Tag Archives: National Bureau of Economic Research

National Endowment for Rich Farts

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Big Government, Charity, Subsidies

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Wailing has begun over the possible defunding and demise of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). How could those cretins propose to eliminate an institution so very critical to promoting artistic expression? If that’s your reaction, you haven’t thought much about the main beneficiaries of federal sinkholes like the NEA. Granted, at $146 million annually, it is not a major federal budget item, but I’d rather not stoop to defend a lousy program because it’s small. So what’s my beef with the NEA, you ask? Read on.

First, any implication that the NEA is the lifeblood of the arts is laughable. No, the arts won’t die if federal funding is denied. Jeff Jacoby quotes figures suggesting that grants from the NEA represented less than 1% of all support for the arts and culture in the U.S. in 2015. Great art was created prior to the establishment of the NEA in 1965. Without the NEA, such bungles as “Piss Christ” would have met with less acclaim. As such a minor funding vehicle, eliminating the NEA won’t make much difference to artists, but it will end a subsidy for wealthy patrons, who can and do provide support for worthy projects, but also derive essentially private benefits from the federal arts spigot.

A large share of NEA grant money goes to non-profit organizations that are already subsidized to the extent that they are not taxed. (Let’s face it: the term “non-profit” itself is often a term of art.) Large arts organizations, which receive a significant share of NEA grants, often have highly-paid administrators and sumptuous facilities. Contributions to those organizations are tax-deductible for the donors. And few of those organizations provide art to the public for free or at a discount. Indeed, as noted at the last link, they often charge significant prices for attendance, and their audiences include a disproportionate percentage of high-income patrons.

Lawrence Reed argues persuasively that government need not subsidize the arts in an article in his series on the Cliches of Progressivism. Here are the highlights:

  • “Government funding of the arts… carries with it all the downsides of dependence on politics.
  • Claims that arts spending is magically “multiplied” are specious and usually self-serving, and never look at alternative uses of the same money.
  • Culture arises naturally and spontaneously among people who chose to interact with each other. Art is part of that, but it also competes with all sorts of other things people choose to do with their time and money.
  • If art is truly important, then the last thing we should want to do is politicize it or divert it toward those things that people with power think we should see or hear.”

Reed’s comment regarding “multipliers” might need some explanation in this context. The NEA’s defenders often claim that each dollar of NEA grant money results in multiple additional grants from other sources, but there is absolutely no evidence to support this claim except for a requirement that NEA grants be matched at the state level (not to mention a requirement for a state-level arts agency). Obviously, that represents another cost to taxpayers. It is quite possible, in fact, that the NEA and matching state grants act as substitutes for, and depress, private arts giving. See this piece in Forbes for more background. This NBER research utilized a large panel data set on individual charities and found only mixed support for the proposition that government grants encourage private contributions. In fact, the estimated effect was ambiguous for individual categories of charitable giving (which did not explicitly address the arts as a category). In any case, a positive cross-sectional effect of government grants on private giving for individual charities is consistent with a negative effect on other charities that do not receive public grants.

In a 20-year-old report from the Heritage Foundation, Stuart Butler offered a list of reasons to defund the NEA, which have held up well. Here, I provide eight that seem relevant:

  1. The arts will have more than enough support without the NEA: See above.
  2. Welfare for cultural elitists: See above. NEA grants fund a number of big and very elite organizations, but they would have you believe that it’s a veritable welfare program for the arts. That is a huge distortion. There is no question that the distribution of patrons of these organizations skews to the wealthy.
  3. Discourages charitable gifts to the arts: See above. Is the award of an NEA grant the equivalent of establishing a credit record to an arts organization? This might hold up for a few small organizations with projects the NEA has funded, but again, the support for this proposition is anecdotal and self-serving, and the numbers are small. And is there an implied stain on the legitimacy of any organization unable to win such a grant?
  4. Lowers the quality of American art: Committee decisions and central planning are not conducive to the spirit of creativity. Public institutions are often guided by political agendas, and government-sanctioned art stands in sharp contradiction to the ideal of free expression. Butler quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature…. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
  5. Funds pornography: this is not my hot button… it’s an issue only to the extent that public funds should not be used for purposes only flimsily in the public interest that many taxpayers find morally repugnant.
  6. Promotes politically correct art: See #4 above. The merits are then judged on the basis of criteria like race, ethnicity, and gender identity, not the quality of the art itself.
  7. Wastes resources: Butler offers a few examples of the waste at the NEA, a shortcoming common to all bureaucracies. The NEA funds organizations that behave as non-profit cronyists, engaging in lobbying efforts for more support. Butler also cites evidence that recipients of government grants in the UK hire more administrative staff than non-recipients, and tend not to reduce ticket prices.
  8. Funding the NEA disturbs the U.S. tradition of limited government: I suppose this goes without saying….

