Category: Education spending

A Debate on Education

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December 15, 2024

by Stephen Stofka

This is fifth in a series of debates on various issues. The debates are voiced by Abel, a Wilsonian with a faith that government can ameliorate social and economic injustices to improve society’s welfare, and Cain, who believes that individual autonomy, the free market and the price system promote the greatest good.

Cain said, “Last week, after our discussion on healthcare, you asked what kind of public good our group likes. Education is a proper role for government.”

Abel asked, “Our group thinks both healthcare and education are public goods. Why do you agree on one and not the other?”

Cain replied, “What’s a public good? Something that benefits an entire group of people but the market undersupplies.”

Abel interrupted, “Like healthcare.”

Cain disagreed, “Education is different than healthcare because learned skills are portable and transferable.”

Abel countered, “Our group would argue that healthy people are more productive. Good health is a transferable skill as well.”

Cain shrugged, “I’ll grant you that. But there’s a difference. Education transforms human beings. Healthcare is restorative. Education can be traced to a source that bears the expense of training. Good health has multiple sources.”

Abel interjected, “Wait. Let me get these distinctions you’re making. Transformative versus restorative. Single source versus multiple source. Ok, got it.”

Cain continued, “There’s a cost benefit paradox. Let’s say a company trains some people at their own expense. In the middle ages and Renaissance, a trade or craft guild trained their apprentices. They controlled advancement to the ranks of journeyman and master and where their guild members worked.”

Abel said, “In the 15th century, London public schools taught students basic reading and math skills so they could be admitted to a trade or craft guild. Even then, education was understood as a role of government.”

Cain replied, “Ok, but even under the guild system, the masters paid their apprentices less to recover the costs of training. Let’s imagine a more modern system where guilds do not dictate where a person can work. An employee learns that they can earn more at a competing company whose business model is hiring trained employees from other companies. The training benefits the employees and the competitor but not the company that does the training. No company wants to train their employees unless everyone does it. That’s an ideal role for government.”

Abel replied, “Ok, so your group acknowledges the role of government in providing education. How much education? Who pays for that expense? Those are policy decisions that are outside the price system.”

Cain nodded. “How much meaning how many years? Grade school, high school, college?”

Abel replied, “Yes. I would include trade schools.”

Cain said, “Our group advocates for school choice, a voucher system that allows parents to decide what school is best for their children. Our K-12 system was designed in the 19th century when many parents had little formal education and could not evaluate a school’s practices. That is no longer true.”

Abel argued, “That approach can lower standards. Schools would learn to cater to parents. For instance, a high school might offer a diploma without the need to take geometry or algebra class. A parent whose child was not good in math would be attracted to such a school.”

Cain replied, “There would have to be some standards, of course.”

Abel responded, “But setting standards requires a governing body to set those standards. How are those people appointed? Are they elected? Again, the price system cannot achieve a desired allocation of resources.”

Cain shook his head. “Sure, there will be parents who game the system, but they will be a small minority. Don’t use those few to invalidate an entire framework.”

Abel said, “It’s not just a few. During the 1980s, some online colleges became ‘diploma mills’, enabling students to acquire diplomas with little effort. In some fields like the law, a diploma is a credential that enables a person to get a license to practice the law. That diploma is a direct factor of production. In the humanities, a diploma can be more of a signaling device. In markets like that, the price system invites abuse.”

Cain nodded. “I’ll grant you there is a need for standards.”

Abel continued, “Many of the products we consume are subject to standards that were set by some governing body over a century ago. In the 19th and 20th century, groups like yours with libertarian sentiments opposed such standards.”

Cain said, “OK, I get your point. Our point is that such intervention, which is subject to political ideologies and alliances, should be kept to a minimum.”

Abel replied, “A college certification or degree is not an electrical appliance that can be easily tested. Some trade certifications are only awarded after a hands-on or clinical test. But some disciplines like sociology have no testable application. In that case, only the rigor of the curriculum can be evaluated. A school must submit its curriculum to an accrediting body.”

Cain said, “An who evaluates the accrediting body? The Department of Education. Some advocacy organizations like Veterans Education Success have questioned the legitimacy of an accrediting agency.”

Abel nodded. “Agreed. There will always be a political element in any market. Your group wants to look at the price system in isolation. It is skeptical of government institutions. Our group sees those institutions as vital to functioning markets as umpires are to the game of baseball. The price system cannot survive without strong government institutions that people respect or at least tolerate. When those institutions seem to be biased to a particular group, they lose credibility, and the price system invites abuse.”

Cain replied, “Let’s agree that a market is like a game. It needs some governing body to set the rules, and it needs umpires or referees to make sure players abide by the rules. Our group opposes government agencies setting rules to force a particular outcome. Baseball fans are used to it. The dimensions of the strike zone are changed to advantage batters and promote higher scoring games. That’s fine for an entertainment sport like baseball. It’s not fine for the private economy. Regulators might change the rules to promote a more equal distribution of income. The people who are attracted to government are attracted to power. A rule change is like pulling a big lever on the economic machine.”

Abel shook his head. “There you go again. Your group assumes that people in the market have benign self-serving intentions. You assume that people in government, on the other hand, have suspicious motives. They are villains twirling their long moustaches and plotting the end of a free republic.”

Cain laughed. “There are few adaptable constraints on their behavior. We are not saying that people in the private market are saints. Adam Smith’s point about the invisible hand was that the sum of individual self-serving action promoted an overall good. Each of us serving our own needs acts as a constraint on others.”

Abel interjected, “Adam Smith also pointed out that businessmen were constantly colluding to subvert the price system and the public good.”

Cain nodded. “Fair enough. My point is that politics is a dangerous game because there are so few players. The Constitution specifically gives the House and Senate the ability to set their own rules. State and federal legislatures regularly change those rules to promote their own party power. Gerrymandering congressional districts is an example of changing the dimensions of the strike zone. They change the rules to achieve a specific outcome.”

Abel said, “In the cause of promoting higher education for everyone, policymakers want to change the rules to give everyone a chance at a higher education. That includes funding for school and guidelines that promote more diversity on campus.”

Cain argued, “Like everything else government touches, they make the process of getting financial aid complicated. Many parents and students need help with the labyrinth of information and regulation that the financial aid form – FAFSA – requires.”

Abel replied, “The Department of Education needs to assess the financial need of each student. They want to make sure that a student from a high-income family is not tapping the pool of funds that could be helping a student from a low-income family.”

Cain said, “That’s the problem with needs-based frameworks. Some government agency has to assess a student’s need. Imagine if a restaurant owner charged different prices for a meal based on their customers’ incomes.”

Abel shook his head. “An education is not a restaurant meal. At any rate, colleges and universities usually publish the same price per semester. Based on ability and financial need, a student gets scholarships or grants. If you want to use the restaurant meal analogy, those grants are like having a discount coupon off a meal. The complicated part is figuring out who gets the coupons and how much the coupons are worth. Your group doesn’t like complications.”

