Christopher Condon: Biden Is Rebranding Reagan’s Supply-Side Economics to Save His Agenda
Supply-Side Liberalism is in the news. (It is sometimes called Supply-Side Progressivism these days, but personally, think of “Liberal” as a much more positive word than “Progressive.”) Christopher Condon interviewed me as well as many other economists for his piece “Biden is Rebranding Reagan’s Supply-Side Economics to Save His Agenda.”
Here are the bits most directly related to Christopher’s interview of me (bullets added to separate quoted passages):
A host of economists, such as Eli Dourado at Utah State University, have been promoting what they call “progressive supply-side economics.” Miles Kimball at the University of Colorado at Boulder has been writing a blog since 2012 titled Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal.
At its heart, supply-side economics is about tax policy. Because people seek to avoid them, taxes cause distortions in behavior that can hurt the economy. For example, if your next hour of work will be taxed at 80% instead of 20%, you’re less likely to keep working. Applied more broadly, anything the government provides by means of taxation will involve a trade-off that reduces total output by hindering the supply of capital or labor to productive economic pursuits. How large a trade-off, and whether it’s worth it, have long been matters of intense debate.
Under Reagan, an exaggerated interpretation emerged … [See my inaugural post “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?”]
Hubbard, now a professor at Columbia’s business school, calls foul on how the Biden administration is pursuing that last goal through subsidies, like ones for child care, that aren’t tied to work requirements. “Doing it when work is not present doesn’t strike me as supply-side at all. That’s purely social welfare,” he says. “You may or may not think those are a good idea—democracy will decide that—but calling them modern supply-side economics is just disingenuous.”
That’s splitting hairs to liberal supply-siders like Kimball, but he has his own quibbles. [I think what I said was that tending young children should count as work, even if they are one’s own children! It certainly isn’t an easy task. I just saw strong correlations from “Fragile Families” data in a seminar last Friday by Rebecca Lessem that, if interpreted causally (a big if), say that kids’ later outcomes are better if the focal parent isn’t working when they are young.]
If the Biden administration were really serious, [Kimball] says, it would address a couple other obvious supply-side targets. The first, government regulation, isn’t an easy topic for a Democratic White House, but it’s a big reason public infrastructure is far more expensive in the U.S. than in most other developed economies. Then there’s immigration, another political hot potato. “Of course, immigration should be part of this,” says Kimball, who advocates revamping policies to allow more skilled foreign-born workers into the country. “I’m surprised they’ve almost totally given up on that politically.”
What Christopher didn’t include in his piece was my insistence that state and local policy also needs a supply-side transformation. On that, see for example, my posts “Why Housing is So Expensive,” “Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg on Immobility in America,” “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School”—and looking forward a bit more to the future, and “Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz: Self-Driving Cars, Tolls, and Carpooling are Much More Powerful as a Combination than Separately.” Also, I mentioned that higher education is messed up and needs a transformation; see “How to Foster Transformative Innovation in Higher Education.”