Category Archives: Fiscal Issues

The Continued Fall in Government Spending Under Obama

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Govt Spending on Goods & Services by Presidential Term, Quarterly

A.  Introduction

Government spending continues to fall under Obama.  As this blog has noted in earlier posts, the fiscal drag from this reduction in demand for the goods and services that unemployed workers could have been producing can fully explain why the recovery from the 2008 has been so slow.  As another blog post noted, if government spending had merely been allowed to grow under Obama at the same pace as it had historically, the economy would by now be back at full employment.  The public debt to GDP ratio would also be lower, as GDP would be higher.  And if government spending had been allowed to grow as it had under Reagan, we would likely have returned to full employment by 2011.

Fiscal drag is therefore important.  Yet it is still not yet commonly recognized that government spending has been falling in real absolute terms for the last several years (and even more so when measured as a share of GDP).  Earlier blog posts have reviewed this.  The trends have unfortunately continued and indeed strengthened over the last year.  Whether this will now change with government spending finally leveling off, and perhaps even start to recover, remains to be seen.  The budget compromise for fiscal years 2014 and 2015 reached by Senator Patty Murray and Congressman Paul Ryan in December, and passed by Congress in January, will reverse part of the impact of the budget sequester.  According to calculations by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (fiscal hawks in favor of budget cuts), the agreement for FY2014 will lead to a small (1.8%) rise in nominal terms in budget authority compared to the FY2013 post-sequester levels.  This would still be flat to negative in real terms, based on inflation of about 2%.  And the FY2014 sum would still represent a 3.7% fall compared to what the FY2013 pre-sequester levels would have been.

Possibly more important would be government spending at the state and local level.  This was cut back as a result of the 2008 collapse and slow recovery, due to lower revenues and the requirement in many states and localities of a balanced budget.  While expenditures were still falling in 2013, revenues have started to grow (due to the positive, though still slow, recovery of GDP) and state and local budgets as a result can now start to recover as well.  But it also remains to be seen if that will happen.

This blog post will update the government spending figures during the Obama term through the fifth year of his administration.  And it will present the figures from a different perspective than before, by tracing the paths during the course of each presidential term (going back to Carter’s) relative to what the spending was at the start of their respective presidencies.

[Note that all the government spending figures used in this post will be in real, inflation-adjusted, terms.]

B.  Government Spending on Consumption and Investment

The graph at the top of this post shows the tracks of real government spending on consumption and investment during each presidential term going back to Carter, as a ratio to what it was at the start of their terms.  The base period is always taken as the last quarter before their inauguration (i.e. in the fourth quarter of the calendar year preceding their January 20 inauguration).  The data is computed from the figures in the standard National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA accounts, also commonly referred to as the GDP accounts) of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the US Department of Commerce, and are seasonally adjusted.  Note that all levels of government are included here – federal, state, and local.  We will examine below spending at the federal level only, as well as spending including transfer payments.

This government spending has fallen by 5 1/2% in real terms by the end of the fifth year (the 20th quarter) of Obama’s term in office.  It rose by 2 1/2% during Obama’s first year, which one might note is similar to the increases seen by that point under Carter, Reagan, and Bush I, and with a significantly greater increase by that point under Bush II.  Spending during Obama’s term has since been falling steadily, leading to the fiscal drag referred to above, to a point where it is now 8% lower in real terms than it was in his first year, or a net 5 1/2% fall from when he took office.

There has been no such fall in government spending under any other presidential term since Carter.  The closest was spending during the Clinton period, but there was still a 3% rise by the end of his fifth year in office.  The increases by the end of the fourth year under Carter and Bush I (single term presidencies) were 8% and 6 1/2% respectively.  And the increases by the end of the fifth year in office were 13% during the term of Bush II, and by a full 21% in real terms under Reagan.  Government spending also continued to grow under Bush II and Reagan, reaching increases of 21% and 33% respectively by the end of their eight years in office.

Yet Reagan and Bush II are seen as small government conservatives, while Obama is deemed by conservatives to be a big spending liberal.  The facts simply do not support this.

C.  Government Spending Including Transfers

Government spending for the direct purchase of goods and services (used for consumption or investment), reviewed above, is a direct component of GDP demand.  When there are substantial unemployed resources (as now), such government spending will have a significant positive impact in spurring economic expansion.  As was discussed in an Econ 101 post on this blog, under such circumstances the fiscal multiplier will be positive and high.  Hence the fiscal drag from the cut-back in government spending during Obama’s term in office has kept the recovery below what it would have been.

