Binyamin Appelbaum has an NYT piece arguing that many economists oppose a draft. At the risk of losing my economist card, let me raise a couple of points of dissent.
First, Appelbaum dismisses the argument that requiring everyone to share the risk of fighting a war, regardless of class, as being a deterrent to politicians’ adventurism. He refers to research that shows this is not true.
While I have not seen the research, I would be skeptical. Even if the children from wealthier families can ultimately escape a draft, forcing them to jump through hoops still means they pay a price for a war, even if not as great a price as the children from poorer families who actually have to fight. (Bill Clinton’s letter to his ROTC colonel is an excellent example of this sort of price. ROTC was a way to escape the war for those lucky enough or connected enough to get in.) Certainly protests of the Vietnam War seemed to fall off sharply when Nixon stopped sending draftees there, as the piece notes.
The other point is that the military has historically been an important source of upward mobility, at least for men, when it involved near universal service. This meant that children from disadvantaged backgrounds had the opportunity to meet, and occasionally make connections with, people who grew up in families with far more resources. (It is also good if people who will subsequently hold positions of responsibility at least have some contact with people who grew up in working class and poor families.)
These benefits are even more concrete when veterans enjoy benefits like low-cost or no-cost college tuition and access to low interest mortgages. Congress is more likely to support generous veterans benefits when they apply to nearly the whole population, rather than a subset of relatively low-income people who have little alternative to the military as a promising career opportunity.
For these reasons a draft might not be a bad idea, in spite of the standard economic arguments against it.
Correction: An earlier version incorrectly said that the piece had claimed that “all” economists opposed the draft.
Binyamin Appelbaum has an NYT piece arguing that many economists oppose a draft. At the risk of losing my economist card, let me raise a couple of points of dissent.
First, Appelbaum dismisses the argument that requiring everyone to share the risk of fighting a war, regardless of class, as being a deterrent to politicians’ adventurism. He refers to research that shows this is not true.
While I have not seen the research, I would be skeptical. Even if the children from wealthier families can ultimately escape a draft, forcing them to jump through hoops still means they pay a price for a war, even if not as great a price as the children from poorer families who actually have to fight. (Bill Clinton’s letter to his ROTC colonel is an excellent example of this sort of price. ROTC was a way to escape the war for those lucky enough or connected enough to get in.) Certainly protests of the Vietnam War seemed to fall off sharply when Nixon stopped sending draftees there, as the piece notes.
The other point is that the military has historically been an important source of upward mobility, at least for men, when it involved near universal service. This meant that children from disadvantaged backgrounds had the opportunity to meet, and occasionally make connections with, people who grew up in families with far more resources. (It is also good if people who will subsequently hold positions of responsibility at least have some contact with people who grew up in working class and poor families.)
These benefits are even more concrete when veterans enjoy benefits like low-cost or no-cost college tuition and access to low interest mortgages. Congress is more likely to support generous veterans benefits when they apply to nearly the whole population, rather than a subset of relatively low-income people who have little alternative to the military as a promising career opportunity.
For these reasons a draft might not be a bad idea, in spite of the standard economic arguments against it.
Correction: An earlier version incorrectly said that the piece had claimed that “all” economists opposed the draft.
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In most ways the January employment report was weaker than most economists had expected (not me, my jobs prediction was 140,000). However, many reporters seized on the 12 cent reported rise in wages in January to say that wages are finally starting to rise at a healthy pace. This was indeed a large one-month jump, but the 2.5 percent rise over the last year was pretty much the same we had been seeing for many months. (The Post piece took the 2.9 percent annual rate over the last six months to claim a more solid rise.)
There are two points to make on this wage growth. First, the monthly numbers are extremely erratic. The Labor Department reported zero growth in the hourly wage for December. It is almost inconceivable that average wages didn’t rise at all in December and then suddenly jumped 12 cents (0.5 percent) in January. This is why it is best to do some averaging.
