Globalization

President Obama: Countries Around the World are Upping Their Game

In his weekly address, President Obama describes the path for American success in the more competitive, technologically connected 21st century economy:

We’re living in a new and challenging time, in which technology has made competition easier and fiercer than ever before. Countries around the world are upping their game and giving their workers and companies every advantage possible. But that shouldn’t discourage us. Because I know we can win that competition. I know we can out-compete any other nation on Earth. We just have to make sure we’re doing everything we can to unlock the productivity of American workers, unleash the ingenuity of American businesses, and harness the dynamism of America’s economy.

GE's Immelt on the President's Council on Jobs and Competitivess

 

General Electric CEO and newly appointed Chair of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness Jeffrey Immelt authored a piece in the Washington Post today describing the major areas of focus for the council. Immelt's "hope is that the council will be a sounding board for ideas and a catalyst for action on jobs and competitiveness."

Ensuring that America can compete in a 21st century, globalized economy is perhaps the greatest governing challenge of our time. It is now more than clear that our economic competitors have raised their game, and we must now raise ours. Everything Immelt describes in his piece is right on – we must better engage with fast growing markets outside the United States and we must increase innovation here in the United States. The agenda required to raise our game is vast, and I look forward to hearing more on this agenda from the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and the State of the Union on Tuesday. Immelt concludes:

GE sells more than 96 percent of its products to the private sector, where America's future must be built. But government can help business invest in our shared future. A sound and competitive tax system and a partnership between business and government on education and innovation in areas where America can lead, such as clean energy, are essential to sustainable growth.

It is possible to be a competitive global enterprise and still care about your home. In fact, it is not just possible but imperative. There is no easy solution to "fix" the American economy. Persistent and high unemployment - and the pessimism it breeds - should not be accepted. We must work together to construct an economy that creates more opportunity for more people.

Indeed.

 

What the Obama-Hu Meetings Can Mean for the U.S. Economy

Barack Obama and China’s President Hu Jintao have genuinely important economic matters to talk about this week, even if there’s little prospect for any agreements that could materially improve our own economy anytime soon. But President Obama can –– and certainly will –– use these meetings to hammer home his long-term priorities for the U.S.-Sino relationship. And so long as Hu continues to see the United States as the “indispensable nation” for China’s economic development –– Hu’s own words –– a U.S. President’s priorities matter. And in acknowledging China’s increasing success in the global economy, the President can also remind Americans why they have to raise their own economic game –– and how his domestic policies can help them do just that.

A few of these discussions may produce quick benefits. For example, Obama will press Hu on China’s lax enforcement of the intellectual property (IP) rights of American companies in the Chinese market. A lot of Americans still see such enforcement as a parochial issue for a few big pharmaceutical and software outfits. It’s true that Chinese producers regularly try to rip off U.S. patented drugs, mainly for third-world markets; and until recently even the Beijing government used pirated versions of Windows.  But there’s much more at stake here for us. The fact is, the only promising, long-term strategy that the global economy offers the United States today depends on our outsized national capacity for developing and adopting economic innovations –– from new products and technologies, to new ways of financing, marketing and distributing goods, and new ways of organizing a business and running a workplace. IP rights in the world’s second largest market, then, affect everything from movies, machine parts and genetically-enhanced foods, to computer slates, Internet business processes, and nanomachines. 

China already is legally obliged to protect the IP rights of American companies inside China under the rules of the World Intellectual Property Organization. So, Obama will press Hu to actually meet those obligations; and since China has recently begun to build its own R&D establishment, it’s an area where China’s interests and ours are beginning to align. The truth is, this is ultimately non-negotiable for the United States. But it also should prove to be a small price for China to pay for a solid economic relationship with the country that is not only one of its largest markets, but also its leading source of foreign direct investment into China –– including new technologies and business methods that are at issue in IP enforcement. 

There is much less prospect of real progress on nudging China to revalue its currency, a recent hot-button issue for some prominent members of Congress.  A stronger renminbi certainly would appear to be in our interest, since it would cut the price of U.S. exports inside China and raise the price of their exports inside the United States.  In practice, it probably would make little difference to our economy. A stronger renminbi mainly would help companies in places which produce the same things as domestic Chinese companies –– places like Bangladesh and Thailand, not Michigan or Alabama. Yes, it would shave the price of U.S. products inside China –– but it would do the same for the products of our Japanese and European competitors.

