Center for Business & Public Policy
Collaborative blog exploring the relationship between market forces and public policy.

Here is the third in a series of blogs that I started on May 18.  The first was called “Why YOU may LIKE Government ‘Theft’”.  In it, I listed four possible justifications for government to act like Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor.  The point is to think about whether the top personal marginal tax rate really should be higher or lower than currently, as currently debated these days in the newspapers.

However, perhaps we should also remember what is wrong with government using high marginal tax rates to take from the rich in order to help the poor.  The problem is that a higher personal marginal tax rate distorts individual behavior, particularly labor supply and savings behavior, by discouraging work effort and investment.  Since those are good for the economy, high marginal tax rates are bad for the economy!  In fact, economic theory suggests that the “deadweight loss” from taxation may increase roughly with the square of the tax rate.  In other words, doubling a tax rate (e.g. from 20% to 40%) would quadruple the excess burden of taxes – the extent to which the burden on taxpayers exceeds the revenue collected.

The point is just that we face tradeoffs.  Yes, we have four possible reasons that we as a society may want higher tax rates on the rich in order to provide a social safety net, but we also have significant costs of doing so.  Probably somewhere in the middle might help trade off those costs against the benefits, but it’s really a matter of personal choice when you vote: how much do you value a safety net for those less fortunate that yourself?  And how much do you value a more efficient tax system and economy?

In the first blog on May 18, I listed all four justifications, any one of which may or may not ring true to you.  If one or more justification is unconvincing, then perhaps a different justification is more appealing.  In that blog, I put off the last three justifications and mostly just discussed the first one, namely, the arguments of “moral philosophy” for extra help to the poor.   As a matter of ethics, you might think it morally just or fair to help the poor starving masses.  That blog describes a range of philosophies, all the way from “no help to poor” (Nozick) in a spectrum that ends with “all emphasis on the poor” (Rawls).

In the second blog on July 13, I discussed the second justification.  Aside from that moral theorizing, suppose the poor are not deemed special at all: every individual receives the exact same weight, so we want to maximize the un-weighted sum of all individuals’ “utility”, as suggested by Jeremy Bentham, the “founding figure of modern utilitarianism.”  His philosophy is “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”.   Also suppose utility is not proportional to income, but is instead a curved function, with “declining marginal utility”.  If so, then a dollar from a rich person is relatively unimportant to that rich person, while a dollar to a poor person is very important to that poor person.  In that case, equal weights on everybody would still mean that total welfare could increase by taking from the rich to help the poor.

The point of THIS blog is a third justification, quite different in the sense that it does NOT require making anybody worse off (the rich) in order to make someone else better off (the poor).  It is a case where we might all have nearly the same income and same preferences, and yet we might all be better off with a tax system that has higher marginal tax rates on those with more income, and transfers to those with little or no income.  How?  Suppose we’re all roughly equally well off in the long run, or in terms of expectations, but that we all face a random element in our annual income.  Some fraction of us will have a small business that experiences a bad year once in a while, or become unemployed once in a while, or have a bad health event that requires us to stop work once in a while.  To protect ourselves against those kinds of bad outcomes, we might like to buy insurance, but private insurance companies might not be able to offer such insurance because of two important market failures:

1. Because of “adverse selection”, the insurance company might get only the bad risks to sign up, those who are inherently more likely to become unemployed or to have a bad year.
2. Because of “moral hazard”, insurance buyers might change their behavior and become unemployed on purpose, or work less and earn less.

With those kinds of market failure, the private market might fail altogether, and nobody is able to buy such insurance.  Yet, having such insurance can make us all better off, by protecting us from actual risk!

Potentially, if done properly, the government can help fix this market failure.  Unemployment insurance is one such attempt.  But the point here is just that a progressive income tax can also act implicitly and partially as just that kind of insurance:

In each “good” year, you are made to pay a “premium” in the form of higher marginal tax rates and tax burden.  Then, anytime you have a “bad” year such as losing your job or facing a difficult market for the product you sell, you get to receive from this implicit insurance plan by facing lower tax rates or even getting payments from the government (unemployment compensation, income tax credits, or even welfare payments).