The federal government in the U.S. was granted a set of enumerated powers in the Constitution, and promoting the arts was not one of them. It wasn’t as if the subject didn’t come up at the Constitutional Convention. It did, and it was voted down. Today, entrenched interests at organizations like the NEA and National Public Radio distort the character of the constituencies they serve. In reality, those constituencies  are heavily concentrated among the cultural and economic elite. The NEA and NPR also promote the fiction that they are all that stand between access to the arts and culture and a bleak, artless dystopia. Give them credit for creating a fantasy about which the political left readily suspends disbelief.

Educational Free Fail

07 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in Education, Subsidies

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image

Free college tuition would undermine the quality of higher education and increase its real cost to society. In fact, it may well cost many subsidized students more than its worth in lost work experience, wages and self-esteem. Those foregone opportunities are very real costs despite their consignment as “unseen” counterfactuals. They are mostly incremental to costs that are more obvious to the minds of statists promoting free post-secondary education.

Basic supply and demand analysis is the only requirement for understanding the tuition bubble in U.S. higher education, and the absurdity of heavy subsidies as a solution. Ariel Deschapell calls subsidies “worse than nothing“, comparing the approach to “throwing gasoline on a fire“. He’s quite right.

There is no question that increased subsidies lead to higher tuition and ultimately greater student debt. A recent paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that loan subsidies “fully account” for the increase in college tuition costs from 1987 – 2010. Another 2015 study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reached broadly similar conclusions:

“We find that institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition disproportionately around these policy changes, with a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent. We also find that Pell Grant aid and the unsubsidized federal loan program have pass-through effects on tuition, although these are economically and statistically not as strong. The subsidized loan effect on tuition is most pronounced for expensive, private institutions that are somewhat, but not among the most, selective.“

As Deschapell points out, most schools turn away a significant share of their applicants. How can that sort of demand exist, given the sky-high tuition charged by many colleges and universities? Subsidies. Subsidized tuition. Subsidized loans. When the cost to the end user of educational services is reduced at a given price, demand for those services increases. The papers linked above demonstrate the strength of the response.

Unfortunately, the supply of higher education is subject to relatively hard limits. Traditionally, the supply of educators, facilities and other learning resources has not been especially elastic. Technology has arguably made education more scalable, but only in terms of enrollment, and not at a zero incremental cost. Outcomes are more dependent than ever on a student’s intelligence, preparation and ability to remain engaged.

The supply of education is limited by still other factors. The long-term impact of inflation on costs is often more severe for service industries such as education, as they generally do not share in the productivity growth enjoyed by goods-producing sectors. Moreover, the increasing complexity of administrative functions, including education finance and regulatory compliance in an astonishing number of areas such as health, environmental and diversity goals (and certainly some self-inflicted administrative bloat), imposes cost escalation at many schools. Worst of all, the supply of education and acceptance of federally-subsidized student loans by certain institutions is restricted by federally-appointed accreditation agencies. This puts a lid on competitive pressures in higher education and inflates costs.

Higher demand and limited supply mean that some form of rationing is necessary. What mechanisms for rationing educational opportunities are available? Higher admission standards are sometimes a possibility, but public institutions may have little flexibility to raise standards, especially for resident students. Interestingly, diversity goals can lead to a de facto tightening of admission standards for some applicants even as standards for others are overridden or compromised. Declining quality of education is a “relief valve” to be avoided, but it is a very real possibility.

Higher tuition to the payer is an almost unavoidable consequence. That is why Deschapell likens free, givernment-paid tuition to an accelerant. Supporters of free tuition fail to recognize this relatively simple, causal chain.

