A Ética do Trabalho sendo Destruída pelo Governo - Livro "Recessão da Redistribuição"

O professor de economia da Universidade de Chicago, Casey Mulligan, discute no livro acima o impacto de ajuda de governo aos pobres na ética do trabalho, no incentivo para se trabalhar. A gente ouve muito falar disso quando se discute o bolsa família no Brasil.

É um assunto que me interessa bastante.

Recentemente, prof. Mulligan escreveu sobre o assunto no jornal Wall Street Journal, com ênfase na nova lei de saúde dos Estados Unidos, a "lei assinatura" do governo Obama, conhecida como Obamacare.

Vejamos o texto de Mulligan no Wall Street Journal abaixo (neste texto, ele menciona um artigo dele publicado no National Bureau Research, clique aqui para acessá-lo)

Casey Mulligan: How ObamaCare Wrecks the Work Ethic

By 
• CASEY B. MULLIGAN

A new wave of redistribution will arrive in America on Jan. 1, primarily thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The president's health-insurance plan forces those who hire, work and produce to pay full price for health care, while creating generous discounts for practically everyone else.

This second redistributionist wave of the Obama era will follow a first wave of tax hikes, additional unemployment benefits, food-stamp expansions, waived work requirements for welfare benefits, etc. These measures were supposed to be temporary, intended to help people cope with the recession. The recession officially ended in mid-2009, but many of the administration's measures continue.

Regardless of whether redistribution is achieved by collecting more taxes from families with high incomes, levying employment taxes on businesses, providing more subsidies to families with low incomes, or all of the above, an essential consequence is the same: a reduction in the reward for working. In a National Bureau of Economic Research paper issued in August, I quantify the combined effect of the two redistribution waves and higher payroll taxes on the financial reward for working.

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The chart nearby shows an index of marginal tax rates for non-elderly household heads and spouses with median earnings potential. The index, a population-weighted average over various ages, occupations, employment decisions (full-time, part-time, multiple jobs, etc.) and family sizes, reflects the extra taxes paid and government benefits forgone as a consequence of working.

The 2009-10 peak for marginal tax rates comes from various provisions of the "stimulus" programs in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the extension of unemployment benefits to 99 weeks in some states. At the end of 2012, the marginal tax rate index reached its lowest value since 2008: 43.9%. A little over a year later (January 2014), the index will be close to 50%, driven up by the expiration of the payroll tax cut and multiple provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The ACA employer penalty, delayed until 2015, adds more than a percentage point in that year alone, while other ACA provisions strengthen their disincentives for the various reasons cited above.

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Reuters

The Affordable Care Act signup page on the HealthCare.gov website

By 2016, the index exceeds 50%, which is at least 10 percentage points greater than it was in early 2007.

The 50% rate is even higher than the rates that prevailed when the so-called Recovery and Reinvestment Act's redistribution was at its peak. Without new federal legislation and a departure from the strategy of forcing workers and employers to finance everyone else's health care, the new 50%+ rate will not be a peak, but rather a new normal for tax rates.

To appreciate the added burden that the two redistribution waves put on the labor market, look at what people keep, on average, when they decide to retain or accept a job, or to take on a longer work schedule. Before the recession, a decision to work would benefit public treasuries by an amount equal to 40% of the compensation from the job. The worker and his family got the other 60%.

In the years 2015 and beyond, full-time workers with median incomes will keep only half of the compensation created by their decisions, with the other half going to the government in the form of additional taxes and savings on subsidy payments. By keeping 50% rather than 60%, workers will find that the reward for holding a job will have fallen a damaging 17%.

Advocates of redistribution try to perpetuate the income-maximization fallacy that business continues as usual as long as tax rates are less than 100%, because receiving even 1% of your compensation is supposedly better than getting no compensation at all. But even if full confiscation were the only way that taxes would depress the labor market, recall that the nearby chart is just an average: The average rate rising to 50% and above involves millions of people with rates far higher.

America absolutely must have taxes and safety-net programs, even though they reduce the reward for working. But advocates for the recent program expansions have failed to acknowledge that redistribution necessarily increases marginal tax rates and contracts the labor market.

Don't be surprised if the second redistribution wave coincides with a recessionary double-dip.