But there is also government spending on transfers to households (such as for Social Security, food stamps, or unemployment insurance).  Such transfers are ultimately spent by households for their consumption of goods and services (or will in part be saved, including through the pay-down of debt such as mortgage debt).  It will enter into GDP demand by way of the spending of households for consumption, and the impact on GDP will depend on the behavior of households in deciding what share of those transfers they will spend or save.

Such spending rose more sharply during Obama’s first year in office, as he faced an economy in free fall as he was taking his inaugural oath:

Govt Spending, Total incl Transfers, by Presidential Term, Quarterly

The economy was losing 800,000 jobs per month at that time, pushing the unemployment roles up rapidly and plunging the incomes of many in the population to levels where they qualified for food stamps.  Government spending including transfers therefore rose by almost 9% by the third quarter of 2009, and reached a peak of 9.8% in the third quarter of 2010.  Since then, however, total government spending including transfers has been modestly falling, and is now 7 1/2% above where it was when Obama took office.

[Note all figures are in real terms.  The personal consumption expenditures deflator in the NIPA accounts was used to adjust transfer payments for inflation.]

Only during the Clinton period did one see a modestly smaller increase, of about 6 1/2%.  But there was a 16 1/2% increase in such spending at the same point in the term of Bush II, and an increase of over 22% under Reagan.  It was also higher by the end of their fourth years in office for both Carter and Bush I.

The differences are not small.

D.  Federal Government Spending on Consumption and Investment

What matters to the economy when demand is inadequate and unemployment is high is spending at all levels of government.  Yet while we commonly blame the president in office for the performance of the economy, they at best can only influence the federal budget (and influence it only partially, as Congress decides on the budget).  Hence it may be of interest also to examine the paths of only federal government spending.

Such federal spending on direct consumption and investment at first rose during the Obama term, reaching a peak 8% increase in the third quarter of his second year in office.  It then fell sharply, to a point where it is now 5 1/2% below where it was when Obama took office:

Federal Govt Spending on Goods & Services by Presidential Term, Quarterly

The initial increase in federal spending was in part due to the stimulus package that served to restart the economy (GDP was falling from 2008 through the first half of 2009; it then began to recover).  Note that while federal spending rose by 8% by the third quarter of 2010, overall government spending (including state and local) rose only by 2 1/2% at that point.  State and local government was cutting back, as they were forced to do by the balanced budget requirements of many of them, so federal spending and the stimulus it could provide was partially being offset by their cut-backs.

But after this initial increase in the first two years of the Obama presidency, federal spending has been cut substantially, to the point where it is now 5 1/2% below in real absolute terms where it was when Obama took office.  Federal spending also fell during the Clinton term, by 11% at the same point in his term.  In contrast, federal spending rose sharply under Bush II (by 27% at the same point) and especially under Reagan (by over 31%).

E.  Federal Government Spending Including Transfers

Finally, federal government spending including transfers:

Fed Govt Spending, Total incl Transfers, Quarterly

[Technical Note:  Federal government transfers in the NIPA accounts include transfers to individuals as well as transfers to the states or localities for all purposes, including road construction, for example.  Such intra-government transfers are netted out in the accounts when government as a whole – federal, state, and local – is examined, so that remaining government transfers are then solely transfers to individuals, such as for Social Security.]

Such spending is now lower under Obama than under any of the presidencies examined, including Clinton.  Federal spending including transfers rose to a peak in 2010 of 10% above where it was when Obama took office, but has since declined to just 1% above that level.  It was 4% higher at that point in Clinton’s term, 23% higher at the point in the term of Bush II, and 25 1/2% higher at that point in the term of Reagan.

F.  Conclusion

Republicans in Congress and conservatives generally continue to criticize Obama as being responsible for runaway government spending.  But after an initial modest increase in the first two years of his term, as he sought to stop the economic free fall he inherited on taking office (and succeeded), government spending has come down under any measure one takes.  The resulting fiscal drag has held back the economy, leading to an only slow recovery.  And the fiscal drag during Obama’s term in office is in sharp contrast to the large increases in government spending observed during the terms of George W. Bush and especially Ronald Reagan. Yet they have been viewed as small government conservatives.

