May 08, 2015
Wow, the Social Security trustees have no better grasp of the economy than Alan Greenspan and the clowns at the Fed, the Congressional Budget Office, and other economic forecasting outfits! That is the implicit punch line of an article NBC ran with the headline, “Social Security may be in worse shape than we thought: study.”
The gist of the piece is that the Trustees projections have been overly optimistic since 2000. This is true. The trustees failed to recognize that the stock market bubble would collapse and throw the economy into a recession in 2001 and that the recovery from this recession would be very weak. Nor did they recognize that the housing bubble would collapse and throw the economy into an even deeper recession in 2007-2009 and the recovery would be even weaker.
It is reasonable to blame the trustees for missing these really huge bubbles, the collapse of which and the resulting damage were predictable. However, they erred in the same way as the vast majority of the economics profession. This does not excuse these huge errors. These people and their staffs are paid very well — say compared to people who don’t make mistakes cleaning rest rooms. However, it is extremely misleading to imply that the trustees are uniquely wearing rose-colored glasses in their view of the economy. It’s also worth noting that they erred on the pessimistic side when the economy had a growth and employment boom in the late 1990s.
The piece then tells us about a preferred approach using an infinite horizon rather than Social Security’s 75-year forecast period:
“Kotlikoff [Boston University economics professor, Larry Kotlikoff] wants the administration to calculate unfunded obligations using the “infinite horizon,” which accounts for funding after 75 years. Under this accounting system, SSA’s projected unfunded liabilities would be $24.9 trillion (instead of the $10.6 trillion projected in 2088).”
Presumably the point is to make readers really scared with a liability of $24.9 trillion! Scaring people could be the only possible motivation, since almost no one reading this piece has any idea of how much money $24.9 trillion is over the infinite future.
It would not have been difficult to make the number understandable to readers, since it can be found expressed as a share of GDP right in the trustees report. Table V1.F1 shows that $24.9 trillion is equal to 1.4 percent of future GDP. By comparison, the increase in military spending associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was equal to 1.6 percent of GDP at its peak.
If the concern is that mistaken assumptions will generate misleading numbers then that concern should be far greater with an infinite horizon calculation than a calculation for a 75-year horizon. After all, our knowledge of the 22nd and 23rd century is really not very good. (That is where most of the infinite horizon shortfall comes from.) Of course, people alive today also don’t get to make policy for people living 100 and 200 years from now. Assuming the country remains a democracy, the people alive at the time will decide what their social insurance programs look like.
If the point is to inform people and not to scare them, NBC might have celebrated the sharp reduction in the infinite horizon shortfall in Medicare. Back in 2008 the Trustees (Table III.B10) projected it would be $34.4 trillion (in 2008 dollars). The most recent report puts the shortfall at just $1.9 trillion (in 2014 dollars) or 0.1 percent of GDP. The change implies a reduction in the infinite horizon shortfall of almost $36 trillion (in 2014 dollars). This should be cause for real celebration for those arguing that infinite horizon projections are the way to go.
We look forward to the NBC piece on this good news.
Correction:
Andrew Biggs called my attention to the fact that the main point in the underlying article is that people are living longer than had been projected by the Social Security trustees, not that the they had over-predicted economic growth. As a consequence, we should expect more people to collect benefits, which worsens the program’s finances. There appears to be good evidence for this view.
A flip side is that if people are living longer than projected, and therefore presumably healthier, then we may expect more people to work later in life, which would improve the system’s finances. The article did not attempt to assess projections on retirement ages.
It is worth noting that whether or not workers share in the gains of economic growth over the next two decades, will swamp the impact of any conceivable increase in Social Security taxes that might be used to fund the program. Wages will be on average more than 40 percent higher in three decades according to the Social Security trustees projections. If the tax rate were raised by 3 full percentage points, it would take back less than 10 percent of the increase in wages.
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