The six month average used by the Post is better than taking a single month, but can also be misleading. If we had done six month averages last year, we would have been happy to see a rise of 2.6 percent over the prior six months in August, only to be disappointed when it dropped to 2.2 percent in September. My preferred approach is to compare the average wage of the last three month period (Nov to Jan in this case) and compare it to the average for the prior three month period (Aug to Oct). That produces an annual rate of 2.45 percent in this case. Not much evidence of an acceleration of wage growth in this story.
The other point is that the rise in January was almost certainly helped by the effect of a rise in many state and local minimum wages at the start of the year. The average hourly wage in the leisure and hospitality sector rose by 0.8 percent in January. This is important to note, since we will not see this effect repeated in future months. In short, we should hold the applause on wage growth until we see it confirmed by more data. (On this point, it is worth noting that the Labor Department’s Employment Cost Index for the 4th quarter showed no evidence of any acceleration in the growth of wages or compensation.)
It is striking that the bad news in this report has been largely overlooked. In the addition to the slower than expected jobs growth, some of the measures on the household side were not good. Both the average and median length of unemployment increased, as did the share of long-term unemployed. Also, the percentage of unemployment due to voluntary job leavers fell. At 9.9 percent, it is at a level that would be expected in a recession, not a strong labor market.
In short, while not a terrible report, this is not one that should have prompted celebration.
In most ways the January employment report was weaker than most economists had expected (not me, my jobs prediction was 140,000). However, many reporters seized on the 12 cent reported rise in wages in January to say that wages are finally starting to rise at a healthy pace. This was indeed a large one-month jump, but the 2.5 percent rise over the last year was pretty much the same we had been seeing for many months. (The Post piece took the 2.9 percent annual rate over the last six months to claim a more solid rise.)
There are two points to make on this wage growth. First, the monthly numbers are extremely erratic. The Labor Department reported zero growth in the hourly wage for December. It is almost inconceivable that average wages didn’t rise at all in December and then suddenly jumped 12 cents (0.5 percent) in January. This is why it is best to do some averaging.
The six month average used by the Post is better than taking a single month, but can also be misleading. If we had done six month averages last year, we would have been happy to see a rise of 2.6 percent over the prior six months in August, only to be disappointed when it dropped to 2.2 percent in September. My preferred approach is to compare the average wage of the last three month period (Nov to Jan in this case) and compare it to the average for the prior three month period (Aug to Oct). That produces an annual rate of 2.45 percent in this case. Not much evidence of an acceleration of wage growth in this story.
The other point is that the rise in January was almost certainly helped by the effect of a rise in many state and local minimum wages at the start of the year. The average hourly wage in the leisure and hospitality sector rose by 0.8 percent in January. This is important to note, since we will not see this effect repeated in future months. In short, we should hold the applause on wage growth until we see it confirmed by more data. (On this point, it is worth noting that the Labor Department’s Employment Cost Index for the 4th quarter showed no evidence of any acceleration in the growth of wages or compensation.)
It is striking that the bad news in this report has been largely overlooked. In the addition to the slower than expected jobs growth, some of the measures on the household side were not good. Both the average and median length of unemployment increased, as did the share of long-term unemployed. Also, the percentage of unemployment due to voluntary job leavers fell. At 9.9 percent, it is at a level that would be expected in a recession, not a strong labor market.
In short, while not a terrible report, this is not one that should have prompted celebration.
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The Washington Post had an article on a vote in West Virginia to make it a “right-to-work” state. This means that workers cannot sign enforceable contracts with employers, which require that workers covered by the contract pay the union their share of its operating costs.
The piece refers to a study that purported to find that states with “right-to-work” (RTW) laws had more job growth than other states. This study was fundamentally flawed in its design, since it was treated as a time series study, using years as individual observations, when it really was a cross section study.
Only one state actually switched from being non-RTW to being RTW in the period analyzed. (The study wrongly has both Texas and Utah making this switch, when in fact they just adopted stronger RTW laws.) This means that they really only have data on the 50 states, not separate observations for each year for each state. Treating the analysis as a time-series in this way gives an illusion of having much more data than is actually available. This makes it possible to get statistical significant results when it almost certainly would not be possible if the analysis were done correctly.
