interviews
After the Polls Close
by John Fortier
October 19, 2020
This interview with John Fortier, Director of Bipartisan Policy Center’s Democracy Project, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Why do we have an Electoral College?
Our election system is really much more of a states’ issue than people realize. We vote differently in different states, and the Electoral College really is the mechanism by which we vote through the states.
Who makes up the Electoral College? Who are our electors?
Sometimes people think of the Electoral College as a point system — if you win a state, you get some amount of points — but, really, when you vote, you are electing a slate of electors.
Slates of electors — one Republican, one Democrat — are nominated or elected by the parties in each state. On election day, the public votes for one of those slates.
The vote on November 3rd typically results in an Electoral College majority. There is a second election in December amongst electors, but it is not widely discussed or covered, mostly, because it doesn’t matter. Electors are loyal to their parties and typically vote as expected. The new Congress then votes to validate the Electoral College votes on January 6th, and by January 20th we reach inauguration. Usually, there are not any great hiccups in the process.
Does that change if it is a close election?
Even in a close election, we don’t think too much about the Electoral College. However, there are a few things that have happened in the past that could happen again.
First, there can be “faithless electors” — electors who vote against the popular vote of their state. Electors, for the most part, have the ability to act freely, and some people worry that they could tip a very close election if a few electors were to change their votes at the last minute — they could move the total for a candidate from 270 to 268, for example. However, in the past, faithless votes tend to be protest votes that do not really amount to anything.
Recently, a number of states have passed strict laws that bind their electors to the popular vote of their state. Previously, laws asked that electors be bound and, in some cases, imposed small fines on faithless electors, but there were no severe constraints. In the 15 States that now have this power, electors will be replaced if they vote the wrong way.
I wasn't sure if that was going to pass constitutional muster, but The Supreme Court upheld it this summer. The Supreme Court actually, in their footnote, hinted at the idea that the only case where this would cause additional hiccups is in the scenario that a candidate unexpectedly drops out, dies, or, for one reason or another, is not on the ticket. Which, of course, is something that has been in the conversation over the last couple of weeks with the president having Covid.
Another thing that can happen is the bargaining amongst the electors. In the 1968 election, George Wallace, a third-party candidate, won states and won electoral votes. Amongst the Nixon and the Humphrey electors, there was some discussion about coming together to exclude the Wallace electors. They didn’t want the election thrown into the House of Representatives, which is what happens if the Electoral College is tied.
But these are sort of odd situations, and these aren't the issues that keep me up at night.
What would you consider to be the more pressing concerns with the Electoral College during this election cycle?
I think the more realistic scenario that we could see is something like what started to happen in 2000 or what happened in 1876. In both cases, because the state race was so tight, there was a real question as to which slate of electors, the Republican slate or the Democratic slate, should be appointed.
In Florida 2000, if Al Gore were to pull ahead in the recount, would a second slate of electors need to be appointed? Eventually the Supreme Court stepped in and halted the recount in Florida, and the Republican slate of electors was appointed. But, imagine a scenario where the dispute is not resolved.
There are cases where two slates of electors may be appointed, and there is no set way to resolve that conflict.
Eventually, the dispute will end up in Congress’ hands, but it is not clear in The Constitution how Congress is supposed to decide. After 1876, when multiple slates of electors were actually sent in, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act to try to address how to approach that sort of scenario, but, I would say, it still is ambiguous.
It is also important to note that though we do have popular elections in every state, popular elections are not guaranteed by The Constitution.
Early on in our democracy, many state legislatures would directly appoint state electors. If you had a Republican legislature, you would appoint a Republican slate of electors. While this faded out after the Civil War, an argument — a controversial argument — was made by the Florida legislature in 2000. The Republican legislature felt that Democratic attorney generals were unfairly favoring the recount for Gore, so they wanted to step in and send the slate of electors to Washington themselves.
If I wanted to think of disaster scenarios — this is the sort of case that would be the disaster scenario. This is where there is the least amount of clarity in the election mechanisms after November 3rd. This is where parties could really seriously disagree, and this is where we have no third arbitrator to decide between the two of them. The parties would have to work it out on their own.
Are there deadlines that are important to know in the electoral process?
The president’s term ends on January 20th at noon.
Despite conversations about postponing the election, it would be incredibly hard to do. The deadline is in The Constitution.
