Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

“Austerity”

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I do not think this means what some news writers think it means. In a Wall Street Journal article, the news writer used the term this way:

A budget deficit contributes…by injecting more demand into the economy via spending than it subtracts via taxes.
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But deliberately shrinking the budget deficit, via fiscal austerity, or expanding it, via fiscal stimulus….

What he’s talking about here is reducing government spending as austerity. Government spending is one component of the overall spending that is the demand component of GDP; the other component of demand at the GDP level is consumption spending by us citizens. But reducing government spending, while reducing that overall component of demand, isn’t austerity. That reduction simply reduces the level of competition between government on the one hand and us citizens and our private enterprises on the other hand for the same goods and services. That reduction in the government’s side of that competition at the very least reduces upward pressure on the price we citizens and our businesses face for those same goods and services, even eliminates pricing pressure in some areas, and in some few areas, allows prices to fall.

That’s not austerity, that’s an early step in prosperity.

The news writer again misused the term:

Fiscal austerity does the job with much less collateral damage than tariffs. Inflation goes down instead of up. Trading partners don’t retaliate. There’s no special-interest lobbying or corrosive uncertainty over who gets hit with tariffs for how long.
Austerity’s main drawback is that it slows growth.

Reducing government spending isn’t the only path to private prosperity, and done by itself can be decidedly reductive of that. Taxes directly take money away from both us citizens and our private enterprises. Some taxation is necessary for our government to do the things we hire it to do—pay our national debt, see to a defense capability adequate to the threats we face, and satisfy our nation’s general welfare in the ways delineated in our Constitution. Leaving taxes alone—or raising them—whether in isolation or in order to fund spending unrelated to those three purposes takes money away from us and our businesses that we’re better situated to allocate to our actual needs and wants.

Those taxes are the source of austerity inflicted on us by government. Reducing those taxes to the more minimal level needed to satisfy those three Constitutional requirements reduces austerity far more directly than reducing spending: every dollar left in our and our businesses’ pocketbooks and not taken by government is a dollar we can allocate more efficiently than government is capable of doing.

Reducing government spending—the news writer’s definition of austerity—actually indirectly facilitates prosperity if not actually increases it, and reducing taxation—not addressed at all by the news writer—directly increases prosperity by reducing real austerity, the taking of money from private coffers and putting it in government coffers. Doing both in concert with each other—that’s the far opposite of austerity.

Yapping vs Action

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Republican Congressmen are starting to push back, ever so gently, against President Donald Trump’s (R) DOGE initiative and agency. They want more control, for themselves and for the several Department and Agency heads, over spending and Federal job cuts.

The calls come as some GOP lawmakers have pushed back against job cuts and characterized moves as haphazard, even as they largely agree with the broader goal of reducing government costs and inefficiencies.

That’s the difference between yapping and action. It’s necessary to be specific, to name programs and to name names, if actual action—cuts—are to be made. Republicans are exposing themselves now.

The House, with its alleged Republican majority, has passed its budget outline proposal, and already it does not include an aggregated ceiling for spending cuts that’s high enough to have room for all of the ones the DOGE effort is suggesting.

Certainly, it’s useful to not make cuts as sweeping as those on offer from DOGE and from Trump all at once; business and especially State budgets need time to adjust to the sharply reduced inflow of Federal dollars and outflow of ex-Federal employees, but that’s easily enough accommodated over a period of two years, so all the cuts proposed could be accomplished within a single Congressional session.

Just as certainly, the several constituencies of the several Republican Representatives have differing imperatives and needs—Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis’ (R, NY) constituents have different views of appropriate levels of cuts and where to make them than do Congressman Thomas Massie’s (R, KY), but in the Federal Congress, these Congressmen have national level constituents in addition to their local ones.

But, as ralflongwalker passed along to me:

You want to gore my ox? Oh, no!

Pick one, guys. Either you’re for spending cuts and reductions in the bloated Federal bureaucracy labor force, or you’re like a bunch of spendthrift Progressive-Democrats, just yapping differently.

An Alternative Approach to Bird Flu

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The current approach is, when a chicken in a chicken flock shows itself to be infected with the avian flu, kill the entire flock. That’s hard on a chicken farmer’s pocket book, since the government only reimburses the farmer for part of the cost of his loss (whether the government should reimburse the farmer for 100% or 0% of his loss is a separate question).

A current alternative is to vaccinate the chickens in the flock against the avian flu, but that’s a labor (and cost) intensive effort since the vaccine must be delivered by injection under the skin, chicken by chicken. Vaccines are under development that would allow mass vaccination, but those are a ways away.

There’s an alternative approach that isn’t, as far as I can tell, being looked into. I sympathize with one of the motives for the mass killing of entire flocks—no one wants to let the chickens die miserable deaths one by each. However, if the avian flu is allowed to run its course through the flock, 90% to 100% of infected birds die. That means that some number of those chickens survive their infection.

How about letting the avian flu run its course through some number of flocks and collecting up the survivors? Those chickens have shown themselves to be resistant to the avian flu. These should be bred among themselves to see if an avian flu-resistant population of chickens could be bred.

Or not, but it seems worth the try.

Some Thoughts on our Trade Imbalance

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Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux had an extensive op-ed in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. I have a couple of thoughts on their piece.

Overall, they presented a typical argument regarding international trade balances, and it was sound as far as it goes. However, I’ve never seen an argument for or against US trade deficits/surpluses that take into account the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

For international trade, how much, really, are local currencies traded for dollars in order to purchase American goods and how much are local dollars traded for foreign currencies in order for Americans to buy foreign goods? How much of those currency exchanges are really just taps of the foreign nation’s dollars held as reserves and similarly replenished into those reserves through ordinary trade-of-goods-and-services exchanges? In other words, how much to buyers and sellers themselves do the currency exchanges and how much of those currency exchanges are actually done from government to government out of government reserve holdings?

Maybe a lot is government to government, maybe a little, but the question needs answers.

Also this:

Has the expansion of global trade “hollowed out” US manufacturing, as Joe Biden claimed in 2022? No. US industrial production today is more than double what it was in 1975, the last time we ran a trade surplus.

What is produced by today’s “industrial production” compared to that of 1975? Or immediately after WWII? That never gets specified. Nor does “industrial production” ever get normalized to account for changes in technology and manufacturing techniques.

A similar definition disconnect exists for services.

Until those specifications are made, claims of industrial production or services changes in either direction are meaningless.

Reciprocal Tariffs

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National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett says that negotiations are underway with a variety of nations regarding tariffs.

Reciprocal tariffs are absolutely a high priority for the president, [they] have been forever. You know, our trading partners charge us way more in tariffs than we charge them. And it’s something he talked about before[.]
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And there’s got to be a lot more action on it today[.]

A lot more action. Recall that, during his first term, President Donald Trump (R) offered the G-7 nations and EU a tariff-free trade zone. All of those nations and the EU blew him off.

It’s time to renew that offer: let tariffs reciprocally drop to zero and create a true free trade zone. See if those nations, and especially the EU are serious about doing honest business with us. American producers will have no trouble competing in that zone.