Anyway, Hu has no intention of taking major steps in this area. Chinese leaders have always approached the value of their country’s currency as a matter of national sovereignty.  The truth is, we don’t react very well either when China or the governments of other countries criticize U.S. monetary policies, such as the recent blasts from Germany and China about the Fed’s second round of quantitative easing.  And even if Hu approached this matter less dogmatically, it wouldn’t change that fact that the cheap renminbi is a critical part of the country’s basic strategy for strong, export-led growth; or that Hu and his fellow leaders see the success of that strategy as a lynchpin of their own political legitimacy.  And while it won’t be mentioned this week, China’s long-term goal in this area is to claim for the renminbi part of the U.S. dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, which would come at our expense and help insulate the renimbi from future pressures to revalue. 

Obama may get a more receptive hearing when he presses Hu to engage with the United States –– and the rest of the world –– on climate change. Both men know very well that China is now the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.  That’s mainly because China has the world’s most ambitious program for building new electricity-generating plants; and since its only significant domestic energy source is coal, that’s what those plants run on.  Hu also knows that the world will address this threat sooner or later –– and when they do, China cannot afford to sit on its hands.  Obama’s challenge is the same one he faces with many Americans –– come up with a strategy that will raise the price of fossil fuels without imposing serious costs on the economy.  Here at home, the answer to that riddle is a carbon-based tax with the revenues recycled for tax cuts in other areas.  For China, Obama’s approach will have to be more subtle –– for example, intimations about a future agreement to promote joint ventures by U.S. and Chinese companies to develop and sell new alternative fuels and climate-friendly technologies. 

These issues also give Obama the opportunity to drive home his case for new public investments at home –– in education and training, for example –– to expand America’s modest comparative advantage in fielding a workforce that can adapt easily to new technologies and business methods. This week’s meetings also could provide a platform to highlight his tax incentives for businesses, so they can make the investments required to better compete with Japanese and European companies in the Chinese market.  And any meaningful U.S.-Sino discussions on climate change will dovetail nicely with the administration’s calls to expand R&D in this area, and so establish a more commanding position for the United States –– with or without China –– in global markets for green fuels and technologies.

What Role for Regulation in the American Economy

Today in the Wall Street Journal, President Obama lays out a vision for a 21st Century Regulatory System. He concludes that:

Despite a lot of heated rhetoric, our efforts over the past two years to modernize our regulations have led to smarter—and in some cases tougher—rules to protect our health, safety and environment. Yet according to current estimates of their economic impact, the benefits of these regulations exceed their costs by billions of dollars.

This is the lesson of our history: Our economy is not a zero-sum game. Regulations do have costs; often, as a country, we have to make tough decisions about whether those costs are necessary. But what is clear is that we can strike the right balance. We can make our economy stronger and more competitive, while meeting our fundamental responsibilities to one another.

It is important to understand that not only is regulation not always bad, sometimes it can lead to innovation. Over the summer, Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote about Harvard Professor Michael Porter's research on just that:

It's been 20 years since Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter provided scholarly support for the notion that, rather than hamper economic growth and competitiveness, well-crafted regulation could actually promote it. Porter's first observation was that some of the world's most prosperous and economically vibrant countries were also those with some of the most stringent business regulations, such as Germany and Japan. His studies of specific industries also turned up numerous examples of new products and more efficient ways of doing business that came about only because companies and industries were forced to comply with rules.

Porter's musings, introduced in an article in Scientific American, have since spawned a cottage industry of researchers intent on proving or disproving his hypothesis. Its most controversial aspect was to suggest that profit-maximizing companies were ignoring opportunities to produce profitable new products or adopt more-efficient production techniques. Such a notion not only runs counter to the most basic principles of economics and efficient markets, but it also offends the sensibility of corporate managers, who find it preposterous that such opportunities could be revealed only when the EPA or an OSHA inspector knocks on their company's door.

But subsequent research confirmed what some of us have long since discovered -- namely that corporate executives can be stuck in their ways, averse to risk and unwilling to sacrifice short-term profitability for long-term gain. And as a result of these market "imperfections," sometimes a new regulation comes along that spurs innovation by forcing companies to look at things in new ways. That doesn't mean that regulation is costless, but it does suggest that, on an economy-wide basis, those costs can be offset by subsequent investment and innovation.

As the President's op-ed describes, the role of regulation in our economy is not as simple as many describe. For more on his strategy, check out OMB Director Jack Lew's blog.

