Tuerck letter to Suffolk Environmental Club

The following letter from BHI Executive Director David G. Tuerck was sent to the Suffolk Environmental Club on November 20, 2014:

Dear Students:

Concerning your comments in the Suffolk Journal about Koch money “influencing … scientific results,”  I find it appalling that a group of students at Suffolk – or any student anywhere – would sign on the idea of banning money that goes to support research  without even the slightest attempt to confer in advance with the authors of the work being condemned.

You say you have “questions about what the [Koch] money is being used for exactly.”  Well, I have already told the Journal that almost all the money from Koch has gone to support faculty salaries, student scholarships and a speaking program.

As for the funds that go to the Beacon Hill Institute or its research, you, in my opinion, violated generally-accepted standards of academic integrity when you allied yourselves with the “Koch-free” people without first talking to me and my staff. I have to wonder how you would blindly attach yourself to what is a blatant, anti-free-speech, radical-left political campaign without first finding out what you are talking about. Where, I have to ask, was your faculty advisor when you did this?

What you do when you sign on to that the anti-Koch campaign is ally yourself with a political operative who is using her Suffolk connection to advance her career.  It seems to me that you might want to reconsider allowing yourselves to be used as pawns in her game.

I have a suggestion:  Contact Frank Conte, our Director of Communications, and ask for an appointment to meet with my staff to discuss our work.  Then you can reach your own conclusions about the quality of our research and whether you want it banned from Suffolk.

Sincerely,

David G. Tuerck
Executive Director, Beacon Hill Institute
Professor of Economics
Suffolk University

Related: Letter to the editor, Suffolk Journal, November 19, 2014

BHI work cited in Campaign 2014

BHI's work on labor market reform and interstate competitiveness has drawn the attention of office-seekers far and wide. Safe to say both parties like us. After all, the work speaks for itself. 

A peek at the Fed's model

From the Fed's authors: 

The U.S. labor market is large and multifaceted. Often-cited indicators, such as the unemployment rate or payroll employment, measure aparticular dimension of labor market activity, and it is not uncommon for different indicators to send conflicting signals about labor market conditions. Accordingly, analysts typically look at many indicators when attempting to gauge labor market improvement. However, it is often difficult to know how to weigh signals from various indicators.Statistical models can be useful to such efforts because they provide away to summarize information from several indicators. This Notedescribes a dynamic factor model of labor market indicators that we have developed recently, which we call the labor market conditions index (LMCI). Details of the data, model, and estimation will be presented in a forthcoming FEDS working paper. 

We look forward to reading the paper. 

Hat tip: Brian Wesbury of First Trust.

Composition of the Massachusetts workforce: By sector

Education and Health Services is the largest job sector in Massachusetts. More on the June Employment Situation in Massachusetts.

Source: Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, Commonwealth of Massachusetts

BHI's Conte in the Herald: Bay State benefits from foreign trade

This morning the Boston Herald published our op-ed on extending Trade Promotion Authority to extend free trade pacts. This benefits Massachusetts.

State Tax Collections - U.S. Census Bureau

Quick takeaway: State sales taxes remain steady and dropped only slightly during the downturn of 2009.

A response to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's misguided critique of the STAMP model

On May 21, 2014, The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) released a report entitled, “STAMP is an Unsound Tool for Gauging the Economic Impact of Taxes.” The report makes several criticisms of the Beacon Hill Institute (BHI) State Tax Analysis Modeling Program (STAMP®).  BHI responds here on what ITEP gets wrong about the STAMP model. (PDF file)

In defense of STAMP as a tax modeling tool

A PDF version of this primer is available here. 

The following is an assessment of the appropriateness of modeling state tax policy using methods that came to the fore in The General Theory of Employment Interest, and Money, published in 1936 by the British economist, John Maynard Keynes. The two features of Keynes’s book that are most relevant to the topic at hand are (1) that it was written to address the economic conditions of the Great Depression, which was in its 7th full year at the time of the book’s publication, and (2) that it offered a tool, called the Keynesian multiplier, for measuring the effectiveness of the policy recommendations that came out of the book.

