Month: April 2019

Green New Deal Part 4: Guaranteeing employment and housing is very hard—but we should still try (public policy)

PNRJ ethics, public policy , , , , ,

Apr 28 JDN 2458602

In previous posts I have talked about the “easy parts” of the Green New Deal (infrastructure, healthcare and education), as well as one of the “hard parts” (net-zero carbon emissions). But today it’s time for the “very hard parts”: guaranteed employment and housing.

“Guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”

“Providing all people of the United States with – […] (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security; […].

Let me start by giving you a sense of how difficult this is: No country on Earth has ever successfully guaranteed employment and housing. Even Scandinavia’s extensive social safety nets and active labor market programs are not sufficient to eliminate homelessness or unemployment (though they do dramatically reduce them).
The Soviet Union came close to guaranteed employment, but only as part of a labor system that was extremely inefficient and unproductive. Effectively, they guaranteed everyone a job by not even firing people who didn’t actually do the jobs they were given. This is clearly not a sustainable solution.
There are serious proposals on the table for a job guarantee program, but they are extremely ambitious.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a proposal that would add 9.7 million people to the federal workforce and cost over $500 billion per year to operate. For comparison, the current non-postal federal workforce is only 2.1 million. The postal service has about another 600,000. So we are talking about quintupling the federal workforce, at a cost comparable to the entire (bloated) military budget. That’s a huge number of people and a lot of money.
The basic idea of such a program is that we can (hopefully) find various forms of public service that need to be done, and pay people to do that public service at a certain minimum level of pay and benefits. These jobs would be available to anyone who wanted them, and any time you lost a private-sector job you could always take the guaranteed job. This would effectively create a floor on wages and benefits; any job that offered a worse deal than the government job would be competed out of existence.
I’ve written before about why I’m skeptical of such programs. If there is all this work that needs done, why aren’t we already doing it? If people have the skills they need to do this work, why is no one currently employing them?
Maybe there is a way to solve these problems. Maybe I’m underestimating the public goods that could be produced by people with low levels of skill. But at the very least we need to face up to the fact that it is a problem. We need to actually find work that it makes sense to guarantee—we can’t just wave our hands and say that “obviously” there is plenty of valuable work to be done that will happen to line up exactly with the skills of the people who are currently unemployed.
And then we need to think about the fact that we can’t really guarantee it, not the way the Soviet Union did. We do need to be able to fire people. We need to be able to fire them for not showing up to work, for being drunk at work, for sexually harassing co-workers, or simply for being incompetent. We need to be have some sort of policy in place for what happens to people who get fired: How long before they can get another guaranteed job? And being fired should hurt: It’s supposed to be an incentive to do your job correctly. We don’t need to punish laziness or incompetence with homelessness—but we do need to punish it with something.
Ultimately what I would like to see is not guaranteed jobs but guaranteed income: A basic income that everyone gets, no questions asked. And then I would hope that our norms about work would change, and people would stop defining themselves by their paid employment and start defining themselves by other things, like creating art, supporting their family, or contributing to their community.
What about guaranteed housing? On that front I am more optimistic.
Housing is quite expensive, particularly in major cities. But homelessness is also very expensive from a societal perspective. In the long run, free housing might actually pay for itself.
One of the most successful programs at reducing homelessness is called Housing First. Rather than going through the usual machinations of shelters and transitional housing, the program just takes people off the streets and gives them homes. Like a basic income, it sounds ludicrously simple; it’s the sort of thing a five-year-old would suggest. Surely it can’t be that easy?
Well, the results speak for themselves. Implementation of Housing First programs in several major US cities has resulted in reductions in homeless of over 30% and reductions in the social cost of homelessness of over 50%.

The current population of about 80,000 chronically homeless Americans each cost taxpayers about $40,000 per year in social costs, via emergency room visits, shelter maintenance, crime, court costs, and so on. This is about $3 billion per year. For that same amount of money—or potentially even less—we could have put all those people into homes.

