Ben Bernanke writes: US has to help it states for economic recovery

Congress must act decisively to avoid repeating mistakes of the recovery from the Great Recession, writes former chairman of the Federal Reserve

The coronavirus pandemic has set loose a recession of shocking speed and severity. In the coming months, the actions taken by both the public and the private sectors will have economic and public health repercussions that will reverberate for years.

As a member of Gov. Phil Murphy’s Restart and Recovery Commission in New Jersey, I have worked to help put together an effective reopening strategy, one that not only will allow the state’s economy to move forward but also will address the glaring inequalities the pandemic has revealed.

The experience has been eye-opening. It’s become abundantly clear that the responsibility for responding to the pandemic cannot lie only with local and state governments. Congress must act decisively — and it must act in ways that don’t repeat mistakes of the recent past, during the Great Recession.

Our state governments serve a dual role as providers of critical services — health care, public safety, education and mass transit — as well as large employers. Many states, including New Jersey, are responsible for tens of thousands of jobs and the paychecks that go with them.

Since a raging outbreak in March, New Jersey has successfully flattened the curve of new Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations. But since the state had to virtually shut down in order to control the spread, that success has come with a staggering price tag: The state faces a revenue shortfall in the billions of dollars.

Many other states face ominous budgetary outlooks, too, implying the need for draconian reductions in essential services to state residents and large potential job cuts. Furloughs have already begun in New Jersey. Since February, state and local governments collectively have laid off close to 1.5 million workers.

We have been here before. I was the chairman of the Federal Reserve during the global financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession. As part of the recovery effort, Congress responded with a stimulus package of nearly $800 billion.

But that package was partly offset by cuts in spending and employment by state and local governments. Like today, with sharp declines in tax revenue as the economy slowed, states and localities were constrained by balanced-budget requirements to make matching cuts in employment and spending. This fiscal headwind contributed to the high unemployment of the Great Recession, which peaked at 10 percent in late 2009.

Together with a subsequent turn to austerity at the federal level, state and local budget cuts meaningfully slowed the recovery.

In the current recession, unemployment rates have been much higher than 10 percent, and even with recent job gains the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, without further action from Congress, the unemployment rate at the end of 2020 will most likely be close to 11 percent.

Those numbers are particularly dire for people of color. Black, Latinx and Native American communities not only face a far greater health risk from Covid-19; they also face higher rates of unemployment than white families.

States and localities are in desperate need of additional federal intervention before the bulk of the CARES Act funding expires this summer. Budget gaps like the one in New Jersey cannot be closed by austerity alone. Multiply New Jersey’s problems to reflect the experiences of 50 state governments and thousands of local governments and the result, without more help from Congress, could be a significantly worse and protracted recession.

The CARES Act allocated $150 billion to state and local governments. This new aid package must be significantly larger and provide not only assistance for state and local governments but also continued support for the unemployed, investments in public health and stimulus payments to encourage household and business spending and restore full employment.

I know that states such as New Jersey are grateful for the aid they have received so far — without it, their fiscal reality would be much more grim. But much of the aid already provided has come with tight restrictions, which means that it cannot be used to offset budgetary shortfalls resulting from the recession and pandemic-related shutdowns.

To continue to provide services that its citizens need and to avoid severe budget and employment cuts that will drag down the economy, states and localities need more federal help. Providing that help is in everyone’s interest.

(Ben S. Bernanke, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, is a distinguished fellow in residence at the Brookings Institution)