I don’t mean that the entire U.S. tax system works that way; I only mean that it has some element of that kind of plan, and it might help make some people happier knowing they will be helped when times are tough.  But you can decide the importance of that argument for yourself.

Next week, the final of my four possible justifications for progressive taxation.

I find myself bemused by the sheer number of commentators that have labeled vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan a “radical” because of his views on the federal budget.  His core view – that we ought to keep federal spending as a share of GDP at a level approximately equal to where it has been for the entire lifetimes of most Americans – strikes me as far less radical than the current policy status quo.

Let’s start with some basic facts.  In the post-war period in the U.S., federal spending has averaged just under 20 percent of GDP.  (You can confirm this for yourself by going to the White House OMB site and downloading Table 1.2).  There have clearly been some ups and downs over this period for a variety of reasons, but it has never exceeded a quarter of GDP except for 2009 – the depths of the Great Recession – when outlays reached 25.2% of GDP.

In other words, for 60 years – through military conflicts great and small, through booms and busts, through the creation and demise of countless government programs, and through tectonic shifts in the global economic landscape, the U.S. has found it possible to keep government at about 20% of GDP.  And throughout this period, the economic engine of the U.S. remained the envy of the world, even now in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Absent substantial changes to our public policies, however, U.S. government spending as a share of GDP is projected to rise at an unprecedented rate.  According to the CBO’s “extended alternative fiscal scenario,” which they describe roughly as a continuation of current policies, spending as a share of GDP is projected rise to 35.7% of GDP in just the next 25 years.  This seems to me to be prima facie evidence that our future fiscal problems are being driven by rising spending, rather than a lack of revenue.

Given this, what sounds more radical?  Suggesting that we make cut the growth rate of spending to keep the ratio of government-to-GDP near historical levels, as Paul Ryan has suggested?  Or allowing government to grow from 20% to over 35% of GDP?

Google’s definition of radical is “affecting the fundamental nature of something.”  A failure to change policy course would affect the fundamental nature of the U.S. economy.  Now that is radical.

If we want to avoid this, then we need to re-think the role of government.  Most of the future projected growth of government is due to a rising health care costs and an aging population.  One cannot slow rising health care costs and population aging simply by cutting spending, as any serious student of the budget – of which I consider Paul Ryan to be one – already knows.  Nor is it obvious we really want to stop all those trends – at least some of the rise in health spending brings new health benefits, and most of us are quite happy to live longer.

What we can do is recognize that our programs need to change with the times.  Remaining life expectancy today, conditional on reaching age 62, is about 50% longer than it was in the 1960s.  Yet we continue to encourage people to exit the labor force early.  Even worse, we have created a mentality where most Americans seem to believe that they have a God-given right to have their retirement income and health care expenses paid for by taxpayers after they reach age 62 or 65.  At a minimum, we should recognize that if people are living both longer and healthier lives than they were in decades past, we ought to make them wait longer to start receiving benefits.

There are good reasons to have Social Security and Medicare.  But we need to recognize that the fiscal burden they are placing on taxpayers is going to grow rapidly in the years to come, and that the best way forward is to reform them to make them sustainable for future generations.  Paying for these rapid cost increases through an inefficient tax system that depresses investment, discourages entrepreneurship, penalizes work, and retards economic growth is the real “radical” solution – and the one that should work hard to avoid.

Despite being in a Department of Finance, my own background and research is in economics and public policy (hence the “Center for Business and Public Policy” in our department).  I don’t claim expertise in finance, per se.   On the other hand, it seems that both sides of the JP Morgan debate are using discussion of the Volcker Rule and their other financial expertise to obscure the basic logic of government bank regulation.  It is a basic logic of incentives, which does not require expertise in finance!

