stimulus

/ / , , , , , , , /

Uncertainty, Uncertainty, Uncertainty

Well I think it’s safe to come out now. The threat of another depression has passed. Phew. Now comes the hard part. The odd thing about where we’ve just been is that in the depths of the last few months it was easier to act: thinking too far ahead was pointless and formulating proper reforms or corrective policies was just not appropriate. There was simply too much uncertainty.

“Without a fix for the banks we will absolutely be headed back into dangerous gambling soon, but this time without the resources to fix it. That way lies the road to depression.”

Now, from my point of view, uncertainty is the dominant theme in any economy. It is concern over the unknown that compels us to save and to form businesses that can undertake long term projects. Indeed from a theoretical perspective a business firm is simply a ‘hedge against uncertainty’ – as described by the economistBrian Loasby. Money is also such a hedge: we use money as a way to avoid having to barter and as a way to store value for future use. Money has no intrinsic value other than what it can be exchanged for, so keeping or setting aside a cash store in savings etc can be viewed either as a way to postpone current consumption for the future, or, alternatively, as a measure of the uncertainty we have about our ability to pay for future consumption.

So everywhere we look uncertainty affects the way we construct our economic lives.

I mention this because as we emerge from the storm of the past year one key factor seems to stand out: the dramatic drop in confidence, or conversely the dramatic increase in uncertainty, that has settled in on the economy.

This might appear odd in the context of the revival of the credit markets which is one of the clear signals that the storm is abating. It is true that the financial world has lost much of the panic feeling that gripped it over that past few quarters. Banks have been able to issue equity; spreads are returning to more normal levels; bank profits are rising; and capital ratios are not declining, but are fairly stable. None of this implies that the system is repaired, but it is on its way to recovery. The banks are back to having fun. We are left to clear up their mess. Confidence is creeping back on Wall Street. That’s not our issue just yet.

No. The uncertainty that has risen is on the consumer’s side of the economy. There has been an enormous shift in private savings. Looked at as the difference between private incomes and private expenditures, savings have gone through the roof. This implies an enormous contraction in consumption. And I mean enormous. Were it not for the extremely large increases in government spending we would most definitely be in the grips of a full depression at the moment. The contrast with the 1930’s is extraordinary: the rise in savings back then was less than our current shift. This means that we were on course for a worse depression than the Great Depression. It was, and still is, that bad.

I say ‘still is’ because the shift towards savings, which has been advocated by many of us for a very long time, has been so sudden, and violent, that it risks completely dampening the recovery. There is no doubt that we need to unwind the overhang of debt that we gorged on over the past few decades. One of the reasons I regularly harangue the Reagan/Bush era is that the economy was encouraged to rush into indebtedness in order to mask underlying weaknesses. The moment Reagan filled the country’s imagination with hazy visions of yesteryear he led it away from fixing its issues. Those rose tinted glasses created an illusion that prevented a proper understanding of long term problems then emerging. And so a very imbalanced economy was created: loss of long term competitiveness and growing foreign oil dependency were ignored; stagnating wages and rising health care costs were glossed over; and the fact that many people had to borrow to stave off a declining standard of living was seen as a sign of optimism about the future, rather than a sign of something going badly wrong.

The final nail in the Reagan/Bush coffin came when massive inflation in home prices was seen as a source of wealth rather than as a destabilizing social force. The prevailing, and hopelessly wrong, economic thinking that pervaded the whole Reagan/Bush era missed the danger of the real estate bubble precisely because it saw no bubble, just ‘exuberance’.

The consequent implosion, which contrary to the opinions of many in the media, was foreseen by many of us, has now manifested itself in the shift towards savings I mentioned earlier.

Uncertainty indeed abounds.

Couple the huge blow to confidence that a 30% to 40% drop in home prices has dealt, with a bleak long term employment outlook and it easy to see why consumers are saving at the rate they are. Who knows what could happen next?

The bad news is that the total debt level of the private sector is down only a couple of percentage points from its high back at the beginning of 2007. That implies we are likely to experience this rate of savings for a while longer as de-leveraging continues.

The conclusion I come to from all this is that the recovery will be long and very slow. Unemployment will stay high, and most likely increase over the next few months.