The Rate of Economic Growth and the Budget Gap: Returning to the Long-Term Average Growth Rate Would Eliminate It

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Long Run US GDP per Capita Growth (1870-2088) in logarithms

Larry Summers published an op-ed yesterday (appearing in Reuters, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, and probably elsewhere) in which he makes the important point that the current budget impasse is focussed on the wrong issues.  The discussion, at least as publicly expressed, has focussed on what is seen as needed to deal with the fiscal deficit and the resulting public debt.  Even the Republican attempt to end ObamaCare was ostensibly about cutting the government deficit (even though the CBO concluded that the opposite would happen, as they found that the ObamaCare reforms will reduce the deficit, rather than increase it).

Yet this focus on near term and projected budget deficits is misguided.  As Summers notes, under current policies the public debt to GDP ratio is falling, and is projected to continue to fall into the 2020s.  The recently issued Long-Term CBO budget projections indicate that while the debt ratio would then start to rise (primarily driven by expected higher health care costs), there is a good deal of uncertainty in those projections.

Specifically the CBO figures show that it would not take much, in terms of either higher revenues or lower spending, to keep the public debt to GDP ratio flat.  Higher revenues or lower spending or some combination of the two, of 0.8% of GDP over the next 25 years or 1.7% of GDP over the next 75 years, would suffice.  This is consistent with an earlier post on this blog, which showed that if the Bush tax cuts had not been extended for almost all households, the projected debt to GDP ratio in the CBO numbers would fall rapidly.

But projections of revenues or of spending are highly uncertain.  Projected health care spending has been coming down steadily in recent years, for example, in part due to the slow economy, but also in part as a result of the efficiency gains and cost reductions that the ObamaCare reforms are leading to.  With these lower costs, the CBO has been steadily reducing the projected costs to the government budget from Medicare, Medicaid, and other such health programs.  In the recent CBO report, for example, the projections of government spending on health care programs in the 2030s were reduced by 0.5% of GDP from what the CBO had projected just one year earlier.  Going back further, the CBO projections for government spending on health care in 2035 were over 1% of GDP lower in the projections recently issued than in the projections published in June 2010.

This should not be interpreted as a criticism of CBO.  Their projections are probably the best available.  Rather, the point is that these projections are inherently hard to do, and the uncertainty surrounding them should not be ignored.  Yet the politicians often ignore precisely that.

Furthermore and perhaps most importantly, the projected budget deficits and resulting public debt to GDP ratios depend critically on the rate of growth of the economy.  The CBO uses a fairly detailed and reasonable model to project this (based on projected labor force growth, investment in capital, and productivity growth).  However, it is probably even more difficult to project GDP than to project future spending levels and tax revenues for any given level of future GDP.  But Summers notes the critical sensitivity of the projected future deficits to the projected growth in GDP.  He states “Data from the CBO imply that an increase of just 0.2 percent in annual growth would entirely eliminate the projected long-term budget gap”.

One can calculate from the data made available with the CBO report their projected growth of real per capita GDP.  For 2013 to 2088, it comes to 1.60%  year.  A previous post on this blog noted the remarkable constancy of the rate of growth of real per capita GDP since at least 1870 of 1.9% a year (or 1.87% a year at two digit precision).  That earlier post noted that real per capita GDP in the US, despite large annual variations and even decade long deviations (such as during the Great Depression, and then during World War II), has always returned to a path of 1.87% growth since at least 1870.  That path even did not shift when there were even substantial deviations, such as during the Great Depression.  Rather, the economy always returned to the same, previous, path, and not one shifted up or down.

This is truly remarkable, and no one really knows the reason.  The path can be seen as a trend growth of capacity (based on labor available and capital invested, coupled with the technology of the time), but why this should path should have grown at 1.87% a year in the late 1800s; in the early, mid and late 1900s; and all the way into the 21st century, is not known.

Since we do not know why the economy has always returned to this one path, we need to be careful in looking forward.  Still, it is noteworthy that the CBO projections imply that the economy will now slow, to just 1.60% real per capita GDP growth over the next 75 years.  This CBO path is substantially lower than the path of 1.87% growth that has ruled for the last 140 years in the US.