JP Morgan wants to make money; we can hardly blame them for that.  In economics generally, we let companies try to make money, as they have the expertise in their own line of business to determine the risk-reward tradeoff.  If they lose money, then they lose money.  They might even be able to buy various kinds of insurance – that’s between the company and their insurer.  A person or company with insurance might have incentive to undertake riskier activities, since any gains are retained, while losses go to the insurer.  But the insurance company might enter the deal willingly, to charge premiums, especially if it can require the company or person to limit some of their riskier activities.  Your auto insurance has co-insurance and deductibles, to make you pay at least part of a loss and to restore some of your incentive for precaution.  

But when a bank becomes “too big to fail”, the U.S. government is thrown into the role of insurer, without being able to collect premiums, co-insurance, or deductibles.  It is not a “deal” between the bank and their insurer, because the government has no choice.  Because of financial contagion, a single major bank failure could bring down the whole system and cause horrific recession.

Given that the bank’s biggest losses must be covered by their insurer (the U.S. government), the bank has more incentive to undertake even riskier activities: they get any profits, and they don’t suffer the worst losses.   Any private insurer would require the bank to limit their riskiest activities, in order to be willing to sell that insurance.  But the government is the insurer by default, with no private “deal” allowing the government to require limits on the riskiest activities in order to be willing to offer that insurance.

To be sure, the bank still must be careful about some risks, as many different kinds of losses would reduce their profits without requiring government bailout.  The recent JP Morgan case did not create danger of bankruptcy or bailout, because their $2 billion loss on that one operation only offset part of their positive profits!  But any bank that is “too big to fail” has less incentive to avoid the really big losses that could cause bankruptcy, because that would require the government to bail them out.

The government could pass laws and regulations to limit the banks’ riskiest activities, and that is the purpose of the much discussed Volcker Rule.  I will leave the discussion of the details to the experts in finance.  For example, the Volcker Rule may or may not be the best way to regulate banks.  The effects depend a lot on the rule’s design, implementation, and enforcement!  Maybe some other rule or incentive-management would be better.  I will leave those details to the experts.  Instead, the point here is just the simple logic that the government is not a private insurer who would require limitations on risky activity to be willing to sell insurance.  The government must provide insurance, so they must have some kind of regulation to limit banks’ risky activities: higher capitalization requirement, Volcker rule, or other regulations.   

I did in fact talk to some of the finance department’s experts, like Jeff Brown and George Pennacchi.  George notes that “the incentive to take big risks declines as a bank finances itself with more shareholders’ equity (capital), and in JPMorgan’s defense they are one of the most highly capitalized banks, which helped them survive the crisis.”  He adds that “If banks carry government deposit insurance, whether explicit or implicit due to Too-Big-to-Fail, then the government should limit their activities to protect taxpayers from losses.”  Moreover, “it is noteworthy that, prior to the establishment of deposit insurance in 1933, banks had much greater capital (financing via shareholders’ equity) and made much less risky loans. … Indeed, there are several recent “narrow bank” proposals to greatly limit the activities of banks that issue insured deposits.”  He has a review of the topic on his website (forthcoming in the Annual Review of Financial Economics).

The bottom line is that in a private deal between a bank and its insurance company, the bank would have to agree to limit risky activity in exchange for being able to buy this insurance.  With government as insurer, they get the insurance regardless.  So just look at their incentives!  The banks have incentive to make money, and so they have incentive to take more risks since they can keep any profits and not cover the biggest losses.  AND they have incentive to lobby Congress to avoid government regulations.  We switch from a private market “deal” to the world of politics!  If they can get Congress to limit regulation of banks, they can make riskier investments, make more money, and not have to cover the biggest losses.

So just think about those incentives, next time you hear a bank executive use the jargon of financial expertise to make the case against “unfair interference by government regulators into the private market”.

Many advocates of small government have many ideas for how to move activities out of the public sector and into the private sector.  Social Security can be privatized, using fully-funded private retirement investment accounts.  Education can be privatized, with vouchers that can be used by parents to choose the best private school or charter school.  All could save money for the federal budget, by taking advantage of the more efficient operations of the private sector.

