Tag economy

Rand Paul is Willing To Breach the Debt Ceiling

Danny Vinik 1 Comment

Republican Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has been a rising star in the GOP the past couple of months, particularly after his drone filibuster. He’s been the leading libertarian voice, following in his father’s footsteps, but with a more populist tone that could give him a legitimate shot at the Republican nomination in 2016. However, he is very, very confused about how harmful breaching the debt ceiling would be. Here’s what Paul said on Glenn Beck’s radio show this afternoon:

With the debt ceiling, I’ve always been willing to go through the deadline. I’m willing to go a month, two months, three months, as long as it takes. And I think we could use that leverage to bring the Democrats to the negotiating table.

AHHHHHHH. I honestly don’t understand how Paul can think this. By all accounts, he’s a smart, hard-working guy who believes in what he says. But he can’t possibly think that breaching the debt ceiling for three months would be acceptable? That would be a disaster of unheard of proportions. Our interest rates would rise significantly, increasing the cost of our debt by trillions of dollars in the long-term. Vital government services that keep the country going would stop. Three months of that could lead to anarchy.

And this was all after Paul said that he doesn’t want a government shutdown, because it would be bad for the Republican Party. Undoubtedly, Paul understands that a government shutdown would be bad for the country as well. But does he really think that breaching the debt ceiling for 90 days is more acceptable than a government shutdown?

Maybe Paul is bluffing here so that Republicans will be in a better position to extort the President.  Maybe he is trying to shore up support from the base. I don’t know. But the casualness with which Paul speaks about breaching the debt ceiling and causing an international financial crisis is alarming. I truly hope he doesn’t believe what he’s saying.

The Fed’s Non-Taper Is All About Credibility

Danny Vinik 9 Comments

In a surprising move today, the Federal Reserve announced that it was not going to taper its bond-buying program. The Fed has been purchasing $85 billion worth of assets every month – $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities and $45 billion of long-term Treasuries. For months now, investors and journalists had expected the Fed to begin to decrease those amounts in today’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcement. At 2 pm when the September FOMC statement came out, everyone was proven wrong:

 However, the Committee decided to await more evidence that progress will be sustained before adjusting the pace of its purchases. Accordingly, the Committee decided to continue purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month and longer-term Treasury securities at a pace of $45 billion per month

The stock market, bonds and gold all soared on the news of continued easy money while the dollar crashed. Why was everyone so sure that the Fed was prepared to taper today? It all goes back to the June FOMC meeting when Chairman Ben Bernanke first hinted at tapering. The Fed also upgraded its economic forecasts and in the press conference, Bernanke repeatedly emphasized the improvement in the labor market.

“If the incoming data are broadly consistent with this forecast, the Committee currently anticipates that it would be appropriate to moderate the monthly pace of purchases later this year,” Bernanke said. “And if the subsequent data remain broadly aligned with our current expectations for the economy, we would continue to reduce the pace of purchases in measured steps through the first half of next year, ending purchases around mid-year.”

Interest rates on the 10-year Treasury note skyrocketed while stocks and gold both fell. The market took it all to mean that easy money was coming to an end soon.

Except that wasn’t what Bernanke or the Fed was trying to say. They were trying to say that if economic data continues to come in positively, then the Fed will scale back its bond-buying program. But only if the economic data is good. From the June FOMC Statement:

The Committee will closely monitor incoming information on economic and financial developments in coming months. The Committee will continue its purchases of Treasury and agency mortgage-backed securities, and employ its other policy tools as appropriate, until the outlook for the labor market has improved substantially in a context of price stability. The Committee is prepared to increase or reduce the pace of its purchases to maintain appropriate policy accommodation as the outlook for the labor market or inflation changes.

If you read it literally, that statement clearly indicates that the Fed will react to labor market conditions in determining whether or not to taper. But the market parses every single word Bernanke says and it soon became conventional wisdom that a taper was coming. Dallas Fed Bank President Richard Fisher and Minnesota Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota both tried to walk back Bernanke’s statement and assert that a taper was not necessarily coming.