Cain replied, “In our economic system, students are aspiring suppliers of skills and knowledge to the marketplace. They attend college to acquire those skills and knowledge. The schools should supply them with those skills and relevant knowledge. I emphasize the word ‘relevant’. The government’s role is not to fund teachers spreading their Marxist ideologies or to be an advocate for gay issues.”

Abel argued, “Students in a sociology class might be interested in a career as a law enforcement officer, public administration or the practice of law. The treatment of gay people in different cultural backgrounds would provide helpful background in their jobs. Remember the 80-20 rule. We use only 20% of what we learn in school to do our job. The other 80% enables us to understand that 20% we do use.”

Cain nodded. “Professors are there to present information, not their normative perspective. They take advantage of students who are at an impressionable age. Too many professors treat the classroom as their personal pulpit. The taxpayers shouldn’t be funding some professor’s personal political religion.”

Abel shook his head. “Taxpayers help fund Christian Colleges and Bible Colleges. Are you suggesting that the government should support some perspectives and censor others?”

Cain said, “Our group believes that states and local communities should have more of a say in how their taxes are spent.”

Abel replied, “Alaska and Rhode Island receive the most in federal grants on a per-capita basis. Residents of New York and California pay the most in taxes. Should taxpayers in New York City have a say in how Alaska spends its federal grants? We are a republic of fifty states. Our finances are interconnected and that creates conflicts in our common and individual interests. Governing those diverse interests makes it difficult to apply a cohesive set of principles.”

Cain argued, “Transparent principles are essential to good governance. Discretionary public policy invites abuse and corruption.”

Abel nodded, “James Madison, the primary architect of the Constitution, thought that conflicts in regional interests would cause the nation to fracture and fail. As rigid as the Constitution is, we keep patching the contracts and alliances that form our union.”

Cain threw up his hands. “We seem no closer to an agreement on education policy.”

Abel replied, “The path to compromise is paved with disagreements.”

Cain nodded. “We’ll talk next week.”

Abel said, “See you then.”

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Photo by The Oregon State University Collections and Archives on Unsplash

A comparison of training done in medieval guilds with the current university system. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hequ.12305

In 15th century London, public schools taught basic reading and arithmetic skills which were necessary for admittance to the guilds. https://www.thoughtco.com/medieval-child-the-learning-years-1789122

A history of “diploma mills” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diploma_mills_in_the_United_States. Veterans Education Success advocates for veterans in higher education. Here is a complaint they filed with the Department of Education https://vetsedsuccess.org/our-letter-to-the-department-of-education-on-hlc/

The Change Changed

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November 13, 2022

by Stephen Stofka

October’s CPI report released this week indicated an annual inflation of 7.7%, down from the previous month. Investors took that as a sign that the economy is responding to higher interest rates. In the hope that the Fed can ease up on future rate increases, the market jumped 5.5% on Thursday. Last week I wrote about the change in the inflation rate. This week I’ll look at periods when the inflation rate of several key items abruptly reverses.

Food and energy purchases are fairly resistant to price changes. Economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) construct a separate “core” CPI index that includes only those spending categories that do respond to changing prices. It is odd that a core price index should exclude two categories, food and energy, that are core items of household budgets.

Ed Bennion and other researchers (2022) at the BLS just published an analysis of inflationary trends over several decades. Below is a chart of the annual change in energy prices. Except for the 1973-74 oil shock, a large change in energy prices led to a recession which caused a big negative change in energy prices.

We spend less of our income on food than we did decades ago so higher food prices have a more gradual effect, squeezing budgets tight. Lower income families really feel the bite because they spend a higher proportion of their income on food. In the graph below a series of high food price inflation often precedes a recession. Unlike energy prices, there is rarely a fall in food prices. Following the 2008 financial crisis, food prices fell ½% in 2009. It is an indication of the economic shock of that time.

Let me put up a chart of the headline CPI (blue line) that includes food and energy and the core inflation index (red line) which does not. Just once in 75 years, during the high inflation of the 1970s, the two indexes closely matched each other. Following the 1982-83 recession, the core CPI has outrun the headline CPI.

A big component of both measures of inflation is housing. The Federal Reserve (2022) publishes a series of home listing prices calculated per square foot using Realtor.com data. You can click on the name of a city and see its graph of square foot prices for the past year. You can select several cities, then click the “Add to Graph” button below the page title and FRED will load the graph for you. Here’s a comparison of Denver and Portland. They have similar costs.

The pandemic touched off a sharp rise in house prices in both cities. Denver residents have attributed the big change to an influx of people from other areas. However, Census Bureau data shows that the Denver metro area lost a few thousand people from July 2020 to July 2021 (Denver Gazette, 2022). In the decade after the financial crisis, there simply wasn’t enough housing built for the adults that were already here.

The surge in home buying has not been in population but in demographics. As people approach the age of 30, they become more interested in and capable of buying a home. The pandemic helped boost home buying because interest rates plunged from 5% in 2018 to 2.6% in 2021.

Record low interest rates enabled Millennials in their 20s and 30s to buy a lot more home with their mortgage payment. That leverage caused housing prices to rise. A 30-year mortgage of $320K has a monthly mortgage payment of $1349 at 3%. At 5%, it is $1718 and at 7% it rises to $2129. Ouch!

Rising rental costs and home prices drive lower income families to less expensive areas in a metro area or entirely out of an area. Declining public school enrollment has forced two Denver area counties to announce the closing of 26 schools and transfer them to other schools (Seaman, 2022). As the number of students decreases, the schools infrastructure costs do not change, increasing the per student costs. Buses have to be maintained, drivers paid, schools staffed with guards, cafeteria staff, janitors and administrative personnel. Once schools are shuttered, the building may be sold and converted to other uses, either residential or commercial. The public schooling system is like a large ship that takes some time to change course.

During our lifetimes we experience many changes. They can happen quickly or emerge over time. The effects may be short lived or last decades. Families are still living with the consequences of the financial crisis fourteen years ago. Carelessly planned urban development isolates the residents of a community. The social and economic effects can last several generations. As we grow older, we learn to appreciate William Faulkner’s line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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Photo by Davies Designs Studio on Unsplash

Bennion, E., Bergqvist, T., Camp, K. M., Kowal, J., & Mead, D. (2022, October). Why inflation matters. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved November 11, 2022, from https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-11/exploring-price-increases-in-2021-and-previous-periods-of-inflation.htm

Denver Gazette. (2022, March 25). Denver joins big city trend with pandemic population slip. Denver Gazette. Retrieved November 11, 2022, from https://denvergazette.com/news/local/denver-joins-big-city-trend-with-pandemic-population-slip/article_65c6393d-2a4d-5b91-837c-f8c3efce3778.html

Federal Reserve. (2022). Median listing price per square feet:Metropolitan Areas. FRED. Retrieved November 11, 2022, from https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?eid=1138280&rid=462

Seaman, J. (2022, November 10). Schools targeted for closure in Denver, Jeffco have disproportionately high numbers of students of color, data shows. The Denver Post. Retrieved November 11, 2022, from https://www.denverpost.com/2022/11/10/dps-jeffco-school-closures-students-of-color/

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The Old, Young and Middle

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October 9, 2022

by Stephen Stofka

This week I’ll compare inflation-adjusted or real spending on Social Security and K-12 education with wage growth. I was surprised to learn that the number of people in both programs are the same. I’ll begin with Friday’s employment report because the market’s reaction to it indicates the erratic – but rational – thinking that higher inflation can trigger. Job gains of 263,000 were in line with expectations, but the unemployment rate went down by .1% because people stopped looking for jobs. Three years ago a .1% move would be discarded as a survey error. The unemployment rate is derived from a survey of households, not businesses, and often exaggerates any move up or down. In today’s volatile market, traders are skittish, employing algorithms that don’t care about the extent of a move, only whether it is up or down. Short term options trading leverages both money and time and they are now almost half of the options market. A minus sign might trigger a sell, a plus sign a buy. The number after that plus or minus is less important. A trader might have taken a position forecasting a slight uptick in the unemployment rate. No increase or a decrease = sell and minimize losses. This is reactive trading, not economic evaluation.