Keynes saw it as his purpose to replace the hitherto recognized economic paradigm, then called the “classical” model, with a new paradigm that reflected the depth and persistence of the Depression. In the classical model, economic downturns, even severe economic downturns, were supposed to be self-correcting. The relevance here is that the classical model (whose assumptions mirror those of our CGE model) assumed that supply equaled demand except for brief periods of imbalance between supply and demand, which would be eventually corrected by price and wage adjustments.

Given that the ongoing economic downturn was clearly not self-correcting, argued Keynes, it was necessary to forge a new approach that both explained that downturn and provided a path back to more normal conditions. It was necessary to build a model in which the supply of goods and labor could exceed the demand for goods and labor over a protracted period of time.

Keynes’s approach turned the classical model on its head: Previously, saving was necessary for investment and therefore for production and employment. Now saving was a “leakage” from the spending stream that slowed the pace of economic expansion. Previously, government spending crowded out personal consumption. Now government spending provided a spur to consumption. Government could rescue the economy from a protracted downturn by using its tax and spending powers to boost aggregate demand.

In doing so, the government would take advantage of how the Keynesian multiplier could be relied upon to increase production and consumption. Government would spend, say, another$1,000 on some activity. It didn’t matter if the activity was something useful like building a bridge or something wasteful like paying men to dig holes and fill them in again. Spending was spending. And this spending would cause production to expand by some multiple of $1,000.

A key concept in computing the multiplier is the “marginal propensity to consume,” or ”MPC,” defined as the additional consumption that another dollar of disposable income would yield. Suppose this MPC equaled .5. An “injection” of $1,000 in government spending would immediately bring about $1,000 in new production. But then consumers would spend 50% of that, adding another $500 to production. Then consumers would spend 50% of that, or $250, leading to further new production and to further rounds of new consumption and production so that, at the end of the day, the initial ”injection” of $1,000 in government spending yielded altogether $2,000 in new production. Thus by spending only $1,000, the government would cause production to rise by twice that amount. Hence, the Keynesian multiplier.

A further wrinkle in this analysis is the Keynesian “balanced budget multiplier.” This concept, which comes up in Keynesian models of state tax policy, begins with the idea that, just as government spending is good for the economy, taxes are bad (though for reasons unlike those considered by STAMP). Taxes are bad in this analysis because they reduce disposable income. Suppose that the government decided to raise taxes by $1,000, rather than increase spending by $1,000. Now disposable income would fall by $1,000, and as a result, consumption would fall by $500, causing production to fall by the same amount. Then consumption and production would fall by another $250, and so forth, until both had fallen by $1,000.

Now suppose the government decided to raise spending and taxes by $1,000. We get the following effects on production:

• Change in production from $1,000 in new government spending = $1,000 + $500 + $250 + $125 + ... + 0 = $2,000.
• Change in production from $1,000 in new taxes = -$500 - $250 - $125 - ... - 0 = -$1,000.
• Adding: $2,000 - $1,000 = $1,000.

Voila! The simultaneous $1,000 increase in spending and taxes has a net positive effect on the economy of $1,000. Conversely if the government had cut spending and taxes by $1,000, the economy would have shrunk by the same amount. And interestingly, the result doesn’t depend on the size of the MPC. Economic models that have built-in Keynesian elements show that a given increase in spending and taxes will expand the economy by that increase and that a given decrease in spending and taxes will contract the economy by that decrease.

Despite the fact that Keynes himself recognized that this line of analysis was legitimate only when production and employment were significantly below their ”full-employment” norms, the Keynesian model dominated economic thinking well beyond the end of the Depression and until the early 1970s, when “stagflation” cast doubt on its applicability to current conditions. Thereafter, economists started to rehabilitate the previously discarded classical model, causing mentions of Keynes to disappear almost entirely from the academic literature and to receive less and less consideration in college textbooks.

The recent economic downturn did, in fact, breathe new life into the Keynesian corpse. But the failure of the economy to respond measurably to the 2009 “stimulus” policies suggests that this renewed life will quickly fade. The current economic weakness appears to be due, not to an insufficiency of demand, but to uncertainties surrounding Obamacare and Dodd Frank and to safety net measures that deter people from taking jobs, all of which operate on the supply-side of the economy. When ITEP criticizes us for assuming full employment, it is implying that we should be more “Keynesian” in our approach. We should treat government spending as good for the economy and taxes as bad only insofar as they reduce disposable income. The balanced budget multiplier is a handy tool for government expansionists who want to claim, in effect, that the state government can make the state economy as big as it wants by merely spending more.