And the hard part is just beginning: we still have not dealt with the insanity of the banking system, which, if Goldman Sachs performance is anything to go by, is about to head straight back to the recent past and try to replicate its bad habits for huge private gains. There are no signs of lessons being learned there, just rampant opportunism safe in the knowledge that the taxpayers will pay the bill for the next catastrophe the banks heap on us all.

Plus the epic fiscal effort we have had to make to stave off total disaster has left us with a Federal deficit problem that will need urgent attention in the medium term.

Without a fix for the banks we will absolutely be headed back into dangerous gambling soon, but this time without the resources to fix it. That way lies the road to depression.

As I said: uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty.

/ / , , , , , , , /

Catching Up: Grab Bag

First of all an apology to you all: I haven’t posted anything for a few days. While I’d like to say that was because I was on vacation, the real reason was a mysterious technical outage. Apparently Time Warner Cable decided to take some time off. That’s a monopoly for you. Leisurely system upgrades during peak hours. Ugh.

Meanwhile back to work:

This week will see some interesting statistics released, starting with retail sales tomorrow. I think we are headed into a ‘make or break’ period for the administration. There are several signs accumulating that the economy’s recovery is not far off, but like a very tired runner covering those last few yards is getting very difficult.

For instance, last week’s consumer confidence data was quite disappointing. The index fell sharply after having registered four straight months of increase. While there is no direct correlation between consumer confidence and consumption at the aggregate economic level, any decline in confidence at this point in the cycle must be cause for concern. The hope has been that as job layoffs start to decline, and as home prices reach the bottom, consumers will start to venture out of their foxholes and begin to spend once more. There had been tentative signs of that happening – one of those signs being the steady increase in confidence registered since earlier this year. A sustained about-face by consumers would open up a wide hole in the recovery strategy.

The obvious reason for the drop in confidence is the continued poor employment situation. Jobs are simply very hard to find at the moment and there are no signs that employers are about to shift back towards hiring. The numbers of people who have now been unemployed long term is rapidly growing and that is surely eating away at the public’s mood.

Which brings us to the stimulus debate.

As you all know I have been an advocate of much larger stimulus from the beginning. For whatever reason – and frankly I haven’t heard a good one yet – the administration low-balled the amount of effort that we put into the recovery. I have a suspicion that the powers that be thought that once the financial sector was stabilized the economy would right itself fairly quickly. Where they got that reasoning from I don’t know, but it was bogus all along. History tells us clearly that recessions and depressions caused by a collapse in finance are much more severe and need much more stimulus to correct. Add in the devastation caused by unwinding the real estate bubble and the downward spiral was bound to be dramatic.

What we got was a bureaucratic response rather than leadership.

Now we have to dig our way out of two problems: the economy is still stuttering, and the political backlash against stimulus has gathered steam making it difficult to fix the original error. We may be condemned to allow things to get worse again before the political winds changed sufficiently for further stimulus.

Note to self: in a crisis such as this, bold leadership is preferable to calm calculation. I suppose it would be better to combine both, but that would take the presence of a truly historic leader, and the current administration is resolute in not rising to that level of performance.

Too bad.

Meanwhile the opponents of massive fiscal spending haven’t had a good time of it either. A couple of weeks ago the media was full of bombast about the horrendous and impending inflationary impact that the stimulus and loose monetary policies were having. One sure sign of disaster we were told was the run up in long term US government bond yields. Since then those yields have eased off considerably. As a result the opposition has had its main counter stimulus argument neutralized.

Clearly we all need to be very concerned about the long term fiscal balance of the Federal budget. It was the prospect of perpetual deficits that was supposed to be the cause of the sudden spike in rates since earlier this year.

I acknowledge that in an economy operating close to capacity excessive monetary expansion ‘should’ show up as price inflation. But we are nowhere near capacity: the Congressional Budget Office – the politically neutral scorekeeper Congress uses to analyze policies – estimates we are as much as 8% from capacity. So all that money being pumped into the economy ‘should’ flow into propping up demand rather than merely raising the prices of existing demand.

I think a more plausible cause of the rise in rates was simply that the bond and other credit markets were adjusting back to more normal levels after months of traumatized and excessive caution. Such an adjustment would mean a flow of cash from US bonds into competing private uses. The result would be a natural bidding up of bond prices as the government was forced to pay more to keep the flow of bond sales satisfactory.

