"How to Impress the Bond Markets"

Dean Baker says there's more than one way to reassure bond markets, and cutting benefits for retirees in need of the money is one of the worst options available:

How to impress the bond markets, by Dean Baker, Commentary, CIF: The deficit hawks have been pushing the line in recent months that we have to make cuts in social security, along with some revenue increases, in order to reassure the bond markets about the creditworthiness of the US government. According to this argument, by taking tough steps (i.e. cutting social security benefits) we will have shown the bond markets that we are prepared to do what is necessary to keep our budget deficits within manageable levels.

There is some reason to question the merits of this argument. First off, the deficit hawks don't have an especially good track record in the insight category. Not one person among the leading crusaders was able to see the $8tn housing bubble that wrecked the economy. ...

Furthermore, the fixation on social security is peculiar. The Congressional Budget Office shows the program can pay all future benefits through the year 2044 with no changes whatsoever. Even after that date the shortfalls are relatively minor. ...

Furthermore, cutting benefits for near-retirees (workers in their late 40s and 50s) seems cruel and unwarranted. These people paid for their benefits through decades of work. Also, this cohort has seen most of the wealth that they did manage to accumulate destroyed with the collapse of the housing bubble and the plunge in the stock market. The bulk of this cohort will therefore be relying on social security for the overwhelming majority of their retirement income.

For these reasons, the determination to cut social security has the feeling of the class bullies telling the rest of us that we have beat up the weakest kid in the class in order to be admitted to the club. That may be the way things work in Washington, but this doesn't mean it is right.

If the issue is assuaging the bond markets by convincing them that we are prepared to take tough choices to limit long-term deficits, let's put a few other items on the table. For item number 1: how about a financial speculation tax? Wouldn't the bond markets be impressed by seeing Congress crack down on the Wall Street hot shots whose recklessness helped fueled the housing bubble? That one would show real courage given the power of Goldman Sachs-Citigroup gang.

As a second item, Congress could go after the pharmaceutical industry. By 2020 we are projected to be spending almost $500bn a year on prescription drugs. We pay close to twice as much for our drugs as people in other wealthy countries and about 10 times as much as the drugs would cost if they could be sold in competitive market without government patent monopolies.

Suppose Congress decided to pay for the clinical testing of drugs directly and then allowed all new drugs to be sold as generics. This could save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Wouldn't the bond markets be impressed by seeing Congress stand up to the pharmaceutical industry?

As a third item, suppose Congress revisited plans for a public insurance option. The Congressional Budget Office projected that this would save over $100bn by 2020 and certainly much more in future decades. Wouldn't the bond markets be impressed if Congress stood up to the insurance industry?

These are three clear ways in which Congress can take big steps towards reducing long-term budget deficits by standing up to powerful interest groups. In each case Congress would be reducing the deficit in ways that would likely make most people better off, not worse off. If bringing the long-term deficit into line is the issue, all three of these measures should be at the top of everyone's list.

Remarkably, the leading budget hawks never discuss these measures when they push their deficit-cutting agenda. Somehow we are supposed to believe that cutting social security will do the trick with the markets, even though this will hurt tens of millions of people who actually need the money. ...[W]e should just view them as people who want to cut social security and are putting out some nonsense to rationalize beating up on retirees.

The good news is that Alan Simpson appears to have neutered the Deficit Commission:

It must have sounded like a good idea (although not to me): establish a bipartisan commission of Serious People to develop plans to bring the federal budget under control. But the commission is already dead — and zombies did it.

OK, the immediate problem is the statements of Alan Simpson, the commission’s co-chairman. And what got reporters’ attention was the combination of incredible insensitivity – the “lesser people”??? — and flat errors of fact.

But it’s actually much worse than that. On Social Security, Simpson is repeating a zombie lie — that is, one of those misstatements that keeps being debunked, but keeps coming back.

Specifically, Simpson has resurrected the old nonsense about how Social Security will be bankrupt as soon as payroll tax revenues fall short of benefit payments, never mind the quarter century of surpluses that came first.

We went through all this at length back in 2005, but let me do this yet again.

Social Security is a government program funded by a dedicated tax. There are two ways to look at this. First, you can simply view the program as part of the general federal budget, with the the dedicated tax bit just a formality. And there’s a lot to be said for that point of view; if you take it, benefits are a federal cost, payroll taxes a source of revenue, and they don’t really have anything to do with each other.

Alternatively, you can look at Social Security on its own. And as a practical matter, this has considerable significance too; as long as Social Security still has funds in its trust fund, it doesn’t need new legislation to keep paying promised benefits.

OK, so two views, both of some use. But here’s what you can’t do: you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that for the last 25 years, when Social Security ran surpluses, well, that didn’t mean anything, because it’s just part of the federal government — but when payroll taxes fall short of benefits, even though there’s lots of money in the trust fund, Social Security is broke.

And bear in mind what happens when payroll receipts fall short of benefits: NOTHING. No new action is required; the checks just keep going out.

So what does it mean that the co-chair of the commission is resurrecting this zombie lie? It means that at even the most basic level of discussion, either (a) he isn’t willing to deal in good faith or (b) the zombies have eaten his brain. And in either case, there’s no point going on with this farce.

Speaking of zombies, on Facebook, John Quiggin, author of the forthcoming Zombie Economics (i.e., dead ideas finding new life), says:

Would have been great to have a section on the revival of balanced budget ideology in the European crisis, but that's bookbiz.

It's not just Europe. But in any case, how the words "Deficit Commission" and "cuts to Social Security" became roughly equivalent is a bit of a mystery since the rising cost of health care not Social Security, is the primary problem. The focus on Social Security does speak to the ability of those with power and influence to affect the public debate on these issues, but the simple truth is that if we fix the health cost problem then almost all of the long-run deficit problem goes away. But as others have pointed out, the deficit hawks block any attempts in this direction with charges like "death panels," and that raises questions about the true agenda behind these efforts.