Friday, November 21, 2014

New Politico op-ed: "What happened to Warren the watchdog?"

Jason Delisle and I have an op-ed in Politico's magazine that expands on some of the themes we developed in our National Affairs article back in September. This time we contrast Elizabeth Warren’s former role as government watchdog—in which she pointed out that TARP imposed costly market risk on taxpayers—with her current role as evangelist for federal student loans, in which she ignores the cost of market risk. 


Here's a sample:
...[B]efore joining Congress, Elizabeth Warren was a tenacious government watchdog. She charged that the Troubled Asset Relief Program, created in the wake of the 2008 recession, was exposing taxpayers to risky investments and thereby imposing costs that the feds were low-balling. She wrote letters, published reports, testified before Congress and demanded answers from tight-lipped administration officials. It was an admirable performance.

But then she became a politician, herself. In advocating for enhancing the federal student loan program, the now-senator from Massachusetts has taken the other side of her own argument, completely disregarding the cost of market risk. And she’s not alone in her inconsistency. Government accounting has become a political tool with politicians selectively hiding or exposing costs, depending on whether they support the program in question.
Read the whole thing there. I also referenced the op-ed in a recent blog post for National Review.

A couple of days after our op-ed was posted, Jared Bernstein wrote a response piece titled, "Don't pick on Elizabeth Warren." At first he seems to mount a defense of her inconsistency by saying that she was merely following the law, which requires that TARP receive a different accounting treatment than student loans. But then he concedes that this defense really isn't valid, since Warren has been enthusiastic about her advocacy in both cases. His remaining points are standard critiques of fair-value accounting that we addressed in our National Affairs article.

There is room for some agreement, however. Bernstein writes: "Yes, we fight about some weird stuff in D.C." I'll second that one.

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