Mr. Mulligan is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and the author of "The Redistribution Recession" (Oxford, 2012).

Eu já sabia, Greenspan!

Alan Greenspan põe a culpa no crescimento exgerado do estado do bem-estar social para a destruição da economia e para as dificuldades políticas. E também critica as previsões dos economistas.  Ressaltando a importância da psicologia.

Fico muito feliz de ter visto um mundo mais perfeitamente do que Greenspan, pois minha tese de doutorado de 2006 já defendia a abordagem de Daniel Kahneman. Para acessar minha tese, clique aqui. Mas fico triste em ver que ele demorou muito para ver isto.

O texto sobre Greenspan saiu no Wall Street Journal.

Abaixo vai o texto do jornal.

Alan Greenspan: What Went Wrong

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, goes to a lot of parties. He and his wife, the TV journalist Andrea Mitchell, "sort of get invited everywhere," he says, sitting in front of the long bay window in his office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Lately, though, cocktails and dinners seem to have guest lists drawn almost exclusively from one political party or the other. "It used to be a ritualistic 50-50 at parties—the doyennes of culture and partying were very strict about bipartisanship," he adds. "That doesn't exist anymore."

In his new book "The Map and the Territory," to be released on Tuesday, Mr. Greenspan, 87, goes on a hunt for what has gone wrong in American politics and in the U.S. economy. He doesn't blame the current administration for today's partisan divide. The culprit? "It's the benefits," he says, pointing to the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats over how to deal with the growth of entitlements.

In the book, he also ponders why the Fed failed to predict the financial crisis, where he himself went wrong and how that discovery has completely changed his worldview.

Mr. Greenspan's biggest revelation came one day about a year ago when he was playing with gross domestic savings numbers. What he found, to his surprise and initial skepticism, was that an increase in entitlements has closely corresponded to a decline in the country's savings. "We had this extraordinary increase in benefits, with each party trying to outbid the other," he says. "That practice has been eroding the country's flow of savings that's so critical in financing our capital investment." The decline in savings has been partly offset by borrowing from abroad, which brings us to our current foreign debt: "$5 trillion and counting," he says.

He said he is baffled by all the blame that has been piled on him. Since the recession, critics have said the increased money supply and low interest rates during his tenure at the Fed from 1987 to 2006 led to bubble investments. Mr. Greenspan first heard that theory, he says, in 2007, when John Taylor, a professor of economics at Stanford University who has advised Republicans, made the connection between easy money and the housing bubble. "It had absolutely nothing to do with the housing bubble," he says. "That's ridiculous."

Instead, he says Prof. Taylor's statement "served a lot of political purposes of people who have been picking on the Fed from both sides of the aisle." Mr. Greenspan wrote a rebuttal in a paper for the Brookings Institution, going through Prof. Taylor's points one by one. "I thought, that'll kill it," he remembers. "It didn't, because nobody read the paper."

Mr. Greenspan said he didn't press the issue because Prof. Taylor is a friend, but he had no idea how far Prof. Taylor's idea would go. "The trouble, unfortunately, with the argument is there's no evidence that happened, but he's won the battle, and his view is conventional wisdom," he says.

Prof. Taylor stands by the paper in which he presented the idea. "The paper provided empirical evidence…that unusually low interest rates set by the Fed in 2003-2005 compared with policy decisions in the prior two decades exacerbated the housing boom," he wrote in an email. Other economists have corroborated the findings, he added, and "the results are quite robust."

This disagreement is now the centerpiece of a long-running debate among economists, even inside the Fed today, that has yet to be resolved.

"I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist," says Mr. Greenspan. But after the Fed's model failed to predict the financial crisis, he realized that there is more to forecasting than numbers. "It all fell apart, in the sense that not a single major forecaster of note or institution caught it," he says. "The Federal Reserve has got the most elaborate econometric model, which incorporates all the newfangled models of how the world works—and it missed it completely."

He says JP Morgan had put out a forecast three days before the crisis saying the economy was on the rise. And as late as 2007, the International Monetary Fund also said that global risk was declining. "A few days [after the crisis hit], I run into an article, and it is titled, 'Do we economists know anything?' " he says.

