I listened very carefully to Senator Collins as she detailed her excuses for letting Brett Kavanaugh become a Supreme Court Justice. Two aspects of her speech were particularly absurd and kind of appalling. Her claims that Kavanaugh is a moderate akin to Justice Stevens were beyond absurd. The most appalling aspect of her speech was how she dismissed the claims that Kavanaugh sexually abused women in high school and/or college:

Some of the allegations levied against Judge Kavanaugh illustrate why the presumption of innocence is so important. I am thinking in particular not at the allegations raised by professor Ford, but of the allegations that when he was a teenager Judge Kavanaugh drugged multiple girls and used their weakened state to facility gang rape. This outlandish allegation was put forth without any credible supporting evidence and simply parroted public statements of others. That’s such an allegation can find its way into the Supreme Court confirmation process is a stark reminder about why the presumption of innocence is so ingrained in our a American consciousness. Mr. President, I listened carefully to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee. I found her testimony to be sincere, painful, and compelling. I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life.

She believes Dr. Ford but then she went on and on like a defense attorney why she did not believe her when she clearly said it was Kavanaugh. But the real stunner was when she said this:

I do not believe that the claims such as these need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, fairness would dictate that the claims at least should meet a threshold of more likely than not as our standard. The facts presented do not mean that Professor Ford was not sexually assaulted that night or at some other time, but they do lead more to conclude that the allegations fail to meet the more likely than not standard.

I guess “the facts presented” is the key aspect as we know the FBI was not allowed to pursue corroborating evidence, which is why this episode is clearly absurd. But does Senator Collins truly grasp this more likely than not concept? I’m an economist not a lawyer but I have worked with tax attorneys and accountants on the transfer pricing aspects of tax provisions under FIN 48:

Under the Interpretation, absent the existence of a widely understood administrative practice and precedent of the taxing authority, an enterprise cannot recognize a tax benefit in its financial statements unless it concludes that it is more likely than not that the benefit will be sustained on audit by the taxing authority, based solely on the technical merits of the associated tax position. In this evaluation, an enterprise must assume that the position (1) will be examined by a taxing authority that has full knowledge of all relevant information and (2) will be resolved in the court of last resort.

Let’s key in on “full knowledge of all relevant information”. I have seen multinationals trying to convince financial auditors not to impose tax reserves based on some suspect report that key intercompany prices are arm’s length and where material information was not disclosed. In my experience, the financial auditors would refuse to give FIN 48 clearance until this information was disclosed and properly evaluated. It is well known that the latest FBI inquiry literally ran away from material information that may have corroborated Dr. Ford’s testimony. So when Senator Collins raises this More Likely Than Not standard – she should know better given the fact relevant information was not properly explored. Nicole Belle makes a strong case that the Republicans even knew ahead of time that Dr. Ford’s allegations are true:

Don’t Kid Yourself. The GOP KNOWS Kavanaugh Tried To Rape Someone … The FBI notifies the White House of the letter to see if they want follow-up. The White House declines further investigation. But now they know. And now they pass it on to GOP operatives. Early August. So now, Kavanaugh, the FBI, the White House AND GOP operatives all know. BEFORE the hearing even begins. So now the PR campaign goes into overdrive.

Read the entire thing as it explains a lot of the Republican fake anger at Senator Feinstein, which was all a gigantic smoke screen to disguise the fact that the Republican operatives were doing all they could to demean Dr. Ford, pump up Kavanaugh, and evade any real investigation. Senator Collins little More Likely Than Not sort of puts this in the domain of civil litigation rather than criminal charges where the standard is:

preponderance of the evidence – n. the greater weight of the evidence required in a civil (non-criminal) lawsuit for the trier of fact (jury or judge without a jury) to decide in favor of one side or the other. This preponderance is based on the more convincing evidence and its probable truth or accuracy, and not on the amount of evidence. Thus, one clearly knowledgeable witness may provide a preponderance of evidence over a dozen witnesses with hazy testimony, or a signed agreement with definite terms may outweigh opinions or speculation about what the parties intended.

