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My wife and I may not actually be affluent by Silicon Valley standards. Let’s just say we live comfortably and are able to donate generously to worthy causes.
Why am I telling you this? Because I sometimes feel like a welfare bum. I refer mainly to the Social Security payments we receive, though I could add Medicare benefits and perks like half-price transit fare. Between us we take in about $3,500 per month from Social Security, 85% of which is subject to federal income tax but exempt from California income tax.
“You paid into Social Security,” say well-meaning friends, “so you deserve to collect.”
Readers of this blog, economically astute as they are, will likely recognize the flaw in this argument. Social Security does not tuck your contributions away in any sort of “lock box.” They are not invested in productive enterprises that generate a real return. When total Social Security tax revenue (FICA on your pay stub) exceeds beneficiary payments, as was the case in all but eleven of the years since the System’s inception, the excess goes into a Trust Fund. Trust Fund assets are held in the form of special interest-bearing Treasury securities.
What’s wrong with this picture? Aren’t Treasury securities universally regarded as the safest form of investment, backed by the taxing power of the mighty federal government? No private fund manager or bank manager could be accused of imprudence when investing in Treasury securities. It’s another matter entirely when one branch of government lends money to another branch.
Consider this analogy: a father puts a gold coin in a drawer every year, to be used for his daughter’s college education. One day mother and daughter open the drawer and find a bunch of IOUs. No coins. Daddy has spent them on booze, assuaging his conscience by leaving IOUs which, thanks to his generosity, bear interest. Some “trust fund!”
The excess revenue from FICA taxes is transferred to the Treasury in exchange for new securities, and the Treasury uses it to pay current government expenses. It’s an exaggeration to compare general government spending to the father’s drunken splurge, but not a huge exaggeration. Some tax-funded projects like roads provide real benefits. But a great deal of spending is wasteful and a great deal inflicts horrible damage on society, mainly the endless foreign wars.
In short, the Social Security Trust Fund, like the shiftless father’s “trust fund,” is an accounting shell game, as are the other Federal Trust Funds, roughly 150 in number. In light of this shell game, should Trust Fund obligations be counted in the total national debt, now about $23 trillion? Or, seeing that they are simply sums that one government pocket owes to another, should they be omitted, leaving “debt in the hands of the public” at a mere $15 trillion? The answer: it depends.
It depends on your point of view. Viewing the government from a distance, it makes sense to net out intragovernmental debt and focus on debt in the hands of the public (banks, mutual funds, pension funds, local governments, individuals, foreigners, and the Federal Reserve). Up close one might take the point of view of Social Security beneficiaries who mentally separate themselves from the general population that they believe owes them their due. If we adopt this point of view, Trust Fund obligations should be counted; gross federal debt makes sense.
The Social Security Trust Fund has amassed a balance of some $2.8 trillion mainly because of the massive FICA tax increase of 1983 (thanks, Alan Greenspan, objectivist hero!). But in 2020 the annual surplus is projected to turn to a small deficit that will snowball over time. The entire Trust Fund will be exhausted by 2035, they say, at which time, according to current law, benefits will be cut by some 20%. It’s a sure bet that Congress won’t buck the AARP lobby and let that happen, but they will dither until the last minute before applying some sort of patch.
Prior to 2035, how will the deficits be financed? At first, they will stop re-investing Trust Fund interest income, then stop rolling over maturing securities, then start selling securities prior to maturity. The money will come from the Treasury which must get it from increased taxes, increased borrowing, or indirectly by money printing.
Back in 1970, I asked the late Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education and a man of principle if there ever was one, about collecting Social Security benefits, as he was about to attain the age of eligibility. He hadn’t decided whether to apply. We live in an imperfect world and we must transact with statist institutions to carry on our daily lives. We use the monopoly Post Office or teach at a state university or collect Social Security, even as we may oppose the existence of these institutions. Decisions about such transactions are seldom clear-cut. I don’t know what choice Mr. Read ultimately made, but I have chosen to continue collecting. I expect some day to see Social Security converted to a pure welfare program, at which time I will be shut out because I’m too well off.
Here’s my takeaway: let’s not be too quick to shoot down those who decry inequality of income and wealth. Let’s explain that people like Rockefeller, Gates, or Buffett earned their wealth fair and square while others get rich by getting their hands on the levers of government power. In between are those of us who are accidental beneficiaries of the welfare state. Our obligation is not to don a hair shirt but to understand and explain why these programs should not exist.