When student debt is subsidized, it tends to mount faster than educational achievement and job prospects allow, leading to high rates of default. It also distorts the choices of would-be individual payers by inflating tuition costs. Passing the cost of education along to taxpayers, or “socializing the cost” as Deschapell says, completely severs the responsibility for marginal costs from the marginal benefit of education, an obvious prescription for a misallocation of resources. The decision to pursue more education, and the responsibility, should be in the hands of the same individuals: those in the best position to know whether it is viable: prospective students and their families. They know better than anyone the real opportunities foregone in terms of lost wages and the skills and experience that can be gained by staying out of school. Eliminating tuition from the decision would divert many more individuals into pursuits for which they are ill-suited.

College graduation or completion rates are disappointingly low, and correspondingly, dropout rates are very high, especially at community colleges. Moreover, profiles of the dropout population show that colleges have no business admitting a significant share of those individuals. This is damning evidence that we are already over-allocating resources to this activity. Additional subsidies won’t fix the problem.

There is no doubt that cross-sectionally, advanced education is associated with better employment prospects and higher incomes. And higher education can provide “social benefits” in excess of its direct value to students. Those facts do not imply, however, that generous inducements to questionable prospects will create positive outcomes. Quite the contrary. And in fact, the quality of education is vulnerable to dilution with increases in the number of poorly-qualified students.

A better way to improve the lifetime prospects of more people is to encourage production and employment opportunities with flexible wage policies, light taxes and less intrusive regulation. Competition at all levels of education should also be promoted; those steps would do more to improve outcomes than subsidies ever can. Throwing public money at education is generally unproductive, inflates tuition and drains the productive sector of resources. After all, the strength of that very sector must be relied upon to keep public education afloat. Individuals cannot be absolved of facing the real trade-offs inherent in their choices. Ultimately, by distorting decisions, free tuition cannot truly empower individuals and improve well being.

 

 

 

Social Security: Saving or Tax? Proceeds or Aid?

17 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in Big Government

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SOCSEC Negative Return

In general parlance, an entitlement is a thing to which one is entitled. If you have paid into Social Security (FICA payroll “contributions”), you should feel entitled to receive benefits one day. Why do I so often hear indignant complaints about the use of the term “entitlement” when applied to Social Security and Medicare? I’ve heard it from both ends of the political spectrum, but more often from the Left. It is usually accompanied by a statement about having “paid for those benefits!”. Exactly, you should feel entitled to them. You are not asking society to pay you alms!

Yet there seems to be resentment of an imagined implication that such “entitlements” are equivalent to “welfare” of some kind. That might be because the definition of an entitlement is somewhat different in the federal budget: it is a payment or benefit for which Congress sets eligibility rules with mandatory funding, as contrasted with discretionary budget items with explicit approval of funding. Because payments are based solely on eligibility, Social Security, Medicare and many forms of welfare benefits are all classified as entitlements in the federal budget. Obviously, those complaining about the use of the term in connection with Social Security believe there is a difference between their entitlement and welfare. But as long as they are willing to leave their “contributions” and future eligibility in the hands of politicians, their claim on future benefits is tenuous. Yes, you will pay FICA TAXES, and then you might be paid benefits (alms?) if you are eligible at that time. Certainly, the government has behaved as if the funds are fair game for use in the general budget.

Having made that minor rant, I can get to another point of this post: the Social Security retirement system offers terrible returns for its “beneficiaries”. Furthermore, it is insolvent, meaning that its long-term promises are, and will remain, unfunded under the current program design. However, there is a fairly easy fix for both problems from an economic perspective, if not from a political perspective.

The chart at the top of this post shows that Social Security benefits paid to eligible retirees are less than the payroll taxes those same individuals paid into the system. The chart is a couple of years old, but the facts haven’t changed. It’s boggling to realize that you’ll receive a negative return on the funds after a lifetime of “contributions”. That kind of investment performance should be condemned as unacceptable. However, you should know that the program is not “invested” in your retirement at all! Social Security’s so-called “trust fund” is almost a complete fiction. Most FICA tax revenue is not held “in trust”. Instead, it is paid out as an intergenerational transfer to current retirees. In the past, any surplus FICA tax revenue was invested in U.S. Treasury special purpose bonds, which funded part of the federal deficit. Here is a fairly good description of the process. The article quotes the Clinton Office of Management and Budget in the year 2000:

“These balances are available to finance future benefit payments … only in a bookkeeping sense. They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits, or other expenditures.“

Unfortunately, for the past few years, instead of annual surpluses for the trust fund, deficits have been the rule and they are growing. Retiring baby boomers, longer life expectancies, slow income growth and declining labor force participation are taking a toll and will continue to do so. Something will have to change, but reform of any kind has been elusive. An important qualification is that almost any reform would have to be phased in as a matter of political necessity and fairness to current retirees. Unfortunately, just about every reform proposal I’ve heard has been greeted by distorted claims that it would harm either current retirees or those nearing retirement. In fact, leaving the program unaltered is likely to be a greater threat to everyone down the road.