Suppose Dr. Ford chooses to file a civil lawsuit against Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. What then? We would have actual discovery if this lawsuit is allowed. Then again I bet Kavanaugh would hire some slime ball lawyers to squash this lawsuit even if they had to take it to the Supreme Court where Justice Kavanaugh could file the fifth vote in favor of his own motion.

Many thanks to Peter Dorman for highlighting Citizens United As Bad Corporate Law. I guess we had to endure this comment, which is a really weak rebuttal:

Corporate shareholders are most definitely owners; they alone have the authority to sell their shares or the company’s assets. Their rights are based not on contract law but statutory rules of franchise. They are guaranteed rights of assembly abd representation, and they cannot legally surrender those rights even if they elect Directors who vote to do so.

My first thought to this attempted rebuttal was the complaints of condominium owners in San Francisco. They may own the rights to what is effectively an apartment but they have to deal with management as they really do not own the land. And even the land owner does not have that much control in a city where regulations control land use. My second thought involved the minority shareholders of Yukos Oil during Yeltsin’s Russia, which I noted in this related post:

AB noted yesterday that some of Sinclair Broadcasting’s shareholders were upset the decision of management to aid the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign with free air time for another smear of John Kerry. Their stock, which was around $10 a share in early August, is trading now for about $7.30 a share.

Now I get that the corporate governance rules in the U.S. are not as pathetic as they were during Yeltsin’s Russia but the idea that an individual shareholder has any real control of how a corporation is run is quite naïve. Peter asked this commenter if he had read the paper. Had he done so, he might have noticed footnote 34 on page 19, which included a seminal paper by Ronald Coase entitled “the Nature of the Firm”. This paper initiated an entire literature on what this recent paper calls the “nexus of contracts theory”. If our commenter has not read this literature, he should.

I just now got around to reading some May 11 speech by Donald Trump who says he wants to reign in the high price of drugs. A laudable goal and Trump said some things that got applause. But ahem – he may no clue especially when he says things like this:

We’re very much eliminating the middlemen. The middlemen became very, very rich. Right? (Applause.) Whoever those middlemen were — and a lot of people never even figured it out — they’re rich. They won’t be so rich anymore.

Nancy L. Yu, Preston Atteby, and Peter B. Bach did some excellent research on where our drug money goes:

As a starting point, we relied on IQVIA’s 2016 estimate of the net revenue received by drug manufacturers … For 2016, IQVIA reported $323 billion in company-recognized net revenues.

Yea – this sector is characterized by huge profit margins so someone is getting rich. The large pharmaceutical manufacturers also have a knack for shifting income to tax havens. To his credit – Trump talked about generic competition and ending the lobbying efforts of those in this sector. But let’s turn to those middlemen:

The PBMs and wholesaler-distributors are extraordinarily concentrated, with the three largest companies dominating the market share within these segments…United Healthcare reports OptumRx’s revenues, to which we applied a 5 percent margin (comparable to CVS Caremark’s) to estimate its gross profits, bringing total profits for the “big three” to a little more than $17 billion. Assuming lower profitability margins for the remaining smaller players, we grossed up to an estimate of $22.6 billion in gross profits for the PBMs. The three largest pharmaceutical wholesalers, McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal …After aggregating the gross profits for these three dominant companies, we extrapolated the remaining 15 percent to come up with an estimate of $17.7 billion in gross profits for the overall segment.

They estimate that the gross margins for the PBMs and wholesaler/distributors were just over $40 billion. Net profits would be less as these companies bear at least a modest amount of operating expenses. While more competition might drive down these gross margins, the very high gross margins for the manufacturers would be a better starting point. Just saying.

