The San Antonio College Student Newspaper, "The Ranger," Has A Front Page Story On "Occupy Wall Street"

Here is the link:

Occupy movement only beginning, political science professor says

I submitted an op-ed piece in reply. It is below. I guess I will find out on Monday if they print it.

I am very concerned about the front page article the Ranger did on the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

I can understand and sympathize with the protesters. Unemployment is especially high for young people. I got my B.A. in 1982, a year when the unemployment rate was over 9%. It was again the next year. In fact, both unemployment and inflation averaged 7.7% over the nine years from 1975-1983. I began college in the middle of that difficult economic period. It was also a time of bailouts. The government bailed out Chrysler and Continental Bank.

The article said that "the movements' focus is big business and the government's failure to regulate big business." They also seem to be concerned about inequality and how much money the top 1% makes. I believe that the movement is either wrong about these issues or overstates their importance. And their solutions could harm the economy in the long run. How exactly regulations and taxes can harm the economy is not widely understood. So let me try to explain.

Let's take regulation. Many feel that it was a lack of regulation that caused the financial crisis. This is a highly debatable point. Experts like Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, Peter Wallison, Jeffrey Friedman, Columbia University economist Charles Calomiris and Stanford University economist John Taylor have written on how it was regulations that were the main cause. Banks were told to lower their lending standards which caused the demand for houses to reach unsustainable levels. Even the business writer for the New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson, has written a book which lays at least part of the blame on the government created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It also may not be true that we don't have enough regulations. Federal spending by regulatory agencies is about nine times higher today than it was in 1970 (adjusted for inflation). Thousands of pages of new regulations are added every year.

But if we did add even more regulations, how will we make them work? Does each regulator do more work or do we hire more regulators? If the latter, we run into what economists call "the law of increasing opportunity cost." We have to keep taking better and better workers out of the private sector to join government agencies. Fewer goods and services will be produced. The cost of regulation will grow exponentially.

Regulators are also subject to "capture" by the interests they are supposed to be monitoring. They end up not serving or protecting the public since they may have already worked in that industry and regular people don't have time to watch what government agencies do.

Regulations cost about 8% of the national income each year since we need to pay the cost of the government agencies and businesses must spend money to comply with regulations.

Much has been made of the growing inequality problem. One way to measure this is the "Gini coefficient." The higher it gets, the less equal the distribution of income (it ranges from 0 to 1). Yet the Gini coefficient for full-time workers only rose from .31 in 1970 to .40 in 1994. It has basically been unchanged since then. So by that count, then, inequality is not especially worse now.

It is true that the top 1% of earners have seen their share of income rise. But 57% of those in the top 1% in 1996 were not there in 2005. The incomes of the top 1% fell about 16% from 2007-09 while the median income fell just 1.5%. The number of people making $1 million or more per year fell 40%.

People are also not stuck at the bottom. Of those in the lowest one-fifth of incomes in 2001, 44% had moved to a higher "quintile" by 2007. That may not be enough income mobility for some, but I think it is still quite a bit. More people might move between income brackets in Europe than the U. S., but the generally lower incomes in Europe make that easier.

Those at the bottom of the income ladder may be doing better over time than is commonly believed. To measure incomes over time, we need to adjust for inflation. But economists have discovered that we should not use the same price index for the rich and poor. The one for the poor has not risen as much over time. Once this is taken into account, we can see that incomes have not stagnated as much as is normally believed.

Many propose higher tax rates on the rich to deal with inequality. Yet this can lead to problems when recessions hit. The higher income earners are now seeing their incomes fluctuate more and they go down more than for most people in recessions. If we rely too much on them for tax revenue, it will mean extra large budget deficits in recessions, as many states have seen recently. In 2007, the top 1% paid about 37% of all federal income taxes. The more we rely on them for revenue, the bigger the problem will be in the next recession.

Taxes have another problem. They cause increasingly exponential damage to economic efficiency. Taxes distort economic activity. If I normally buy a shirt for $20 and then if that shirt is taxed, say, $5, I may choose not to purchase it. That is a loss for me and for the seller. Our total losses are called the "deadweight loss." It turns out that if you double a tax, the amount of inefficiency or deadweight loss quadruples. So every one-percentage point increase in taxes causes more harm to the economy than the previous one.

The damage to the economy from extra regulations and higher tax rates does not have to be great. Even if incentives to work and produce are only slightly diminished and inefficiency rises marginally, the costs in the long-run can be great due to the compounding effect.

The per capita GDP from 1980-2009 grew 1.95% in the US and 1.83% in the EU. That difference may seem small. But, if, for example, per capita income was 20,000 in both the US and EU in 1980, the per capita income (or GDP) now would be 35,015 in the US and 33,839 in the EU, a difference of $1,176. Maybe not a big difference, but it might matter to many families. But after 100 years the US income level would be 12% higher. After 200 years it would be 26% higher.

We also have to realize that recovery from a recession caused by a financial crisis takes more time than in other recessions. This is what research by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff has shown.

So I think we should be careful about adding more regulations or higher tax rates to our economy. Let's not rush into anything based on what the Occupy Wall Street movement says. The occupiers would probably site other statistics or interpret them differently. But let's recognize that theirs is not the only valid view on these issues.