Lack of accountability

In 2007 the Pitt review told us that climate change was going to greatly increase the incidence of record breaking bursts of rainfall in the UK. The Labour government responded by substantially increasing their spending on flood defences in the spending review which ended in 2010/11.

The coalition government reversed those increases, leading to sharp falls in spending on flood prevention. Five years and many costly floods later, George Osborne has finally admitted he was wrong by announcing a substantial increase in money for flood defences. After being told by the government, one flood disaster after another, that they were doing everything that was possible, they have now decided that maybe it would be a good idea to spend more.

A bigger mea culpa you could not find. Yet if you google “austerity flooding”, it is still my blog post that comes top. When the floods hit around Christmas in 2013, no one seemed to want to connect the two. The government seemed immune to criticism, and successfully directed any culpability to the Environment Agency (who could not answer back). Even with the latest floods, outside the pages of the Guardian or Independent there was little criticism of earlier spending decisions. Yes Labour were slow out of the blocks in attacking the government, but are we really in a media world where if a senior politician does not talk about something it becomes a non-subject?

Chris Dillow asks why Osborne is not given the scorn and derision he deserves. As ever he gives many possible answers, but to many people one factor above all explains what is going on. It can be summarised by the following chart from the IFS, looking at who wins and who loses from this latest budget.

As I noted in my last post, Osborne felt he had to produce a budget like this for reasons that have only to do with who will be the next leader of the Conservative Party. Yet many will conclude that he (almost) gets away with it because it is in the interests of those who control the media to let him get away with it.

While there is undoubtedly some truth in this, I do not think this is quite the killer explanation that some suppose. Another important factor is that we have been living through a period in which the need to cut spending to reduce the deficit has entered the national consciousness as not only an undeniable truth, but an imperative that dominated all other concerns. So strong was that conviction that it helped win the Conservatives an election, despite the fact that they pledged to make the deficit worse by cutting taxes. Osborne had successfully characterised himself as the politician brave enough to ‘make the hard choices’ required to fulfil that imperative.

But as I have argued before, this belief that what George did and continues to do on cuts is an undeniable necessity is a product of the events of the recent past, rather than some immutable idea that the nation will forever hold. The most significant part of Iain Duncan Smith’s resignation letter is the following:

“I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self-imposed restraints that I believe are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest.”

So a plea to political journalists and commentators. Forget the spin that this resignation is all about the EU referendum (which, like all good spin, has an element of truth) and focus on this sentence. The idea that with his cuts George was and is only doing what had and has to be done is crumbling, and you do not want to be the last to notice. Start holding our government to account, not just for benefits cuts but also for the damage caused by flooding, and above all for the dire performance of the UK economy relative to the past.

It’s the politics, stupid

Those looking for any kind of economic logic from yesterday’s budget will look in vain. The budget had one goal, and only one, goal - the election of George Osborne as David Cameron’s successor. Now that mayor of London Boris Johnson has come out in favour of leaving the EU, a position also favoured by the majority of Conservative Party members who will elect the next leader, Osborne has a real fight on his hands.

Once upon a time Osborne could have actually played the prudent Chancellor role for real, but those times are gone. Getting the deficit down no longer appears (to the media and Conservative MPs and party members) the overriding priority it once was. So it has to be tax cuts designed to benefit most those in the upper quarter of the income distribution, plus yet more cuts to corporation tax. (As I noted in a piece for The Independent, the OBR’s downward revision to expected productivity growth suggests the extra dynamism these cuts were meant to induce stubbornly refuses to materialise.)

That is why a Budget where the main external news was a deterioration in the outlook for the UK economy, and where the centrepiece is a (ludicrous) target for the budget surplus at a fixed date, could end up being all about tax cuts. (Apart from the new sugar tax, which is welcome and long overdue.) It is achieved by a combination of more cuts to welfare (the disabled) and spending. Yes there is a lot of creative accounting as well, but when those chickens come home to roost you can be sure that the response of this government will be how public spending has become unaffordable and more cuts are required.

Cut taxes, and use the deficit as an excuse to cut spending. For the Conservatives it has proved to be a winning formula, and Osborne intends to milk it for as long as mediamacro lets him get away with it.