Kevin DOW 36000 Hassett was sent out to the White House press to lie about real wage growth. Or maybe he just proved he seriously needs remedial math for another reason besides one that Brad DeLong notes:

Glassman and Hassett get the math of the Gordon equation for valuing the stock market simply wrong. It’s not the earnings yield that shows up in the numerator, it’s the dividend yield. The book should have been called Dow 22000.

I would put this in a slightly different way. We use the discounted cash flow model not some discounted profits model and anyone who knows anything about basic financial modeling realizes that cash flows equal profits minus the investment in new tangible assets required for growth. But Hassett did not appear to get this basic point back in 1999. Flash forward to today when he was echoing some disinformation written in this report. Credit goes to Jared Bernstein and Larry Mishel for a point by point take down of the intellectual garbage from the Council of Economic Advisers which included this gem:

The most commonly cited wage and compensation data come from the Employment Cost Index (ECI), and these data show, for example, that over the past two years, nominal wages (private sector workers) are up 5.4 percent while fringe benefits are up 5.1 percent. Thus, in these data, adding in benefits doesn’t change the wage growth story.

Hassett admitted inflation is up but argued real compensation growth is growing faster than real wages because of something to do with fringe benefits. Over the past 24 months, the consumer price index has increased by 4.7% so real fringe benefits are only marginally higher whereas real wages grew by a very modest 0.7%. So fringe benefits have actually fallen relative to wages but Hassett told the press that including fringe benefits makes compensation growth appear higher. OK – maybe Hassett was not intending to deceive the press but if he really does not get this simple point, I suspect a few first graders could explain this to him.

Via TalkingPointsMemo AP notes:

Private forecasters cautioned that the April-June pace is unsustainable because, they say, it stems from temporary factors, including a rush by exporters of soybeans and other products to get their shipments out before retaliatory tariffs took effect. They predicted the rest of the year is likely to see solid, but slower growth of around 3 percent. The transformation is also not as dramatic as Trump claims — and in many ways the 4.1 percent annualized growth during the second quarter is in line with an economic expansion that just entered its tenth year. During Barack Obama’s presidency, there were four quarters when annualized growth exceeded the level that Trump praised on Friday. And in 2015, full-year economic growth nearly reached the 3 percent level being targeted by the Trump administration this year when it hit 2.9 percent.

Is this “fake news” being peddled by those socialists at TPM? What do these private forecasters know anyway! Well AP does lead with what the White House wanted to emphasize:

President Donald Trump on Friday celebrated the release of new economic data, claiming the U.S. is now the “economic envy of the entire world.” Trump was responding to new growth numbers announced on Friday that show the U.S. economy surged in the April-June quarter to an annual growth rate of 4.1 percent — the fastest pace since 2014. “We’ve accomplished an economic turnaround of historic proportions,” Trump told reporters during hastily arranged remarks on the South Lawn of the White House, where he was joined by Vice President Mike Pence and flanked by members of his economic team. “Once again, we are the economic envy of the entire world,” Trump said, adding that “America is being respected again.”…Trump, who has repeatedly attacked the economic record of his predecessor’s administration, pledged during the 2016 campaign to double growth to 4 percent or better. And he has been tring to highlight economic gains ahead of the midterm elections. But Trump, ever the salesman, predicted even higher growth as he renegotiates the nation’s trade deals, saying, “We’re going to go a lot higher than these numbers.” And he insisted the economic numbers are “very sustainable” and not “a one-time shot.”

Now that’s telling it like Sean Hannity and Fox & Friends would do! OK – time to listen to an actual economist such as James Hamilton:

Growth in consumption, nonresidential fixed investment, and net exports helped produce the strong numbers. Higher oil prices stimulated a big boost in spending on mining exploration, shafts, and wells. That was one factor in higher investment spending; growing business confidence may have also played a role. Tax cuts likely contributed to the growth in both consumption and investment. Some of the export growth may have come in anticipation of coming tariffs. I count the contribution from exports as a soon-to-disappear plus, though it’s balanced by a big minus in inventory investment that’s also likely transient.