Confirming this explanation is the fact that bond sales have settled back down. When the first stories started to appear about the glut of US bonds on the market the government faced some stiff market conditions: buyers were reluctant to buy bonds and T-Bills because a glut would reduce their future value. Those difficulties have faded, and for now at least, the government doesn’t appear to be having any difficulty raising the cash it needs to keep the stimulus going.

But a word of caution: there is no doubt at all that we are entering a period of higher taxes. The whole Reagan/Bush era was predicated on tax reduction which was supposed to provide stimulus to the private sector and thus drive wealth creation. If we look back over the entire period the policy failed. The only element in the economy that prospered at an above average rate was corporate profits. Apparently tax reduction had no enduring effect elsewhere – wages are certainly a very weak spot in the Reagan/Bush record books. One thing they did leave us with are massive deficit problems that are now impeding our ability to correct the economic downturn. Even if this was the only imbalance we needed to fix, taxes would need to rise. But the recession has blown a hole in Federal revenues, and the political agenda now includes fixing our broken health care system. That will cost money.

So taxes will tend to rise over the next few years. There is no alternative: the public does not seem to have the stomach for the huge service cuts that would be implied by sticking to current Federal revenue levels and then trying to balance the budget. Neither does it seem possible to rein in defense spending. Something has to give. The Republican dream of dismantling the New Deal has been thoroughly shattered every time they mention it to the voters. Yet they have been very successful in selling the ‘trickle down’ snake oil. So the general public is now inured to the notion that taxes can stay low, yet services remain high.

Only in dreamland is such folly possible.

So, I repeat: taxes are set to rise.

In that context an obvious target would be the corporate tax deduction for health care expenses. This deduction costs us $250 billion a year in lost revenues. Its elimination would more than cover the cost of the health care plans now being debated in Congress. It survives because the unions see it as a employee benefit, and are fearful that its loss would force companies to stop offering health benefits. Ironically that is exactly what I would want to happen: business shouldn’t be the source of health care for the simple reason that a rational business sees the cost of workers as a total cost, inclusive of wages and health care. In that scenario a business is legitimate in cutting wages in order to keep offering health care benefits. All the evidence supports this notion: studies indicate that wages in the US as a whole are about 6% less than they would otherwise be were health care not offered through employers. So American workers are paying a significant, but hidden, price for the ‘benefit’ of health care.

Finally, as I catch up ahead of this week’s news, for those economics geeks out there: I read with amusement an article in the Financial Times on Friday that US oil prices were dropping in reaction to news of a rapid build up in inventories. Those of you who follow text book theory will immediately see the oddity of this news. One of the central assumptions of the text book theory is that prices already embody all the news people need in order to buy and sell goods and services. Ergo, there should be no adjustment: the effect of inventory increases should already be built into the oil price. One would think that the economics theorists who defend that notion of prices are currently scurrying about trying to square away the FT’s comment with their theory. But no. One of the most unfortunate aspects of the current crisis is that it has exposed just how oblivious and indifferent those theorists are both to the damage their ideas have wrought, and to the inherent stupidity of them.

As you all know I try to pour as much contempt on the standard economics theory as I can. So spare me this small moment of triumph!

Meanwhile: that increase in oil inventories is occurring especially in the kinds of oil that farming and industry use for fuel. So a back up in inventory could be a sign that usage is not as high as anticipated. In turn, that means the economy may be slowing its improvement.

That gets us back to the stimulus.

More please!

/ / , , , /

Unemployment: Very Mixed

Today’s employment report from the Department of Labor has an odd feel to it. The figures are always adjusted for seasonal factors so whenever we read about the ‘new claims for unemployment assistance’, we are not looking at the raw data, but at a figure manipulated to offset any peculiar and recurring movements. The typical surge in seasonal hiring during the summer is a good example of such an adjustment. The idea being , of course, to get at the underlying trends that such a seasonal ‘bounce’ might obscure.

Ironically today’s report that initial claims fell by 52,000 last month may be an example of the adjustment process producing a perverse result. The data has been scrubbed to exclude the usual summer variations, one of which is the ‘normal’ auto industry round of layoffs prior to the summer time re-tooling for next years model introductions. This year all those layoffs occurred in the spring when Chrysler and GM went through bankruptcy. So the seasonal adjustment downwards of the raw number may not be justified this year and so the reported improvement may not be representative of a long term trend.