There are three general categories of reform: higher payroll taxes, lower benefits, and at least partial privatization. Tax increases have obvious economic drawbacks, while straight benefit reductions would be harmful to future recipients even if that entailed means testing: the return on contributions is already negative, especially at the upper end of the income spectrum. Michael Tanner discusses specific options within each of these categories, including raising the normal and early retirement ages. None of the options close the funding gap, but at least higher retirement ages reflect the reality of longer life expectancies.

Early in his presidency, the George W. Bush administration offered a reform plan involving no tax increases or benefit cuts. Instead, the plan would have offered voluntary personal accounts for younger individuals. Needless to say, it was not adopted, but it would have kept the system in better shape than it is today. The key to success of any privatization is that unlike the Social Security Trust Fund, workers with private accounts can earn market returns on their contributions, which are in turn reinvested, allowing the accounts to grow faster over time. Tanner notes that 20 other countries have moved to private accounts including Chile, Australia, Mexico, Sweden, Poland, Latvia, Peru, and Uruguay. This sort of change does not preclude a separate social safety net for those who have been unable to accumulate a minimum threshold of assets, as Chile has done. Tanner’s article lays out details of a tiered plan that would allow participants a wider range of investments as their accumulated assets grow.

Economic research suggests that participants do not place a high value on their future benefits. From a 2007 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper by John Geanakoplos and Stephen Zeldes entitled “The Market Value of Social Security“:

“We find that the difference between market valuation and ‘actuarial’ valuation is large, especially when valuing the benefits of younger cohorts. … The market value of accrued benefits is only 2/3 of that implied by the actuarial approach.“

An implication is that younger workers who have already made contributions could be offered the choice of a future lump sum that is less than the actuarial present value of their benefits when they become eligible. Such a program could cut the long-term funding gap significantly, if the results found by Geanakoplos and Zeldes can be taken at face value, though it could create additional short-term funding pressure at the time of payment.

Qualified support for such a program seems apparent from another 2007 NBER paper by Jeffrey R. Brown, Marcus D. Casey and Olivia S. Mitchell entitled “Who Values the Social Security Annuity? New Evidence on the Annuity Puzzle“. They find that:

“Our first finding is that nearly three out of five respondents favor the lump-sum payment if it were approximately actuarially fair, a finding that casts doubt on several leading explanations for why more people do not annuitize. Second, there is some modest price sensitivity and evidence consistent with adverse selection; in particular, people in better health and having more optimistic longevity expectations are more likely to choose the annuity. Third, after controlling on education, more financially literate individuals prefer the annuity. Fourth, people anticipating future Social Security benefit reductions are more likely to choose the lump-sum, suggesting that political risk matters.“

Moreover, lump sums may offer an additional advantage from a funding perspective: a 2012 paper from the Michigan Retirement Research Center at the University of Michigan by Jingjing Chai, Raimond Maurer, Olivia S. Mitchell and Ralph Rogalla called “Exchanging Delayed Social Security Benefits for Lump Sums: Could This Incentivize Longer Work Careers?” found that “... workers given the chance to receive their delayed retirement credit as a lump sum payment would boost their average retirement age by l.5-2 years.”

Certainly, it would be difficult for private accounts to fare as badly in terms of returns on contributions than the system has managed to date. The future appears even less promising without reform. There are several advantages to privatization of Social Security accounts beyond the likelihood of higher returns mentioned above: it would avoid some of the labor market distortions that payroll taxes entail, and it would increase the pool of national savings. Perhaps most importantly, over time, it would release the assets (and future benefits) accumulated by workers from the clutches of the state and self-interested politicians. They are not entitled to pursue their political ends with those assets; they are yours!