We’ll get back to the soybean boom which led to real exports growing by more than 9% per annum last quarter. While residential investment fell a wee bit, nonresidential fixed investment has been growing at a 9% per annum clip for the past two quarters. Is this due to temporary facts (see the Econobrowser comment section for more) or is it sustainable as Trump argued? We shall see but permit me to repeat what I said on this in the comment section:

Trump lies about everything. He correctly noted that real business fixed investment has been growing by 9% over the past two quarters but then we have not seen this for decades? Really? We had this rate of growth back over the 2011/2012 two year period. From 1995 to 2000, real business fixed investment grew by about 10% per year. We had double digit growth rates both during the 1976 to 1978 period and the 1964 to 1966 period. I guess it does not count if the President during these periods was a Democrat.

OK now that I got that out of my system, I want to turn to Trump’s argument that we can sustained high growth if we can get a large boost in net exports. Never mind the fact that the soybean boom will turn to a soybean bust now that China’s tariffs on our soybeans are in place. Of course there are other aspects to this stupid trade war but focusing on that may be missing the point that Menzie Chinn articulated last fall:

Josh Marshall provides a nice discussion of the difference between how NATO is funded versus how much each of its members spends on national defense, which begins with:

As we move toward the NATO Summit and the Putin-Trump summit, I thought it made sense to review some of the details behind the President’s demands that NATO member countries pay up and stop doing what he regards as freeloading on the US taxpayer dime. Most people have a general sense that Trump doesn’t seem to grasp how an alliance works, that it’s not meant to function as a protection racket. But the actual details are both sillier and more significant than it may seem on the surface.

While I applaud his discussion, something is amiss here:

The vastly greater amount is the combined military budgets of all the member countries combined, which was $921 billion in 2017. The great majority of that is made up of the US military budget. In 2017 the US military budget was $610 billion. The coming fiscal year puts it at $700 billion. (That big run-up is significant and we’ll return to it.) Some of that difference is driven by the fact that the US economy is far larger than any individual NATO member state. But the US also spends much more on a per capita basis. Staying with the 2017 numbers, the US spends 3.61% of GDP on defense. The next major NATO member is the UK down at 2.36% while most other major NATO powers are significantly under 2%. (Examples: France, 1.79%; Germany, 1.2% Canada, 1.02%)

Actually, U.S. national defense spending was over $744 billion in 2017, which came to 3.8% according to this source. Call me a pacifist but maybe we should all be spending less on the ability to wage war.

Dr. Joseph Francois and Laura M. Baughman are being criticized for writing:

This policy brief examines the potential net impacts on U.S. jobs across all industries of the proposed steel and aluminum tariffs applied to targeted steel and aluminum imports from all countries. It does not take into account any potential retaliation against U.S. exports; only of the tariffs themselves. We find that the tariffs would indeed have positive impacts on U.S. steel and aluminum producers, but negative impacts on producers who use steel and aluminum, both imported and domestically-produced. Those impacts, both positive and negative, would ripple through the economy. We find: The tariffs would increase U.S. iron and steel employment and non-ferrous metals (primarily aluminum) employment by 33,464 jobs, but cost 179,334 jobs throughout the rest of the economy, for a net loss of nearly 146,000 jobs ..

How did they arrive at this alarming conclusion?

We base our analysis on the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database. The GTAP database covers international trade and economy-wide inter-industry relationships and national income accounts, as well as tariffs, some nontariff barriers and other taxes. This includes value-chain related linkages across industries and borders. These data are included in a computer-based model of production and trade known as a “computable general equilibrium” (CGE) model. This is the same model used by the Commerce Department to arrive at the tariff rates it argues will yield increases in U.S. steel production sufficient to bring the industry to 80 percent capacity utilization… In addition to economy-wide impacts, we focused on the impacts of imposing the tariffs on the U.S. workforce. For the analysis conducted here, we treat wages as “sticky,” meaning changes in demand for labor (positive or negative) are first reflected in changes in employment rather than changes in wages. This is appropriate for an examination of the immediate impacts of the tariffs on workers.