If the election is not resolved by the inauguration, if it is still with the House of Representatives, then perhaps we have to go to the line of succession. But January the 20th at noon is when a new president has to take office.
There are two other dates that might matter. They're both in law, not in The Constitution, so theoretically they could be moved. There is the meeting of the electors, which is on December 14th this year. There is also the “safe harbor” deadline which is 6 days before the meeting of the electors, which is set by law to try and aid in the counting by ensuring no interference from Congress if the counting is complete by the set deadline. This date was highlighted by The Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, and was one of the reasons they stopped the recount.
Recently, it seems there have been a lot of claims that the electoral process is undemocratic, and a push to move us towards a national popular vote. Do you think the Electoral College is still a democratic system?
The Electoral College has never been particularly popular in the modern era. Many people think that we should have a national popular vote — it is a more natural line of thought. And if we were to start from scratch now, maybe we would instill a national popular vote.
But is the Electoral College system undemocratic? I guess that I am not fully convinced of that.
We are a country of states. And though a few times there has been a difference between who wins the Electoral College and who wins the popular vote, it still is very unlikely to happen.
The proposal for a national vote, as it stands, is a halfway house, because it is really hard to amend The Constitution. States can appoint electors directly based on whatever criterion they want, and so the idea would be to appoint electors based on national popular, rather than the states' vote. But, there are some issues with that. What happens if the election is really close? You can’t really recount a national election, you can only recount the states. You would also have to make sure that all the states are uniform in their elections. And maybe that's a good thing, maybe people would like that. But maybe when we get down to the nitty-gritty and people will say, "Well, we really liked the way we vote in Alaska, it's good for us, or we like the way we vote in Oregon."
It is hard for a party to be on the losing end of this system twice within 16 years, and perhaps once more again, but I think there are reasons to be cautious about changing the system.
interviews
The Saving Glut of the Rich
by Ludwig Straub
September 22, 2020
This interview with Ludwig Straub, assistant professor at Harvard, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Ludwig | I started working on inequality and debt related issues during my Ph.D, and since then I have been fascinated by how the distribution of resources across households can have macroeconomic impacts. Inequality and debt are just two examples of how these distributional aspects matter to the economy.
frank | To begin, what is the general economic understanding of the role debt plays in financial crises?
Debt is an important contributor to, and sometimes the cause of, economic crises.
Obviously, it does not cause all economic crises, as we have seen with the COVID crisis, but we have fantastic evidence as to the role that debt plays -- like that from my coauthors Atif Mian and Amir Sufi as well as Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor -- who find that household debt run-ups for multiple years often culminate in a large, subsequent economic crisis.
We also see that debt can make financial crises, meaning the crises in which banks lose a lot of their equity, worse. Studies show that financial crises that occur after such household debt run-ups are much worse than other types of financial crises.
Why is a household holding debt dangerous to the economy?
Typically there's some kind of a saving glut – meaning there is a large amount of saving in the economy. This can be a global saving glut, or a domestic savings glut, like the savings glut of the rich that we write about.
Once that saving glut enters an economy, its financial system needs to digest it. In practice, this means the financial intermediaries, such as banks, who are holding the funds, will look for investment opportunities. They might increase lending to businesses and households. If there's not enough demand for those funds from businesses, the funds will flow to households and we will start to see households being offered lower and lower interest rates. We will see households get increased advertisements for using debt to finance all sorts of purchases, even those for every day goods such as furniture or appliances. That sort of thing becomes more and more prevalent the more desperate the financial system is to invest -- in other words, lend -- the funds originating from the saving glut.
One very natural thing that happens here is that people will be more likely to buy a house or a larger house, using mortgage debt. This demand raises house prices, and will ultimately start feeding on itself: if you have five, six, or seven years of steady house price growth, at some point, people irrationally believe that house prices will continue to grow forever. If that is your belief, then anyone’s best response is to go out and invest in housing, raising the price of housing even more. We call this a housing bubble. And all of it is financed by debt.
The problem is that at some point the bubble will burst, and households will see that they have accumulated a large amount of debt and that their investments are not doing so well anymore. As a result, they start cutting back on their spending. What's very important to understand here is that these are often middle-class people, people with high marginal propensities to consume. When they get worried about the depreciating value of their home, or about losing their job, they're going to respond with a dramatic cut in spending.