It didn’t matter.

But today, the Fed proved everyone wrong who parsed the statement and everyone right who read it literally. Subsequent jobs reports have been underwhelming, the Fed reduced its economic forecast today and the federal government is threatening to blow up the economy. If you listened to all of Bernanke’s comments and read the FOMC statement without overthinking it, you wouldn’t have been surprised by today’s announcement. The Fed said it would only begin tapering if the underlying economic data improved. But it worsened so the Fed shouldn’t have been expected to reduce its bond-buying. Yet, journalists and investors alike assumed that the Fed was still set on tapering, despite the underwhelming economic data.

With its announcement, the Fed was not trying to correct anything Bernanke said. It was trying to correct the market’s blind reading of the Fed’s statements. “Don’t just read that we’re going to taper. Read the caveats as well and take them into account.” Markets had assumed that when Bernanke mentioned tapering, it was set in stone that it would begin today. They did not believe for a second that poor economic data could delay it. Despite attempts to walk back Bernanke’s comments, the Fed could not credibly convince investors that it was not necessarily going to taper in September. By surprising the market and adjusting its policy based on labor market conditions, the Fed regained its credibility today.

Sen. Mike Lee Takes The Lead on Conservative Tax Reform

Danny Vinik 3 Comments

At the American Enterprise Institute today, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) unveiled the broad outlines for his tax plan, which he will introduce into the Senate in the upcoming days. The plan focuses on broadening the base, lowering rates, consolidating tax brackets and simplifying the tax code. However, the emphasis of Lee’s plan is to eliminate the parent tax penalty. Here’s how Lee described the penalty today:

Under the current system, all seniors are entitled to the same benefits, based on their total lifetime contributions.

But parents are required to contribute to this system not once, but twice. First, when they pay their taxes, just like everyone else. And then again, by bearing the enormous economic costs of raising their children, who in time, of course, grow up to become the next generation of taxpayers.

Under the current system, parents receive no additional benefits for having contributed or sacrificed hundreds of thousands of additional dollars raising their kids.

Lee’s plan, appropriately titled the Family, Fairness and Opportunity Tax Reform Act, creates a $2,500 per-child tax credit applicable to both payroll and income taxes. This last part is particularly important. Many poor Americans don’t pay income taxes, but they do pay payroll taxes. Making the credit applicable to payroll taxes allows those low-income parents to benefit from it as well. This corrects the parent tax penalty for all parents.

The freshman senator emphasized later that the purpose of this credit was to correct an unfairness in the tax code, not to influence the childbearing decisions of Americans.

“My plan would simply level the playing field to treat all taxpayers more equally,” he said. “It’s not social engineering.”

The Family, Fairness and Opportunity Tax Reform Act would create two tax brackets. The first would be at 15% for individuals with incomes less than $87,850 (and double that for married couples). All income above those thresholds would be taxed at 35%. In addition, Lee would create a new mortgage interest deduction capped at $300,000 worth of principal and a new charitable deduction available to all taxpayers, not just those who file itemized deductions. Both of these are alterations to current popular deductions intended to distribute the benefits of them more evenly across the income spectrum. At the moment, high-income homeowners reap most of the benefits of the home interest deduction as they pay a large proportion of mortgage payments. Low-income individuals are also less likely to itemize their deductions so they are unable to take advantage of the charitable deduction in the current system.

Lee’s plan also eliminates special interest loopholes, the state and local deduction and repeals Obamacare taxes and the AMT. You can read the rest of it here. He estimates that it will raise revenue equal to approximately 18-20% of GDP, which is right in line with the historical average. The Joint Committee on Taxation will take it up in the near future after Lee officially files the bill and will score it. Hopefully others will look at the distributional impact of the plan as well. It’s a promising piece of legislation that deserves an honest debate and conversation. I’m looking forward to having it.