In this blog, I’ll describe my new idea for privatization.  Why not privatize the military!  Many rich Republicans want more military spending, and I can imagine that they might well be willing to pay for it.   Why not let them?  Now, they are probably not willing to simply donate money to the federal government, with no recognition, nor any private return on their investment.  But, we could provide the same kind of naming rights as many private operations: FedEx Field is the home of the Washington Redskins, because FedEx paid for the naming rights and they get PR advantages of doing so.  The name of the business school at the University of Texas is the “McCombs School of business”, because Red McCombs paid for the naming rights, and he gets PR advantages of doing so.  The J. Paul Getty Museum is the name of a major art museum in Los Angeles, presumably because somebody in the Getty family or foundation paid for the naming rights and gets PR advantages of doing so.

So, the idea is to write the name of any major donor on any piece of military equipment for which that donor covers at least half the cost.  Pay for half a tank, and it will be the “Your Name Here” Army Battle Tank, with the name engraved on the equipment.  You can even visit it, at certain times of year under certain conditions, and have your picture taken with it.  If you are willing to pay a little more, half the cost of a cruise missile, you can have your name on that instead.

Now I’m not suggesting that the donor ought to be allowed to decide when to push the button.  Nor even make any decisions at all.  The payment is just to help out the U.S. Federal Budget deficit, with recognition for doing so.  I’d bet that a good number of millionaires would really be willing to pay, for that kind of prestige.  It might even be greater recognition if the missile were actually used!  The well-heeled U.S. businessman might even get more U.S. business activity, after the newspaper announces that the “Your Name Here” cruise missile was launched at Tehran, killing 137 innocent civilians, but successfully deterring the Iranian government from pursuing a nuclear weapon that might kill even more.

Politicians like to say they want the U.S. to produce at least as much energy as it consumes – “energy independence”.  And they certainly want to reassure consumers that they are doing something about the high price of gasoline.  But the two goals are inconsistent.  You can’t have both.  Indeed, the current high price of oil is exactly what is now REDUCING our dependence on foreign oil!

We all know the price of gasoline has been increasing lately, now well over $4 per gallon in some locations.  Five-dollar gas is predicted by Summer.  In addition, the New York Times just reported that our dependence on foreign oil is falling.  “In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005.”  The article points out that this strong new trend is based BOTH on the increase of U.S. production of oil AND on the decreased U.S. consumption of it.  And both of those factors are based on the recent increases in oil and gasoline prices.  Those higher prices are enough to induce producers to revisit old oil wells and to use new more-expensive technology to extract more oil from those same wells.  The higher prices also are enough to induce consumers to conserve.  Purchases of large cars and SUVs are down.  Many people are driving less, even in their existing cars.  A different article on the same day’s New York Times, on the same front page, also reports that “many young consumers today just do not care that much about cars.”

Decreased dependence on foreign oil does sound like good news.   Actually, it is good for a number of reasons. (1)  It is good for business in oil-producing states, helping raise them out of the current economic slow-growth period.  (2) It is good for national energy security, not to have to depend on unstable governments around the rest of the world.  (3)  It reduces the overall U.S. trade deficit, of which the net import of oil was a big component.  And (4) the reduced consumption of gasoline is good for the environment. 

On the other hand, the increased U.S. production of oil is not good for the environment, as discussed in the same newspaper article just mentioned.   As an aside, I would prefer to do more to decrease U.S. consumption of oil – not only from increased fuel efficiency but also by the use of alternative non-fossil fuels – and perhaps less from increased U.S. production of oil from dirty sources such as shale or tar sands.  But that’s not the point for the moment.

The point for the moment is just that maybe the higher price of gasoline is a GOOD thing!  We can’t take even small steps toward decreasing U.S. dependence on foreign oil UNLESS oil and gas prices rise.  Any politician who tells you otherwise is pandering for your vote.  It is the high price of oil that is both increasing U.S. production and decreasing U.S. Consumption.