This week’s ADP report of private job gains showed a decline of 7,000. Averaged together job gains were only 116,000 in September and has shown a distinct downward response to the Fed’s raising of interest rates. The historical average of the two surveys has been the more accurate after revisions. More disappointing for workers is that wage growth has been more than 3% below the inflation rate.

While workers’ wages are not keeping up with inflation, social security recipients will likely get a COLA (cost-of-living-adjustment) raise of about 8.6% this year. By law, the COLA calculation compares this year’s average third quarter CPI to last year’s third quarter average. September’s CPI report will be released Thursday, October 13th, finalizing this year’s 3rd quarter and the final adjustment percentage. It will be the largest increase since 1981’s adjustment of 11.3%, according to the Social Security Administration (2022).

An eternal theme in the Republican platform is the privatization of Social Security before it goes broke. A few weeks before the election, some Republicans will undoubtedly use the COLA adjustment to call for Social Security privatization. They will claim that higher payments will inevitably lead to the insolvency of the fund. Retirees will get partial payments or no payments.

Former House Speaker and Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Paul Ryan once asked Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the Fed and a fellow conservative, a leading question meant to demonstrate the insolvency of Social Security. Wouldn’t personal retirement accounts (privatized Social Security accounts) make the retirement system more financially secure? In his dry tone, Greenspan answered that “there is nothing to prevent the Federal Government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody” (C-Span, 2005). Ryan, a champion of privatization, was disappointed in the answer.

Why then do we have the trust funds? The Social Security system is “Pay-Go.” The taxes of current workers pay for the benefits to retired workers. When the program was created almost 90 years ago, President Roosevelt (FDR) thought that Republicans – and some conservative southern Democrats – would be more hesitant to cancel the program if funds were – on paper at least – dedicated to the program and called “insurance.” Republicans challenged the program up to the Supreme Court on the basis that the Federal government had no Constitutional right to force people to pay into a retirement program. The Court ruled that, even if the program was called “insurance,” it was a tax and the government had the right to tax incomes. Read the 16th Amendment. The unfairness in the system was that the first generation of recipients paid little into the system for the benefits they received when they retired. Today, the average retiree receives $1673 a month, or $20K per year (SSA, 2022). Let’s compare that to spending on K-12 education.

The U.S. has about the same number of K-12 students as it does retirees who are collecting Social Security – a bit more than 50 million. Social Security is a federal program. K-12 education is funded at the state and local level with only 8% federal funding. The federal government has deep pockets. State and local governments have shallow pockets with many demands from their constituents. In 2019, federal, state and local governments spent $765B, or $15,120 per pupil in 2019 (Hanson, 2022). That’s 75% of what we spend on retirees. Have we shifted too many resources to seniors from children?

Retirees have paid Social Security taxes for their entire working lives and feel that those funds have been set aside for them. The federal government doesn’t have to provide goods and services to retirees. Even the task of computing and remitting Social Security taxes is done by businesses – by law and for free. The accounting is a business expense. State and local governments must provide real resources. These include schools and facilities, teachers and lunches, school nurses and security guards.

Education competes with other essential services. The 2008 financial crisis and the slow recovery “put a hurt” in most state and local budgets. Since 2008, the national average of real per pupil funding has increased only 6% (Hanson, 2022). For most of that time, inflation has been low. Imagine what a sustained period of high inflation might do. Let’s look back at the last period – the 1970s and early 1980s.

Higher inflation wakes us up. Even when inflation is low, workers are squeezed, having to support children and retirees. Inflation increases the budget squeeze so workers pay closer attention to personal budgets and public policies. In the high inflation decade of the 1970s the public discovered that income and real estate taxes were not indexed to inflation. Rising wages caused people to go into higher tax brackets even when their real wages had barely moved. Tax laws were changed in the 1980s.

Ever rising real estate taxes in California made it difficult for retired homeowners on fixed incomes to stay in their homes. A growing taxpayer revolt rose up in many states. In 1978, California voters approved Proposition 13 which limited annual increases in taxes. Real estate taxes are the largest source of funding for schools so today California spends 10% less than the national average on K-12 students. Will today’s higher inflation provoke some sweeping policy changes?

Knowing past history, the Fed can’t let high inflation get entrenched in the economy for long. People will demand policy and institutional changes. Next week I’ll look at consumer psychology during high inflation periods.

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Photo by CDC on Unsplash

C-Span. (2005, March 3). User Clip: Alan Greenspan answers Paul Ryan. C-Span. Retrieved October 7, 2022, from https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4923562%2Fuser-clip-alan-greenspan-answers-paul-ryan

Hanson, Melanie. “U.S. Public Education Spending Statistics” EducationData.org, June 15, 2022, https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics

Social Security Administration. (2022). Cost of Living Adjustments. Cost-Of-Living Adjustments. Retrieved October 7, 2022, from https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/colaseries.html

SSA: Social Security Administration. (2022, August). Monthly Statistical Snapshot, August 2022. Research, Statistics & Policy Analysis. Retrieved October 7, 2022, from https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/

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A Public Sense of Duty

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Each New Year we renew our hope in the future, but have we lost our sense of duty to the future? Following World War 2, the U.S. and Russia engaged in a protracted Cold War of competing ideologies. We fought proxy wars in Vietnam and Indochina, South and Central America. Instrumental to the battle against Communism, America invested in our children’s education.

In 1978, the homeowners of California revolted against the rising property taxes that funded public schools. Since then, our per capita spending on children and young adults has steadily declined.

China’s spending on education has risen dramatically in the past two decades but it still lags the U.S. in spending as a percent of GDP. For how long? Do Americans have the “fire in the belly,” that focused desire to best the enemy, that we did seventy years ago?

In our technological society, the level of education of one’s parents has become a class distinction. The National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) reports that 80% of low-income families are headed by parents without a high school diploma. With a high school diploma, kids still have a 60% probability of being born into a low-income family (NCCP, 2021).

A child born in a middle-class suburb will receive a better education than one born in a poor neighborhood, where many residents are renters. Property taxes fund public schools, but landlords don’t live in those neighborhoods and want low property taxes. They have an influential voice in local politics.

