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Our treasured colleague Kulak is at it again with another post on his Substack.
I know that a slow-moving budget crisis is not the spiciest meatball, but the fiscal situation in the United States is looking bad. Debt to GDP is now above the previous high set at the peak of WWII. But whereas the post-wars years saw demographic and technological tailwinds, the current epoch is characterized by low fertility and productivity growth.
It gets worse:
While it might be possible to split a shrinking pie and remain friends, it is definitely IMPOSSIBLE to split a pie when more than 100% of the pie has already been promised to one person or another. Give a person a dollar, they are mildly happy. Take a dollar away and they are FURIOUS.
At this point, I'd encourage you to find a nearby senior citizen. Please explain to them that they don't deserve their social security check. You see, the money that was supposedly SAVED was in fact already SPENT. Far from saving money, their generation actually left a sizeable DEBT to future generations. So not only would seniors have to give up their government checks, they would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional taxes just to get to even.
I'll wait.
Just how irrational are the expectations of our Boomer rulers? Slobodan Milošević understood.
The last politician to even contemplate reforming Social Security was George W. Bush, who claimed to have earned "political capital" shortly after his re-election in 2004. By March of 2006, his approval rating had fallen from the high 50s to just 31. Nowadays, politicians in either party don't even mention Social Security except to praise it effusively and promise to defend it at all costs.
We are well and truly fucked. The Federal government will be forced to default or inflate away its debts within the next 10-20 years. And this is BEFORE the numerous suggestions to somehow EXPAND the welfare state, whether they be student loan forgiveness, payments to favored racial groups, or universal basic income. After all, ours is a great laboratory of democracy. So while the Federal government enters a slow fiscal doom loop, some states like Illinois, California, and New York seem to be attempting a speed run.
How do we get out of this? Kulak has a few ideas, but I'm a little less dramatic.
AI. Maybe we will somehow thread the needle between doom and nothingburger. 🤷
Immigration. The U.S. could escape this problem by cherry picking the best citizens from other countries and telling everyone else to GTFO. We are still, after all, the best country (>10 million population subdivision). This would work, but it would never happen and it's probably a bad thing for the world at large.
Inflation. Many liabilities are indexed to inflation such as Social Security and Medicare. But we could inflate away all the existing debt. Debt to GDP actually decreased in 2022 because of 9% inflation. That level of inflation for a decade or two could make the problem less bad. It would also be helpful if the official inflation numbers were even more fake.
Things are just shittier in the future. Brazil is still a country. This is your future.
Maybe I'm missing it, but isn't Kulak making the basic mistake that Social Security (etc) are, by design, an immediate transfer from the young to the old? I will pay so much more than my 633k in taxes over my career. I get that most people pay less tax, and it doesn't all go to Social Security. Still, the analysis seems to fall short of showing that amount can't be paid off per person.
My prior of "nothing interesting happens" strongly objects, e.g. to
As far as I understand the $200 trillion is the difference between liabilities and tax income if taken from the perspective of government's infinite horizon intertemporal budget constraint. It takes into account the net present value of such liability and the number is 200 trillion. I actually like this calculation even for home budget as you can put on the same playing field different type of spending. Imagine that you want to compare value of drinking a $3 coffee every day compared to let's say once in a lifetime expenditure you are about to undertake such as let's say some medical procedure or even a voucher entitling you to one free coffee for the rest of your life, which for that $3 coffee is around $20,000 net present value with around 5% interest rate. You can use this method to discover ponzi schemes if somebody tries to do magic with cash flow - as the US government wants to do.
Similarly here, the solution can only be to increase taxes to increase income to finance those liabilities, or decrease payouts which means reneging on those liabilities or some combination of thereof. Also you are correct that Social Security is a transfer from young to the old but with implicit assumption that the young will receive similar from young if they themselves are old. Except there is a huge risk that by the time it should happen the boomer or even Gen X generation will be long dead and the Millenials and Zoomers will end up with no place to sit in this metaphorical musical chairs game.
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