How the US economy is like Luke Wilson in “Idiocracy”

See for yourself. Our anemic economic performance since 2007 is . . . the best in the world?

Yes, it’s still a slow recovery that has yet to restore full employment, but, except for Germany, we’ve done better than any of our counterparts in Europe that also experienced a financial crisis.

“The ordinary will be considered extraordinary.”

I was going to say something about the folly of austerity policies (spending cuts and tax increases) during an economic slump, which is true insofar as US budget policy has been only mildly contractionary while our European counterparts have embraced austerity and all but one have sick economies to show for it, but that one is Germany, which was slightly ahead of the US as of 2013:Q2 (data for 2013:Q3 and Q4 were not available for the European countries). Germany’s economy defies easy explanation. Maybe Germany should be Luke Wilson’s character and the US can be Maya Rudolph’s.

(For anyone who’s not familiar with “Idiocracy,” here’s the trailer.)

New York to self: Drop dead

President-elect Obama and Congress are talking about a federal stimulus package that includes a substantial though as-yet-undetermined amount of aid to states and, possibly, localities.  Earlier this month Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland made an eloquent case for still more federal aid, to make up for more of the huge shortfall in revenues that normally go to education:

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense … to put huge resources into creating jobs with these infrastructure projects, while at the same time the states are having to lay off teachers, and to underfund education and to allow college tuition to explode.”

According to the Associated Press, Strickland and four other Democratic governors, including David Paterson of New York, presented Obama’s transition team and Congressional leaders with a request for $1 trillion in state aid, including $250 billion for education, $250 billion for social services such as Medicaid, and $150 billion in middle-class tax cuts.   The article mentions that Paterson said New York has a $15.4 billion deficit, but that’s it from him.  New York, as possibly the hardest-hit state in the union in this financial and economic crisis, has a compelling case for why the states have recession-related revenue shortfalls and could use federal aid.  Maybe Paterson made that case, but if so it didn’t make the article.

Fiscal policy in the oughts

Everyone’s expecting some fairly big fiscal stimulus bill to emerge early next year from Congress and to be signed by President Obama, but let’s not forget about what’s happening right now at the state level.  Most states are constitutionally required either to pass a balanced budget or to have their governor submit one, so right now the talk in the statehouses, notably here in New York State where I live, is all austerity all the time.

Austerity budgets — draconian spending cuts, tax increases, or some combination thereof — are the last thing any economy needs during a recession.  The backfiring “Hoover” tax increase of 1932 is forever held up as one of the Lessons From the Great Depression.  Another lesson, familiar to economic historians though not so much the general public, is that the overall fiscal stimulus during the 1930s was actually quite small, as the New Deal deficits (which were actually not that huge in relation to the economy, as Paul Krugman reminds us) were largely offset by budget-balancing efforts at the state and local level.  (The classic reference is E. Cary Brown’s “Fiscal Policy in the Thirties,” American Economic Review, 1956.)

This point about the government’s overall fiscal thrust might be even more important now than in the 1930s, when much if not most of the (partial) recovery of 1933-41 came from monetary expansion, mostly in the form of gold inflows from Europe.  (Christina Romer, the incoming Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, has an article about this, “What Ended the Great Depression?”, in The Journal of Economic History.)  Right now, by contrast, the Fed is trying everything and then some, and doesn’t seem to be able to get the economy going again.  So it may be up to fiscal policy.

Right now it seems to be mostly talk at the federal and state levels.  The White House and Congress are in lame-duck mode, so nothing very concrete is being proposed.  State legislatures are home for the holidays, and in states like mine where the governor has to submit a balanced budget but the state doesn’t have to pass one, there’s even less certainty.  My take is that the federal stimulus package should not skimp on aid to state and local governments.  For all the dysfunction of some state governments (like my own), their budgets reflect the needs and priorities of their people to at least some degree, and ignoring them just seems like bad policy.  (I remember, when Clinton was getting started in 1993 and talking about an economic stimulus plan, hearing David Gergen deride the new president’s planned aid to state and local governments as “walking-around money for mayors.”  I’m sure those kinds of dismissals will be common in the halls of Congress in 2009.)

My nightmare is that Congress passes a “Washington Knows Best” stimulus package that mostly stiffs the states and instead puts the funds into projects of its own choosing.  Thousands of Bridges to Nowhere, and fifty state governments in distress.  If that happens, the recession could be a long one, and could feel like a depression for anyone who works for a state or municipal government.