To see this point, imagine the study had used monthly data instead of annual data. This would give them twelve times as many data points, even though there was no additional information on the relevant variable. If a test finds statistically significant results in this context, which would not be present in a simple cross section analysis, then these results are clearly being driven by other factors, not a state’s RTW status.
The Washington Post had an article on a vote in West Virginia to make it a “right-to-work” state. This means that workers cannot sign enforceable contracts with employers, which require that workers covered by the contract pay the union their share of its operating costs.
The piece refers to a study that purported to find that states with “right-to-work” (RTW) laws had more job growth than other states. This study was fundamentally flawed in its design, since it was treated as a time series study, using years as individual observations, when it really was a cross section study.
Only one state actually switched from being non-RTW to being RTW in the period analyzed. (The study wrongly has both Texas and Utah making this switch, when in fact they just adopted stronger RTW laws.) This means that they really only have data on the 50 states, not separate observations for each year for each state. Treating the analysis as a time-series in this way gives an illusion of having much more data than is actually available. This makes it possible to get statistical significant results when it almost certainly would not be possible if the analysis were done correctly.
To see this point, imagine the study had used monthly data instead of annual data. This would give them twelve times as many data points, even though there was no additional information on the relevant variable. If a test finds statistically significant results in this context, which would not be present in a simple cross section analysis, then these results are clearly being driven by other factors, not a state’s RTW status.
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Neil Irwin had an Upshot piece this morning on the likelihood that the U.S. economy will fall into recession in 2016. He argues that a recession is unlikely, but then gives readers a scenario in which it is possible.
I will say first that I agree that a recession is unlikely. Recessions in the past were brought on by the Fed’s efforts to slow inflation with higher interest rates or by the bursting of an asset bubble.
The Fed’s December rate hike was a mistake, but that is not going to cause a recession. And, few of the members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee are wacky enough to raise rates further in a weak economy with no inflation.
While there may have been bubbles in some sectors of the economy, there was nothing like the $10 trillion bubble in the stock market in the late 1990s or the $8 trillion bubble in the housing market in the last decade. None of the various bubbles were driving the economy, so their collapse will not bring about a recession.
The question then is what could bring a recession. Irwin’s answer is that the continuation of low oil and commodity prices leads to downturns in oil exporting countries and loan defaults by energy producers both domestic and foreign. The hurt to the economy from weaker demand is then compounded by the pessimism of consumers and firms. The former cut back on consumption, while the latter cut back on investment. With the Fed paralyzed by already low interest rates, and also its unwillingness to concede the December rate hike was a mistake, the economy slides into recession.
I see this story as highly unlikely. First, while psychology does matter, there is a tendency to hugely over-rate the size of these effects. For years economists and economic writers were telling us that people were reluctant to consume following the collapse of the housing bubble because they were fearful about their economic prospects.
In fact, there was a much simpler explanation. People had lost trillions of dollars of wealth when the housing bubble burst and the stock market plunged. The “wealth effect,” the idea that people spend based on their wealth, is an economic concept that dates back almost a century. Alan Greenspan frequently touted that people were consuming based on the equity generated by the housing bubble.
Why was it a surprise that they cut back their consumption when this wealth disappeared? The evidence that people are now saving their oil dividend is extremely weak and can easily disappear in subsequent revisions to the data. In short, I don’t see a story where people cut back their consumption in a big way because they hear that Russian economy is in trouble.
There may be a bit more of a story on the investment side, but here too the psychological hit in 2008 was hugely exaggerated. If we pull out structures (there was also a bubble in non-residential investment) Investment actually didn’t fall that much in the downturn and fairly quickly got back to pre-recession levels as a share of GDP. This doesn’t mean that bad vibrations from plummeting oil prices can’t have an impact, just that it is not likely large enough to be recession material.