Why It Doesn’t Matter Much that Obama’s Jobs Record is Better than Bush’s

 

The great partisan squabble of 2011 over the economy begins this week with the new Congress.  Even if some of the rhetoric seems fresh, the core issues likely to become the stuff of real political fights – the terms of entitlement spending, the shape of the tax code, and the value of public investment -- are all familiar from battles during the previous two administrations.  There is one important difference, however, which will startle both sides.  When we probe the economics and politics, it appears that the real issue for most Americans isn’t jobs and unemployment, but incomes and wealth. 

The first clue lies in public data which have been almost universally ignored:  George W. Bush’s record on jobs was much worse than Barack Obama’s.  Both men took office during recessions which had taken shape under their predecessors, but with quite different effects.  So far, we have 21 months of jobs data under Obama, from February 2009 to November 2010:  Over that period, as the administration took numerous steps to support the economy, American businesses shed a net of 1,975,000 jobs.  George W. Bush’s approach was much simpler, relying almost entirely on large tax cuts.  Yet, even though the 2001 downturn was barely a blip compared to what Obama would face eight years later, Bush saw 2,852,000 private-sector jobs disappear in his first 21 months.  The job losses in Bush’s first two years, then, were nearly 1 million larger than during Obama’s first two years.  Set aside the first six months of each president’s term, before their policies could take effect, and the comparison grows even starker.  In those subsequent 15-month periods, American business under Bush shed 1,772,000 jobs, compared to job gains of 715,000 under Obama’s program. That doesn’t include the most recent developments, including a report today from ADP Employer Services estimating that private employment jumped by 297,000 in December.  By any economic measure, then, the Obama approach has been much more successful with regard to jobs than the Bush program which congressional Republicans now want to repeat.  

But the Bush program was much more successful politically, judging by the 2002 and 2010 midterm elections.  To be sure, the Bush White House managed to change the subject from its dismal jobs record to terrorism and Saddam Hussein, which helped a lot.  But the huge Democratic losses last November, despite Obama’s much better record on jobs, tell us that the main issue for most voters – at least those with jobs -- probably wasn’t unemployment at all, but rather their overall economic condition.  In this regard, Bush was as lucky as a Rockefeller:  He inherited an economy which under Clinton had produced large income and wealth gains for most Americans, giving them a critical cushion to muddle through the 2001 recession without having to cut back much.  Obama, on the other hand, had the misfortune of inheriting a much weaker economy from Bush, one which had left most Americans treading water even before the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2007-2009 eroded their assets.   

Let’s retrace the real conditions.  Throughout the Bush expansion, most Americans experienced no income gains, although their wealth appeared to increase.  Here, the stock market isn’t very important.  The Federal Reserve reports that the top 20 percent of Americans control 93 percent of the value of all financial assets, including pension and retirement accounts.  With 80 percent of the country holding only 7 percent of the nation’s financial assets, the falling stock markets of 2000-2001 and 2007-2009 had little direct effect on most people economic condition.  But one asset is widely held by Americans: Nearly 70 percent of the country owns their own homes.  Bush’s legacy to Obama, then, included not only a half decade of stagnating incomes, but also wealth losses for most people amounting to between 25 and 30 percent of the value of their homes.  Layer a deep recession on top of all that, and voters grow very cranky.

The truth is, most people are prepared to live with large job losses that affect others, so long as their own economic conditions remain decent.  But wipe out a good slice of their assets, so that most of them have to cut back, and whoever is in office will pay a big political price.

Where does Washington go from here?  The GOP wants to replay the Bush program, which is no more likely today to lead to sustained income progress and wealth gains than it was in the last decade.  This time around, they also want to layer on deep cuts in public spending, an approach likely to cut the legs off of the fragile expansion which just now is beginning to take hold.

The administration’s alternative looks a lot like Bill Clinton’s program, which did help promote broad income gains.  In his State of the Union address and budget proposal, President Obama will likely call for targeted, new public investments in infrastructure, R&D and education, additional steps to expand foreign markets starting with the free trade agreement with Korea, and measures to bring down the deficit very gradually by restraining defense, Medicare and overall discretionary spending.   This agenda may not usher in another historic boom, but it would provide a more solid foundation for long-term income progress.

It’s also time to help Americans rebuild their assets through new public steps to finally stabilize housing values.  The best way to do that is to provide direct loan assistance to those facing home foreclosures, since high foreclosures are the most powerful force still driving down housing prices in most places.  Otherwise, the voters may prove to be quite cranky again in 2012, endangering second terms for scores of congressional Republicans and perhaps even President Obama.

