Everything in the Democrat Economic Central Planning Arsenal is a Dud

The government told us the GDP growth rate in the first quarter was 1.8%, which is not a healthy growth rate at any time and is especially weak if an economy is recovering from a recession.  In May, the government increased that reported first quarter growth rate to 1.9%.  This was still not good, but it seemed to leave the door open to optimism that while recovery was slower than in other recessions, it would occur.  Then, the bottom fell out.  The first quarter GDP growth was revised downward to 0.4% and the second quarter GDP growth was said to be an anemic 1.3%, which has just been revised down to 1.0%.

Jobs growth is not keeping up with the growth in population.  The annual Consumer Price Index (CPI) stands at 3.6% and is running much higher in the last half year.  The average American worker workweek decreased by 0.1 hours and earnings fell by $0.03, which is no way to keep up with the inflation.  Labor productivity has very unusually been falling lately as well.  These factors bode ill for further hiring.

The rest of the world economy is not in good shape either, so there is no chance that exports will do much to change the bleak picture of the American economy.  The Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI), a measure of business purchasing activity, fell to a two-year low in August to 49.0.  Numbers below 50.0 mean contraction of business activity is going on.  Among the European countries with reduced activity are Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Greece.  The positive PMI's of Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland dropped.  The PMI of Japan is at a 3-month low and Taiwan's PMI is very negative at 45.2, its lowest value since January 2009.  Canada's GDP contracted, largely due to a 2.1% drop in exports.  The leading retailer in Australia expects falling sales.  China has a PMI on the edge of contraction and its exports to the U.S. have fallen.  The world economy is staggering.

In the U.S., the favorite Democrat central planning tools of stimulus spending and quantitative easing, or creating money from thin air, have not worked.  What a surprise!  Despite the GDP growth of the first half of the year being only 0.7%, the White House is telling us that GDP growth for the year will be 1.7%.  Wow, what a howler that is!  This means they are predicting growth in the second half of this year at an annual rate of 2.7%.  I suppose they think that growth will occur because businessmen and consumers are trusting that Obama's speech on his economic recovery plans this week will solve all of our problems!  For that to be so, all Americans would have to regress to the point that they believed that he could stop the oceans from rising and cure all of the diseases of the world, as many did when they first voted for him.  I think many even of those favorable voters have learned something since!  Even if that were the case, that growth which has not been evident through August, would have to occur entirely in the last 4 months of the year.

Let us examine a few issues with the stimulus approach loved by socialists.  The CBO, not really a very reliable source, recently released a report saying that the $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act has really cost us a $825 billion increase in debt.  They claim that they cannot figure out how many jobs were created by it, but it was somewhere between 1.4 million and an unbelievably generous 4 million.  I do not think they seriously try to estimate the number of jobs lost due to the bill.  So let us divide $825 billion by 1.4 million jobs and we find each job cost $589,300.  While some investment is needed to create meaningful jobs, that is enough money to pay someone the median income of $46,300 for 12.7 years!  I could readily provide several scientists with jobs with that amount of money, but the federal government is always incompetent and inefficient!  While I do not believe there is even a 1% chance that the stimulus bill created 4 million jobs, even if it did, each job would have cost $206,250 which would have allowed me to provide at least 1.5 long-term new jobs in my laboratory instead of a mythical job.

The CBO report claims that printing up $0.825 trillion in a $15 trillion economy added between 0.8% and 2.5% to the GDP in real, inflation-adjusted growth.  Printing this amount of money diluted the value of all money by at least 5.5% since 0.825/15 = 0.055.  One could argue that the dilution of money value is proportional to the smaller value of money in circulation, making the dilution much greater than this.  The act of printing that money did nothing to add to productivity so its effects upon production are transitory.  Worse yet, that monetary dilution devalued all property, including the already depressed housing market, and all commodities, such as oil, cotton, corn, wood, and metals.  Despite these huge negative effects, the CBO tells us that the expenditure increased the GDP by something in the range from 0.8% to a totally unbelievable 2.5%.  Well, this is another instance of the very bad track record of the CBO showing its lack of understanding of economics or its adherence to rules which do not correspond to reality.

The CBO then goes on to say that direct government purchases of goods and services have a multiplier effect of 1.0 to 2.5 for every dollar spent!  Well that is very interesting.  If that were so then the stimulus bill expenditure of $825 billion would have increased the GDP by between 5.5% and 13.75%!  Clearly, direct expenditures by government have no advantageous multiplier effect.  In fact, we can calculate the effect from their own numbers for the GDP growth they claim for the stimulus bill.  0.8/5.5 = 0.145 for the lower bound multiplier and the upper bound multiplier would be 2.5/5.5 = 0.45.  These calculated multipliers ranging from 0.14 to a clearly too high 0.45 are way below 1.0, which is more like what one expects from an incompetent and inefficient government with no real interest in human productivity.

Alan Reynolds, an unusually insightful economist, has written an excellent article entitled The Fed vs. the Recovery, which first appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 26 August 2011.  It is on the CATO Institute website here.  He says:

In demand-side theorizing, monetary stimulus means the Fed buys more bonds. The Treasury has certainly been selling a lot of bonds, and the Fed has been buying (monetizing) a huge share of those bonds. That helped push the broad M2 money supply up at a 6.8% rate over the past six months. Yet the only thing we have to show for all that stimulus over the past year has been rapid inflation of producer prices and a simultaneous slowdown in the growth of the private economy. Consumer price inflation also accelerated to 5.2% in the first quarter and 4.1% in the second, from just 1.4% in the third quarter of 2010.

He notes that industrial supplies and materials account for 34.5% of our imported goods so far this year and capital equipment and parts add another 23% of imports.  Because of the second quantitative easing (QE2) which began in November 2010 and ended in June of 2011, the value of the dollar fell about 15% relative to the Euro.  The Economist's commodity-price index went up 50.9% in a year in dollars, but 22.8% in Euros.  Our import prices rose by a 15.1% annual rate and our export prices rose by an annual 11.4% over the last three quarters under QE2.  These effects reduced the growth of real GDP.

Alan Reynolds notes that

The net effect was to reduce the profitability of manufacturing and distributing products in the United States, and therefore to shift such activities (and jobs) to other countries which were less handicapped by the dollar's weakness.

Fortunately for the S&P 500 companies, 46% for their sales came from other countries!  As a result, their operating earnings per share rose from $20.40 a year earlier to $24.86 by June 2011.  Thanks to our government's policy of printing money, this did most Americans little good.

One of the commodities whose price was driven up by QE2 with important and devastating consequences was that of oil.  As I have pointed out many times (thanks to reading Alan Reynolds), every postwar recession except that of 1960 has been triggered by a sudden increase in the price of oil. From August 2007 to July 2008 we had such an oil price spike as the value of the dollar fell and oil prices doubled.  We had another large oil price increase due to the dollar losing value from late August 2010 when Bernanke announced QE2 until the end of April 2011.  The price of oil increased from $72.91 to $112.30, an increase of 54%.  Just the price of oil increasing suddenly has a very negative impact on our economy.  This is aggravated by our refusal to allow reasonable increases in domestic production, which makes us more vulnerable to fluctuations in the value of the dollar relative to other currencies.

Both the Stimulus and the Quantitative Easing efforts have depressed the growth of the GDP and resulted in giving companies every incentive to hire aboard and every disincentive for hiring at home.  Meanwhile, the regulatory, tax, anti-business, promotion of labor cost increases, and anti-energy policies and rhetoric of the Obama cabal has been added to the wrongheaded policies of the Federal Reserve to put us into a never-ending recession.