On the Fed, it is important to note that it is far from out of ammunition. In addition to its conventional control of the short-term interest rate, and its buying of long-term bonds under quantitative easing, the Fed can also go the route of targeting long-term interest rates. Under this policy, which has been pushed by Joe Gagnon, a former Fed economist, the Fed would set a target of say 1.0 percent for the interest rate on 5-year Treasury notes. It would commit itself to buying as many notes as necessary to keep the interest rate at its targeted level.
The Fed has not tried this sort of policy in more than half a century, but there is no legal constraint that prevents it from going this route. Presumably its hesitance is the fear that such a policy could spur inflation.
While it is understandable that the Fed must concern itself with inflation, it is important for the public to recognize that it has policy options to boost the economy and lower unemployment that it has chosen not to use. It is simply wrong to say the Fed is out of ammunition.
Neil Irwin had an Upshot piece this morning on the likelihood that the U.S. economy will fall into recession in 2016. He argues that a recession is unlikely, but then gives readers a scenario in which it is possible.
I will say first that I agree that a recession is unlikely. Recessions in the past were brought on by the Fed’s efforts to slow inflation with higher interest rates or by the bursting of an asset bubble.
The Fed’s December rate hike was a mistake, but that is not going to cause a recession. And, few of the members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee are wacky enough to raise rates further in a weak economy with no inflation.
While there may have been bubbles in some sectors of the economy, there was nothing like the $10 trillion bubble in the stock market in the late 1990s or the $8 trillion bubble in the housing market in the last decade. None of the various bubbles were driving the economy, so their collapse will not bring about a recession.
The question then is what could bring a recession. Irwin’s answer is that the continuation of low oil and commodity prices leads to downturns in oil exporting countries and loan defaults by energy producers both domestic and foreign. The hurt to the economy from weaker demand is then compounded by the pessimism of consumers and firms. The former cut back on consumption, while the latter cut back on investment. With the Fed paralyzed by already low interest rates, and also its unwillingness to concede the December rate hike was a mistake, the economy slides into recession.
I see this story as highly unlikely. First, while psychology does matter, there is a tendency to hugely over-rate the size of these effects. For years economists and economic writers were telling us that people were reluctant to consume following the collapse of the housing bubble because they were fearful about their economic prospects.
In fact, there was a much simpler explanation. People had lost trillions of dollars of wealth when the housing bubble burst and the stock market plunged. The “wealth effect,” the idea that people spend based on their wealth, is an economic concept that dates back almost a century. Alan Greenspan frequently touted that people were consuming based on the equity generated by the housing bubble.
Why was it a surprise that they cut back their consumption when this wealth disappeared? The evidence that people are now saving their oil dividend is extremely weak and can easily disappear in subsequent revisions to the data. In short, I don’t see a story where people cut back their consumption in a big way because they hear that Russian economy is in trouble.
There may be a bit more of a story on the investment side, but here too the psychological hit in 2008 was hugely exaggerated. If we pull out structures (there was also a bubble in non-residential investment) Investment actually didn’t fall that much in the downturn and fairly quickly got back to pre-recession levels as a share of GDP. This doesn’t mean that bad vibrations from plummeting oil prices can’t have an impact, just that it is not likely large enough to be recession material.
On the Fed, it is important to note that it is far from out of ammunition. In addition to its conventional control of the short-term interest rate, and its buying of long-term bonds under quantitative easing, the Fed can also go the route of targeting long-term interest rates. Under this policy, which has been pushed by Joe Gagnon, a former Fed economist, the Fed would set a target of say 1.0 percent for the interest rate on 5-year Treasury notes. It would commit itself to buying as many notes as necessary to keep the interest rate at its targeted level.
The Fed has not tried this sort of policy in more than half a century, but there is no legal constraint that prevents it from going this route. Presumably its hesitance is the fear that such a policy could spur inflation.
While it is understandable that the Fed must concern itself with inflation, it is important for the public to recognize that it has policy options to boost the economy and lower unemployment that it has chosen not to use. It is simply wrong to say the Fed is out of ammunition.