We prefer the alternative approach is to revert to classical arguments that government spending crowds out consumption and that taxes matter, not for how they affect disposable income, but for how they affect incentives to work, save and invest. In that framework, a reduction in government spending translates into an increase in personal consumption. Reductions in tax rates, as they apply to sales or income taxes, increase the reward to work, saving and investment and, through that mechanism, cause production to expand. This “supply-side” approach makes sense insofar as the demand-side palliatives called for by the Keynesian model seem to have lost their usefulness some 70 years ago. No one outside of some other modeling organizations takes the idea of the balanced budget multiplier seriously anymore.

It is the position of the Beacon Hill Institute that, in modeling tax policy, Keynes’s ideas work well, insofar as they do at all, for considerations of federal tax policy changes in an economy that is clearly depressed owing to a lack of aggregate demand. The federal government can influence national economic conditions through Keynesian policies since it can run budget deficits and print money, whereas state governments can do neither. Furthermore, the federal government doesn’t have to concern itself with the outmigration of capital, jobs and consumer activity in the way that the states do when it comes to raising taxes.

Economic models that use Keynesian multipliers to rationalize individual projects, such as building a sports arena in a depressed area, are also fine as far as they go. But state policy makers should be wary of models that presume to generalize that approach to making to state tax policy.

The BHI approach to modeling a reduction in, say, the state sales tax is focus on how that tax change will expand consumption by making consumption cheaper in the state and thus bring in more retail business and, by doing so, increase production and salaries. Sales tax revenues will go down, but the reduction in those revenues will be partly offset by an increase in income tax revenues and other tax revenues. Government spending will fall but the taxes previously paid to government will show up as increased consumption. The alternative view, that the path to economic expansion lies in combined spending and tax increases does not fit the facts of the current economy at the national level and certainly does not fit those facts at the state level.

Blasts from the past for critiques of BHI that don't last.

 
Another day, another reason for a handy compendium of response to "critiques" of BHI's work (and an note on argumentation.)

Update: Keynesian v. Classical Methods in Modeling State Tax Policy (November 2013)
 
Response to Rep. Hunter (March 2014)

An Appeal to Facts in a “Fact Check”:  Response to Critique of BHI's Renewable Portfolio Standards studies (November 2013)

Response to the Union of Concerned Scientists' "Critique" of BHI's RPS studies (January 2013)

BHI’s response to TP’s Climate Progress blogger Michael Conathan’s critique of NJ wind farm study (August 2011)

The Beacon Hill Institute’s Tax Analysis Modeling Program: A Response to Charney (April 2010)

The Beacon Hill Instituteʹs Analysis of Pennsylvania Tax Policy: STAMPing Out the Nonsense from Our Critics (July 2009)

Information about the BHI State Tax Analysis Modeling Program (October 2012, rev)

A brief primer on the motive fallacy. 

WSJ's Notable & Quotable for today nails the data problem with prevailing wages

From today's Wall Street Journal (gated)

Philip K. Howard, from his new book "The Rule of Nobody: Saving America From Dead Laws and Broken Government" (Norton, 2014):
 The 2009 economic stimulus package promoted by President Obama included $5 billion to weatherize some 607,000 homes-with the goals of both spurring the economy and increasing energy efficiency. But the project was required to comply with a statute called the Davis-Bacon Act (signed into law by President Hoover in 1931), which provides that construction projects with federal funding must pay workers the "prevailing wage"-basically a union perk that costs taxpayers about 20 percent more than actual labor rates. This requirement comes with a mass of red tape; bureaucrats in the Labor Department must set wages, as a matter of law, for each category of construction worker in each of three thousand counties in America. There was no schedule for "weatherproofers." So the Labor Department began a slow trudge of determining how much weatherproofers should be paid in Merced County, California; Monmouth County, New Jersey; and several thousand other counties. The stimulus plan had projected that California would weatherproof twenty-five hundred homes per month. At the end of 2009, the actual total was twelve.
 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303725404579461330128654314?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303725404579461330128654314.html

For more on the prevailing wage, see BHI's 2008 study.

David G. Tuerck interviewed by Massachusetts Matters on the recent UAW vote in Tennessee.