthy interest in macroeconomic spin. If you are concerned about policy you just cannot avoid it, and while it would be nice to pretend that spin does not matter, I suspect it would be a pretence. So, just on the level of spin, I cannot help feel that this fictional memo is ill conceived. Most people sense that when a public figure avoids answering a question, this is because they have something to hide. So in doing so, the effect is both to suggest that the policy will indeed require more borrowing, and that this is a problem, which is why the interviewee does not want to talk about it.

So here are a few alternatives, in the form of an imaginary interview

Q: Wouldn’t this involve the government borrowing more?

A: Yes, it would involve paying for the investment by borrowing. That is what a company would do if it saw a good investment opportunity, and we are always being told that the public sector should learn from good practice in the private sector.

Q: Wasn’t it excessive borrowing that got us into this mess?

A: Borrowing for a good reason is not a problem, as anyone with a mortgage will tell you. Borrowing becomes a problem when it underestimates the risks involved, and when the borrower may not be able to afford the repayments. The financial crisis was caused in part by excessive borrowing by consumers who thought house prices could never fall, but mainly it was banks over-extending themselves. The recession caused high government borrowing, and not the other way around.

Q: But isn’t pubic sector borrowing at record levels?

A: Yes, but so is the desire of the financial markets to buy public debt. This is why interest rates on public debt are so low. The financial markets desperately want to buy government debt, and so they are prepared to get very little back in return. That is one reason why now is just the right time for the government to borrow to invest.

Q: The government tells us that if it borrows more we will become like Greece.

A: This is nonsense. It is no coincidence that all the major countries experiencing a government debt crisis are in the Eurozone, because Eurozone countries do not have their own central bank. Governments outside the Eurozone have no problem borrowing at the moment – as I said interest rates outside the Eurozone are at record lows. If there was a serious risk that the UK would become like Greece, interest rates would not be so low.

Q: Isn’t it wrong for the government to be borrowing more when consumers are so strapped for cash, and often cannot borrow or are trying to rebuild their savings?

A: Exactly the opposite is true, as any economics student will tell you. If consumers are saving more, there is less spending power in the economy. If the government also spends less, we get a recession. That is the basic mistake the government is making. This is the other reason, besides low interest rates, why now is just the right time for the government to borrow more. In a recession, there is no danger that government spending will crowd out private spending, and it is much more likely to stimulate the economy.

Q: But surely no government can keep on borrowing more forever.

A: Of course not. But the right time to cut government borrowing is when the economy is strong, and the cost of borrowing is high.

Q: All politicians will find an excuse to spend more or tax less, and put off the day that borrowing is brought under control. At least this government has had the courage to deal with the problem, unlike their predecessors.

A: As many countries besides the UK are finding, it is much more difficult to bring down borrowing when the economy is weak. By contrast, many governments have succeeded in reducing borrowing when the economy has been stronger. Before the financial crisis, the ratio of government debt to GDP in the UK was below the level when Labour came into office in 1997. Bill Clinton successfully reduced US government debt during the 1990s, when the US economy was growing strongly.      

Q: But government borrowing more now will inevitably mean higher taxes in the future. We should not burden future generations in this way.

A: Not necessarily. By spending more today, we can reduce the need for the government to spend in the future, so taxes need not rise. As far as future generations are concerned, I suggest you ask some of the nearly one million young people who are currently trying to find a job what they think.

     

Dangerous Voices and Macroeconomic Spin

                Dangerous voices are what the British Prime Minister called those who criticised austerity in a speech on Thursday. In response one of those dangerous voices, Martin Wolf, became shrill in Friday’s FT ($). After noting the observation by Jonathan Portes that public investment could currently be financed very cheaply because UK long term real interest rates are so low, he writes “it is impossible to believe that the government cannot find investments .... that do not earn more than the real cost of funds. Not only the economy, but the government itself is virtually certain to be better off if it undertook such investments and if it were to do its accounting in a rational way. No sane institution analyses its decisions on the basis of cash flows, annual borrowings and its debt stock. Yet government is the longest-lived agent in the economy. This does not even deserve the label primitive. It is simply ridiculous.”