In other words, they concede that these are short-term impacts and their model has Keynesian features. For some reason, this offends Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI):

This EPI report explains why the actual economic impact of the tariffs will be quite minor, and why Francois and Baughman’s 2018 study should be treated as an odd outlier in studies of tariffs, and not as a study to guide policy decisions. Our key findings are: The Francois and Baughman (2018) results are driven overwhelmingly by a nonstandard modeling assumption: that growth in the U.S. economy is constrained by aggregate demand. This is not how the vast majority of trade modeling analyses are done. Even with the assumption of demand-constrained growth, the Francois and Baughman (2018) results are totally implausible. There is no credible evidence that these tariffs could drag on growth in demand anywhere near enough to generate employment losses as large as the authors report…While Francois and Baughman (2018) look at the effects of raising tariffs on steel and aluminum, the textbook case for arguing that lowering tariffs will boost economic efficiency relies on the assumption that the economy operates at full employment, meaning that overall economic growth is constrained only by growth in the economy’s productive capacity and not by spending decisions made by households, businesses, and government. This means that economic growth is not constrained by too-slow growth in aggregate demand. This full employment assumption lies behind the vast majority of analyses of trade policy and is a necessary condition for many of the findings that lower tariffs boost economic efficiency. Such full employment modeling would imply extremely modest economic losses from the steel and aluminum tariffs. The standard rule-of-thumb for converting tariff increases into economic losses is: [0.5*(t/(1+t))^2*m*e]. Here, t is the percentage tariff, m is the share of imports in the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), and e is the elasticity of demand for imports with respect to price.

First of all it would have been nice had this EPI discussion given Paul Krugman credit of this “standard rule-of-thumb”. But since when has the EPI embraced the New Classical macroeconomics model? To be fair, I have made similar arguments that trade policy has no net aggregate demand effects. For example, my post on Navarro’s Nonsense on Net Exports dusted off the Mundell-Fleming IS-LM-BP model:

My concern was that Navarro was all Keynesian with no consideration of where output was relative to potential GDP or the impacts on potential GDP. Navarro proposed using some sort of trade protection to raise net exports by $500 billion per year. That might have a big aggregate demand impact under the assumptions of fixed exchange rates and fixed interest rates, which of course is the most basic Keynesian model that Navarro both mocks and uses. One can wonder whether the output gap now is really that large. Of course, I have suggested that perhaps the output gap may indeed be as much as 5 percent but other economists suggest it is smaller. Scott is noting, however, the Trump wants to increase defense spending and massively cut taxes which push aggregate demand so high that the Federal Reserve would have to raise interest rates. We should also note how various policy positions work in a standard Mundell-Fleming model.

One of the implications of this model is that any expenditure-switching policy such as reducing imports will so appreciate the currency that export demand falls as much imports rise. Of course the EPI has often dismissed this conclusion on the grounds that we do not live in an idealized world of freely floating exchange rates. Then again – even Keynesian economists would argue that a well designed monetary policy could offset any negative aggregate demand effects – providing we do not hit that liquidity trap again. So yea – I have argued for a full employment modeling in the past. But what worries me is that Trump’s follies may match or rival the macroeconomic mess we had during the early years of the reign of St. Reagan. To suggest that in such an environment that we should ignore aggregate demand effects is something I would have never expected from the EPI.

In my Take Back ICE, I wrote:

I would hope the leaders of ICE would speak up and strongly object to what the Demagogue in Chief has done with their agency but to date they seem to be intimated from doing what is right.

