Averting America’s Bankruptcy

Laurence Kotlikoff proposes a New New Deal in Economist's Voice:

Averting America’s Bankruptcy with a New New Deal, by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Economist's Voice:  The United States is essentially bankrupt and requires critical and immediate fiscal surgery thanks to decades of fiscal profligacy and the impending retirement of the baby boom generation. According to the latest projections ..., the difference between the federal government’s present value of projected expenditures and the present value of projected receipts is $63.3 trillion. This fiscal gap is 8.2 percent of the present value of GDP, meaning that we need to devote that share of GDP every year for eternity to cover the shortfall.

Since federal personal and corporate income taxes represent 9.8 percent of GDP, one way to close the gap would be to immediately and permanently raise those taxes by roughly 84 percent (8.2 divided by 9.8). Advocating this hike is a political non starter. Enacting it could well be economically ruinous. Yet, doing nothing, and leaving this bill for our children and grandchildren to pay is neither feasible nor moral.

What should we do? ... Neither the Republican or Democratic politicians are offering sensible solutions; and indeed present policies are making matters worse. Given this, it is time for academic economists, who care more for policy substance than for partisan advantage, to suggest sensible, efficient, and equitable solutions.

So let me suggest solutions to our three most troubled fiscal institutions – our tax system, our Social Security system, and our government healthcare system. Each solution is radical, but simple. The three reforms, in conjunction with cutbacks in federal discretionary spending, would leave us with ... fiscal institutions that can reliably pay for what the government spends. ... Let’s start with the tax system.

Tax reform – moving to a federal retail sales tax plus a rebate

Not only does the current tax system raise too little revenue relative to the current level of expenditures; but it’s also woefully complex, expensive to use, highly inefficient, and, in my view, inter- and intragenerationally inequitable. ... The system is so complex that no one can claim to fully comprehend its provisions, incentives, or the degree to which it is redistributing resources across the current and future population. An army of well educated and highly talented lawyers, accountants, and auditors spends every hour of every working day coping with this miasma. Add to this all the taxpayer compliance costs and you’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars in annual wasted resources. This is not to mention the efficiency losses from the current system’s distorted incentives, which the GAO puts at 2 to 5 percent of GDP.

What’s worse, the tax system is geared in many ways to take from the poor and young and give to the rich and old. ... There are several candidates for wholesale tax simplification and reform, including a value added tax (VAT), a flat tax, and a federal retail sales tax. The most straightforward reform is the federal retail sales tax... In principle the VAT and flat taxes would also tax only consumption; but in practice, they will likely ... leave us taxing not consumption, but rather wages. Such a "reform" would be highly inequitable, both on intra- and intergenerational grounds. Consequently, I favor the federal retail sales tax ... to tax all consumption (including services, food, and imputed rent on owner-occupied housing and automobiles).

The specific plan is to replace the personal income tax, the corporate income tax, the payroll (FICA) tax, and the estate and gift tax with a federal retail sales tax plus a rebate. The rebate would be paid monthly to households, be based on the household’s demographic composition, and equal the sales taxes paid, on average, by households at the federal poverty line with the same demographics.

Most Democrats assume that a sales tax would be regressive. But my proposed reform, which is very similar to the FairTax, has three highly progressive elements. First, thanks to the rebate, poor households would pay no sales taxes in net terms. Second, the reform eliminates our highly regressive FICA tax. Third, the sales tax will effectively tax wealth as well as wages: When the rich spend their wealth and when workers spend their wages, they will both pay sales taxes. By broadening the effective tax base to include the corpus of wealth, not just the income earned on it (much of which is currently exempted or taxed at a low rate), one can lower the required sales tax rate and, thereby, reduce the tax burden on workers.

The single, flat-rate sales tax would pay for all federal expenditures. The tax would be highly transparent and efficient. It would save hundreds of billions of dollars in tax compliance costs. It would significantly reduce effective marginal taxes facing most Americans when they work and save. Finally, the federal retail sales tax would enhance generational equity by asking rich and middle class older Americans to pay taxes when they spend their wealth. The poor elderly, living on Social Security, would end up better off. They would receive the sales tax rebate even though the purchasing power of their Social Security benefits would remain unchanged thanks to Social Security’s automatic cost of living adjustment. ...

A 25 percent effective sales tax rate would raise federal revenues to 21 percent of GDP – the ratio of revenues to GDP that prevailed in 2000. This is 5 percentage points more of GDP than we are now collecting ... On the other hand, the sales tax rebate would cost about 4 percent of GDP. Consequently, the net reduction in the fiscal gap from the tax reform would be only about 12 percent, or one percent of GDP.

I’d close the remaining 88 percent of the gap with cuts in Social Security, healthcare, and discretionary spending. But cuts, by themselves, will not carry the day. We need to restructure Social Security and federal healthcare delivery to ensure that any cuts made today are not undone by spending increases tomorrow.