The graph at the top of this post shows the path of GDP per capita projected by the CBO (which one should note is a year by year projection, which just averages out to 1.60% per year over the full period), along with an extension of the 1.87% path that has ruled since at least the 1870s.   The graph is adapted from my earlier post (although now converted to prices of 2005 whereas the earlier one was in prices of 1990; this does not affect the rates of growth).  It is expressed in logarithms, since in logarithms a constant rate of growth is a straight line.

It is not clear why there should be this deceleration to 1.60% from the 1.87% rate of growth the economy has followed over the last 140 years.  Mechanically, one can ascribe the deceleration to what the CBO assumes for the rate of growth of technological progress.  But projecting growth in technology over a 75 year period is basically impossible, as the CBO notes.

The deceleration over the next 75 years has a very important implication, however.  The CBO found in its sensitivity analysis that a rate of growth that is just 0.2% faster will suffice to close the budgetary gap, even if one does not take any new measures to raise revenues or cut government spending.  Hence a return to the previous historical growth path of 1.87% a year from the 1.60% rate the CBO projects, or a difference of 0.27%, will more than suffice to close the budgetary gap.

The policy implication is that with such sensitivity to the growth in GDP, we should be focussed on measures to raise growth, rather than short term budgetary measures that will act to reduce growth.  The economy has suffered from government austerity since 2010, which has held back growth.  Government has been cutting spending, thus undermining demand in an economy with high unemployment and close to zero interest rates, where more labor is not employed and more is not produced because the resulting products could not then be sold due to the lack of demand.  As an earlier post on this blog noted, if government spending had been allowed to grow simply at the historic average rate (and even more so if it had been allowed to grow as it had under Reagan), the US would by now be back at full employment.

Over the medium term, Summers notes that both conservatives and liberals agree that growth should be raised, and on the types of measures which should help this.  More investment, both public and private, is required rather than less.  Research and development, both public and private, is important.  More effective education is also required.

I would agree with all of these.  But to be honest, since we do not really understand why the economy always returned to the 1.87% growth path over the last 140 years, it would not be correct to say we can be sure such measures will be effective.  However, what we can say with confidence is that measures that hinder the recovery of the economy, as the government spending cuts have been doing, will certainly hurt.

We Have a Revenue Problem: Government Debt to GDP Would Fall Without the Bush Tax Cuts

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Debt to GDP Ratio, FY1790 to 2038, no Bush Tax Cuts

A.  Debt to GDP Would Fall Without the Bush Tax Cuts

If the Bush tax cuts had not been extended at the start of this year for almost all households, the public debt to GDP ratio would be falling rapidly.  Even though health care costs are rising and Social Security payments will need to increase as baby boomers retire, the US would be generating more than sufficient tax revenues to cover such costs, if we simply had reverted to the tax rates that held prior to the Bush tax cuts.

The figures on this can be calculated from numbers provided by the Congressional Budget Office with its annual Long-Term Budget Outlook, which was published earlier this week.  Most of the attention paid to the report focussed on the base case projection by the CBO of the public debt to GDP ratio if nothing changes in current policy.   The ratio had risen sharply as a consequence of the economic collapse of 2008, in the last year of the Bush administration, and subsequent weak recovery.  But with the economy recovering and with other measures taken, the ratio is now projected to stabilize and indeed fall modestly for several years.  However, the ratio would then start to grow again in fiscal year 2019, and especially after 2023.  As the graph above shows, the CBO projects that, under current policy, the debt to GDP ratio would rise to 100% of GDP by fiscal 2038, reaching levels last seen at the end of World War II.

This has been interpreted by Republicans as a runaway spending problem, and have asserted this calls for further sharp cuts.  But the data issued by the CBO with its report allows one also to work out what the consequences were of allowing most of the Bush tax cuts (primarily – there were also some other tax measures) to be extended from January 1, 2013.  The Bush tax cuts had been scheduled to expire on that date.  They were instead extended and made permanent for all but the extremely rich (those households earning more than $450,000 a year, the richest 0.7% of the population).

Specifically, the CBO provided in the projections it had made last year (in 2012) what public revenues would have been if the tax cuts had expired, as scheduled, at the start of 2013.  The new report provides those figures for comparison, updated to reflect the new methodology for GDP that the BEA adopted in July.  One can combine those revenue projections with CBO’s current projections of non-interest expenditures, along with a calculation of what interest would then be on the resulting (lower) debt, to estimate what the fiscal deficit and debt to GDP figures would then be.