Government Supplies a Cliff; Would you Jump?

14 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Big Government, Welfare State

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welfare cliff

People respond to incentives. That does not, in and of itself, make some people “energetic” and others “lazy”. To the contrary, it really means they are responsive and capable of calculating rewards. Critics of the welfare state are sometimes accused of labeling welfare recipients as “lazy”, which is absurd and a cop-out response to serious questions about the size, effectiveness, and even the fairness of means-tested benefits. The structure of welfare benefits in the U.S. often penalizes work effort and market earnings. That being the case, who can blame a recipient for minimizing work effort? From their perspective, that is what society wants them to do. Note that this has nothing to do with the provision of a social safety net for those who are unable to help themselves.

The welfare incentive phenomenon is explored by Zero Hedge under the Fight Club nom de guerre Tyler Durden in “When Work Is Punished: The Ongoing Tragedy Of America’s Welfare State“:

“At issue is the so-called “welfare cliff” beyond which families will literally become poorer the higher their wages, as the drop off in entitlements more than offsets the increase in earnings.“

The cliff looks different in different states and even differs by county. The chart at the top of this post is for Pennsylvania, from the state’s Secretary of Public Welfare, though I saw it on this post from LiberalForum. (Go to the link if the image is not clear). The Zero Hedge post linked above includes a dramatic illustration for Cook County in Illinois. Not many welfare recipients participate in all of the programs shown in the charts, but the point is that many of the programs create nasty incentives that tend to “trap” families at low income levels. Often, these workers and their families would be better off in the long-run if they were to suffer the consequences of the cliff in order to gain more work experience. Unfortunately, few have the resources to ride out a period of lower total income precipitated by the cliff. Another obvious implication is that increases in the minimum wage would actually harm some families by pushing them over the cliff.

Welfare cliffs differ by the recipients’ family structure (one- versus two-parent households, number of children) and do not apply to every welfare program. For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is very well-behaved in the sense that additional work and/or wage income flows through as a net gain the household. While most welfare programs involve a benefits cliff, incentives are undermined even before that point. A flattening in the level of total income as earned income rises indicates that the recipient faces an increasing marginal tax rate. The chart above shows that total income is relatively flat over a range of earned income below the income at which they’d encounter the cliff. This flat range starts at an earned income of $15,000 to $20,000 and extends up to the severe cliff at almost $30,000.

Zero Hedge quotes a report from the Illinois Policy Institute:

“We realize that this is a painful topic in a country in which the issue of welfare benefits and cutting (or not) the spending side of the fiscal cliff have become the two most sensitive social topics. Alas, none of that changes the matrix of incentives for Americans who find themselves facing a comparable dilemma: either remain on the left side of minimum US wage and rely on benefits, or move to the right side at far greater personal investment of work, and energy, and… have the same (or much lower) disposable income at the end of the day.“

Another interesting take on this issue is offered by Dan Mitchell, who cites a recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper, which finds:

“…the decline in desire to work since the mid-90s lowered the unemployment rate by about 0.5 ppt and the participation rate by 1.75 ppt. This is a large effect…“

The findings suggest that the welfare reforms of the 1990s actually had positive effects on work effort, though even the EITC creates some incentive problems for second earners. Worst of all is the incentive impact of expanded disability benefits, which have undone some of the gains from reform. Newer programs like Mortgage Assistance and now, Obamacare, have added to the work disincentives. Mitchell cites other research that reinforce these conclusions.

The welfare cliff harms economic efficiency by distorting the offer price of labor, by increasing costs to taxpayers, and by reducing the availability of productive resources. It is grossly unfair because it consigns its intended beneficiaries to a life of dependency. What a waste! Here is Mitchell’s prescription:

“Regarding the broader issue of redistribution and dependency, I argue that federalism is the best approach, both because states will face competitive pressure to avoid excessively generous benefits and because states will learn from each other about the best ways to help the truly needy while minimizing the negative impact of handouts on incentives for productive behavior.“

A side effect of negative welfare incentives is that they increase the relative benefits of participating in illegal income-earning activity. The “War on Drugs” exacerbates this effect by driving up drug prices. Of course, this activity is untaxed, and because it is unreported, it does not push the recipient toward the benefits cliff. This is another example of different government policies working at cross purposes, which is all too common.