There’s a lot of ‘mays’ and ‘ifs’ in that analysis, which only goes to highlight the difficulty we have in getting at what’s really going on. So I repeat my mantra: watch the data accumulate and don’t focus too heavily on any one week’s or month’s numbers.

With that in mind I want to point out one worrisome fact that we ought to be paying attention to closely over the next few months: ‘repeat claims for assistance’. This figure shows us the trend in long term unemployment. While ‘initial claims’ obviously reveal recent layoffs, ‘repeat claims’ give us an idea of how easy or difficult it is to find work. If the ‘repeat claims’ keep on edging up, as they did this week, then we can assume that employers are not re-hiring. So the two figures provide insight into the two parts of the employment cycle: when the initial claims figure starts to drop, we know that the run up in unemployment is ending; and when the repeat claims start to drop we know that the unemployment rate will start to fall also.

Right now the trends seem to show a slowing but still rising trend in unemployment with no shift towards decline in sight.

To put the employment picture in perspective: the number of people claiming unemployment insurance was 3,218,000 at this time last year and is now 6,883,000. That’s the size of our problem. We need to get these folks back to work.

Addendum: Unemployment and the stimulus package …

As an afterthought: unemployment is a lagging indicator. It rises after a recession has begun and improves after a recovery has started. There is no way that the unemployment rate will improve in the near term. So all the current hyped up talk over the ‘failure’ of the stimulus package is just that: hype. There hasn’t been enough time to have an effect. The original proposals laid out very clearly that the earliest expected improvement in employment resulting from the stimulus was in the late third and early fourth quarters this year.

We should therefore ignore the critics.

In any case anyone suggesting that we don’t need a stimulus should be clear about what their alternative is. Reduce interest rates? Can’t do that: they are at zero. Cut taxes? Did that already in 2001 and 2003: nothing happened, the last eight years have been the weakest employment years of any post war expansion. What else? …

Exactly. We have one policy option. Get over it.

/ / , , , , , , , /

Stimulus Debate Heats Up

You have to love it when a politician starts rambling on about Keynesian economics. Even when he’s wrong. Today’s Financial Times has this quote in it:

‰ÛÏI thought the outdated and discredited Keynesian economic theory behind the effort was misguided, and I was convinced it wouldn‰Ûªt work,‰Û? he said. ‰ÛÏUnfortunately, recent economic data has validated my opposition.‰Û?

The quote is from Darrell Issa, the lead GOP member of the House oversight committee, and was made at a hearing on the ‘failure of the stimulus’ package.

Well, Darrell, nice try.

But you’re still way off base.

Let’s set aside the fact that it is still too early to tell whether the stimulus is working since it has only just started to filter out into the economy. I suppose that’s too easy for the media to research. Instead let’s focus on how there can even be a debate about stimulus.

The discussion is taking place because of the confluence of three things:

  1. Media ineptitude
  2. Republican opportunism
  3. Administration passivity

The media has done a frustratingly poor job of discussing the economic situation. It has framed everything in typically small sound bite types of analyses, along with ‘deeper’ thought pieces all of which appear to have been written by conservatively inclined authors. There has been a remarkable homogeneity of opinion in the media: the stimulus was an expensive folly, it may have been unnecessary, and it was certainly too expensive given the federal debt. These three criticisms have shaped the ‘debate’. None of this should surprise anyone who is familiar with the state of economic theory. I have argued here before that the overwhelming bias in economics education is to teach what is called neoclassical orthodoxy. This theory is the source of most of the theoretical attacks on the kind of expansionary fiscal policy we have implemented. Orthodoxy argues that a recession can only be reversed using monetary policy actions, which means reducing interest rates in order to spur investment and other expenditures. The textbooks most often exclude the rare caveat that orthodoxy allows: that there are very odd circumstances in which monetary policy is ineffective, and therefore fiscal policy should be employed. Presumably all the media pundits now leading the argument against stimulus didn’t get that part of the standard theory.

Because we are exactly in that very rare circumstance.

This is the whole point: monetary policy cannot work because interest rates cannot be lowered any further. According to internal Federal Reserve Board calculations the Federal Funds rate, which is the benchmark rate they use to manipulate overall rate levels, should be at -5%. Yes that’s right: minus 5%. But you can’t have negative interest rates. Think about that: a negative interest rate implies that a lender pays the borrower to induce them to borrow. That’s nuts. It won’t happen. So when interest rates get down to zero or even close enough to zero, there is no more room for ‘conventional’ monetary policy. The text book goes out the window.