This is a key distinction between bubbles that happen in the housing market compared to bubbles that happen in the stock market. The majority of the stock market wealth is held by the top few percent of the wealth distribution. The wealthy typically have a low marginal propensity to consume. If they lose wealth in the stock market, they're not going to cut back their spending in a significant way.
That distinction explains why housing bubbles have much stronger effects on the real economy.
Is that a widely accepted view of debt and crises, specifically in the 2008 crisis?
There are two broad views on the 2008 crisis, and they each have their own set of supporters. Nearly everybody agrees that household debt and the housing bubble in the early 2000s played a role in the crisis and that we did have a crisis in the financial sector. The two camps just differ on how much weight they put on either factor.
Is the saving glut always tied to inequality?
A savings glut can happen in many different ways. I'll give you a few examples.
For the global savings glut of the early two-thousands, we need to look at what happened in 1997. After the East Asian financial crisis in 1997, central banks in East Asia feared they might run out of foreign reserves again, so they began and have continued to purchase massive amounts of U.S. treasuries. U.S. treasures are the go-to asset for central banks wanting to accumulate reserves outside of their country. Another well-studied source of a saving glut is an aging population. As people get older, there are more wealthy, older households compared to less wealthy, younger households. That is a phenomenon that is very pronounced in Italy and Japan, for example.
In our research, we focus on the saving glut that has emanated from rising inequality. The key idea is quite intuitive.
When you speak to the idea that more saving means more lending to households, what does that decision-making process look like?
That is something we don't have a definitive answer to yet. For instance, one of the big surprises that we found in our work is that when presented with that strong increase in saving, the financial system did not successfully channel those funds into businesses.
One of the most well-known relationships in macroeconomics is that saving is equal to investment. If there are more savings, typically the lending rate will go down, and businesses invest more. The thought is that we will have more investment overall and stronger growth; everybody will be better off no matter where the saving is coming from, whether it is from abroad or from the rich.
Quite frankly that surprised us. It goes against the standard logic macroeconomists grow up with.
More research is needed to understand whether the fact that the funds did not flow to businesses is because businesses didn't seem to want the investment, or if banks had preferences against lending to businesses and instead preferred to lend to households. I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm very interested in doing more work on it.
Are there policy solutions to look towards?
There are a number of solutions.
One possible solution is to have governments invest more. If businesses are not investing, why don't governments take advantage of low lending rates and invest, for instance, in infrastructure? Public investment has never been so low, and it has been falling over the past few decades. That could be one way to substitute for some of the missing private investment.
Another solution is redistribution, away from richer savers towards less rich spenders. And that is important for several reasons. One is that a heavily indebted population reduces demand. Whenever an economy generates less demand, central bankers cut their interest rates in order to stimulate the economy as much as they can. Currently, we are at zero percent interest rates, which means that one of the big steering wheels we used to navigate past crises is out the window. We are up against a constraint – we can’t go lower with interest rates than the zero lower bound. That is a major challenge that is coming about from too much borrowing in the bottom rungs of the wealth distribution.
How do you see the role of debt in the crisis we are in now?
The precise role remains to be seen, but there are already a few indicators as to what the role might be.
So far, household debt seems relatively stable, but since the extra unemployment insurance benefits in the Cares Act have not been extended, it might be the case that households need to begin to borrow more to make ends meet. That will have all of the macroeconomic implications related to debt that we spoke about earlier. So that is something to watch.
I think that the two types of debt that are going to be most affected are corporate debt and government debt.
For corporate debt, one key issue is going to be something called debt overhang. Consider a restaurant in New York City. After the pandemic, the restaurant's debt payments may be two or three times higher than before because the owners had to borrow in order to stay in business. This level of debt can make them less willing or able to invest in new locations.
That's the debt overhang problem, and that will put an additional drag on corporate investment in the coming years. That, I think, is another factor we need to watch.
For government debt, the risk that many economists think about is that there might be a loss in confidence in the dollar as the world’s reserve currency if we don't manage to get deficits under control. I don't think this is a risk that will materialize in the next 10 years. There's still ample room to go before that risk starts to become threatening, but at some point, if there is no sign of willingness to bring deficits under control, it may certainly become a threat. In that case, we would potentially see foreign central banks turning to other assets as opposed to U.S. treasuries, like Chinese or European bonds. But to emphasize, I think this is one is, luckily for us, more of a long term problem.