There is an additional population of about 500,000 transient homeless—people who are homeless for a short period after an adverse life event (such as losing a job, having a divorce, or getting their mortgage foreclosed) but will find housing within a few weeks or months. Their situation is not as dire, and the costs they impose on society are not as large. But standard estimates are still generally over $10,000 per person per year—which, if given to them in cash, would probably be enough to get most of these people into homes.
So this is not a question of affordability: We are already paying these costs, but doing so in a way that doesn’t actually solve homelessness.
The real challenge is subtler than that: How do we make this fair and politically feasible?
When we’re talking about chronically homelessness, I think we can make a pretty strong case: These people are in a really bad way and they need our help. Since we’re already spending all this money anyway, we may as well spend it in a way that would actually help them.
But transient homelessness gets a bit more complicated. Many people who are transiently homeless are not all that poor. They may be college students, or recent divorcees, or failed entrepreneurs, or people who could afford a home but not the expensive home they actually tried to buy. Once they get back on their feet, they will probably go on to maintain a middle-class standard of living. So it really does seem unfair to just hand these people free homes that other people would not get.
And making housing in general completely free is simply a pipe dream. No country has ever even gotten close to that. Housing is such a huge part of a country’s expenditures that even a country like Denmark where the government is half the economy still can’t afford to put everyone in public housing.
I think what I would do instead is provide guaranteed subsidized loans—much as we do for student loans. These loans could be used to pay rent, to pay a mortgage, or even to make a down payment. They would be available to any adult US citizen, regardless of credit history, in relatively large amounts (the average down payment in the US is about $14,000, but as high as $50,000 is not unusual), at very low interest rates (I’d say aim for 0% real interest, so target the nominal interest rate to inflation) and very generous repayment terms (like student loans, you would never be required to pay more than a certain percentage of your adjusted gross income on the loan). If someone did try to avoid paying, their wages could be garnished or their taxes could be increased—this would make the default rates very low.
This policy would allow people who are temporarily homeless to get back into a home immediately, rather than having to wait until they can get more income—which can become a paradox as most employers will require a permanent address. But it wouldn’t be a free home; this policy would cost taxpayers next to nothing. The only costs would come from subsidizing interest rates and bearing defaults, which wouldn’t be more than about 5% of the outstanding balance—even if we loaned out as much as $100 billion, that still wouldn’t be more than what we’re currently losing in social costs of homelessness.
Had this policy been in place during the 2008 crash, people who lost their homes to foreclosure would have been able to immediately re-borrow and buy new homes. This would have blunted the financial crisis and maybe even done as much as the far more expensive stimulus package and quantitative easing programs.
These policies would not, unfortunately, eliminate unemployment and homelessness. Maybe that’s not even possible. But they would at least greatly reduce the harm caused by unemployment and homelessness, and that alone makes them worth doing.

Green New Deal Part 3: Guaranteeing education and healthcare is easy—why aren’t we doing it?

PNRJ current events, ethics, inequality, personal, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 21 JDN 2458595

Last week was one of the “hard parts” of the Green New Deal. Today it’s back to one of the “easy parts”: Guaranteed education and healthcare.

“Providing all people of the United States with – (i) high-quality health care; […]

“Providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States.”

