by James A. Bacon
A generation ago, liberals mocked the so-called “trickle-down economics” of the Reagan administration, the idea that creating wealth for the rich would trickle down to the less affluent by way of expanded economic activity. While Reagan himself never used that term, his economic philosophy of tax cuts, tax-code reform and restrained federal spending did work as advertised. The 1980s were a period of great prosperity in which all income groups and ethnicities shared. The irony is that the trickle-down economics is a label more aptly applied to the policies of President Barack Obama. During O’s five years in office, the rich have gotten richer while the poor have fed on scraps. But you’ll never hear the term “trickle down” applied to Obama’s monetary policies.
There are many winners from the low interest rate policy implemented by the Federal Reserve Board with the full support of the Obama administration — most of them wealthy. One group is the “millionaires and billionaires” who benefit from rising stock and bond prices. Another is the owners of mortgages who have refinanced their debt at lower interest rates, in many cases saving hundreds of dollars a month. Needless to say, those with the highest incomes who can afford the most expensive houses benefit the most. The biggest beneficiary, of course, is the federal government, the world’s largest debtor, which saves on the order of $200 billion to $300 billion a year in interest payments on its $17 trillion debt. Finally, there is a modest trickle-down effect in the form of job creation in interest rate-sensitive industries like construction.
Of course, there are many losers, too — a mega-narrative that has gone largely unreported by the mainstream media. One group of losers is small business, which finds it more difficult to gain access to capital (it’s easier for banks to lend to the government). Another group consists of state and local governments whose retirement funds no longer generate the returns they were several years ago and now face chronic fiscal stress as they struggle to make up the difference. Fifteen years ago, for example, the Virginia pension system was fully funded. Today, even after major structural reforms, Virginia and its local governments still owe billions.
Then there are the little guys, especially the Baby Boomers who accumulated modest nest eggs to help support them in retirement. I have fulminated on this topic on and off since writing “Boomergeddon,” frustrated that the issue has drawn so little attention. But a Bloomberg News article published today in the Times-Dispatch (sorry, can’t find the link) shows the full dimension of the problem. Some key points:
A 65-year-old who wanted to pay for retirement with annuities tied to bonds needed 24% more wealth in 2013 than in 2005. National Bureau of economic Research President James Potera calculated in a research paper released in February. …
U.S. Treasury yields are at least 2 percentage points less than what they would be otherwise because of the Fed’s low-rate policies and stimulus programs, said William Ford, former Atlanta Fed president who wrote a 2011 paper estimating the impact on savers of monetary easing. That reduces their income by at least $280 billion annually, his analysis shows.
“The cost of low interest rates are being ignored,” Ford said. “It is killing savers, elderly savers who are living on life savings that have been conservatively invested.”
The Fed is engineering one of the greatest wealth transfers in American history — from the working-class and middle-class to the rich. The stock market has never been higher. Wall Street is doing better than ever. Bankers are still getting their big bonuses. And the little guys with meager savings are watching their pathetic little nest eggs lose value as inflation exceeds the income they can generate.
The extraordinary thing is that Obama then turns around and castigates the economic system for inequalities in wealth — the very same inequalities that he and former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (it’s too early to pin any blame on Janet Yellen yet) did to aggravate. Rather than undo the harm he has inflicted, Obama ask Americans to entrust him with even more power to “help” the poor and downtrodden. What I find mind-boggling is that this is not the delusion of a single man — it’s that liberals and leftists have so uniformly and gullibly bought into the delusion. They have become apologists for the very evil, income inequality, that they decry.
I suppose that’s inevitable. The political class always gravitates to “solutions” that entail the accumulation of more power for the political class. In Virginia, liberals’ idea is to expand the Medicaid entitlement, paid for the federal government with borrowed money. Why not? It’s “free” money. But it’s really not. Every billion dollars borrowed by the federal government requires more financial repression and more wealth transfer from savers to favored classes of borrowers, the foremost of which is the U.S. government. The favored classes do not include the poor and middle-class who rack up credit card debt, typically charges around 13% to 15%.
Liberals prattle about “social justice” and lobby for distractions like a higher minimum wage (which raises pay for some and destroys jobs for others) while aiding and abetting the trickle-down economics that leaves America’s less well-off with crumbs. The hypocrisy is almost too much to bear.
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