February 12, 2013
David Brooks told us again today that he doesn’t like Social Security and Medicare. He does this frequently in his columns although usually while he ostensible makes some other point.
Today’s other point is that the country is less forward thinking in the past. A main piece of evidence in this regard is the money that we are spending on Medicare and Social Security.
“The federal government is a machine that takes money from future earners and spends it on health care for retirees. Entitlement spending hurts the young in two ways. It squeezes government investment programs that boost future growth. Second, the young will have to pay the money back.”
Both parts of this are of course wrong. Brooks assumes that the federal government would be able to collect the same tax revenue if it didn’t have Medicare as if it did. That is implausible. Medicare is an enormously popular program for which people are willing to tax themselves. It is not likely that if we nixed Medicare that we could raise the same tax revenue and simply use the money for something else. (We would at least have to change the name for the designated Medicare tax.)
It is also important to note that the excessive spending for Medicare is not due to the fact that seniors in the United States are getting such good care, but rather that we pay more than twice as much per person as people in other wealthy countries. If we paid the same as people in other wealthy countries then we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficits. In this sense it is not a question of transferring money from future earners to give to retirees, it is a question of taking money from future retirees to pay drug companies, doctors, and others in the health care industry.
It is also inaccurate to say “the young will have to pay the money back.” Of course the debt never literally has to be paid back, the government debt has grown in nominal terms almost every year in the last century. Even the interest will be paid from some future earners to other future earners so government debt ends up being a transfer within generations, not between generations.
The piece also includes a couple of other items about a lack of future orientation that are between bizarre and wrong. Brooks tells readers:
“Banks can lend money in two ways. They can lend to fund investments or they can lend to fund real estate purchases and other consumption. In 1982, banks were lending out 80 cents for investments for every $1 they were lending for consumption. By 2011, they lent only 30 cents to fund investments for every $1 of consumption.”
No data source is cited for this statistic, however if Brooks is just referring to bank lending (as opposed to all credit) then the obvious explanation would be the development of the junk bond market. Many mid-sized and even large firms that would have been dependent on bank loans for investment in 1982 (the middle of the recession — a year when housing was hugely depressed) can now borrow directly in capital markets without going to banks. It is not clear what this tells us about the country’s future orientation.
He then adds:
“Increasingly, companies have to spend their money on retirees, not future growth. Last week, for example, Ford announced that it was spending $5 billion to shore up its pension program. That’s an amount nearly equal to Ford’s investments in factories, equipment and innovation.”
This one is a real head-scratcher. Has Brooks missed the plunge in defined benefit pensions over the last three decades? How about the rapid disappearance of employee health care coverage? The trend here seems to be going rapidly in the other direction. Pensions are of course are part of workers’ compensation, just like pay. Companies are supposed to put aside money at the time pension liabilities are accrued, so a properly managed pension fund does not imply a drain on the future.
Of course the country does seem to have shortage of people with proper skills in finance, so many companies do have underfunded pensions. However this has little to do with preferring the present over the future, as opposed to a simple lack of skills in an important sector of the economy.
Comments