Two years ago, I wrote about the post-war surge in college degrees (Stofka, 2018). Before WW2, only 5% of children earned college degrees; more than a third of children now earn college degrees (NCES, 1993). Is our society paying for that learning and experience? Despite their educational skills, teachers in charter schools make the same $53K average as all employees in private industry (NCES, 2020, Table 5). The pay in charter schools is 15% less than public schools (Table 5); that may explain the much higher ratio of black and Hispanic teachers in charter schools (Table 1).

An NCES survey in 2003-4 showed a national student teacher ratio of almost 15. The ratio in a 2018 survey was 21 students per teacher (NCES, 2020). Our educational system is asking our teachers to do more, to have a bigger and more expensive skill set, but does not pay them for their talent and hard work.

Construction workers average $63K per year, higher than public school teachers (BLS Series CES2000000011). 50% of teachers in traditional public schools have a master’s degree, in charter schools it is 39% (Table 4). Do half of all construction workers have a master’s degree? No, of course not. Why does our society value a painter or a carpenter more than a public-school teacher?

Construction workers provide mostly private goods, where private parties benefit from their work. Teachers provide public goods; the immediate benefit is only to the parents of the children in school. The provisioning of public goods and the caretaking of natural resources are only possible when a community has a sense of public duty. Has it declined in the past few decades?

Americans once built a sense of community in opposition to the common enemy of Communism. Covid-19 might have been that common enemy; it has highlighted just how fractured our society is. The common enemy is us, our neighbors, our professionals, and institutions.

The erosion of trust began in the 1960s but culminated in the financial crisis a decade ago. We learned that our institutions were run by pirates, whose duty was chiefly to other pirates, the elites who knew how to work the system. Under President Obama, Attorney-General Eric Holder did not want to waste public money on prosecuting financial crimes when there was a small chance of conviction. Neither he nor Mr. Obama understood the damage of that policy. The American people watched as the pirates were let off with a slap on the hand. Washington was awash with scoundrels.

In 2016, Americans elected an outsider, a pirate in the real estate industry who pledged to rid Washington of pirates. The Trump administration proved to be little more than a carousel of pirates. The Senate, in a shambles under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, held few confirmation hearings for department chiefs. Why bother? Most had temporary titles as acting heads of departments and agencies for a few months before another Twitter outrage from the pirate in chief tossed them overboard.

President-elect Joe Biden can avoid the policies of the Trump administration that so undermined the trust of the American people, but can he avoid those policies of the Obama administration which caused many Americans to abandon any hope for fairness in Federal policy? When public trust and public duty are so greatly diminished, the country declines – its spirit, its institutions and its infrastructure. Will we – can we – recapture that sense of public duty?

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Photo by Dan Russo on Unsplash

NCCP. (2021). United States Demographics of Low-Income Children. Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://www.nccp.org/demographic/?state=US

NCES. (1993, January). 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait. Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf#page=17

NCES. (2020, September). Characteristics of Public and Private Elementary and Secondary School Teachers in the United States. Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020142rev.pdf

Stofka, S. (2018, June 12). Study Dollars. Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://innocentinvestor.com/2018/06/10/study-dollars/

Green Goals

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March 3, 2019

by Steve Stofka

Last week I reviewed the infrastructure goals of the Green New Deal (Note #1). In Part Two this week, let’s look at the resolution’s re-commitment to justice and education, time honored themes of American life. Next week, I’ll review the income and health care proposals of the Green New Deal.

“Promote justice for all people.”
What Lincoln and the Reconstruction Republicans began in the 19th Century, President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) hoped to fulfill in the 20th Century. President and Mrs. Johnson started the LBJ foundation in 1971, three years after he left office. In an ongoing commitment to the goal of justice for all, the foundation honors individuals who have demonstrated a dedicated pursuit of those values. Last year’s recipient of the foundation’s Liberty and Justice For All award was former Arizona Senator John McCain. (Note #2).

During his life growing up in Texas, LBJ witnessed the class/race warfare that many white Southerners took for granted. The un-Christian racism apparent for all to see in the southern states was almost as prevalent in northern states but cleverly disguised by implicit understandings among white Northerners. Urban housing maps were “redlined” to confine blacks to small sections of a city where they could purchase or rent housing. During his presidency, LBJ signed the Fair Housing Act to outlaw, if not stop, the practice (Note #3). Many Northerners who had adopted the moral high ground in their criticism of white Southerners continued to flee toward the suburbs (Note #4).

LBJ had to overcome opposition in his own Democratic Party to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Note #5). The Act struck down employment, credit and some housing discrimination prevalent throughout the country at the time. This point in the resolution is a reaffirmation of last century’s aspirations and legislation.

“Providing resources training and high-quality education to all people of the United States.”
This goal, first stated in the middle of the 19th century, led to the adoption of public education by all states shortly after the Civil War. By the end of World War 1 in 1918, all states had adopted compulsory education laws. During the first half of the 20th century, the country began Ed 2.0 as many states built secondary schools. When America declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor in 1941, half of all young people had high school diplomas (Note #6).

After the war, the Federal government’s G.I. bill expanded access to college for veterans. This marked a new phase Ed 3.0 in American education, in which the Federal government took a greater role. During the post-war thirty-year period, the federal government and states expanded funding to traditional four-year colleges and universities.

In the last forty years, Ed 4.0 has been marked by the growth of community colleges within the states. This allowed more students affordable entry to a college education and promoted two-year degrees in applied training.

In Germany, where the government provides low cost or free higher learning, one third of high school students attend college. In Britain, the rate is one-half (Note #7). In the U.S., 2/3rds of high school students attend college (Note #8).

This goal in the Green New Deal marks a new phase in American Education: Ed 5.0. In the first two stages, the states were responsible for the development and funding of K-12 schools. The growing role of the Federal government in phases Ed 3.0 and 4. 0 worry those who have a well-grounded suspicion of the Federal government. In most areas, it is inefficient, slow to respond to a changing environment and dismissive of local concerns and standards.

These concerns should inform, not impede, this new phase of American education. Most states do not have the resources to build and maintain educational institutions that are global leaders. The Federal government must take the lead because the need is urgent. Mechanical Automation has replaced many blue-collar jobs but many of these jobs are still not cost effective to automate. Artificial Intelligence, or Intellectual Automation, is the greater threat and it affects low to medium skilled white-collar jobs.

Trends in Financial Sector employment illustrate the growing threat. A steady increase in employment from the end of World War 2 through the middle of the 1980s hit a ceiling as affordable computing became more available. Since that time, the percent of jobs in the financial sector has declined.

FinEmpPctTotEmp

A sharp mind, attention to detail and a knack for customer service are no longer a path into this sector. Programming jobs that paid the equivalent of $70,000 twenty years ago have been replaced by jobs paying $50,000. Common programming tasks have been automated. White collar employees will compete against AI systems that can be situated in any country. To compete against other industrialized nations, the white-collar workers of tomorrow will need to develop the magical talents of the human brain that are difficult to automate. That will require a large national re-commitment to education.