Another good rule with this Chancellor, apart from it is always about the politics, is that whatever phrase he keeps repeating tells you where he thinks he is vulnerable. Hence 'long term economic plan' to cover decisions made to achieve short term political ends. That is why the current slogan is ‘putting the next generation first’, because everything Osborne has done so far has achieved the opposite. The slogan is not meant to signal a sudden change, but just to distract from more of the same. Climate change? He failed to raise fuel duty, and more. Public investment? As I say in The Independent, lots of talk but the OBR numbers tell us he plans in this parliament a level of net public investment almost 25% below the level in the previous parliament. The rhetoric may be enough to win the votes of (generally old) Conservative party members, but the next generation will not thank him for it.     

MMT: not so modern

Followers of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) often comment on my posts. I had never heard of MMT before I started this blog. From what I could gather from comments

1. MMT seems obsessed with the accounting detail of government transactions
2. This seemed to lead to ideas that I thought were standard bits of macroeconomics

Occasionally I would out of curiosity try and read something by MMT’s leading lights, which reinforced these impressions. For example MMTers seemed to think that they had discovered that a government with its own central bank need never default on its debt, but as far as I was concerned that was a standard and rather trivial implication of the government’s consolidated budget constraint. MMTers also seem curiously averse to equations.

Lately these MMT comments have been getting rather annoying, so I thought I would write all this down. Luckily I do not have to, as Thomas Palley has already done it for me (here and here). I have absolutely nothing to add, except to note that the upshot is not that what MMT says about this budget constraint is wrong, but that it was well known long before MMT and that it is hardly a complete macro theory.

Let me give an illustration of this last point. Some have commented that my recent discussion of fiscal rules ignores the fact that governments can finance investment, or anything else, by creating money. What would happen if the government started doing exactly that: stopped issuing debt and just created money. Let’s assume that real output is at its ‘full employment’ level. That would force interest rates down, which in turn would raise demand and create inflationary pressure, which is not really desirable. MMTers tend to ignore this, and it is not at all clear why. Of course in a recession with interest rates at their zero lower bound (ZLB) things are different, but MMT does not pretend to be just ZLB macro.

This raises the question of why MMT seems to have quite a following. Perhaps it is a reaction to mediamacro’s often implicit assumption that a country like the UK or US could go bust through a forced default. And, to be fair, some mainstream economists seem to want to keep that misapprehension alive, while others take the existence of independent central banks as a binding constraint. It is suggested too often that the government cannot create money in reaction to a funding crisis because this would cause inflation, even when we are at the ZLB, inflation is well below target and the central bank is creating huge amounts of money.

Finally a request. I am bound to get comments on this post disputing what I say, which is fine. But please, for the sake of those people who may still have an open mind, keep these short and to the point. If you accept that a government’s deficit must equal new borrowing plus the creation of new (base) money, there is no need to go into the accounting or transaction details therein.

Does public investment have to pay for itself?

A key distinction between Labour’s new fiscal rule and Osborne’s fiscal charter is that the former allows borrowing for investment. When supporters of the fiscal charter treat borrowing as if it was inherently sinful (‘Labour will borrow forever’) it is natural to remind them that firms often borrow to invest and grow, and consumers invariably borrow if they buy a house. We also note that public investment can enhance economic growth. But this can lead to a confusion about whether such investment has to ‘pay for itself’.

When a firm borrows to invest, it hopes to make enough profits to pay back the borrowing. There may be forms of public investment which could raise future GDP (and therefore income and spending) such that eventually taxes rise by enough to pay at least the interest on the borrowing that made the investment possible, or even start paying back the borrowing itself. But there are two other important reasons why it makes sense to borrow to invest.

The first involves intergenerational equity. Suppose we have a public investment project which significantly enhances the quality of life, but there is no pecuniary benefit: GDP does not rise. So taxes will have to rise at some point to pay for that borrowing. But who should pay those taxes? When we are talking about investments that are long-lived, the obvious answer is those that benefit from the investment, which means future generations as well as the current generation. That can happen if investment is paid for by borrowing rather than raising current taxes.