The resulting path of federal government debt to GDP is shown as the green line in the graph above.  The debt to GDP ratio plummets.  Instead of reaching 100% of GDP in fiscal 2038, it instead would fall to just 37% of GDP in that year.  And a simple extrapolation of that line forward would bring the debt all the way to zero in a further 24 years.

The extension of the Bush tax cuts for most households can therefore, on its own, more than fully account for the projected rise in the public debt to GDP ratio.  With tax rates as they had been under Clinton, there would be no debt issue.

B.  A Longer Term Perspective

The CBO report also provides data on the federal government debt to GDP ratio going back to the founding of the republic in 1790.  I have put the projected paths on a graph with the history to put them in that context.  The fall in the debt ratio that would follow if the Bush tax cuts had not been extended is similar to the falls seen in that ratio in the periods following the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and during the Clinton years following the run-up during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies.

Public debt reached a peak of 106% of GDP in fiscal year 1946, at the end of World War II.  The ratio then fell steadily in the 1950s and 1060s, and was just 25% in 1981, at the end of the Carter presidency.  It fell during this period not because there were large budget surpluses, but rather because of generally strong economic growth.  This also shows that strong growth is possible even if the debt ratio is as high as 106%, undermining the argument made by the economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff in a 2010 paper, that debt in excess of 90% of GDP will lead to a sharp reduction in growth.  Republican politicians had quickly jumped on the Reinhart and Rogoff conclusion, arguing that this work supported their views.  But aside from numerous counterexamples, such as the US after World War II, researchers later discovered that there had been a coding error in the spreadsheet Reinhart and Rogoff used to assemble their data.  More fundamentally, researchers showed that to the extent there is a relationship between high debt and slow growth, it is that downturns and slow growth lead to a rise in the debt to GDP ratio (as we saw in the US after the 2008 collapse), rather than that a high debt ratio leads to slow growth.

The debt ratio then rose sharply during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies, rising from 25% of GDP in fiscal 1981 to 48% in fiscal 1993.  This was the first such rise in the debt ratio in American history, aside from the times when the country went into war or at the start of the Great Depression.  During the Great Depression the ratio rose during the Hoover years from 15% in fiscal 1929 to 39% in fiscal 1933, and then to 43% in fiscal 1934.  But it is interesting that during the Roosevelt presidency, and in stark contrast to the common view that the New Deal was characterized by big increases in government spending, the ratio then stayed in the range of 40% to 44% until 1942, following the entry of the US into World War II.

The debt ratio then fell during the Clinton presidency, from 48% in fiscal 1993 to 31% in fiscal 2001.  But with the Bush tax cuts and then the 2008 collapse, the ratio rose to 52% in  fiscal 2009, and to 73% this year.   As noted above, the ratio would now start to fall again if the Bush tax cuts had not been extended, reaching a projected 37% in fiscal 2038.  But with most of the Bush tax cuts made permanent, the ratio (with the same government spending levels) is instead projected to rise to 100% in that year.

C.  Conclusion

The first step in addressing some problem is to understand the cause.  The cause of the current fiscal problems, which if not addressed would lead to a public debt rising to 100% of GDP by fiscal 2038, is the Bush tax cuts.

An earlier post on this blog looked at what the debt to GDP ratio would have been had the Bush tax cuts never been enacted (in 2001 and 2003) and the Afghan and Iraq wars had not been launched.  It found that even assuming the 2008 economic downturn would still have occurred, the public debt to GDP ratio would have risen only to about 35% by fiscal 2014, and would then start to fall.  That post also showed that even assuming the cost of the wars and with the Bush tax cuts in place from 2001 to 2013, phasing out the tax cuts starting in fiscal 2014 would have led the public debt to GDP ratio to fall until at least fiscal 2022 (the last year in the CBO figures then available).

The current post has made use of the CBO’s new long term projections, and finds that if the Bush tax cuts had not been extended at the beginning of 2013, the debt to GDP ratio would be on a sharp downward path to at least fiscal 2038.  The current conventional wisdom appears to be that rising health care costs and the increase in the number of retirees as the baby boom generation reaches 65 means that a rise in the debt to GDP ratio is inevitable, unless there are sharp cut-backs in Medicare and Social Security.

But that is not the case.  The debt ratio would be falling rapidly if it were not for the Bush tax cuts.