The high unemployment that characterized the Great Recession and Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 made it apparent to many job seekers that they needed some post-secondary education. Millions signed up for classes in community colleges, private colleges and public universities. Many took advantage of federally insured loans. Since 2006, student loan debt has almost quadrupled to its current level of approximately $1.6 trillion (Note #9). More than 11% of loans are delinquent (Note #10). Current law prevents the discharge of student debt in bankruptcy. Payments in default can be withheld from federal benefits like Social Security.

As the nation enters Ed 5.0, there will be much discussion and dissension over student loan forgiveness. Is it right that one person should receive an advantage over another person in the job market at taxpayer expense? These involve questions of moral hazard and fairness that provoke instinctual reactions in all of us. Compromises may include a debtor paying an additional percentage in taxes on wages above a certain threshold. We must not sacrifice the pragmatic concerns of a nation competing in the global workforce on the altar of our righteousness toward the actions of others.

By re-committing to traditional American values and ideals, this resolution can engage the public in a lively debate. What are our values? How do we attain our ideals in a practical and equitable manner? Do Americans need the passage of a resolution to spark argument? Heck no. This country was founded on argument and a consensus over how we should argue. The Civil War was our one horrible failure to argue with words. Thousands died in an argument using guns and cannons, not debate. Let’s hope that was our last failure to debate.

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Notes:

1. Politifact article on Green New Deal
2. Liberty and Justice For All award
3. Fair Housing Act 
4. White Flight to the suburbs
5. Civil Rights Act of 1964 
6. Education in the U.S.
7. 49% of British high school students attend college – Guardian article
8. 2/3rds of American high school students attend college – BLS data
9. Student loan debt series at FRED database
10. Student debt delinquency – Minneapolis Fed Reserve article

Study Dollars

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June 10, 2018

by Steve Stofka

In the past forty years, inflation-adjusted per student spending on higher education has increased by 40%. Despite this, the number of tenured professors has fallen by half. Two-thirds of instruction is now carried out by adjunct faculty with no job security and few benefits. State and federal dollars subsidize workers training for the banking and insurance industries, but not those entering the construction and manufacturing industries. No wonder people express their grievances at government for a lack of funding (Alternet article) . Where is the money going? Maybe the question is: who is the money going to?

In 1940, just 5% of Americans had a four-year college degree (NCES, Dept. of Ed).  In 2015, 75 years later, a third of Americans reported having a college degree.

CollegeDegreePct

A few years after WW2 and the enactment of the GI Bill’s education benefits, 2.7 million were enrolled in a two or four-year degree granting institution. By 1959, enrollment had grown 33% to 3.6 million students (NCES). About 60% were enrolled in a public institution. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), total Federal, State and Local spending in 1959 was $12.4B, about $3400 per student in 2016 dollars.

In 2016, there were 20.2 million students enrolled in college, a third of them in two-year programs. They were sharing a pot of $241B federal and state dollars, about $12,000 per student. That’s inflation-adjusted dollars: apples to apples. Here is a chart covering the past 50 years.

EdSpendPerStudentReal

Confronted by escalating Medicaid costs and uncooperative taxpayers, the state portion of higher education spending has fallen over the past two decades.

StateLocalEdSpendPerStudent2016$

In Colorado, the taxpayer rebellion started in the 1990s when the Denver Post reported that a University of Colorado (UC) faculty member was retiring with an annual pension almost eight times the average yearly income in Colorado. The abuse has not stopped. Last year, the L.A. Times reported that UC continued to hand out generous pensions to faculty members.

In the 1990s, UC and other public and private universities planned that the future annual investment returns on their endowment funds would continue to be generous. They stopped making contributions to meet the future obligations of the equally generous pensions they promised to faculty. “Our accountants told us we would be all right,” was the lament of one city official in California. After a decade of rock bottom interest rates and single digit returns for college endowments, students, parents and taxpayers must now pick up the tab for the Polyanna thinking of politicians and college administrators.

In 1959, state and local governments spent 98% of higher education funding. In 2016, they spent less than 60%. Because public and private institutions are tax-exempt, state and local governments provide billions in forgone tax revenue that is not counted.

StateLocalPctEdSpend

About 9% of total spending goes to private for-profit institutions (NCES). Because the for-profit institutions grab headlines, some might think that they receive a greater percentage of education dollars than they do. I did.

Inflation-adjusted per student spending has risen 27% in the past twenty years. Where is all that money going? Not to today’s instructors. Less than a third of spending goes to instruction (NCES). About 40% goes to administration and student support.

Public and private non-profit institutions do not detail the expenses for maintenance and operation of their buildings and grounds, nor their interest and depreciation expenses. This gap is about 28-30% of spending, so we can conservatively estimate that they spend at least 25% of their budget on these items. As buildings continue to age, operations expenses will grow faster than the rate of inflation and eat up more education dollars. Each year, colleges and universities spend more time and dollars in their outreach to a growing cohort of “non-traditional” students.

An educational system designed for the children of the landed elite in the 19th century is trying to catch up to the needs of a diverse student population in the 21st century. That earlier system wasn’t much good to start with. That’s a topic for another time.  Entrenched political and financial interests now hinder any substantive changes in these institutions as they prepare the students of today for the world of tomorrow.

About 3 million students are graduating high school this year. Two thirds of those graduates are enrolled in a two or four-year college (BLS), and the majority are female. Out of every 100 college students, 56 are female (NCES). There are not enough state or federal educational programs to meet the skills training for the million students who will not go on to college this year, or the million who may drop out before getting a degree.

Discrimination – Education policy in this country subsidizes the training of workers employed by a large bank like J.P. Morgan Chase, but has little support for the workers in the construction and manufacturing industries. The subsidized workers at Chase are more likely to lose their jobs to automation than the unsubsidized workers at a large homebuilder like Pulte.

Fifteen percent of all employees are in the BLS category of Professional and Business Services. This percentage has grown from 8% of the work force in 1980. Employees work for private companies and government, enjoy lower unemployment rates and much higher incomes. (BLS profile ) The great majority have college degrees. College enrollees are attracted by these numbers, but the numbers are changing. The growth of this category in the 1990s lessened during the 2000s and has lessened again since the Great Recession. I’ve highlighted the trend changes in the graph above.

ProfBusSvcPctPayems

In the past year growth is relatively flat. The number of institutions with job growth has offset those with declining job growth.

ProfBusSvcEstablish
The world is changing rapidly, and for some the changes are too much and too quick. That reaction against change underlies the support for Donald Trump in the rust belt states.

Current college enrollees and graduates may find that they have prepared for a world that existed a decade ago, and will be materially changed a decade hence. The college debt is permanent but not the state of the job market. Be versatile, be flexible, be prepared.

 

Border Adjustment Tax

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March 5, 2017

Gary Cohn,  President Trump’s Chief Economic Advisor, says that the Border Adjustment Tax (BAT) is off the table. This is a key revenue raiser, a hidden tax, in the Republican scheme to lower corporate taxes. We will continue to hear about BAT as the fight over tax reform heats up. What is it and how will it affect American families?

