Why Was Trumponomics a Flop?

Neither tax cuts nor tariffs are working.

Donald Trump has pursued two main economic policies. On taxes, he has been an orthodox Republican, pushing through big tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, which his administration promised would lead to a huge surge in business investment. On trade, he has broken with his party’s free(ish) trade policies, imposing large tariffs that he promised would lead to a revival of U.S. manufacturing.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates, even though the unemployment rate is low and overall economic growth remains decent, though not great. According to Jay Powell, the Fed’s chairman, the goal was to take out some insurance against worrying hints of a future slowdown — in particular, weakness in business investment, which fell in the most recent quarter, and manufacturing, which has been declining since the beginning of the year.

Obviously Powell couldn’t say in so many words that Trumponomics has been a big flop, but that was the subtext of his remarks. And Trump’s frantic efforts to bully the Fed into bigger cuts are an implicit admission of the same thing.

To be fair, the economy remains pretty strong, which isn’t really a surprise given the G.O.P.’s willingness to run huge budget deficits as long as Democrats don’t hold the White House. As I wrote three days after the 2016 election — after the shock had worn off — “It’s at least possible that bigger budget deficits will, if anything, strengthen the economy briefly.” And that’s pretty much what happened: There was a bit of a bump in 2018, but at this point we’ve basically returned to pre-Trump rates of growth.

Republican faith in the magic of tax cuts — and, correspondingly, belief that tax increases will doom the economy — is the ultimate policy zombie, a view that should have been killed by evidence decades ago but keeps shambling along, eating G.O.P. brains.

The record is actually awesomely consistent.

  • Bill Clinton’s tax hike didn’t cause a depression,
  • George W. Bush’s tax cuts didn’t deliver a boom,
  • Jerry Brown’s California tax increase wasn’t “economic suicide,”
  • Sam Brownback’s Kansas tax-cut “experiment” (his term) was a failure.

Nevertheless, Republicans persist. This time around, the centerpiece of the tax cut was a huge break for corporations, which was supposed to induce companies to bring back the money they’ve invested overseas and put the money to work here. Instead, they basically used the tax savings to buy back their own stock.

What went wrong? Business investment depends on many factors, with tax rates way down the list. While a casual look at the facts might suggest that corporations invest a lot in countries with low taxes, like Ireland, this is mainly an illusion: Companies use accounting tricks to report huge profits and hence big investments in tax havens, but these don’t correspond to anything real.

What about the trade war? The evidence is overwhelming: Tariffs don’t have much effect on the overall trade balance. At most they just shift the deficit around: We’re importing less from China, but we’re importing more from other places, like Vietnam.

And there’s a good case to be made that Trump’s tariffs have actually hurt U.S. manufacturing. For one thing, many of them have hit “intermediate goods,” that is, stuff American companies use in their production processes, so the tariffs have raised costs.

Beyond that, the uncertainty created by Trump’s policy by whim — nobody knows what he’ll hit next — has surely deterred investment. Why build a manufacturing plant when, for all you know, next week a tweet will destroy your market, your supply chain, or both?

Now, none of this has led to economic catastrophe. As Adam Smith once wrote, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Except in times of crisis, presidents matter much less for the economy than most people think, and while Trumponomics has utterly failed to deliver on its promises, it’s not bad enough to do enormous damage.

On the other hand, think of the missed opportunities. Imagine how much better shape we’d be in if the hundreds of billions squandered on tax cuts for corporations had been used to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. Imagine what we could have done with policies promoting jobs of the future in things like renewable energy, instead of trade wars that vainly attempt to recreate the manufacturing economy of the past.

And since everything is political these days, let me say that pundits who think that Trump will be able to win by touting a strong economy are almost surely wrong. He most likely won’t face a recession (although who knows?), but he definitely hasn’t made the economy great again.

So he’s probably going to have to do what he’s already doing, and clearly wants to do: run on racism instead.

Why I changed my mind about nuclear power | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxBerlin

For more information on Michael Shellenberger, please visit www.tedxberlin.de. Michael Shellenberger is co-founder and Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, where he was president from 2003 to 2015, and a co-author of the Ecomodernist Manifesto.
Over the last decade, Michael and his colleagues have constructed a new paradigm that views prosperity, cheap energy and nuclear power as the keys to environmental progress. A book he co-wrote (with Ted Nordhaus) in 2007, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism
to the Politics of Possibility, was called by Wired magazine “the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,” while Time Magazine called him a “hero of the environment.” In the 1990s, he helped protect the last signi cant groves of old-growth redwoods still in private hands and bring about labor improvements to Nike factories in Asia. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Nuclear energy is the only practical alternative that we have to destroying the environment with oil and coal.
-Ansel Adams, 1983 (14 min)

The Unrealistic Economics of the Green New Deal

Saving planet, creating jobs are noble ideas—but by combining them, Green New Deal exacts too high a cost

The Green New Deal that Democrats unveiled last week is actually two deals: one to combat global warming, another to create millions of well-paid jobs for targeted groups.