Employment increased by 297,000, exceeding the highest projection in a Bloomberg News survey, after a revised 92,000 rise in November, according to figures from ADP Employer Services. The median estimate in the Bloomberg survey called for a 100,000 gain last month.

 

The (Lack of) Economics Behind Conservative Arguments about Spending

According to John Boehner, government spending is killing jobs and harming the economy. His idea is to cut domestic discretionary spending by 20 percent. Unfortunately, Boehner seems to have badly misplaced a lesson from an introductory economics course. Let's look at  the economics behind this popular conservative argument.

The economics behind the conservative complaint about spending are straightforward – in good economic times, government investment that leads to borrowing can "crowd out" private investment by raising interest rates, thereby diverting economic activity away from the private sector. This can be a legitimate concern in boom times, which is part of the reason having smaller deficits in good times is generally a good idea; a sizeable government deficit can lead to higher interest rates, which hurt the economy.

These, however, are nothing close to good economic times, and government is not driving out private sector investment and therefore not hurting job creation. How do we know this? There is virtually no inflation – economists are more worried about deflation right now – and a huge shortage of demand. Interest rates are basically the lowest they can possibly be, and the Federal Reserve keeps trying to drive them down. (That’s why the Federal Reserve has gone to quantitative easing; it can’t lower rates any further.)

The point of the stimulus, in fact, was that government needed to function as the spender of last resort to avoid a deflationary spiral.  In a package of tax cuts and spending, government injected demand into an economy that was sorely lacking it in order to spur the economy and create jobs. The idea behind stimulus is that government injects demand, which is then multiplied throughout the economy. Since the economy still sorely lacks demand, further cutting government would be an economic disaster of epic proportions. Here’s the kicker: the countercyclical economic underpinnings are the same on the spending and tax sides – so conservatives talking about the need to cut taxes in a recession are actually espousing the same Keynesian economics that I am. 

That the economics don’t work out for John Boehner right now points to another fact – that his arguments are actually about a philosophical belief in the appropriate size of government. Fair enough. But then let’s have that debate, over which government functions are appropriate and which ones are not. As John Boehner will soon find out (when he has a fight that sounds eerily similar to the one Bill Clinton cleaned Newt Gingrich’s clock on in 1995-1996), more than 80 percent of domestic discretionary programs are not ones Americans will actually consider "discretionary."

The Pitfalls of Economic Nostalgia

The United States faces economic problems as daunting as any seen since the 1930s. GDP growth and job creation remain slow in the early stages of the current recovery, when both should be strong.  Moreover, the pressures of globalization, along with technological advances, have reduced the capacity of American businesses to create new jobs even when demand is strong.  These changes have boosted productivity, but most people’s wages and incomes remain stalled.  And in the most dynamic sectors of our economy, those technological advances increasingly demand skills beyond those of most working Americans.  These developments also have produced rapidly widening gaps in incomes and wealth, so that 20 percent of Americans now own 93 percent of the nation’s financial assets.  And the one asset that most families can claim, their homes, has lost an average of 30 percent of its value in the last three years.

Yet, Washington continues to respond to these challenges through an economics of nostalgia.  The economic agenda of most conservatives today consists mainly of tax cuts for those at the top who earn, save and invest the most, resting on an unflagging faith that markets are self-correcting and invariably produce the best possible outcome.   After all, this approach seemed to work in the 1980s -- even if its reprise under George W. Bush led to nearly a decade of historically anemic job creation and stagnating incomes, and culminated in a disastrous financial meltdown and long deep recession of 2007-2009.   The progressive response amounts mainly to a series of stimulative spending and tax measures bolstered by virtually unlimited and free loans for large financial institutions to stimulate their own lending.   And while similar approaches worked in the 1960s and 1990s, the current iteration has produced the weakest recovery in decades. 

The progressives are closer to the mark than the conservatives, because when the private sector underperforms as badly as ours has over the last 18 months, it needs stimulus of the sort currently promoted by the President and likely to pass the Senate this week.   But in an economy hampered by serious structural problems, stimulus alone cannot ignite strong and self-sustaining gains in growth, jobs and incomes.  To accomplish that, both sides need to put aside their traditional responses and consider new approaches that can directly address the structural problems holding back real prosperity.  Ironically, the most significant initiative to do so is the one program that the Administration gets the least credit for – the health care reforms or at last those parts which over time should slow the rate of increase in medical and insurance costs, and thereby help provide a foundation for faster job creation and wage gains.