First, a bit of context. Most other developed countries have a VAT, or Value Added Tax, on purchased goods and services. In the EU most VAT taxes range from 20-25%. In America, we have state and local sales taxes that might add as much as 8 – 10% to the cost of a good. A VAT is like a Federal sales tax of 20%.

Unlike a VAT tax that affects most goods and services, the BAT will affect only imported goods. Here’s an example of the BAT tax using Big-Box as an example of a large merchandiser similar to Wal-Mart.

Big-Box imports a DVD Player for $80 (Cost of Goods Sold) and sells it for $100, making $20 gross profit. It has $5 other costs which are deducted from gross profit to reach a taxable profit of $15. Let’s say that Big-Box’s effective Federal tax rate is 30% (27.1% per Congressional Research Service). $15 taxable profit x 30% = $5 (rounded) Federal Tax.  Big-Box has a net after-tax profit of $10, or 10% of the retail price.  Remember that.  Current law = 10%.

Under the BAT proposal, Big-Box could not deduct the $80 it paid for the good because it is an import. Big-Box’s gross profit is now $100. Subtracting the $5 other costs, the taxable profit is $95. Multiply that by a lower 20% corporate tax rate and the Federal tax is now  about $19, far more than the $5 using the current tax system. Big-Box paid $80 cost + $19 in tax = $99, leaving them a gain of $1, or 1%.  Current law = 10% profit.  Proposed law = 1% profit.

For Big-Box to make the $10 after-tax profit it has under the current tax system, it would  need to raise the price of the DVD player about $15.  After paying a 20% tax ($3) on the additional revenue, it will net an additional $12. So the customer now pays $115 for a DVD player that used to be $100.  No change in quality.  Just an extra $15 out of the consumer’s pocket for an imported CD player.

What if Big-Box buys the DVD player from an American supplier for $100?  Under BAT, the $100 direct cost of the DVD player would be deducted from the sale amount, giving Big-Box a tax CREDIT of $20 ($20%).  The after-tax cost of the player is now $80 direct and the same $5 indirect cost = $85. To make a $12 net profit as under the current system, Big-Box could sell the DVD player for $97 and undercut another vendor selling the same DVD player for $115.

In theory, customers would rush to the vendor selling American DVD players. BUT, there is only one DVD manufacturer in the U.S. (Ayre Acoustics) and we don’t know how many parts of their product are imported.  The transition could take years and consumers will pay more for many household goods during that time.

Some products can only be imported.  Most of the lumber used to build homes is imported from Canada.  This hidden tax will be added onto the prices of homes and remodels.  Most diamonds are imported and will bear this hidden tax.  Businesses will lobby to have their product excluded where there is no alternative to an import.  This will be a boon for lobbying firms.

Businesses, particularly durable goods manufacturers, anticipate a complexity in this new tax. Planes, cars, boats, sporting goods and appliances are made with parts from a variety of countries, including the United States. Assessing the component value of imports and exports may require a judgment call by the company, and that is subject to dispute with the IRS. This is sure to become a headache.

Should the BAT become law, customers who have benefitted from the lower prices of imported goods are sure to complain loudly at the higher prices. Retailers have opposed the scheme. Republicans are promising tax cuts for middle class households but the tax reduction won’t offset the extra cost of many household goods.

Republicans have long resisted tax increases in their effort to shrink the size of the government yoke on American families. Many have signed a pledge not to raise taxes. To avoid any appearance of raising taxes, Republican lawmakers had to hide the tax and this was the best they could do.

Side Note: Why not just add the extra $20 as an import tax, or duty? Import taxes are paid to the government by the importing company of record when the goods are received in the country. Even if an item sits in a warehouse as inventory, the import duty has been paid, creating a cash flow problem for companies. With both VAT and BAT taxes, the tax is not charged until the good or service is sold.

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IRA Contributions

Did you put off making your IRA contribution for 2016? In May 2011, I compared several “timing” scenarios of investing in an IRA for the years 1993-2009.The choices were making a contribution on:
1) July 1st, the middle of the tax year;
2) January 31st following the tax year;
3) April 15th following the tax year

The 1st option had a 2.5% advantage over the 2nd option because of the longer time frame invested. An even greater advantage was an option not on this list. Contributing an equal amount every month produced a 4% greater gain over the first option.

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Stand up or Sit Down

The Bureau of Labor Statistics published a study  of  the time workers spend standing/walking or sitting. The average worker spends 3/5th of their time standing or walking.

timestudy
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Education in the 21st Century

“Education technology is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it…”

That’s just one quote from this TechCrunch article on the investments needed in K-12 and higher education. The author feels that the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education will break up a coalition of interests that has stymied the adoption of technology in classrooms.

Readers who do not support Ms. DeVos may still find themselves in agreement with the author’s comment that “in both K-12 and higher education, technology remains supplemental to chalk-and-talk practices as old as the hills, and not much more effective from a pedagogical standpoint.”

Those who are sympathetic to teacher’s unions will bristle at this comment: “In K-12, the most promising applications of technology have been found most consistently in private and charter schools — freed from the strictures of teachers unions.”

The author discusses a new “10/90” proposal to give higher education institutions some “skin in the game.” Under an Income Share Agreement (ISA), higher education schools would contribute 10% of the amount of every federal loan. After graduation, students would make loan payments based on a fixed percentage of their income for a fixed number of years, with a clear cap on the total amount paid. The schools would recap their money ONLY if students graduated and would thus be more invested in the future of their students.

Productivity And Labor Unions

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February 5, 2017

About 10% of all workers, public and private, belong to a union. Today the percentage of private sector employees who are unionized is the same as in 1932, eighty years ago. (Wikipedia) The rise and fall of unon membership looks like the familiar bell curve, with the peak in the 1970s. The causes of the decline are debated but some attribute the erosion of union power as an important factor in wage stagnation.

The major factor is not declining union membership but declining productivity, and that persistent decline has economists and policymakers baffled.  Higher productivity should equal higher wage growth and, in the 30 year post-war period 1948-1977, multi-factor productivity (MFP) annual growth averaged 1.7%. MFP includes both labor and capital inputs. In the 40 year period from 1976-2015, MFP growth averaged about half that rate – .9%.

prodmfp1948-2015

In the debate over the causes of the decline, some contend that all the easy gains were made by 1980.  Productivity is now returning to a centuries long growth trend that is less than 1%. In an October 2016 Bloomberg article, Justin Fox picked apart BLS data to show that growth has been flat in some key manufacturing areas for the past three decades. The ten-fold surge in productivity growth in the tech sector is largely responsible for any growth during the past 30 years. OECD data indicates that other developed countries are experiencing a similar lack of growth (OECD Table) When no one can conclusively demonstrate what the causes are for the decline, policymakers face tough challenges and even tougher debate over the solutions.

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LoanGate

LoanGate may the next scandal. A few months ago, the Dept of Education (DoE) revealed that they had seriously undercounted student loan delinqencies because of a programming error. When the Wall St. Journal analyzed the revised data, they found that the majority of students at 25% of all colleges and trade schools in the U.S. had defaulted on their student loan or failed to make any repayment.  (WSJ article)

The Obama administration forced the closure of many private institutions whose students had low repayment rates. In 2015, Corinthian Colleges shuttered the last of its schools and filed for bankruptcy. The revised data show that many more institutions, both public and private, should be shut down.