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In a piece on the difficulty that many people are having in paying their rent, Morning Edition told listeners that rents have risen back to their levels of the housing bubble years. Actually rents didn’t rise in the housing bubble, rather they pretty much tracked the overall rate of inflation. The sharp divergence between house sale prices and rents was one of the reasons that people who pay attention to data were able to recognize the bubble.
In a piece on the difficulty that many people are having in paying their rent, Morning Edition told listeners that rents have risen back to their levels of the housing bubble years. Actually rents didn’t rise in the housing bubble, rather they pretty much tracked the overall rate of inflation. The sharp divergence between house sale prices and rents was one of the reasons that people who pay attention to data were able to recognize the bubble.
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It’s clear that Bernie Sanders has gotten many mainstream types upset. After all, he is raising issues about the distribution of wealth and income that they would prefer be kept in academic settings, certainly not pushed front and center in a presidential campaign.
In response, we are seeing endless shots at Sanders’ plans for financial reform, health care reform, and expanding Social Security. Many of these pieces raise perfectly reasonable questions, both about Sanders’ goals and his route for achieving them. But there are also many pieces that just shoot blindly. It seems the view of many in the media is that Sanders is a fringe candidate, so it’s not necessary to treat his positions with the same respect awarded the views of a Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio.
The New Yorker is clearly in this attack mode. It ran a piece by Alexandra Schwartz asking, “Should Millennials Get Over Bernie Sanders?” You can guess the answer.
But the piece runs into serious problems getting there. It tells readers:
“[Sanders’] obsession with the banks and the bailout is itself phrased in weirdly retro terms, the stuff of an invitation to a 2008-election theme party. As my colleague Ben Wallace-Wells points out, we voters under thirty have come of political age during the economic recovery under President Obama. When I graduated from college, unemployment was close to ten per cent; it’s now at five. Sanders’s attention to socioeconomic justice is stirring and necessary, but when his campaign tweets that it’s “high time we stopped bailing out Wall Street and started repairing Main Street,” you have to wonder why his youngest supporters, so attuned to staleness in all things cultural, are letting him get away with political rhetoric that would have seemed old even in 2012.”
Those familiar with economic data know the labor market, which is the economy for the vast majority of the public, is very far from recovering from the recession. While the unemployment rate is reasonably low, this is largely because millions of workers have dropped out of the workforce.
And, contrary to what is often asserted, these are not retiring baby boomers or people without the skills needed in a modern economy. The employment rate of prime age workers (ages 25–54) is still down by 3.0 percentage points from its pre-recession level. Furthermore, this drop is for workers at all levels of educational attainment. Employment rates are even down for workers with college and advanced degrees. Other measures of labor market strength, like the percentage of people involuntarily working part-time, the quit rate, and the duration of unemployment spells are all still at recession levels.
Furthermore, the huge shift from wages to profits that we saw in the downturn has not been reversed. As a result, wages are more than 6.0 percent lower than they would be if the labor share had not changed.
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis.
If this stuff is hard for New Yorker editor types to understand, if workers lose 6.0 percent of their wages to profit it has the same impact on their living standards as if they faced a 6.0 percentage point increase in the payroll tax. Would the New Yorker think that today’s young people have anything to complain about if they had seen an increase in the payroll tax in 2009-2010 of 6.0 percentage points and which still remains in place today?
If the answer to that one is “yes,” then its editors should be able to understand why millennials in 2016 are unhappy about the state of the economy and why they might find a figure like Senator Sanders attractive.
It’s clear that Bernie Sanders has gotten many mainstream types upset. After all, he is raising issues about the distribution of wealth and income that they would prefer be kept in academic settings, certainly not pushed front and center in a presidential campaign.
In response, we are seeing endless shots at Sanders’ plans for financial reform, health care reform, and expanding Social Security. Many of these pieces raise perfectly reasonable questions, both about Sanders’ goals and his route for achieving them. But there are also many pieces that just shoot blindly. It seems the view of many in the media is that Sanders is a fringe candidate, so it’s not necessary to treat his positions with the same respect awarded the views of a Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio.