Warren C. Gibson
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What Arthur Burns Broke, Paul Volcker Fixed
Paul Volcker, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987, passed away this week at the age of 92. He is widely credited with ushering in a new era in Federal Reserve policy making, where much more attention is given to controlling inflation.
When President Carter appointed Volcker to the Fed, inflation was approaching double digits for the second time in less than a decade. Arthur Burns, who began his tenure as Fed chair in 1970 when inflation was around 4.90 percent, saw inflation rise to 11.51 percent in 1974 Q4, fall to 5.13 percent by 1976 Q4, and begin climbing again thereafter. Inflation rose from around 6.43 to 8.52 percent during G. William Miller’s brief tenure from 1978 to 1979.
Before Volcker, Fed chairs occasionally denied their ability to control inflation. Arthur Burns referred to cost-push inflation (in contrast to the demand-pull inflation caused by faster money growth). “The rules of economics are not working in quite the same way as they used to,” he told Congress in 1971.
There were dissenting views, to be sure. But, for most of the 1970s, they were coming from outside the Fed. Milton Friedman, for example, called Burns out at the December 1971 American Economic Association annual meeting. It was not cost-push inflation, Friedman claimed, but “erratic and destabilizing monetary policy [that] has largely resulted from the acceptance of erroneous economic theories.”
Volker changed that. He acknowledged that the Fed could bring down inflation and then set a course to do just that. Moreover, he did so with great resolve.
Engineering a disinflation is a costly proposition. The central bank must cut the growth rate of money to bring down inflation. However, cutting the growth rate of money also tends to fool producers into thinking there has been a decrease in the relative demand for their products. As a result, they produce fewer goods and services — which often means laying off workers — until they realize the error and adjust their prices down accordingly.
The underproduction problem can be mitigated, to some extent, by credibly announcing the policy in advance. If producers reduce their inflation expectations in line with the policy, they will not be fooled into underproducing.
But that is easier said than done. It is difficult to credibly announce a policy in normal times. Most folks just don’t pay that much attention to — or understand — monetary policy. It is harder still when the central bank has failed to live up to expectations in the past, since even those who do pay attention and understand how monetary policy works are unlikely to believe the Fed will do what it says it will. Hence, even when such measures are called for, cutting the growth rate of money virtually guarantees a recession.
Volcker’s disinflation was no exception. Real GDP growth fell from 6.51 percent in 1979 Q1 to −1.62 percent in 1980 Q3 and remained low through 1983 Q1. Unemployment shot up, from 5.7 percent in 1979 Q2 to 7.7 percent in 1980 Q3; by 1982 Q4, it had reached 10.7 percent. Home builders around the country pleaded for cheap credit by sending two-by-fours to the Marriner Eccles building in D.C.
But Volcker didn’t relent. Inflation came down and stayed down. Indeed, the public came to believe the Fed chair was willing to do whatever it takes to keep inflation low and steady. For every ounce of institutional credibility Burns had lost, Volcker gained a pound.
William J. Luther
Related Articles – History
How To Stop the Proliferation of Municipal Bond Issues
It seems rather strange that in a putative democracy a handful of people can legally, if figuratively, reach into the pockets of their neighbors but it happens all the time all across America via municipal bond ballot measures.
The main problem is that the measures “pass” if the majority of those who actually vote are in favor, even if hardly anyone votes. That leads to abuses. We should change the rules and mandate that bond/tax measures must obtain the affirmative approval of over 50 percent of eligible voters, not just those with sufficient incentive, education, and information to vote.
In most areas of our lives, no means no in the sense that no decision defaults to no action. You do not have to actively dislike the advertisement of a stationary bike company to avoid buying one of its products, you can vote “no” by not taking steps to purchase one. Heck, you may even approve of its ad but that does not give the manufacturer the right to drop ship one of its high-tech torture machines to your house and dock your checking account in exchange.
The same goes for physical intimacy. A stranger does not get to lawfully have sex with you because you did not actively swipe left on his or her Tinder profile. And Tinder does not get to establish a Tinder profile for you because you did not explicitly tell it not to. Wells Fargo found that out the hard way (though arguably not hard enough).
The need to obtain explicit consent before taking somebody else’s money (or bodily fluids) is one of the key remaining features of liberty. Without it, life begins to look a lot like slavery or authoritarianism.