Many Americans seem to think that providing universal healthcare would be prohibitively expensive. In fact, it would have literally negative net cost.
The US currently has the most bloated, expensive, inefficient healthcare system in the entire world. We spend almost $10,000 per person per year on healthcare, and get outcomes no better than France or the UK where they spend less than $5,000.
In fact, our public healthcare expenditures are currently higher than almost every other country. Our private expenditures are therefore pure waste; all they are doing is providing returns for the shareholders of corporations. If we were to simply copy the UK National Health Service and spend money in exactly the same way as they do, we would spend the same amount in public funds and almost nothing in private funds—and the UK has a higher mean lifespan than the US.
This is absolutely a no-brainer. Burn the whole system of private insurance down. Copy a healthcare system that actually works, like they use in every other First World country.
It wouldn’t even be that complicated to implement: We already have a single-payer healthcare system in the US; it’s called Medicare. Currently only old people get it; but old people use the most healthcare anyway. Hence, Medicare for All: Just lower the eligibility age for Medicare to 18 (if not zero). In the short run there would be additional costs for the transition, but in the long run we would save mind-boggling amounts of money, all while improving healthcare outcomes and extending our lifespans. Current estimates say that the net savings of Medicare for All would be about $5 trillion over the next 10 years. We can afford this. Indeed, the question is, as it was for infrastructure: How can we afford not to do this?
Isn’t this socialism? Yeah, I suppose it is. But healthcare is one of the few things that socialist countries consistently do extremely well. Cuba is a socialist country—a real socialist country, not a social democratic welfare state like Norway but a genuinely authoritarian centrally-planned economy. Cuba’s per-capita GDP PPP is a third of ours. Yet their life expectancy is actually higher than ours, because their healthcare system is just that good. Their per-capita healthcare spending is one-fourth of ours, and their health outcomes are better. So yeah, let’s be socialist in our healthcare. Socialists seem really good at healthcare.
And this makes sense, if you think about it. Doctors can do their jobs a lot better when they’re focused on just treating everyone who needs help, rather than arguing with insurance companies over what should and shouldn’t be covered. Preventative medicine is extremely cost-effective, yet it’s usually the first thing that people skimp on when trying to save money on health insurance. A variety of public health measures (such as vaccination and air quality regulation) are extremely cost-effective, but they are public goods that the private sector would not pay for by itself.
It’s not as if healthcare was ever really a competitive market anyway: When you get sick or injured, do you shop around for the best or cheapest hospital? How would you even go about that, when they don’t even post most of their prices and what prices they post are often wildly different than what you’ll actually pay?
The only serious argument I’ve heard against single-payer healthcare is a moral one: “Why should I have to pay for other people’s healthcare?” Well, I guess, because… you’re a human being? You should care about other human beings, and not want them to suffer and die from easily treatable diseases?
I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.

