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David Stockman, Reagan budget director dropped a stink-bomb in the NY Times OpEd section this weekend. It has been the talk of Monday.
The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.
Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.
Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.
So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.
When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.
THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.
As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.
The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days. …
… These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.
All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.
It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.
It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.
That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.
Stockman makes Steve Malanga’s Jeremiad about state debt mild by comparison.
Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Illinois officials with making misleading statements to bond investors about the state’s pension system. The agency detailed a long list of deceptive practices including failure to tell investors that the system was so underfunded that it risked bankruptcy.
Illinois taxpayers, as well as the holders of its debt, will ultimately bear the burden of the officials’ misdeeds. But there is nothing unique about the PrairieState. For years, elected officials in states and municipalities across the country have been imprudently piling up obligations that are imposing serious strains on budgets, prompting higher taxes and cutbacks in services.
In January, city officials in Sacramento, California’s capital, reported the results of a study they had commissioned on all the debt that the municipality had incurred. At a City Council meeting that the Sacramento Bee reported as “sobering,” the city manager explained that Sacramento had racked up some $2 billion in obligations (mostly pensions and retiree health care). All this for a municipality of 477,000 residents with an annual general fund budget of just $366 million.
Sacramento finances are already stretched—the city has cut some 1,200 workers, or 20% of its workforce, in the past several years. Servicing its debt in years to come will only add more woe, especially given the intractability of public unions. The budget report noted that “While reducing staff is clearly not the preferred method for reducing costs, the city has a very limited ability to reduce the cost of labor absent cooperation from the city’s employee groups.”
According to studies by the PewCenter on the States, states and the biggest cities have made nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in promises to pay for retiree health-care insurance. Yet governments have set aside only about 5% of the money they’ll need to pay for these promises. …
Michael Barone on why railroad freight pays and passenger trains suck.
Forty years ago, American railroads were in trouble. The Penn Central, the largest railroad, had recently gone bankrupt. American freight rail was technologically obsolescent and hamstrung by union rules and government rate regulation. American passenger rail was unprofitable and unreliable. Freight rail was losing business to trucking firms. Passenger rail was losing out to cars on the new interstate highways and airplanes on long routes. The past 40 years have seen a laboratory experiment on how to revive railroads. Government has gotten out of freight rail, while passenger rail has become largely a public-sector function.
We’ve had a chance to see which works better and to understand why. It took a while for the government to get out of the freight rail business. In 1973, Congress created Conrail, which took over the lines of the Penn Central and other Northeast railroads. Despite rosy projections, Conrail racked up big losses, with the federal government picking up the tab. Fortunately, the idea of transportation deregulation — pushed by Ralph Nader as well as market-oriented think tanks — was picking up steam.
In 1980, Congress passed and Jimmy Carter signed the Staggers Rail Act, ending the rigid rate regulation by the 1887-vintage Interstate Commerce Commission. Conrail began making profits and was sold to private investors in 1987. The following quarter-century has seen a renaissance of American freight rail. As a March 27 Wall Street Journal story relates, rail companies have been investing in rail yards, refueling stations and new tracks. They are building new bridges, widening mountain tunnels and “turning their networks into double-lane steel freeways.” The Association of American Railroads says it will invest $14 billion this year, up from $6 billion in 2003.
But doesn’t this mean higher costs? No, freight rail rates are less than half what they were in the early 1980s. That’s because freight rail faces aggressive competition from trucking, which was also deregulated in 1980. …
Baron Hinkle wonders if the GOP will ever come around on legalizing pot.
… In his new book The Last Line of Defense, Cuccinelli contends the states provide protection from federal tyranny. This is an argument many conservatives find as appealing as they find the U.N. objectionable. And if they extend that line of thinking just a bit, they may come around on pot.
The syllogism is easy enough to follow: The U.N. should not tell Washington what it can do, and Washington should not tell the states what they can do — so why then should the states tell individuals what they can smoke? What sovereignty is more important than the individual kind?
With liberals such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg dictating how much soda you can buy, Tea Party enthusiasts already are primed to declare not just “Don’t tread on me” but also, “Keep your laws off my body.” After all, as Lingamfelter put it in his January memo about Agenda 21: The great threat from the U.N. is that it wants to “tak[e] away individual freedoms from people like you and me.” And that would be, pardon the term, a real drag.