I give the Fed huge credit. They have been pursuing ‘unconventional’ policy and have invented all sorts of ways with which to pump cash into the economy: the Fed has tripled its balance sheet and has printed money like crazy. The result? We avoided an all out depression. At least so far.

The Republicans are naturally trying to pick apart any seams in the administration’s cloth, and the media’s misinformation about the stimulus has provided them fertile ground for criticism.

By misleading the public relentlessly about the stimulus, and in particular by focusing on its cost and its apparent ineffectiveness, the media has enabled the GOP to start the current debate as if it a serious discussion about policy options. It isn’t. It cannot be. There are no options.

My frustration is heightened by Obama’s extraordinary quiescence. His economics team is filled with top class academics who know the flaws in the textbook theory. Yet they are very poor at staging strong push backs against the Hooverite opinions being thrown up by the opposition. More importantly they have failed to disabuse the media of its wrong headed thinking.

This recession is diabolically bad. It’s trajectory is scarily like that of the Great Depression. We are nowhere near safety. Any debate about the ‘failure of stimulus’ should be thoroughly and totally thrashed. We simply should not be having discussions about this.

On the contrary: we are most likely going to need further stimulus.

There are signs that the administration is slowly realizing this and is trying to set the ground rules for what will, at the current rate, be a very tough argument to make. Why else would Joe Biden make his inane comment last weekend that the recession was ‘worse than we thought’?

Excuse me. But ‘we’ thought the world could end. I don’t know how it could have been worse. Only someone avoiding reality for ‘political’ purposes could have failed to see the depth of what was then unfolding. Other ‘officials’ are repeating that Biden line. The only explanation I can offer for it is that they are trying to paper over the obvious weakness that the administration showed last January when it caved abjectly and could only get Congress to push through a $787 billion package, about $300 billion of which was known to be useless tax cut nonsense up front. They are now trying to argue that ‘no one’ could have foreseen that the current package was too small.

My father used to use the word ‘tosh’ to describe such ridiculous rubbish.

There were many very respectable economists arguing loudly that the stimulus needed to be much larger – Paul Krugman being the most well known. The administration was very well aware of the views of such folks at the time. It just chose, for those notorious ‘political’ reasons to ignore them.

So. Back to Darrell Issa.

I love his quote. It demonstrates just how much self-inflicted damage the administration has sustained. By being weak when it counted it made it much tougher to maintain the only plausible policy option we have for avoiding collapse. I also love the reference to Keynes: the economist who now stands as the only theoretician to follow. Why? Because all the rest have patently failed. They have been exposed as deeply flawed.

But we can forgive Issa: how would he know about the ongoing battle for the heartland of economic theory? The resurgence of ‘pure’ Keynesian thinking, and policies based upon his prescription, are the only remaining weapon we have. It is laughable to dismiss Keynes as ‘outdated and discredited’ just at the moment of his greatest triumph. Then again Issa is simply reflecting what he is told by the experts gathered around the right wing think tanks: they are bastions of neoclassical orthodoxy after all.

And that is the crux of the matter.

Somehow economic theory forgot the lessons of the Great Depression. Keynes, the real Keynes, was expunged from memory. What passed for Keynesian in the 1960’s and 1970’s was a cobbled together and heavily redacted version retrofitted onto neoclassical root stock – to make it acceptable to the free-market, deregulatory, anti-government economics establishment. Keynes would have disavowed it. If the hard line free market ideologue Milton Friedman can claim, as he did, ‘that we are all Keynesian now’ despite his revulsion for the core of the unadulterated version of Keynes, then we all should know that something is amiss.

So Darrell Issa may be right after all. The Keynesian theory he is objecting to is indeed ‘outdated and discredited’. That’s because it wasn’t truly Keynesian! Hyman Minsky tried to explain all this back in the 1970’s, but unfortunately no one listened.

By now I am sure your eyes have glazed over, so allow me one more bash at this. It really is important.