Fixing Social Security – The Personal Security System

My second proposed reform deals with Social Security. With 2528 rules in its Handbook, the system is a bureaucrat’s dream come true. It’s also significantly underfunded. ... Here’s what I would do. I’d shut down the retirement portion of the current Social Security system at the margin by paying in the future only those retirement benefits that were accrued as of the time of the reform. This means that current retirees would receive their full retirement benefits, but current workers would receive retirement benefits based only on covered wages earned prior to the reform....

The current system will be immediately replaced by a fully funded and modern system of compulsory saving, which I call the Personal Security System (PSS). PSS has individual accounts, but one with very different properties from the scheme proposed by President Bush... All workers would be required to contribute 7.15 percent of their wages up to what is now the Social Security covered earnings ceiling ... into an individual PSS account. Married or legally partnered couples would share contributions so that each spouse/partner would receive the same contribution to his or her account. The government would contribute to the accounts of the unemployed and disabled. In addition, the government would make matching contributions on a progressive basis to workers’ accounts, thereby helping the poor to save.

All PSS accounts would be private property. But they would be administered and invested by the Social Security Administration in a market-weighted global index fund of stocks, bonds, and real estate securities. Everyone would have the same portfolio and receive the same rate of return. The government would guarantee that, at retirement, the account balance would equal at least what the worker had contributed, adjusted for inflation... This would protect workers from the inevitable downside risks of investing in capital markets. ...

Although this plan has individual accounts and market investment, neither Wall Street nor the insurance industry would get their hands on workers’ money. There would be no loads, no commissions, and no fees. Nor would there be all the risks associated with individual investing. Like the current Social Security system, PSS would take advantage of economies of scale in operating saving systems and the government’s unique ability to pool risk across generations.

The switch from paying projected Social Security benefits to paying only accrued Social Security benefits would reduce the fiscal gap by roughly $15 trillion or roughly 24 percent. Together with the tax reform, I’ve now reduced the fiscal gap by 36 percent.

Cutting Back on Discretionary Spending

The federal government’s discretionary spending currently represents 7.8 percent of GDP. This is 1.5 percentage points higher than the year-2000 figure. I propose restoring the year-2000 discretionary spending rate. This would reduce the   fiscal gap by another 18 percent, leaving 46 percent to be cut via my proposed   healthcare reform.

Healthcare Reform: MSS

According to the Gokhale and Smetters, the combined unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Medicaid total roughly $120 trillion. The gargantuan size of these liabilities has everything to do with the projected growth in benefit levels. Limiting benefit growth to that of labor productivity would reduce the fiscal gap by roughly $36 trillion, or 57 percent, which would more than close the remaining fiscal gap.

But cutting future benefit growth in these programs appears to be impossible under the current fee-for-service structure. Our government has tried all manner of ways to reduce healthcare benefit growth in recent decades, and all have failed. What we need is a foolproof means by which the government can set an expenditure limit in a given year and stick to it. At the same time we need a system that delivers healthcare to everyone in society, not just the aged and indigent. As is well know, some 45 million Americans currently have no health insurance coverage. This is unacceptable in a civilized society.

Consequently, I propose moving to a universal healthcare system that limits benefit growth over time. This system will cost more money in the short run, but much less over time than our current system. My proposal, culled from earlier work by John Goodman and Peter Ferrara, would abolish the existing fee-for-service Medicare and Medicaid programs and enroll all Americans in a universal health insurance system called the Medical Security System (MSS).

In October of each year, the MSS would provide each American with an individual-specific voucher to be used to purchase health insurance for the following calendar year. The size of the voucher would depend on the recipients’ expected health expenditures over the calendar year. ...

Providing individual-specific vouchers based on full and accurate medical information obviously eliminates the adverse selection problem that has plagued private medical insurance provision ... Some readers are sure to worry about a possible invasion of privacy. Yet the government already knows about millions of Medicare and Medicaid participants’ health conditions because it’s paying their medical bills. This information has never, to my knowledge, been disclosed or abused.

The beauty of this plan is that all Americans would receive healthcare coverage and that the government could limit its total voucher expenditure to what the nation could afford. Unlike the current fee-for-service system, under which the government has no control of the bills it receives, MSS would explicitly limit the government’s liability. In setting its voucher budget through time, the government would target to spend, in present value, no more than the current system were benefit levels to grow only with labor productivity.

The MSS plan is also progressive. The poor, who are more prone to illness than the rich, would receive higher vouchers, on average, than the rich. And, because we’d be eliminating the current income tax system, all the tax breaks going to the rich in the form of non-taxed health insurance premium payments would vanish.

A Final Word

It’s high time we got our fiscal house in order. Economists have a key role in keeping our country from experiencing the fiscal and financial meltdown to which current policies are pointing. To do this, we need to unite as a profession around solutions to which our discipline points. The reforms presented here are neither entirely new nor wholly original. To me they represent solid economic engineering – straightforward solutions to clear cut problems. Yes, they are radical changes. But nothing short of radical changes will help us resolve our $63.3 trillion shortfall.

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Economists’ Voice January, 2006