Individually, both goals have their merits. But by combining them, the Green New Deal promises to make climate mitigation both absurdly expensive and deeply partisan and is thus more likely to set back than advance the climate cause.

The premise behind the Green New Deal is right. While the world may not spontaneously combust in 10 years, global carbon-dioxide emissions need to start dropping soon, by a lot, to keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from 1800s levels, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Increases beyond that raise the probability of extreme weather, deadly heat and rising sea levels.

Because the private market has no incentive to reduce carbon emissions, government intervention is necessary. But not all interventions are created equal, and the Green New Deal’s seem engineered to be as expensive as possible.

Consider its goal of massive public investment to achieve 100% renewable energy in as little as 10 years. Kevin Book, head of research at ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm, estimates replacing the 83% of current U.S. generation that is not renewable with solar photovoltaic, wind and biomass would cost $2.9 trillion—nearly a full year’s tax revenue.

This excludes any cost for interest, operations, maintenance, new transmission lines or compensation to private investors for writing off natural-gas and coal plants with plenty of useful life left. It assumes cheap battery storage that doesn’t yet exist. Even so, this works out to $83 to avoid one metric ton of carbon dioxide.

The Green New Deal’s plan to upgrade every building in the U.S. to “maximum energy efficiency” is even more questionable. A study by Meredith Fowlie, Michael Greenstone and Catherine Wolfram in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found the federal government paid an average of $4,585 each to weatherize homes in Michigan. Extrapolate that to 95 million homes nationwide, and the bill tops $400 billion. The cost of avoided carbon dioxide: up to $285 per ton.

To understand how high $83 to $285 per ton of carbon dioxide is, consider that Barack Obama’s economists put the economic harm of a ton of CO 2 at $50. Or that you can pay a power producer
just

  • $6 to reduce emissions by one ton in New England,
  • $15 in California, and
  • $25 in the European Union,

based on emission permit prices in those jurisdictions, notes Mr. Greenstone, an economist at the University of Chicago.

Yet in the Green New Deal, trillion-dollar price tags are a feature, not a bug. That is because its mission is to create “millions of good, high-wage jobs” in “front-line and vulnerable communities.” The higher the price tag, the more jobs it creates. How to pay for it? Its Democratic sponsors would raise taxes on the rich and borrow the rest, including from the Federal Reserve, just as the U.S. did during World War II, dramatically boosting output and employment.

But in 1941, the U.S. had plenty of unused resources to mobilize: just 28% of prime-aged women had jobs. By 1945, 35% did and today, 74% do. (The data aren’t strictly comparable due to changing definitions.) The war effort still spurred intensive inflation pressure, contained only with wage and price controls. The U.S. is now close to full employment and its debts are far higher. Even in today’s world of low inflation and low interest rates, the scale of deficit spending the Green New Deal implies would likely push both higher.

Republicans and business groups have long fought even modest costs to mitigate climate change. Jacking up the price to finance left-wing Democratic priorities will only intensify their opposition. Indeed, Republicans and President Trump are itching to run against the Green New Deal. This guarantees inaction on climate unless Democrats win the White House, House of Representatives and 60 Senate seats.

What the U.S. needs is the Green New Deal’s sense of urgency combined with market mechanisms that incentivize carbon reduction at the lowest price, such as a carbon tax, carbon credits or tradable emission permits. This will also spur innovation that other countries can adopt to tackle their own emissions, which will be 88% of the global total by 2040.

Germany’s experience is illustrative. In 2000 it began targeting subsidies to renewable power and by 2017, renewables’ share of power consumption had risen fivefold to 38%. Because renewable generation was initially so small, the subsidies weren’t that burdensome, says Michael Pahle of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The priority, he says, was spurring innovation to drive down costs. But, he says, as renewables became much larger, cost became much more worrisome.

In 2015 Germany introduced reverse auctions, in which producers bid to supply energy at the lowest possible subsidy. By attracting the lowest-cost supply, this has driven solar photovoltaic prices down by half. Some bids have required no subsidy at all.

Even so, because Germany is phasing out nuclear power and hasn’t targeted transport, industry and agriculture emissions, it is behind on its emissions reductions. This underlines the need for an economywide carbon price, Mr. Pahle says. That is a lesson Americans should learn now, not after they’ve spent trillions on a Green New Deal.