One of the great contributory causes to our current economic crisis was the failure of economic theory. It may sound odd, but it is true. That failure, which was completely anticipated by Keynes, has infected a generation or two of academics with wrong headed, and dangerous, thinking. They, in turn have advised politicians and media analysts. The consequence is that we have, for the past thirty years or so, pursued economic policies and have engaged in economic discussions, based upon false premises. Our entire elite has held to a world view based upon free market neoclassical dogma that is simply hollow under tight scrutiny. It fails completely under some circumstances. Unfortunately we find oursleves in those circumstances.

And the error is endemic: banks have developed risk models based upon bad theory. Regulators have applied rules created from bad theory. And the public has been misled into thinking that economists are competent to discuss the economy. Perhaps this latter point is the most weird to grasp: academic economists hew closely to a set of ideas that are literally ‘other worldly’ when studied closely. Yet they have ‘expert’ status. The public is entitled to view the economics profession as being capable of more than playing with abstract theories: they expect policy advice that helps avoid recessions. Even as recently as 2007 the neoclassicists [e.g. the Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas] were crowing that the business cycle – the recession and recovery cycle – had been defeated by advances in economic theory.

What are they all doing now? They are defending that theory even in the face of this mother of recessions. Their credibility is shot through. And in their desperation they are feeding their political and media contacts a flood of disinformation about the one theoretician they fear the most: Keynes.

No wonder his name pops up in Issa’s speech.

Heck even my mother-in-law has been enquiring about who ‘this Keynes guy’ is. Since she only listens to standard Fox News reporting we know that Keynesian policies must be a hot topic, if only to be vilified.

This is truly Alice in Wonderland territory. You can be forgiven for being confused.

Something to think about as the stimulus debate, which should not be a debate, heats up.

/ / , , , /

The Hidden Problem: State Budget Collapse

The news that California has now run so low of cash that it is resorting to using IOU’s to pay its creditors should have made you sit up and take notice: for all the rumbling about the parlous condition of the federal treasury the states are relatively worse off.

Should we care?

Absolutely.

First let me point you to an excellent summary of the situation by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The gist of this report is that the worst is yet to come, and that the worst is very bad indeed. Only a couple of states have so far managed to stay in the black and some, California being the most obvious, are on the brink of total disaster.

The expected budget shortfall for all the states combined looks as if it will be in the region of $111 billion this year, $166 billion in 2010, and $180 billion in 2011. In other words there is no turn around in sight. Since most states have constitutional restrictions on their ability to run deficits they will be forced to adjust somehow. This inevitably means they will cut services and reduce spending or they will raise taxes.

Nothing could be worse for the national economy.

Not only do states provide the bulk of essential services like Medicaid, but they are the providers of education and local social services. The impact over the next few years of cuts in budgets for those services will produce a massive human cost and lasting damage on the economy: education expenditure will be significantly reduced and may take decades to recover.

The slump in home prices has slashed property values and reduced property tax income, and the rapid rise in unemployment has eaten into local income tax revenues. This double assault on local funding has produced a crisis of unparalleled proportion: state deficits are now running at an aggregate level of about 24% of total budgets. That is a crippling and daunting problem. Some states are even worse: California’s shortfall is over 50% of its budget.

There has been nothing like this since the Great Depression.

The bigger problem is, of course, that the budget balancing efforts by the states offset the fiscal stimulus being pumped out at the federal level. It is as if we had fifty-one economic policies with fifty trying to restrict and one trying to expand the economy. As a matter of fact that’s exactly what we are faced with.

The depth and length of the state level crisis is a significant drag on the federal effort. By now you are all aware of my opinion that the federal stimulus package was far too small, it was about half that I would have liked to have seen. Now the states are cutting into even the smaller amount: if the states are successful in reducing their spending sufficiently to return to balance in 2011 they are, in effect, counteracting against, or reducing, the federal stimulus by about $180 billion. Since the entire federal package was only around $800 billion, that’s a huge drag on the economy.

This problem is largely hidden from view and so receives little media attention, but it is a major component of the overall economic picture. The impact of the various local attempts to balance state budgets is severe enough that I would like to see a coordinated approach as part of the next round of stimulus. Perhaps state budgets can be underwritten temporarily at the federal level and so services can be maintained and jobs preserved. That would have immediate impact on the level of unemployment since it would prevent state employees being fired, and it would remove the fiscal drag that state budget balancing is having on our overall growth.

This, naturally, assumes that we will have another round of stimulus at the federal level. But that seems inevitable. And the state level crisis is a good reason to add to the list to support such another round.

«< 34 35 36 37 38 >»