The New Yorker is clearly in this attack mode. It ran a piece by Alexandra Schwartz asking, “Should Millennials Get Over Bernie Sanders?” You can guess the answer.
But the piece runs into serious problems getting there. It tells readers:
“[Sanders’] obsession with the banks and the bailout is itself phrased in weirdly retro terms, the stuff of an invitation to a 2008-election theme party. As my colleague Ben Wallace-Wells points out, we voters under thirty have come of political age during the economic recovery under President Obama. When I graduated from college, unemployment was close to ten per cent; it’s now at five. Sanders’s attention to socioeconomic justice is stirring and necessary, but when his campaign tweets that it’s “high time we stopped bailing out Wall Street and started repairing Main Street,” you have to wonder why his youngest supporters, so attuned to staleness in all things cultural, are letting him get away with political rhetoric that would have seemed old even in 2012.”
Those familiar with economic data know the labor market, which is the economy for the vast majority of the public, is very far from recovering from the recession. While the unemployment rate is reasonably low, this is largely because millions of workers have dropped out of the workforce.
And, contrary to what is often asserted, these are not retiring baby boomers or people without the skills needed in a modern economy. The employment rate of prime age workers (ages 25–54) is still down by 3.0 percentage points from its pre-recession level. Furthermore, this drop is for workers at all levels of educational attainment. Employment rates are even down for workers with college and advanced degrees. Other measures of labor market strength, like the percentage of people involuntarily working part-time, the quit rate, and the duration of unemployment spells are all still at recession levels.
Furthermore, the huge shift from wages to profits that we saw in the downturn has not been reversed. As a result, wages are more than 6.0 percent lower than they would be if the labor share had not changed.
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis.
If this stuff is hard for New Yorker editor types to understand, if workers lose 6.0 percent of their wages to profit it has the same impact on their living standards as if they faced a 6.0 percentage point increase in the payroll tax. Would the New Yorker think that today’s young people have anything to complain about if they had seen an increase in the payroll tax in 2009-2010 of 6.0 percentage points and which still remains in place today?
If the answer to that one is “yes,” then its editors should be able to understand why millennials in 2016 are unhappy about the state of the economy and why they might find a figure like Senator Sanders attractive.
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The NYT had a front page article on how bad debt is threatening world growth. The article focused on China, which it indicated could have as much as $6 trillion in bad debt.
It would have been worth mentioning that China’s government could easily cover the cost of bad debt and keep its economy moving forward. The government’s debt to GDP ratio is very low, its interest burden is less than 1.0 percent of GDP, and it is more worried about deflation than inflation.
In this context, there is no economic reason the government could not put up the money to clear up bad debts. The only obstacles would be political.
The NYT had a front page article on how bad debt is threatening world growth. The article focused on China, which it indicated could have as much as $6 trillion in bad debt.
It would have been worth mentioning that China’s government could easily cover the cost of bad debt and keep its economy moving forward. The government’s debt to GDP ratio is very low, its interest burden is less than 1.0 percent of GDP, and it is more worried about deflation than inflation.
In this context, there is no economic reason the government could not put up the money to clear up bad debts. The only obstacles would be political.
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Eduardo Porter had a piece this morning about how a group of academics on the left and right came together around a common agenda. It is worth briefly commenting on two of the items on which the “left” made concessions.
The first is agreeing that Social Security benefits for “affluent Americans” should be reduced. There are three major problems with this policy. The first is that “affluent Americans” don’t get very much Social Security. While it is possible to raise lots of money by increasing taxes on the richest 1–2 percent of the population, the rich don’t get much more in Social Security than anyone else. This means that if we want to get any significant amount of money from reducing the benefits for the affluent we would have to reduce benefits for people that almost no one would consider affluent. Even if we went as low as $40,000 as the income cutoff for lowering benefits, we would still only save a very limited amount of money.