Single-payer healthcare is not only affordable: It would be cheaper and better than what we are currently doing. (In fact, almost anything would be cheaper and better than what we are currently doing—Obamacare was an improvement over the previous mess, but it’s still a mess.)
What about public education? Well, we already have that up to the high school level, and it works quite well.
Contrary to popular belief, the average public high school has better outcomes in terms of test scores and college placements than the average private high school. There are some elite private schools that do better, but they are extraordinarily expensive and they self-select only the best students. Public schools have to take all students, and they have a limited budget; but they have high quality standards and they require their teachers to be certified.
The flaws in our public school system are largely from it being not public enough, which is to say that schools are funded by their local property taxes instead of having their costs equally shared across whole states. This gives them the same basic problem as private schools: Rich kids get better schools.
If we removed that inequality, our educational outcomes would probably be among the best in the world—indeed, in our most well-funded school districts, they are. The state of Massachusetts which actually funds their public schools equally and well, gets international test scores just as good as the supposedly “superior” educational systems of Asian countries. In fact, this is probably even unfair to Massachusetts, as we know that China specifically selects the regions that have the best students to be the ones to take these international tests. Massachusetts is the best the US has to offer, but Shanghai is also the best China has to offer, so it’s only fair we compare apples to apples.
Public education has benefits for our whole society. We want to have a population of citizens, workers, and consumers who are well-educated. There are enormous benefits of primary and secondary education in terms of reducing poverty, improving public health, and increased economic growth.
So there’s my impassioned argument for why we should continue to support free, universal public education up to high school.
When it comes to college, I can’t be quite so enthusiastic. While there are societal benefits of college education, most of the benefits of college accrue to the individuals who go to college themselves.
The median weekly income of someone with a high school diploma is about $730; with a bachelor’s degree this rises to $1200; and with a doctoral or professional degree it gets over $1800. Higher education also greatly reduces your risk of being unemployed; while about 4% of the general population is unemployed, only 1.5% of people with doctorates or professional degrees are. Add that up over all the weeks of your life, and it’s a lot of money.
The net present value of a college education has been estimated at approximately $1 million. This result is quite sensitive to the choice of discount rate; at a higher discount rate you can get the net present value as “low” as $250,000.
With this in mind, the fact that the median student loan debt for a college graduate is about $30,000 doesn’t sound so terrible, does it? You’re taking out a loan for $30,000 to get something that will earn you between $250,000 and $1 million over the course of your life.
There is some evidence that having student loans delays homeownership; but this is a problem with our mortgage system, not our education system. It’s mainly the inability to finance a down payment that prevents people from buying homes. We should implement a system of block grants for first-time homeowners that gives them a chunk of money to make a down payment, perhaps $50,000. This would cost about as much as the mortgage interest tax deduction which mainly benefits the upper-middle class.
Higher education does have societal benefits as well. Perhaps the starkest I’ve noticed is how categorically higher education decided people’s votes on Donald Trump: Counties with high rates of college education almost all voted for Clinton, and counties with low rates of college education almost all voted for Trump. This was true even controlling for income and a lot of other demographic factors. Only authoritarianism, sexism and racism were better predictors of voting for Trump—and those could very well be mediating variables, if education reduces such attitudes.
If indeed it’s true that higher education makes people less sexist, less racist, less authoritarian, and overall better citizens, then it would be worth every penny to provide universal free college.
But it’s worth noting that even countries like Germany and Sweden which ostensibly do that don’t really do that: While college tuition is free for Swedish citizens and Germany provides free college for all students of any nationality, nevertheless the proportion of people in Sweden and Germany with bachelor’s degrees is actually lower than that of the United States. In Sweden the gap largely disappears if you restrict to younger cohorts—but in Germany it’s still there.
Indeed, from where I’m sitting, “universal free college” looks an awful lot like “the lower-middle class pays for the upper-middle class to go to college”. Social class is still a strong predictor of education level in Sweden. Among OECD countries, education seems to be the best at promoting upward mobility in Australia, and average college tuition in Australia is actually higher than average college tuition in the US (yes, even adjusting for currency exchange: Australian dollars are worth only slightly less than US dollars).
What does Australia do? They have a really good student loan system. You have to reach an annual income of about $40,000 per year before you need to make payments at all, and the loans are subsidized to be interest-free. Once you do owe payments, the debt is repaid at a rate proportional to your income—so effectively it’s not a debt at all but an equity stake.
In the US, students have been taking the desperate (and very cyberpunk) route of selling literal equity stakes in their education to Wall Street banks; this is a terrible idea for a hundred reasons. But having the government have something like an equity stake in students makes a lot of sense.
Because of the subsidies and generous repayment plans, the Australian government loses money on their student loan system, but so what? In order to implement universal free college, they would have spent an awful lot more than they are losing now. This way, the losses are specifically on students who got a lot of education but never managed to raise their income high enough—which means the government is actually incentivized to improve the quality of education or job-matching.
The cost of universal free college is considerable: That $1.3 trillion currently owed as student loans would be additional government debt or tax liability instead. Is this utterly unaffordable? No. But it’s not trivial either. We’re talking about roughly $60 billion per year in additional government spending, a bit less than what we currently spend on food stamps. An expenditure like that should have a large public benefit (as food stamps absolutely, definitely do!); I’m not convinced that free college would have such a benefit.
It would benefit me personally enormously: I currently owe over $100,000 in debt (about half from my undergrad and half from my first master’s). But I’m fairly privileged. Once I finally make it through this PhD, I can expect to make something like $100,000 per year until I retire. I’m not sure that benefiting people like me should be a major goal of public policy.
That said, I don’t think universal free college is a terrible policy. Done well, it could be a good thing. But it isn’t the no-brainer that single-payer healthcare is. We can still make sure that students are not overburdened by debt without making college tuition actually free.

Green New Deal Part 2: How do we get to net-zero carbon emissions?