                Ridiculous it is, but as a piece of spin, the focus on reducing debt works as long as the Euro crisis lasts. I was puzzled at first by the phrase ‘dangerous voices’ in the Prime Minister’s speech. Why focus on the act of saying, rather than the content (as in ‘dangerous advice’ for example). Maybe it is just a little Freudian. They are dangerous voices, not because the advice they offer is dangerous, but because they offer a persuasive alternative to the dominant macroeconomic spin. Let’s start with that spin.

                It is good politics to say that “there, but for austerity, go us”. I doubt very much that the government actually believes what it says, but the spin is too good to abandon. Why can I claim that the government does not believe what it says? Because, if debt was the constraint, the government would have tried balanced budget fiscal expansion. Balanced budget fiscal expansion is the growth plan that does not conflict with (and probably helps) the debt problem. Sure, long term supply side reform is good too, but we need demand stimulus now. See, for example, Ian Mulheirn here, or indeed the IMF. I’ve explained the logic many times, and Pontus Rendahl gives a nice theoretical account of why this works (and a new model) here.

                If the government really believed that the markets would not let them borrow to expand, but wanted to do something nevertheless, then this is the obvious way out. So why have they not taken it? One answer (there are others) is that the short term lack of growth in the economy, and rising unemployment, is not actually a big problem for the government (or at least the major part of it). It is consistent with their five year strategy. The prime aim of this strategy is to shrink the size of the state, and the need to reduce debt provides an obvious public justification for this. Balanced budget expansion goes in the wrong direction, at least for a time.

                But the government wants to get re-elected. Here the calculation might be as follows. First, the recession has not hit the Conservative’s political base hard, so in the short term there is no overwhelming internal pressure to change policy. Second, by the time of the next election in 2015, economic growth will have returned, and the macroeconomic spin will be “we said it would be hard, but growth shows the policy has been successful”. Some economists will complain about the output gap, but that will get lost in argument over what the size of the output gap really is. Others will point to average growth over five years, but then the well tested line about clearing up the mess we were left will come back into play.

                In terms of macroeconomic spin, I think it is a pretty good strategy. Good spin is simple, and plays off real events. So the line “we have to reduce debt quickly because otherwise we will be like Greece, or Spain” works, while the response “but the Eurozone is special because member countries do not have their own central bank” is too technical to be an effective counter. In contrast the argument that Wolf and Portes put forward above – why not invest when it’s so cheap to borrow – is effective, which is why it is dangerous. So of course is “austerity is stifling growth”, as long as growth is negative or negligible. However, come 2015, the spin “we have done the hard work and the strategy has worked” will accord with (relatively) strong growth, while talk of output gaps and lost capacity will have less resonance. True, unemployment will still be high, but not many of the unemployed are Conservative voters, and the immunising spin about lack of willingness to work can be quite effective.[1]

Will the strategy, and the associated spin, work? The risk that growth will not be respectable in 2014 must be low: by then consumers and firms should have adjusted their borrowing and wealth sufficiently such that growth can resume.  If there is a chance that it might not be, I expect to see some measures in next year’s budget that do not conflict with the overriding ideological objective, such as incentives for firms to bring forward investment. The fact that the main fiscal mandate involves a rolling five year horizon means there is always room for such measures.

The Office for Budget Responsibility, that very positive innovation by the current government, will in all likelihood be pointing to the need for continuing austerity, because the earlier absence of growth will have (or appear to have) reduced capacity through hysteresis effects. I suspect that this was not in the original game plan. However I also doubt that it will be a fatal flaw either. Indeed, while austerity may be becoming unpopular now, do not be surprised to hear the following bit of spin in 2015: “Austerity laid the foundation for our current growth, so we need to stick with it to ensure growth continues”.  As you can see, I think the connection between macroeconomic spin and macroeconomic reality is pretty tenuous. Please someone convince me that I’m being too cynical.

                  

---

[1] Some argue that the “Labour isn’t working” advert in the 1979 election was effective. However high unemployment did not prevent Mrs Thatcher being re-elected. Perhaps unemployment is more of a problem for Labour than Conservative governments?