These nostalgic economic nostrums seem to blind most of Washington to the necessity for a new economic strategy.  For example, it should be evident to all but the most ideologically-blinkered free marketers that the housing market has been dysfunctional for nearly a decade.  Moreover, the sustained decline in housing values has produced a “negative wealth effect” which continue to dampen consumer demand when the various stimulus measures run out.  Conservatives argue for letting those markets work their will, which would amount to another two years of slow demand and declining assets for most Americans.  A better strategy begins by acknowledging that declining housing values are a real problem, now driven by high levels of home foreclosures.  We can try to fix that with a new loan program to help families facing foreclosure keep their homes.  And if that strengthens consumer demand, it should also trigger significant increases in business investment – and together, both should generate real job gains.

The problem of slow job creation isn’t limited to our current circumstances – in the expansion of 2002-2007, American businesses created jobs at less than half the rate, relative to GDP growth, seen in the expansions of the 1980s and 1990s.  Much of this problem comes from the intense competitive pressures unleashed by globalization, which limit the ability of businesses to pass along higher costs by raising their prices, and therefore forces them to cut costs when, for example, their energy, health care or pension bills go up.  A reasonable response to this problem would be measures to lower the cost to businesses of creating new jobs.  For the short term, for example, we can give U.S. multinationals 18 months to bring back their foreign profits at a lower tax rate, but only if they already expand their U.S. workforces by 5 percent to 10 percent.  That would produce an estimated 750,000 to 1.3 million additional jobs.  For the longer term, we should consider cutting the payroll tax for employers on a permanent basis and using a carbon fee to restore the revenues for Social Security.  

Similarly, neither stimulus nor the market alone can affect the growing mismatch between the IT skills required to excel at most well-paying jobs today and the training of most American workers over age 30 or 35 years.  For $300 million to $400 million a year – a fraction of the smallest bank bailout of 2008 or 2009 – Washington could provide grants to community colleges to keep their computer labs open and staffed in the evenings and on weekends so any adult could walk in and receive free computer training.  It’s also time to join the rest of the advanced world in recognizing that higher education has become as much a public good as elementary and secondary education.  Our idea-based economy now requires that government also ensure genuine low-cost access for both undergraduate and graduate training for anyone attending public colleges and universities, tied perhaps to a requirement for a year or two of public service.

This leaves us a major structural problem that at least Washington acknowledges – the prospect of damaging long-term deficits once the economy recovers, tied to fast-rising entitlement spending for retiring boomers.  The economics of nostalgia will be of little use here as well, but a view of a more effective strategy will require a separate discussion. 

Paul Ryan Wants to Know What He Gets for Not Letting America Default

From The Hill's blog:

"The debt ceiling, obviously, is going to have to be increased if we're not going to default, so the question is, what do we get in exchange for that, and what kind of fiscal controls?" said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the incoming chairman of the House budget panel, last week on Bloomberg Television.

Ryan's question - what do I get in exchange for not letting the United States of America default? - has only one answer: a $174,000 paycheck for being a member of the United States Congress. This is going to be an interesting battle over the next few months, but Ryan's current position of demanding something that fits his ideology in exchange for not ruining America's credit could easily be considered unpatriotic.

Taxes and the Art of the Possible

Barack Obama exhibited this week what Machiavelli called the essential quality of a successful statesman, “virtu,” or the capacity to advance a society’s vital interests while respecting the constraints of conditions beyond his control.   The vital interest at stake here is a decent economic expansion that improves the circumstances of the vast majority of Americans, and the critical condition beyond the President’s control was the Republicans’ ability to block any tax increase for a very small minority of high-income households.  While this week’s tax deal isn’t nearly enough to drive a robust recovery, it should be good economic news for most Americans. 

Yes, the President agreed to two more years of the Bush tax cuts for very well-to-do people, covering their overall incomes, dividends and capital gains, and sheltering all but the very richest estates from inheritance taxes for two years.  But those were concessions to conditions beyond his control, since without them, there would have no action at all. Moreover, in return the President won the GOP leaders’ acquiescence to some significant help for nearly everyone else.  Beyond two more years of lower tax rates for average Americans, he secured expanded tax credits for parents putting their children through college, a one-year payroll tax reduction for working people, an expanded Earned income Tax Credit for working poor families, and an additional year of unemployment benefits for millions of out-of-work Americans.  