Some good news:

The political backlash against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has turned so intense that leaders of the agency’s criminal investigative division sent a letter last week to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen urging an organizational split…Though ICE is primarily known for immigration enforcement, the agency has two distinct divisions: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), a branch that carries out immigration arrests and deportations, and HSI, the transnational investigative branch with a broad focus on counterterrorism, narcotics enforcement, human trafficking and other crimes. The letter signed by 19 special agents in charge urges Nielsen to split HSI from ICE, because anger at ERO immigration practices is harming the entire agency’s reputation and undermining other law enforcement agencies’ willingness to cooperate, the agents told Nielsen.

The letter can be found here. My mayor may be interested in this proposed split:

We should abolish ICE. We should create something better, something different. But in the way it’s developed, it has become a punitive, negative tool for division and it’s no longer acceptable.

Now if we transform ICE into HIS – what is to become of ERO? I’m sure Trump and Session will still want some agents to do their sick bidding. If so, I think we need a new name for this group. Truth in advertising could call this group ICAA. One side point – we are hearing a lot about how this abuse occurred even before Trump become President. Let’s be clear – abuse of immigrant rights is wrong. I’d hope former President Obama addresses this.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established 15 years ago:

ICE was granted a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and public safety in answer to the tragic events on 9/11. Leveraging those authorities, ICE has become a powerful and sophisticated federal law enforcement agency.

My link was for a 2013 discussion of its laudable achievements during its first ten years. As a resident of New York City, I appreciated ICE. On this muggy day, several protesters are calling for something dear to my heart – Keep Families Together:

Hundreds of marches took place across the United States on Saturday as thousands of people demanded the Trump administration reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. The protests, marching under the banner “Families Belong Together,” are hoping to push the Trump administration to reunite thousands of immigrant children separated from their families after crossing into the United States.

Let’s be clear – the Demagogue in Chief high jacked ICE to push his poisonous agenda with over 2000 children separated from their immigrant parents. Rather than blaming Trump, some of the left has called for abolishing ICE. What to play into the Demagogue’s hands!

“The Democrats are making a strong push to abolish ICE, one of the smartest, toughest and most spirited law enforcement groups of men and women that I have ever seen. I have watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13 & clean out the toughest of situations. They are great!” Trump tweeted. In a follow-up tweet, Trump urged the men and women of ICE not to worry about the ongoing calls to abolish the department. “You are doing a fantastic job of keeping us safe by eradicating the worst criminal elements. So brave! The radical left Dems want you out. Next it will be all police. Zero chance, It will never happen!” he wrote.

I know this Demagogue routinely lies but ICE was doing a fantastic job a few years ago. But even ICE has limited resources which this Demagogue has diverted from their true purpose. As such Trump is not only abusing the rights of these families, he is also making us less safe. I would hope the leaders of ICE would speak up and strongly object to what the Demagogue in Chief has done with their agency but to date they seem to be intimated from doing what is right. I would hope that Congress would hold hearings into this abuse of ICE and diversion of scarce resources away from securing our safety but these hearings are not going to happen as long as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are in charge. But for God’s sake – could we on the left stop losing our minds over the rightful anger at the Demagogue in Chief so we can put forth a coherent message that taking back ICE not only ends the abuse of these immigrant families but gets this agency back to securing us as opposing as to serving the sick agenda of the Demagogue in Chief?

Greg offers us a nice speech by Saint Reagan. While Ronald Reagan preached free trade, Jeffrey Frankel notes that his actual record was rather protectionist. The discussion is an excellent account of how Republicans have been protectionist since 1854. But the really weird thing in Reagan’s discussion was how he claimed the U.S. has been a free trade nation since 1776. Of course Congress passed the Tariff Act of 1789:

One of the major early actions of Congress was the passage of the Tariff Act of 1789, which was designed to: raise revenues for the new government by placing a tariff on the importation of foreign goods (averaging more than 8 percent); encourage domestic production in such industries as glass and pottery by taxing the importation of those products from foreign sources.

Someone at Harvard’s history department should visit Mankiw’s office.