PNRJ public policy , , , , , , ,

Apr 14 JDN 2458588

I said in my post last week that the Green New Deal has “easy parts”, “hard parts”, and “very hard parts”, and discussed one of the “easy parts”: increased investment in infrastructure. Next week I’ll talk about another “easy part”, guaranteeing education and healthcare.

Today is the most important “hard part”: Reducing our net carbon emissions to zero—or even less.

“Meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

“Overhauling transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in – (i) zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; (ii) clean, affordable, and accessible public transportation; and (iii) high-speed rail.”

“Spurring massive growth in clean manufacturing in the United States and removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and industry as much as is technologically feasible.”

“Working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.”

There have been huge expansions in solar and wind power generation, which are now cheaper than coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric, on a par with natural gas, and only outcompeted by geothermal. As a result of this dramatic increase in renewable energy production, electric power is no longer the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States; it is now second to transportation.
Policy clearly matters here: While total US carbon emissions were trending downward during the Obama administration, they began trending back upward once Trump took office. Even under Obama, they were not trending down fast enough to realistically meet the Paris Agreement targets. Only 14 states are on track to meet those targets, and they are all hard-Blue states except for Virginia and North Carolina. Unsurprisingly, the most carbon-efficient states are New York and California; yet even our emissions (about 9 tonnes per person per year, about twice the world average) are still far too high.
Of course the US is not alone in failing to meet the targets; in the EU, only three countries (Sweden, France, and Germany) are on track to hit the Paris targets. How did they do it? Germany has managed to do it mainly by expanding wind power, but for most countries, the fastest route to zero-carbon electricity is clearly nuclear power.
Germany has been foolishly phasing out their nuclear capacity, but it’s still 11% of their generation; Sweden’s grid is 40% nuclear; and France has a whopping 72% of their grid on nuclear (no other country comes close). The US grid is about 20% nuclear, which isn’t bad; but if California for instance had not phased out half of our nuclear generation since 2001, we could have taken out 15,000 GWh/yr of natural gas generation instead. At least we did basically eliminate coal and oil power in California, so that’s good.
How much would it cost to convert the entire US electricity grid to renewables and nuclear by 2050? Estimates vary widely, but a good ballpark figure is about $20 trillion.
Let’s not kid ourselves: That is a lot. It’s almost an entire year of the whole US economy. It would be enough to establish a permanent fund to end world hunger almost ten times over. Inflation-adjusted, it’s five times the total amount spent by the US in the Second World War.
Completely re-doing our entire electricity generation system is a project on a scale we’ve really never attempted before. It would be very difficult and very expensive.
But is it feasible? Yes, it’s entirely feasible. Assuming our real GDP grows at a paltry 2% per year between now and 2050, the total economic output of the United States during that period will be almost $1 quadrillion. $20 trillion is only 2% of that. Since the top 1% get about 20% of the income, this means that we could raise enough revenue for this project by simply raising the tax rate on the top 1% by 10 percentage points—which would still make the top income tax rate substantially lower than what we had as recently as the 1970s.
Unfortunately, converting the electricity grid is only part of the story. We also need to make radical changes in our transportation system—switching from airplanes to high-speed rail, and converting cars either to electric cars or public transit systems. Trains are really the best bet, but rail systems have a high up-front cost to build.
Even state-of-the-art high-speed rail systems just can’t be a jet airliner for speed. The best high-speed rail systems can cruise at about 250 kph, while a cruising Boeing 737 can easily exceed 800 kph. We’re just going to have to get used to our long-distance trips taking longer. Even 250 kph is a lot better than the 100 kph you’d probably average driving (not counting stops), which is also about the speed that most current US trains get—far worse than what they have in Europe or even China.
Then we have to deal with the other sources of carbon emissions, like manufacturing and agriculture. It’s simply not realistic to expect that we will actually produce zero carbon emissions; instead our goal needs to be net zero, which means we’ll need some way of pulling carbon out of the air.
To some extent, this is easier than it sounds: Reforestation is a very easy, efficient way of pulling carbon out of the air. Unfortunately it is also very slow, and can only be done in appropriate climates. To really pull enough carbon out of the air fast enough, we’re going to need industrial carbon sequestration or some form of geoengineering—right now iron seeding looks like the most promising candidate, but it could only compensate for about 1/6 of current carbon emissions. Solar geoengineering could do more—but at a very high cost, since we’re talking about pumping poisonous chemicals into the air in order to block out sunlight.
The reason we need to do this is essentially that we have waited too long: Had we started the process of converting the whole grid to renewables in the 1970s like we should have, we wouldn’t need such desperate measures now. But we didn’t, so here we are.
Estimates of how much it will cost to do all this vary even more widely, to the point where I’m hesitant to even put a number on it. But it seems likely that in addition to the $20 trillion for the electric grid, it will probably be something like another $30 trillion to do everything else that is necessary. But the global damage from climate change is estimated to be as much as $3.3 trillion per year—so a total of over $100 trillion over 30 years. Spending $50 trillion to save $100 trillion doesn’t sound like such a bad deal, does it?