This latest programming error at the DoE follows other embarrassing episodes during the two Obama terms. In October 2013, the rollout of Obamacare was riddled with programming errors that blocked many applicants from enrolling in a plan with healthcare.gov.

In 2010, the IRS delayed many applications for 501(c)3 tax status from mostly conservative political groups. Lois Lerner, the head of the agency, first claimed that these had been innocent clerical mistakes by an overworked staff, but a series of hearings uncovered the fact that employees at the IRS had acted on their own political feelings and deliberately targeted these groups. (Mother Jones)

In yet another incident, the Office of Personnel and Managment (OPM), the HR dept for thousands of Federal employees, revealed in 2016 a data breach involving 22,000,000 personnel records, including Social Security numbers.  Unchecked programming errors and data breaches erode the public’s faith in public institutions.  That these mistakes happened under a Democratic administration favoring ever bigger public institutions to solve ever bigger social problems is especially embarrassing.

When Obama first took office in 2009, the inflation adjusted total of student debt had quadrupled in the 15 year period (DoE paper – page 1) since 1993. By the time he left office eight years later, student debt had grown ten-fold to $1.3 trillion. The delinquency rate on that debt is 11% but the repayment rate is considered a better predictor of future delinquencies. The revised data reduced the combined repayment rate to a little more than 50% (Inside Higher Ed), far lower than the 75% plus repayment rates of a few decades ago.

The defaults are coming and there will be an inevitable call for a taxpayer bailout.  A popular element of Bernie Sanders’ Presidential platform was that a college education should be free. In the real world, nothing is free, so somebody pays.  Who should pay and how much will further aggravate tensions in an already divided electorate.

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Five Year Rule

A few weeks ago I wrote about the 5-year rule, a backstop to any allocation rule. Any money needed in the next five years should be in stable assets like short to intermediate term bonds, CDs and cash. Why 5 years of income? Why not 2 years or 10 years? Answer: History.

Let’s look back at 80 years in 5 year slices, or what is called 5-year rolling periods. As an example, the years 2000 – 2004 would be a 5-year rolling period. 2001 – 2005 would be the next period, and so on.

Saving me the time and effort of running the data on stock market returns is a blogger at All Financial Matters who put together a table of this very data for the years 1926-2012. The table shows that the SP500 has held or increased its inflation adjusted value (very important that we look at the real value) almost 75% of the time. So the 5-year rule guards against a loss of value the other 25% of the time.

The 5-year rule can apply whenever there are anticipated income needs from our savings: retirement, college expenses, sickness or disability, and even a greater chance of losing our jobs. In a retirement span of 25 years, 6 of those years will fall into that 25% category. The 5-year rule minimum usually kicks in toward the end of retirement when a person’s reserves are lower and prudence is especially important.

 

GDP and Education

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June 29, 2014

This week I’ll review some of this week’s headlines in GDP, personal income, spending and debt, housing and unemployment.  Then I’ll take a look at some trends in education, including state and local spending.

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Gross Domestic Product First Quarter 2014

The headline this week was the third and final estimate of GDP growth in the first quarter, revised downward from -1% to -2.9%.  This headline number is the quarterly growth rate, or the growth rate over the preceding quarter.  A year over year comparison, matching 2014 first quarter GDP with 2013 first quarter GDP, shows an annual real growth rate of 1.5%, below the 2.5 to 3.0% growth of the past fifty years.  The largest contributor to the sluggish GDP growth was an almost 5% drop in defense spending.  Simon Kuznets, the economist who developed the GDP concept, did not include defense spending in the GDP calculation.

Contributing to the quarterly drop was the 1.7% decline in inventories.  Businesses had built up inventories a bit much in the latter half of 2013 in anticipation of sales growth only to see those expectations dashed by the severe winter weather.  Final Sales of Domestic Product is a way of calculating current GDP growth and does not include changes in inventory.  Let’s look at a graph of the annual growth in Real (Inflation-Adjusted) GDP and Real Final Sales of Domestic Product to see the differences in the two series.

Note that Real GDP growth (dark red line) leads Final Sales (blue line) as businesses build and reduce their inventory levels in anticipation of future demand and in reaction to current and past demand.
  
The Big Pic: if we look at these two series since WW2, we see that ALL recessions, except one, are marked by a year over year percent decline in real GDP.  The 2001 recession was the exception.

Secondly, note that in half of the recessions, y-o-y growth in Final Sales, the blue line in the graph, does not dip below zero.  We can identify two trends to recession: 1) businesses are too optimistic and overbuild inventories in anticipation of demand, then correct to the downside, causing a reduction in employment and a lagging reduction in consumer spending; 2) consumers are too optimistic and take on too much debt – selling an inventory of future earnings to creditors, so to speak – then correct to the downside and reduce their consumption, causing businesses to cut back their growth plans.  In case #1, a decrease in consumer spending follows the cutbacks by businesses.  In case #2, businesses cut back following a downturn in consumer spending.

In this past quarter, employment was rising as businesses cut back inventory growth, indicating more of a rebalancing of resources by businesses rather than a correction.  Consumer spending may have weakened during the first quarter but, importantly, did not decline.  We have two hunting dogs and neither is pointing at a downturn.

For a succinct description of the various components of GDP, check out this article written for about.com by Kimberly Amadeo.  Probably written in the first quarter of 2014, her concerns about the inventory buildup in 2013 were proved accurate.

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Income and Spending

Personal Income rose almost 5% on an annualized basis in May but consumer spending rose at only half that pace,  2.4%.  The spending growth is only slightly more than the 1.8% inflation rate calculated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, revealing that consumers are still cautious.

I heard recently a good example of how data can be presented out of context, leading a listener or reader to come to a wrong conclusion.  Data point: the dollar value of consumer loans outstanding has risen 45% since the start of the recession in late 2007. Consumer loans do not include mortgages or most student loan debt. If I were selling a book, physical gold, or a variable annuity with a minimum return guarantee, I could say:

My friends, this shows that many consumers have not learned any lessons from the recession.  They are living beyond their means, running up debts that they will not be able to pay. Soon, very soon, people will start defaulting on their debts and the economy will collapse.  This country will suffer a depression that will make the 1930s depression look tame.  Now is the time to protect yourself and your loved ones before the coming crash.

Data is little more than an opportunity to spread one’s political message.  Data should never lead us to reconsider our message, our point of view.  If I were penning a politically liberal message, I could write:

The families in our country are desperate.  Without enough income to satisfy their basic needs, they are forced to borrow, falling ever deeper into debt while the 1% get richer.  We need policies that will help families, not the financial fat cats on Wall Street.  We need a tax structure that will ensure that the 1% pay their fair share and not have the burden fall on the shoulders of most of the working Americans in this country.


Selling a political persuasion and selling a car brand often employ similar techniques.  Data should never lead us to question our loyalty to the brand.  If I were crafting a conservative message, I could write:


The misuse of credit indicates an immaturity fostered by cradle to grave social programs, which are eroding the very character of the American people, who come to rely less on their own resources and more on some agency in Washington to help them out.  People steadily lose their sense of personal responsibility, becoming more like children than self-reliant adults.