But the rules change when the compulsory monopoly we call government makes the rules. The original impetus behind municipal bond measures was the notion that voters need to explicitly accept the tax increases needed to service the bonds. No taxation without representation and all that. When most people voted, and where taxpayers and voters were roughly the same people, bond ballot measures approximated consent. (Why fifty percent is often considered the best threshold is another matter, but I will stipulate it here.)
Statewide bond measures pass about four out of five times. Local ones appear to pass at the same rate, even at the 55 percent threshold established in California. And issuers who fail to gain approval can try again year after year, unlike in corporate proxy resolutions where shareholders are banned from reintroducing resolutions that fail to garner sufficient votes. (The SEC, incidentally, wants to raise those thresholds.)
It is a minor miracle when voters in a town like Monument, Colorado repeatedly put the kibosh on bond measures because the issuer, often a school district, is a concentrated interest with the budget authority to hire consultants who appear to make scientific, objective cases for the “necessity” of the bond. Some of those consultants even conduct market research studies designed to help the issuer use words and arguments most likely to sway voters to click “yes” come election day. Opponents are typically individuals with jobs, families, and lives.
Unlike in the commercial sector, municipal bond issuers do not need to persuade people to their cause, they just need to create enough uncertainty, confusion, or complexity to induce most voters to abstain. While often rational in other contexts, inaction on bond measures often means tax increases because the denominator for passage, regardless of the threshold, is always the number of people who actually voted on the measure rather than the number of registered voters.
Issuers know that and use it to their advantage. A suburb of Sioux Falls, South Dakota recently passed a bond measure 1,085 to 129. That seems like a mandate except 14,700 people were eligible to vote on the measure, which went up for vote on 10 September, a time when most East River South Dakotans are busy settling their kids in school, hanging tree stands, and “gettin’ the beans in” (soybeans of course). In other words, only about 1 in 15 people explicitly approved of the bond measure but the outcome is somehow counted “democratic.” (I don’t live in that town, incidentally, and the measure did not raise taxes but merely did not lower them as a previous bond recently matured.)
Other issuers put their measures up in November but only in odd-numbered years, when voter turnout is even lower than during even-numbered years. Often, public discussion of bond measures is muted because debate might draw out voters, which issuers want to avoid because when turnouts are low measures can be won simply by mobilizing teachers and naive statists.
In response to those obvious problems, some have called for minor reforms, like mandating that all municipal bond measures come up for vote on regular election days in even-numbered years. While that would be an improvement, it misses the main point, that no (action) should always mean no (money or booty). In other words, passage of anything authorizing use of the coercive power of the state to take citizens’ money should require the assent of fifty percent plus of eligible voters, not those who turned out at the polls.
When I proposed this recently at a meeting of the South Dakota chapter of Americans For Prosperity, someone immediately objected “but then no bond measure would ever pass!” “Exactly,” was my response. But of course truly important bond measures would pass, after mature consideration and extensive public debate clarified the issues at stake.
Consider again Monument, which sits on the Front Range betwixt Denver and Colorado Springs. Traditionally, taxes and public spending there were low so it attracted childless singles and older couples. Recently, younger couples with children began moving in because it was relatively cheap and improvements on I-25 promise to reduce commute times to both metropoles. Once ensconced, though, those couples began demanding more and better schools, even though that would mean higher taxes and, ceteris paribus, lower real estate values via what economists call tax capitalization.
I do not live in Monument either and would not presume to tell its residents what type of community they should try to create. But I do believe that a nation that purports to be a democracy should encourage citizens to debate the merits of proposals openly and to have to gain explicit approval for taxes, not a bare majority of a few percent of eligible voters in an inconvenient, secretive ballot. Robust debates could raise awareness of charter schools or maybe signal to parents with young children that they should live elsewhere. Or maybe they would lead to even more financial support for public schools. At the very least, full public discussion might expose the exorbitant fees that many municipalities now pay to consultants and issuers. The point is that to win approval, issuers would have to make a case and not just slide in under the radar.
Yes, voters could turn out to defeat bond measures, as they sometimes do, but the burden of proof should fall on the issuer, especially when public school districts seek funding because they have, with few exceptions, failed to create the type of citizens who vote. NGOs like iCivics are trying to improve civics education but the real problem, especially when it comes to bond and tax issues, is the failure of public schools to teach the basic principles of economics and public finance.
Without that background, most people do not feel comfortable voting on complex bond issues. So, as behavioral finance theory predicts, many abstain and the issuers win.
Robert E. Wright