This helps answer a point that is often raised, which is what should count as public investment and what should not. With this reasoning it makes sense to borrow whenever the social benefits of public spending are long lasting. When the benefits are short lived, spending should be paid for by higher taxes. So the relevant metric for what should count as investment in this context is who benefits most. While paying doctors or teachers more may have some knock on benefits for the future, the main beneficiary will be today’s doctors or teachers. The benefits of new schools and hospitals are longer lasting. 

The second reason for using borrowing to pay for investment is if the increase in investment is a one-off. As taxes are distortionary at the margin, it makes sense to smooth those taxes over time. Once again, that can be achieved using borrowing.  

If a lot of public investment does not pay for itself, wouldn’t borrowing only to invest mean that debt just went on increasing and increasing? What matters here is the debt to GDP ratio. If you want to keep that ratio constant, and you always run a zero current balance, then that tells you how much investment you can do. The numbers are fairly simple to work out. If the economy grows in nominal terms by 4.5% on average, and debt is 80% of GDP, net investment could be around 3.5% of GDP to keep the debt to GDP ratio constant. Osborne plans net investment over this parliament averaging 1.6% of GDP.

This leads to one final, important point. You cannot have separate goals for all three of debt to GDP, the current balance, and public investment. In Labour’s new rule, the commitment to reduce borrowing as a share of trend GDP over the lifetime of a parliament, coupled with the zero current balance target, puts an upper limit on the amount of investment the government could do. Whether that is a sensible upper limit in economic or political terms, and what you do if it is not, I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

The question that was not asked

I had the (mis)fortune to listen to the BBC’s World at One while returning home from a lecture yesterday. The second item (20 minutes in) was about the new fiscal rule proposed by Labour’s John McDonnell in a speech that morning. The item contained three segments. The first was from a BBC political reporter, the second an economist at the IFS, and the third from Labour’s 2015 election campaign director.

The reporter, Ross Hawkins, described the zero lower bound knockout as a ‘loophole’, and also talked about taxpayers money. He then described how the knockout would work (the MPC would decide), but went on to relate how a Labour press officer had described his questions as being from a Tory crib sheet and had walked away. The economist Carl Emmerson did a solid job of saying what the rule would mean post 2020, although he had to respond at least once that just because the ‘borrowing to invest’ idea was not new did not make it bad. Then came Spencer Livermore to say exactly that - as it was similar to Labour’s rule for the 2015 election, and as this had failed, Labour needed something new and radical. He did not say, and was not asked, what this new and radical fiscal policy might be.

It occurred to me afterwards that at no point did anyone ever ask whether this rule was better or worse than George Osborne’s fiscal charter. Carl Emmerson tried to contrast the two rules, but natural questions like ‘should we borrow to invest’ or ‘does it make economic sense to have a zero lower bound knockout’ were never asked. Just think about that: the opposition proposes a fiscal rule that is quite different from the government’s, and in 10 minutes of radio no one asks which is better.

Livermore was not asked what his new and radical fiscal rule might be because it was of no interest - all that was of interest to the interviewer was that he was criticising his own side. That was not an accident of the way the discussion went, but inherent in the way the segment as a whole was constructed. If listeners had been looking for any kind of discussion of the economic merits of the new rule they would have been disappointed.

Unfortunately this particular programme was not an isolated case. Channel 4 News took a similar line, interviewing Livermore again, with no economist in sight. I once saw a chart somewhere that looked at who talks about economics in the media, and less than 10% of the time it was economists. This matters, because it is how we end up with governments pursuing policies that sound good in soundbites, but cause considerable damage to our economies.

A (much) better fiscal rule

Today the Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell will give a speech where he puts forward an alternative fiscal rule to George Osborne’s fiscal charter. It involves a rolling target for the government’s current balance: within 5 years taxes must cover current spending. It leaves the government free to borrow to invest. Investment cannot be unbounded, as there is a commitment to reduce debt relative to trend GDP over the course of a parliament.