However, the facts behind the data point lead us to a different story. In the spring of 2010, consumer loans spiked, rising $382 billion in just two months.

That surge represents more than a $1000 in additional debt per person. Consumers did not suddenly go crazy.  Banks did not open their bank vaults in a spirit of generosity. Instead, banks implemented accounting rules FAS 166 and 167 that required them to show certain assets and liabilities on their books. $322 billion of the $382 billion increase in consumer loans during those two months in 2010 was the accounting change. If we subtract that accounting change from the current total, we find that real consumer loan debt increased only 5.5% in 6-1/2 years.  And that is the real story.  Never in the history of this series since WW2 have consumers restrained their borrowing habits as much as we have since December 2007.  We had to.  In the eight years before the financial crisis in 2008, real consumer debt rose 33%, an unsustainable pace.

About two years ago, loan balances stopped declining and since then consumers have added $80 billion, much of it to finance car purchases. $25 billion of that $80 billion increase has come only since the beginning of this year.  On a per capita, inflation adjusted basis, consumer loan balances are still rather flat.

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Housing

New home sales in May were up almost 20% over April’s total, and over 6% on an annual basis.  Existing homes rose 5% above April’s pace but are down 5% on an annual basis.  Each year we hope that housing will finally contribute something to economic growth.  Like Cubs fans, we can hope that maybe this year….

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Unemployment Claims

New unemployment claims continue to drift downward and the 4 week moving average is just below 315,000.  Our attention spans are rather short so it is important to keep in mind that the current level of claims is the same as what is was last September.

It has taken this economy six months to recover from the upward spike in claims last October.  The patient is recovering but still not healthy.

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Minimum Wage

The number of workers directly affected by changes in the minimum wage are small.  We sympathize with those minimum wage workers who try to support a family.  The Good Samaritan impulse in many of us prompts us to say hey, come on, give these people a break and raise the minimum wage.  What we may forget are the implications of any minimum wage increase.  Older readers, stretch your imagination and remember those years gone by when you were younger. Workers in their early working years often see the minimum as a benchmark for comparison.  The much larger pool of younger workers who make above minimum wage may push for higher wages in response to increases in the minimum wage.

Fifty years ago, Congress could have made the minimum wage rise with inflation, ensuring that workers in low paid jobs would get at least a subsistence wage and that increases would be incremental.  Of course, there are some good arguments against any nationally set minimum wage.  $10 in Los Angeles buys far less than $10 in Grand Junction, Colorado.  Ikea recently announced that they will begin paying a minimum wage that is based on the livable wage in each area using the MIT living wage calculator .  Several cities have enacted minimum wage increases that will be phased in over several years but none that I know of are indexed to inflation as the MIT model does.

Congress could enact legislation that respects the differences in living costs across the nation.  For too long, Congress has chosen to use the minimum wage as a political football.  Social Security payments are indexed to inflation because older people put pressure on politicians to stop the nonsense.  There are not enough minimum wage workers to exert a similar amount of coordinated pressure on the folks in Washington so workers must rely on the fairness instinct of the larger pool of voters if any national legislation will be passed.

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Education

Demos, a liberal think tank, recently published a report recounting the impact of rising tuition costs on students and families.  Student debt has almost quadrupled from 2004 – 2012.  Wow, I thought.  State spending per student has declined 27%.  More wows.  How much has enrollment increased, I wondered?  Hmmm, not mentioned in the report.  Why not?

The National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the Dept. of Education, reports that full time college enrollment increased a whopping 38% in the decade from 2001-2011.  Part-time enrollment increased 23% during that time.  Together, they average a 32% increase in enrollment. Again, wow!  Ok, I thought, the states have been overwhelmed with the increase in enrollment, declining revenues because of the recession, etc.  Well, that’s part of the story.  Spending on education, including K-12, is at the same levels as it was a decade ago.

From 2002-2012, states have increased their spending on higher ed by 42%.  Some argue that the Federal government should step up and contribute more.  In 2010, total Federal spending on education at all levels was less than 1% ($8.5B out of $879B).  Others argue that the heavily subsidized educational system is bloated and inefficient.  As much cultural as they are educational institutions, colleges and universities have never been examples of efficiency.  Old buildings on college campuses that are expensive to heat and cool are largely empty at 4 P.M.  Legacy pension agreements, generously agreed to in earlier decades, further strain state budgets.  We may need to rethink how we can deliver a quality education but these are particularly thorny issues which ignite passions in state and local budget negotations.

Although state and local governments have increased spending on higher ed by 42% in the decade from 2002-2012, the base year used to calculate that percentage increase was particularly low, coming after 9-11 and the implosion of the dot-com boom.  Nor does it reflect the economic realities that students must get more education to compete for many jobs at the median level and above.

Let’s then go back to what was presumably a good year, 2000, the height of the dot-com boom.  State coffers were full.  In 2000, state and local governments spent 5.14% of GDP (Source).  By 2010, that share had grown to 5.82% of GDP (Source). That represents a 13% gain in resources devoted to education.  But that is barely above population growth, without accounting for the rush of enrollment in higher education during the decade.

Let’s take a broader view of educational spending, comparing the total of all spending on education, including K-12, to all the revenue that Federal, state and local governments bring in.  This includes social security taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc.  As a percent of all receipts, spending on education has declined from 30% to under 18%.

Many on the political left paint conservatives as being either against education or not supportive of education.  Census data shows that Republican dominated state legislatures, in general, devote more of their budget to education than Democratic legislatures.  W. Virginia, Mississippi, Michigan, S. Carolina, Alabama and Arkansas devote more than 7% of GDP to education, according to U.S. Census data compiled by U.S.GovernmentSpending.com.  Only two states with predominantly Democrat legislatures, Vermont and New Mexico, join the plus-7% club (Wikipedia Party Strength for party control of state legislatures).

In the early part of the twentieth century, a high school education was higher education.  In the early part of this century, college may be the new high school, a minimum requirement for a job applicant seeking a mid level career.  What are our priorities?  In any discussion of priorities, the subject of taxes arises like Godzilla out of the watery depths.  People scramble in terror as Taxzilla devours the city. Older people on fixed incomes and wealthy house owners resist property tax increases.  Just about everyone resists sales tax increases.  Proposals to raise income taxes are difficult to incorporate in a campaign strategy for state and local politicians running for election.

Let’s disregard for a moment the ideological argument over Federal funding or control of education.  Let’s ask ourselves one question:  does this declining level of total revenues reflect our priorities or acknowledge the geopolitical realities of today’s economy?

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Takeaways

Reductions in defense spending, inventory reductions and a severe winter that curtailed consumer spending accounts for much of the sluggishness in first quarter GDP growth.

A surge in new home sales is a sign of both rising incomes and greater confidence in the future.

Consumer spending growth is about half of healthy income gains.

Spending on education has grown a bit more than population growth and is not keeping up with surging enrollment in higher education.