A recent NY Times has an article about SOL Austin, an acronym for Solutions Oriented Living.  This housing development is interesting for at least two reasons.  First, the designs and materials are intended to be “sustainable” (whatever that means), but also “net zero” (which I gather means that it will produce all the energy consumed).  The houses have solar panels and geothermal wells.

Second, however, it is interesting because it is in east Austin, the low-income part of town.  In fact, a 1928 “city plan” decided that east Austin would be “designated African-American”.  The 1962 construction of Interstate I-35 further divided east from west.  The relatively flat east side of Austin had all the industrial blight, pollution, and low-income housing.  In fact, it was quite cheap!  The hilly west side of Austin had the fancy new upscale houses with views of the Hill Country.

One would think that the intellectual-academic, left-leaning, high-income households of west Austin might be more interested in sustainable housing that could go “off the grid.”  Why then are these developers building super-energy-efficient houses in east Austin?

Well, for one thing, the 2010 census showed a 40% increase in east Austin’s white population and a drop in minority population.  In correlated fashion, land prices in east Austin have risen considerably.  In fact, a different article in the NY Times tells about a study based on the 2010 census finding that all residential segregation in U.S. cities has fallen significantly.  Cities are more racially integrated than at any time since 1910.  It finds that all-white enclaves “are effectively extinct”.  Black urban ghettos are shrinking. “An influx of immigrants and the gentrification of black neighborhoods contributed to the change, the study said, but suburbanization by blacks was even more instrumental.”

Since I’m visiting here in Austin, Texas, it is easy enough to go see the new development.  As you can see in the snapshot below, the houses have a modern box-like style.  They range from 1,000 to 1,800 square feet.  That explains the article’s reference to “matchbox” houses.    But the roofs are sloped enough to hold photovoltaic arrays and to channel rainwater into barrels.  

The developers said they wanted to “examine sustainability on a more holistic level, that would not just look at green buildings, but in our interest in affordability, in the economic and social components of sustainability as well.”  As stated in the NY Times article, the developers “hammered out a plan with … the nonprofit Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation, to sell 16 of the 40 homes to the organization.  The group, in turn, sold eight of the houses at a subsidized rate to low-income buyers (who typically were able to buy a house valued at more than $200,000 for half price).”  Each of those 16 subsidized homes has a photovoltaic array on the roof, though not necessarily large enough to produce all of the needed power for the house.

Of the “market-rate” houses, all sold at prices in the low $200,000’s.  Eleven have been sold, and thirteen have yet to be built.  Because of the financial and housing crisis, however, the “holistic” development ideas have not worked perfectly.  Homeowners got rebates from Austin Energy and tax credits from the federal government. So far, however, only four market-rate house owners paid the extra $24,000 for photovoltaic arrays substantial enough to fully power a house.  Only one is also heated and cooled by a geothermal well.  But they all have thermally efficient windows, foam insulation, and Energy Star appliances.

So far, only one couple paid to install the geothermal well and the extra energy monitoring system:  a systems engineer and a microbiologist.  So, “sustainability” in low-income neighborhoods might still require some gentrification.

Taxes are bad, on that we can agree.  So not paying taxes must be good, right? 

Wrong.  A reform to cut taxes for everybody might be a good idea (or not).  But having millions of individuals cheat to reduce their own taxes is never a good idea.  It is a tax cut without reason, without fairness, and without the incentive or cost advantages of a cut in tax rates.

Just to focus on that last point, note that some people have to go to a lot of trouble to re-arrange their affairs to be able to cheat on their taxes, and they have to take on extra risk to do so – the risk of getting caught.  So their net “advantage” from cheating is much less than their dollars of tax savings. That cost of tax cheating does not apply to the case where Congress and the President agree to cut taxes for everybody, because then all those dollars stay in the private sector instead of being wasted.