Green New Deal Part 1: Why aren’t we building more infrastructure?

PNRJ education, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 7 JDN 2458581

For the next few weeks, I’ll be doing a linked series of posts on the Green New Deal. Some parts of it are obvious and we should have been doing them for decades already; let’s call these “easy parts”. Some parts of it will be difficult, but are definitely worth doing; let’s call these “hard parts”. And some parts of it are quite radical and may ultimately not be feasible—but may still be worth trying; let’s call these “very hard parts”.

Today I’m going to talk about some of the easy parts.

“Repairing and upgrading the infrastructure in the United States, including [. . .] by eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible.”

“Building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and ‘smart’ power grids, and working to ensure affordable access to electricity.”

“Upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximal energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.”

Every one of these proposals is basically a no-brainer. We should have been spending something like $100 billion dollars a year for the last 30 years doing this, and if we had, we’d have infrastructure that would be the envy of the world.
Instead, the ASCE gives our infrastructure a D+: passing, but just barely. We are still in the top 10 in the World Bank’s infrastructure ratings, but we have been slowly slipping downward in the rankings.

 

Where did I get my $100 billion a year figure from? Well, we have about a $15 billion annual shortfall in highway maintenance, $13 billion in waterway maintenance, and $25 billion in dam repairs. That’s $53 billion. But that’s just to keep what we already have. In order to build more infrastructure, or upgrade it to be better, we’re going to need to spend considerably more. Double it and make it a nice round number, and you get $100 billion.

 

Of course, $100 billion a year is not a small amount of money.
How would we pay for such a thing?

 

That’s the thing: We wouldn’t need to.

 

Infrastructure investment doesn’t have to be “paid for” in the usual sense. We don’t need to raise taxes. We don’t need to cut spending. We can just add infrastructure spending onto other spending, raising the deficit directly. We can borrow money to fund the projects, and then by the time those bonds mature we will have made enough additional tax revenue from the increased productivity (and the Keynes multiplier) that we will have no problem paying back the debt.

 

Funding investment is what debt is supposed to be for. Particularly when interest rates are this low (currently about 3% nominal, which means about 1% adjusted for inflation), there is very little downside to taking out more debt if you’re going to plow that money into productive investments.

 

Of course debt can be used for anything money can, and using debt for all your spending is often not a good idea (but it can be, if your income is inconsistent or you have good reasons to think it will increase in the future). But I’m not suggesting the government should use debt to fund Medicare and Social Security payments; I’m merely suggesting that they should use debt to fund infrastructure investment. Medicare and Social Security are, at their core, social insurance programs; they spread wealth around, which has a lot of important benefits; but they don’t meaningfully create new wealth, so you need to be careful about how you pay for them. Infrastructure investment creates new wealth. The extra value is basically pulled from thin air; you’d be a fool not to take it.