Mr. Greenspan set out to find his blind spot step by step. First he drew the conclusion that the nonfinancial sector of the economy had been healthy. The problem lay in finance, because of its vulnerability to spells of euphoria and irrational fear. Studying the results of herd behavior provided him with some surprises. "I was actually flabbergasted," he says. "It upended my view of how the world works."

He concluded that fear has at least three times the effect of euphoria in producing market gyrations. "I wouldn't have dared write anything like that before," he says.

Studying the minutiae of the events leading to the financial crisis brought to mind some lessons from his famous friendship, from the 1950s on, with the late Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. He says that Rand didn't influence him politically—he was always a libertarian—but she did point out tensions in his philosophy about life. "She caught me in contradictions, which shook me, and I said, 'My God, she is right,' " he says.

Mr. Greenspan then believed in analysis based mainly on hard science and empirical facts. Rand told him that unless he considered human nature and its irrational side, he would "miss a very large part of how human beings behaved." At the time they weren't discussing economics, but today he realizes the full impact of emotions and instincts on markets. He also has come to admire psychologist and Princeton University professor emeritus Daniel Kahneman's work applying psychological insights to economic theory, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 2002.

Mr. Greenspan won't say whether he has agreed with the decisions of current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, but he will comment on the Fed's broader policies, which have become more aggressive since his time. "I'm not in favor of intervention, because markets so effectively function and work unless they are broken," he says. He did support TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, because at the time the market needed sovereign credit during "the most debilitating financial crisis ever." But, he says, "eventually I think they carried the extent of what they did well beyond what was necessary."

With his new book, Mr. Greenspan hopes to provide politicians and the public with a road map to avoid making the same mistakes again. His suggestions include reducing entitlements, embracing "creative destruction" by letting facilities with cutting-edge technology displace those with low productivity, and fixing the political system by encouraging bipartisanship. He hasn't yet sent a copy to Janet Yellen, the nominee to be the next Fed chief. Though they are good friends, he says, "she and I don't agree on lots of things and never have, but I enjoy talking to her because she has arguments and logic behind it."

Mr. Greenspan often finds himself in the position of a middleman. Now one of the last prominent Washington figures to socialize across the partisan aisle, he says that these days, "politics is broke." He suggests that the last time the country's leadership was this divided was during the Civil War. And he doesn't see Wednesday's budget deal as a long-term breakthrough. Still, he was heartened that the government found a way to end the shutdown.

"I thought it was not a bad deal, all in all, considering how far along the whole thing got," he says. "That's not to say they solved anything fundamental."

Escola de Economia Civil

Hoje, eu vejo no site da Rome Reports o lançamento da Escola de Economia Civil da Fundação Chiara Lubic. Na reportagem é dito que a escola faz parte do Movimento Focolare e a ideia é ensinar uma economia em que o florescimento da humanidade seja o objetivo. Isto é, estimula-se a humanização da economia e não a economia voltada para o lucro egoísta. O texto da Escola diz que não se opõe ao mercado ou ao estado, mas procura uni-los na luz da Doutrina Social da Igreja.

Não há nenhuma palavra no texto da Rome Reports ou na Escola sobre Distributismo, mas fiquei muito interessado. Vejam vídeo e o texto abaixo da Rome Reports.

September 3, 2013. (Romereports.com) Is it possible to have an economy that's not based on numbers, statistics or markets? It may seem impossible, but it's the dream of the Focolare movement and it welcomes the challenge. To achieve this, they have launched a School of Civil Economy which is an educational and research center dedicated to humanizing the economy.  

GIANFRANCO FABI

Lead Columnist Il Sole24Ore

“It's a very concrete initiative, to create a new reality that will be a reference or at least it hopes to be a reference in the economic debate and in the in-depth study of the economy as a subject.”

The Focolare School of Civil Economy is near the italian city of Florence, and it will begin its classes in the upcoming months. Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare movement, always wanted a place where the economy of unity could be taught. An economy not based in merchandise but in solidarity. 

LUIGINO BRUNI

School of Civil Economics

“It's a vision of the economy that is born from biodiversity: from uniting saints with humanists and Christian with Jewish roots....that is civil humanism. FLASH Civil Economy is not an industrial subject, it's a small piece of life where humanity, with all its passion and wishes is reflected.”