The IRS has just released new numbers on the “tax gap” in the United States, the amount of U.S. tax liability that goes unpaid.  From 2001 to 2006, as you can see in the table below, the tax gap increased from $290 billion to $385 billion.  Just to reverse the increase in unpaid tax would gain the much-discussed and much-needed $100 billion revenue per year, or $1 trillion over ten years.  The percent of tax voluntarily paid has fallen from 83.7% to 83.1%.  After expected small amounts are recovered by our meager enforcement efforts, the “overall net compliance rate” has fallen from 86.3% to 85.5%. 

The average taxpayer cheats on about 15% of their tax liability, but almost nobody is “average.”  Rather, the huge majority of Americans earn wages and salaries that are reported by their employers to the IRS, on which tax withholding is paid by the employer to the IRS.  Workers cannot cheat on that income, and so the huge majority of Americans pay all of their tax due.  The cheating is highly concentrated among other Americans, especially those who are self-employed and get paid in cash that is never even reported to the IRS.   In fact, the IRS estimates that noncompliance or misreporting is 1% of  wages and salaries, but a huge 56% of proprietor income!

This issue is covered nicely in the blog by Bruce Bartlett, who also points out that “The number of IRS employees fell to 84,711 in 2010 from 116,673 in 1992 despite an increase in the population of the United States of 53 million over that period.” Fewer auditors chase large numbers of tax cheaters, so of course compliance falls.  When I worked at the U.S. Treasury Department, in the Office of Tax Analysis, I used to hear about revenue/cost ratios of ten to one!  That is, one additional dollar spent on enforcement could generate an additional ten dollars of revenue.  And the problem has only gotten worse since then.

We don’t want a huge number of IRS enforcement agents to strike fear into the hearts of average law-abiding Americans who do pay their taxes on time.  But a lot of us might feel better about our country if a few more IRS agents struck some fear into the hearts of those who are supposed to pay their taxes and don’t!  And those cheaters don’t have to bear extra cost of getting caught, if they just paid taxes instead of cheating.

Here is an interesting article, in the Washington Post, entitled “Payroll tax cut raises worries about Social Security’s future funding“.  It points out that the recent payroll tax cuts are intended for short term stimulus, but they muck with the way that social security benefits are funded.  Instead of coming frm payroll taxes, that money now will haveto come from general revenue. 

As it points out: “For the first time in the program’s history, tens of billions of dollars from the government’s general pool of revenue are being funneled to the Social Security trust fund to make up for the revenue lost to the tax cut. Roughly $110 billion will be automatically shifted from the Treasury to the trust fund to cover this year’s cut, according to the Social Security Board of Trustees. An additional $19 billion, it is estimated, will be necessary to pay for the two-month extension.” 

As it goes on to say, “The payroll tax cut changes that. Instead being a protected program with its own stream of funding, Social Security, by taking money from general revenue, becomes more akin to other government initiatives such as Pentagon spending or clean-air regulation — programs that rely on income taxes and political jockeying for support.”

With crude oil prices hovering near $100 per barrel, the issue of energy independence is sure to be a frequent topic in the upcoming presidential election. Don Fullerton, a finance professor and energy policy expert at Illinois, spoke with News Bureau Business and Law editor Phil Ciciora about whether the goal of energy independence is a viable one or just another pipe dream.

Is energy independence a realistic goal for the U.S.?

It seems like it’s mostly senators from oil-rich states who want to talk about oil and energy independence, because they want subsidies for the oil industry. So it’s really only for political reasons that energy independence has been hyped as an important or worthwhile goal.

If we really are concerned about reducing our dependence on foreign oil, then the implication is to tax oil, not to subsidize it! A tax on oil would discourage its use, which would have three good effects. First, it would discourage imports. Second, it would reduce drilling in the U.S., and thus help keep more oil in the ground for future contingencies. Third, it would encourage the development of other energy technologies such as biofuel, solar power, wind power and better battery technology. Those other technologies are the only realistic route to true energy independence.