 

This is also why I just can’t get all that upset about student loans (even though I personally would personally stand to gain a small house if student debt were to suddenly evaporate). Education is the most productive investment we have, and most of the benefits of education do actually accrue to the individual who is being educated. It therefore stands to reason that students should pay for their own education, and since most of us couldn’t afford to pay in cash, it stands to reason that we should be offered loans.

 

There are some minor changes I would make to the student loan system, such as lower interest rates, higher limits to subsidized loans, stricter regulations on private student loans, and a simpler forgiveness process that doesn’t result in ridiculous tax liability. But I really don’t see the need to go to a fully taxpayer-funded higher education system. On the other hand, it wouldn’t necessarily be bad to go to a fully taxpayer-funded system; it seems to work quite well in Germany, France, and most of Scandinavia. I just don’t see this as a top priority.

 

It feels awful having $100,000 in debt, but it’s really not that bad when you realize that a college education will increase your lifetime earnings by an average of $1 million (and more like $2 million in my case because I’m going for a PhD, PhDs are more valuable than bachelor’s degrees, and even among PhDs, economists are particularly well-paid). You are being offered the chance to apy $100,000 now to get $1 million later. You should definitely take that deal.

 

And yet, we still aren’t increasing our infrastructure investment. Trump said he would, and it seemed like one of his few actual good ideas (remember the Stopped Clock Principle: reversed stupidity is not intelligence); but so far, no serious infrastructure plan has materialized.

 

Despite extremely strong bipartisan support for increased infrastructure investment, we don’t seem to be able to actually get the job done.
I think I know why.

 

The first reason is that “infrastructure” is a vague concept, almost a feel-good Applause Light like “freedom” or “justice”. Nobody is ever going to say they are against freedom or justice. Instead they’ll disagree about what constitutes freedom or justice.

 

And likewise, while almost everyone will agree that infrastructure as a concept is a good thing, there can be large substantive disagreements over just what kind of infrastructure to build. We want better transportation: Does that mean more roads, or train lines instead? We want cheaper electricity: When we build new power plants, should they use natural gas, solar, or nuclear power? We want to revitalize inner cities: Does that mean public housing, community projects, or subsidies for developers? Nobody wants an inefficient electricity grid, but just how much are we willing to invest in making it more efficient, and how? Once the infrastructure is built, should it be publicly owned and tax-funded, or privatized and run for profit?
This reason is not going to go away. We simply have to face up to it, and find a way to argue substantively for the specific kinds of infrastructure we want. It should be trains, not roads. It should be solar, wind, and nuclear, not natural gas, and certainly not coal or oil. It should be public housing and community projects, not subsidies for developers. Most of the infrastructure should be publicly owned, and what isn’t should be strictly regulated.

 

Yet there is another reason, which I think we might be able to eliminate. Most people seem to think that we need to pay for infrastructure the way we would need to pay for expanded social programs or military spending. They keep asking “How will this be paid for?” (And despite a lot of conservatives frothing about it—I will not give them ad revenue by linking—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not wrong when she said “The same way we pay for everything else.” We tax and spend; that’s what governments do. It’s always a question of what taxes and what spending.)

 

But we really don’t need to pay for infrastructure at all. Infrastructure will pay for itself; we simply need to finance it up front. And when we’re paying real interest rates of 1%, that’s not a difficult thing to do. If interest rates start to rise, we may want to pull back on that; but that’s not something that will happen overnight. We would see it coming, and have a variety of fiscal and monetary tools available to deal with it. The fear of possibly paying a bit more interest 30 years from now is a really stupid reason not to fix bridges that are crumbling today.

 

So when we talk about the Green New Deal (or at least the “easy parts”), let’s throw away this nonsense about “paying for it”. Almost all of these programs are long-term investments; they will pay for themselves. There are still substantive choices to be made about what exactly to build and where and how; but the US is an extraordinarily rich country with virtually unlimited borrowing power.

 

We can afford to do this.

 

Indeed, I think the question we should really be asking is:
How can we afford not to do this?