Even though it's leader-oriented, the Focolare School of Civil Economy is not a business school. It's a center dedicated to those with an interest in economy and want  to use it to improve society through ethical principles. It's an idea that was expressed by Pope Francis himself: to build a new economic system that doesn't revolve around monetary profits.

A Ficção dos Bancos

Mais um que entende que há algo de errado com os bancos, coisa que muitos (como a Igreja Católica) dizem há séculos. Desta vez é Adair Turner, ex-chefe da Agência de Controle Financeiro do Reino Unido.

Do Valor Econômico de hoje:

A explosão de endividamento e o QE

Por Gillian Tett

O perigo dos vícios é que eles tendem a tornar-se cada vez mais compulsivos. Essa poderia ser uma moral derivada dos eventos desta semana. Poucos dias atrás, eram muito altas as expectativas de que o Fed (Federal Reserve, o banco central dos EUA) estivesse prestes a reduzir suas compras correntes mensais de títulos no equivalente a US$ 85 bilhões. Mas, o Fed acabou piscando, em parte por estar preocupado com o fato de que os mercados já vinham reagindo excessivamente à mera consideração de uma possível mudança de política. Diante das opções - frear o vício ou fornecer mais uma dose da "droga do alívio quantitativo" (QE, em ingês) o Fed preferiu a última.

Sob diversos ângulos, isso é compreensível; os dados econômicos reais ainda estão fracos. Mas à medida que os investidores tentam entender o que o Fed fará (ou não fará), vale a pena refletir sobre um oportuno discurso feito recentemente por lord Adair Turner, ex chefe da agência reguladora do Reino Unido. Conforme Turner disse na semana passada a economistas suecos, e repetiu para autoridades de bancos centrais e economistas em Londres nesta semana, a verdadeira história por trás da recente dramática saga financeira - a dança dos mercados em torno do QE ou a crise do Lehman Brothers, cinco anos atrás - é que as economias ocidentais tornaram-se viciadas em níveis cada vez mais altos de endividamento.

Até que esta situação mude, é delirante pensar que alguém tenha realmente "consertado" o mundo financeiro ocidental com as reformas pós-Lehman ou tenha criado um crescimento verdadeiramente saudável, insistiu Turner. Dito de outra forma - embora ele não tenha expresso com tanta franqueza -, uma maneira de interpretar a dança em torno do QE nesta semana é que as autoridades econômicas continuam a dar sustentação a um sistema financeiro que é (na melhor das hipóteses) estranho e (na pior) instável.

Essas críticas, evidentemente, não são novas: economistas independentes, tanto na extrema-direita como na extrema-esquerda, têm feito isso há anos. Mas o que torna a contribuição de Turner notável é que, até recentemente ele esteve no centro do sistema financeiro mundial - e do processo de reforma pós-Lehman -, que ele agora considera tão falho. E dessa perspectiva ele destaca algumas contradições curiosas. Considere o que fazem os bancos. Um livro-texto padrão de economia, escreve Turner, afirma que os bancos existem para "captar depósitos de poupadores e, então conceder empréstimos a tomadores"... e "primordialmente emprestar a empresas e empreendedores para financiar projetos de investimento". Assim, "a demanda por dinheiro é um aspecto crucial" em termos de crescimento.

Mas essa descrição é uma ficção, diz ele. O motivo? Ele calcula que hoje, no Reino Unido, apenas 15% do total de fluxos financeiros é efetivamente canalizado para "projetos de investimento"; o restante dá sustentação a ativos empresariais, imobiliários ou finanças pessoais não garantidas, existentes para "facilitar a estabilização do ciclo de vida do consumo".

Algum financiamento não destinado a investimentos é socialmente útil, admite Turner, mas não em largas doses. No setor imobiliário, por exemplo, a maioria do crédito apenas "financia a aquisição de casas já existentes", em vez de investimento em novas casas (ou seja, construção civil). E o que é realmente notável sobre a parcela de não investimento nesse cenário financeiro é que ele explodiu; como resultado, como também ressaltou Andy Haldane, do Banco da Inglaterra, num debate em Londres na semana passada, a dimensão do crédito para pessoas físicas em relação ao PIB dobrou para 200% nos últimos 50 anos.