No doubt we will hear the usual cries from the opponents of sensible fiscal rules: Labour plan to borrow billions more than George Osborne and they plan to go on borrowing forever. The simple response to that should be that it is right to borrow to invest in the country’s future, just as firms borrow to invest in capital and individuals borrow to invest in a house. Indeed, with so many good projects for the government to choose from, and with interest rates at virtually zero, it is absolute madness not to investment substantially in the coming years.

This part of the rule is similar to the main fiscal rule Osborne himself adopted under the Coalition, which in turn is not unlike previous rules adopted by Labour. What is new is that McDonnell’s rule involves what could be termed a ‘zero lower bound knockout’: if interest rates hit their lower bound following a recession, the focus of fiscal policy shifts from deficit targets to helping monetary policy support the economy. It reflects the knowledge we have gained since the global financial crisis.

Again critics will claim that the knockout would have meant building up even more debt after the last recession. But what matters with debt is its relationship to GDP, and it is far from clear whether more stimulus in 2009 and 2010 would have increased the debt to GDP ratio, because you are increasing GDP as well as debt. But even if debt to GDP did rise, this reflects the right choice. It means prioritising the real economy - jobs and wages - over an obsession with government debt.

We will no doubt be told by government supporters that this would have led to financial disaster, just as we are also told that the coalition saved us from disaster. We will be told this by some economists working in the financial sector - a sector that created the Great Recession. But there is no evidence for this impending disaster, and plenty of evidence that it is a complete myth. As Paul Krugman might say, in a country with its own central bank the bond vigilantes just keep failing to turn up.

Recessions come and go, you might respond, but higher debt will always be with us. That ignores two key points. First, prolonged and deep recessions cause lasting damage. UK GDP per head is currently over 15% below pre-recession trends. Does none of that have anything to do with the slowest UK recovery from a recession in centuries? Second using fiscal policy to end recessions quickly does not mean higher debt forever. The key point is that debt can be reduced once the recession is over and interest rates are safely above their lower bound. Doing that will be no cost to the economy as a whole, as monetary policy can offset the impact on demand. Obsessing about debt during a recession, by contrast, costs jobs and reduces incomes, as every economics student knows and as the OBR have shown.

The rule happens to mean that pretty well all of the additional austerity Osborne has detailed since the election is unnecessary. But that is a byproduct of adopting a sensible rule. If there is any ‘reverse engineering’ going on, it is with the fiscal charter, which some argue was adopted with the political purpose of making Labour look less prudent before the election. As McDonnell notes, no economist has attempted to defend Osborne’s fiscal charter.

Yet I know this point worries some Labour MPs and commentators. They say, quite rightly, that one of the main reasons the 2015 election was lost was because Labour were not trusted on fiscal policy. But the basic truth is that you do not enhance your fiscal credibility by signing up to a stupid fiscal rule. Apart from getting attacked for doing so by people like me, your collective heart is not really in it and it shows. You get trapped into proposing to shrink the state as Osborne is doing, or hitting the poor as Osborne is doing, or raising taxes which makes you unpopular. And if by chance it ever looks like you might be getting that trust back, Osborne or his successor will move the goalposts again.

The far more convincing way to get trust back is to adopt a fiscal rule that makes sense to both economists and the public (‘only borrowing to invest’), and actively talking about it. When the Conservatives accuse you of borrowing, you do not try and change the subject, but remind people that is what firms and consumers do. Borrowing is not a dirty word, particularly when it is on vital investment and you can do it for almost nothing! Indeed borrowing to invest shows you are optimistic about the future and are prepared to do things to make it better. In contrast those who would turn down these investment projects in order to reduce debt as fast as possible have a negative outlook that fears the future.

The Conservatives know they are vulnerable on public investment. Osborne tries to give the impression that he is doing a lot of it, but the figures do not lie. In the last five years of the Labour government the average share of net public investment in GDP was over 2.5%. During the coalition years it fell to 2.2%, and for the five years from 2015 it is planned to average just 1.6%. That is not building for the future, but putting it in jeopardy, as those whose homes have been flooded have found to their cost.[1]

[1] Besides cutting spending on flood prevention while part of the coalition, Damian Carrington revealed yesterday that UK funding for research on flooding has been cut by 62%! There can be no better indication of the madness of George Osborne’s deficit obsession.