The second problem is that reducing benefits based on income is equivalent to a large tax increase. To get any substantial amount of money through this route we would need to reduce benefits at a rate of something like 20 cents per dollar of additional income. This is equivalent to increasing the marginal tax rate by 20 percentage points. As conservatives like to point out, this gives people a strong incentive to evade the tax by hiding income and discourages them from working.
Finally, people have worked for these benefits. We could also reduce the interest payments that the wealthy receive on government bonds they hold. After all, they don’t need as much interest as middle-income people. However no one would suggest going this route since the government contracted to pay a given interest rate.
Social Security involves a similar sort of commitment, although many on the right would like to deny this fact. The program is already structured to be highly progressive, the wealthy pay much more money into the program for every dollar they get back. There are many proposals from the left to make the program even more progressive by increasing the taxes paid by the wealthy. This would help to ensure the long-term solvency of the program while maintaining the level of benefits for all workers. There is a serious risk that cutting benefits for middle income seniors will be a first step in the opposite direction, undermining the public support for the program.
The other dubious position in this agenda is the strong endorsement for marriage. While there are enormous benefits from strong relationships, especially for children, the government is not a very good matchmaker. It is not obvious what the government can do to increase the likelihood that two compatible people will remain together in a healthy relationship.
There are plenty of unhealthy relationships, where one member is abusive of the other and often children. In these cases, it is not good to keep couples together and it would be foolish for the government to try.
As a matter of policy, we have to recognize that a large number of children will be raised by single parents. We need policy to ensure that these children are not penalized as a result of their parent’s marital status. Many proposals to promote marriage will at least indirectly have this effect.
Eduardo Porter had a piece this morning about how a group of academics on the left and right came together around a common agenda. It is worth briefly commenting on two of the items on which the “left” made concessions.
The first is agreeing that Social Security benefits for “affluent Americans” should be reduced. There are three major problems with this policy. The first is that “affluent Americans” don’t get very much Social Security. While it is possible to raise lots of money by increasing taxes on the richest 1–2 percent of the population, the rich don’t get much more in Social Security than anyone else. This means that if we want to get any significant amount of money from reducing the benefits for the affluent we would have to reduce benefits for people that almost no one would consider affluent. Even if we went as low as $40,000 as the income cutoff for lowering benefits, we would still only save a very limited amount of money.
The second problem is that reducing benefits based on income is equivalent to a large tax increase. To get any substantial amount of money through this route we would need to reduce benefits at a rate of something like 20 cents per dollar of additional income. This is equivalent to increasing the marginal tax rate by 20 percentage points. As conservatives like to point out, this gives people a strong incentive to evade the tax by hiding income and discourages them from working.
Finally, people have worked for these benefits. We could also reduce the interest payments that the wealthy receive on government bonds they hold. After all, they don’t need as much interest as middle-income people. However no one would suggest going this route since the government contracted to pay a given interest rate.
Social Security involves a similar sort of commitment, although many on the right would like to deny this fact. The program is already structured to be highly progressive, the wealthy pay much more money into the program for every dollar they get back. There are many proposals from the left to make the program even more progressive by increasing the taxes paid by the wealthy. This would help to ensure the long-term solvency of the program while maintaining the level of benefits for all workers. There is a serious risk that cutting benefits for middle income seniors will be a first step in the opposite direction, undermining the public support for the program.
The other dubious position in this agenda is the strong endorsement for marriage. While there are enormous benefits from strong relationships, especially for children, the government is not a very good matchmaker. It is not obvious what the government can do to increase the likelihood that two compatible people will remain together in a healthy relationship.
There are plenty of unhealthy relationships, where one member is abusive of the other and often children. In these cases, it is not good to keep couples together and it would be foolish for the government to try.
As a matter of policy, we have to recognize that a large number of children will be raised by single parents. We need policy to ensure that these children are not penalized as a result of their parent’s marital status. Many proposals to promote marriage will at least indirectly have this effect.
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