To be sure, that won’t be enough to drive a strong expansion.  That still requires difficult measures to correct the distortions that brought on the original financial crisis and still continue to dampen the expansion.  A strong revival of consumer spending, of the sort that powers most early expansions, still depends on steps to stabilize housing prices.  And while this week’s deal includes another dose of tax breaks for business investment, a surge in business spending will have to wait for consumers to begin spending freely again and for lenders to clear their books of billions of dollars in real estate-related investments that continue to deteriorate.  Nevertheless, the deal passes the basic test of sound economic policy by moving the economy in the right direction, and should help nudge the jobless rate down a bit.  

The temporary nature of these measures also provides intriguing opportunities for Democrats.  The payroll tax reduction would expire one year from now, just as the 2012 campaigns get going.  Ultimately, neither party would let that happen, but the President could use its prospect to drive progressive social security reforms.  For example, the 2 percent cut in the payroll tax rate for employees could be phased out very gradually, and the lost revenues could be offset by raising the cap on the wages subject to the tax.  The 1983 social security reforms set the cap to cover 90 percent of all wages, rising each year at the same rate as average wages.  But since the wages of those at the top have grown much faster than the average, today the cap covers only 85 percent of wages.  Push it back to 90 percent, as the Bowles-Simpson Commission has proposed, and we could phase out the “temporary” tax rate reduction over a decade’s time and take a big step towards guaranteeing the system’s long-term solvency.

Moreover, the tax cuts for high-income Americans could be more vulnerable politically two years from than they are today.  It’s safe to say that the deficit will be a hot-button issue in 2012, and with the Bush tax cuts now set to expire in January 2013, the election-year deficit debate will include heated arguments over who should have to pay higher taxes.  According to current polls, at least, the public’s answer is those high-income folks.  

While the loudest complaints about the deal have come from progressive Democrats, the real question is why the Republicans agreed to it.  For all of the GOP’s talk about jobs and deficits, the deal exposes their real bottom line: Preserve at almost any cost lower taxes on the incomes of the top 2 percent of Americans and on the estates of the top 0.5 percent.  The deal equally highlights the President’s priorities – tax relief for the middle class, and help for the unemployed and the poor.  And if the economy finally begins to gather steam by 2012, the contrast embedded in this week’s deal might well boost the President’s prospects.

The Economic Agenda the President Set Yesterday

While certain other parts of the press conference he held yesterday received more attention, the President also built on the speech he gave in North Carolina on Monday, when he described an economic direction for the country. His agenda his one designed to that ensure America's success in the more competitive, global economic of the 21st century:

Here’s going to be the long-term issue.  We’ve had two years of emergency -- emergency economic action on the banking industry, the auto industry, on unemployment insurance, on a whole range of issues -- on state budgets.  The situation has now stabilized, although for those folks who are out of work, it’s still an emergency.  So we’ve still got to focus short term on job growth.

But we’ve got to have a larger debate about how is this -- how is this country going to win the economic competition of the 21st century?  How are we going to make sure that we’ve got the best-trained workers in the world?  There was just a study that came out today showing how we’ve slipped even further when it comes to math education and science education.

So what are we doing to revamp our schools to make sure our kids can compete?  What are we doing in terms of research and development to make sure that innovation is still taking place here in the United States of America?  What are we doing about our infrastructure so that we have the best airports and the best roads and the best bridges?  And how are we going to pay for all that at a time when we’ve got both short-term deficit problems, medium-term deficit problems, and long-term deficit problems?

Now, that’s going to be a big debate.  And it’s going to involve us sorting out what government functions are adding to our competitiveness and increasing opportunity and making sure that we’re growing the economy, and which aspects of the government aren’t helping.

And then we’ve got to figure out how do we pay for that.  And that’s going to mean looking at the tax code and saying, what’s fair, what’s efficient.  And I don’t think anybody thinks the tax code right now is fair or efficient.  But we’ve got to make sure that we don’t just paper over those problems by borrowing from China or Saudi Arabia.  And so that’s going to be a major conversation.

And in that context, I don’t see how the Republicans win that argument.  I don’t know how they’re going to be able to argue that extending permanently these high-end tax cuts is going to be good for our economy when, to offset them, we’d end up having to cut vital services for our kids, for our veterans, for our seniors.

But I’m happy to listen to their arguments.  And I think the American people will benefit from that debate. And that’s going to be starting next year.

...

So my job is to make sure that we have a North Star out there.  What is helping the American people live out their lives?  What is giving them more opportunity?  What is growing the economy?  What is making us more competitive?  

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