Plus, there’s absolutely no way we’re going to achieve energy independence through oil because we’ve basically used up most of our oil. For all practical purposes, we don’t have much more oil. That’s why we either have to rely on other countries or switch to new technologies.

An attempt to achieve energy independence would also be a bad move for energy security, because it just says, “Let’s drain America first.” If so, we’ll be in an even worse situation later. Whatever we still have in reserve should be left there for its option value. If we did have another serious war where we really needed oil that we couldn’t import, those reserves might be good to have.

Do the new sources of domestic energy in the Dakotas and the Gulf of Mexico hold much promise for solving our energy problems?

Sure, there are some new sources of energy in the U.S. – really, natural gas and shale oil – but however much we have won’t bring us any closer to energy independence. Even if we do discover a few new fields of crude oil, it’s not going to make much of a difference.

As the price of crude rises even higher, the oil companies can go back to old and existing fields and drill a little deeper. That extraction is expensive, but it’s worthwhile if the price of oil is back near $100 per barrel. It wasn’t worthwhile earlier because the extra drilling cost was more than the oil was worth. But now that the price of crude is high enough, they can make money if they drill deeper on these old wells.

What happens to energy prices if the European economy continues to sputter?

If Europe experienced, say, a 10- to 20-percent drop in gross national product, then you might actually notice a dip in the price of oil in the U.S. But economic growth in the U.S. would also slow. So just because the price of oil might fall a little bit doesn’t make their troubles good for us, since we would be affected, too. We certainly don’t want to hope for a recession in Europe to make oil cheaper. First of all, the price wouldn’t fall that much. Second, there would be a whole host of negative implications for the U.S.

What (if anything) will bring the price of oil down again?

The only ways to get a significant change in the price of oil would be through a major recession, a major technological breakthrough, or huge policy changes. If the whole world got together and agreed to a new, stringent version of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon emissions, that would have an impact. If the whole world were to reduce the burning of fossil fuels by 20 percent – that would also have an effect. But we don’t want another recession, nor will all nations agree to such a treaty.

Just a couple days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that “U.S. exports of gasoline, diesel and other oil-based fuels are soaring, putting the nation on track to be a net exporter of petroleum products in 2011 for the first time in 62 years.”  Taken literally, this fact is strictly “correct”, but it is misleading.  It is therefore very poor reporting.  The authors either don’t understand the words they use, or they are deliberately trying to mislead readers.

The reason it is misleading is because the article implies the U.S. is headed toward “energy independence”, and that implication is wrong.  It goes on to say:  “As recently as 2005, the U.S. imported nearly 900 million barrels more of petroleum products than it exported.  Since then the deficit has been steadily shrinking until finally disappearing last fall, and analysts say the country will not lose its ‘net exporter’ tag anytime soon.”  That statement and several expert quotes in the article clearly imply the U.S. is headed toward “energy independence”.   

Strictly speaking, the WSJ is correct that the U.S. exports more “petroleum products” than it imports, … but “petroleum products” do not include crude oil!!  “Petroleum products” include only refined products like gasoline, diesel fuel, or jet fuel.  The implication is only that the U.S. has a large refinery capacity!

The U.S. is a huge net importer of crude oil, and a huge net importer of all “crude oil and petroleum products” taken together, as you can see from the chart  below (provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration).   In other words, we import boatloads of crude oil, we refine it, and then we export slightly more refined petroleum products than we import of refined petroleum products.  Big deal.

If the WSJ reporters knew what they were talking about, or if they were not trying to mislead readers, then they should have just stated that the U.S. is a huge net importer of all “crude oil and petroleum products” taken together.  They didn’t.  That is why I conclude they do not understand the point, or that they are trying to misrepresent it. Neither conclusion is good for the Wall Street Journal.

They are simply wrong when they say:  “The reversal raises the prospect of the U.S. becoming a major provider of various types of energy to the rest of the world, a status that was once virtually unthinkable.”  Just look at the figure!