Isso torna ridículas as histórias contadas nos livros didáticos existentes e nas premissas oficiais para as políticas monetárias. Mas a explosão do crédito tem outra implicação peculiar, comentam Haldane e Turner: como o crédito total continua subindo inexoravelmente, ao mesmo tempo em que o crescimento continua inalterado, a "produtividade" do dinheiro está caindo, assim como aumentou a propensão do sistema superalavancado de exibir expansões aceleradas seguidas de colapsos repentinos, em meio a mudanças no ânimo do investidor.

Então, haverá alguma solução? Turner oferece algumas ideias. Ele defende uma revisão radical dos modelos intelectuais que os economistas usam (inclusive, presumivelmente, daqueles pertencentes a bancos centrais). Ele também quer que as autoridades econômicas reduzam deliberadamente o crédito. Assim, o arcabouço de Basileia 3 para os bancos deveria incorporar exigências de capital contracíclicas duras, argumenta ele, e os reguladores deveriam voltar a incluir "entre os instrumentos de política, exigências quantitativas de reservas, que limitam mais diretamente os multiplicadores bancários e, assim, o crescimento do crédito, do que aumentos nas exigências de capital".

Ora, como sabemos, isso não está acontecendo; ao contrário, os bancos britânicos estão sob pressões políticas para que ofereçam mais financiamento habitacional, pois os preços das casas atingiram novos picos, e o Fed está tão determinado a dar um empurrão no mercado imobiliário americano que continua devorando esses títulos lastreados em financiamento habitacional. Claro, a linha política oficial é que essa é apenas uma medida temporária: quando houver crescimento forte e sustentável isso cessará.

Mas não aposte nisso para breve; pelo menos não em um mundo onde os preços dos ativos e os espíritos animais são agora tão dependentes do dinheiro barato, e tão cruciais para estimular o crescimento. De qualquer forma, em meio às comemorações dos investidores pela decisão envolvendo o QE, nesta semana, eles fariam bem em lembrar a estimativa de 15% para os investimentos produtivos. E seria fascinante se alguém tentasse descobrir qual é essa proporção, na economia americana, hoje. Especialmente se esse cálculo vier do Fed. (Tradução de Sergio Blum)

Gillian Tett é comentarista de finanças e mercados, e editora- assistente do FT

Rei da Holanda: "O Povo que se Vire"

O Rei da Holanda, Guilherme Alexander, está certo: o estado do bem-estar social morreu. O povo e o mercado tem de se desenvolver sozinhos. O povo deve criar sua própria rede de assistência social. Vejam vídeo abaixo do discurso do Rei feito esta semana.

Digo eu, foi este modelo de desenvolvimento, que eu chamo de trabalho, que fez o mundo desenvolvido ser desenvolvido. É este modelo que fará os países em desenvolvimento e pobres saírem da miséria.

Criação de própria rede de assistência social é um modelo das associações da idade média que funcionava e ajudou em muito aos países europeus serem o que são hoje.

A assistência exagerada do estado perpetua a pobreza, a preguiça e o conflito social.

Este post também foi publicado no meu blog Thyself, O Lord.


(Agradeço a indicação do vídeo ao blog do Firehead)

Apenas uma Imagem e um Gráfico definem o Federal Reserve

 
Esta imagem acima e o gráfico abaixo dizem tudo sobre a decisão do Federal Reserve (Fed) de ontem em manter as compras de 85 bilhões de dólares mensais de títulos e hipotecas.

O Fed entope o mercado de dinheiro deste 2009, e a economia americana não deslancha, e ainda por cima o mercado financeiro se viciou no dinheiro baratíssimo e cria armadilhas (bolhas) para o Fed. Agora, se o Fed começar a retirar os estímulos financeiros, o mercado imobiliário entra em crise e pode voltar a crise.


(Agradeço a imagem ao site Drudge Report e o gráfico ao site Zero Hedge).

Muitos textos sobre Distributismo hoje (contra e a favor)

Vi hoje no blog de Mark Shea um texto de Thomas Storck sobre o que é Distributismo. É um bom texto para quem não conhece o assunto.

Para um debate sobre Distributismo temos os textos de David Deavel:

"O que há de Certo no Distributismo".
"O que há de Errado no Distributismo".

Temos também a resposta de Storck aos textos de Deavel.