This article was published on August 8, 2011 in the Deseret News under the title, "Debt deal didn't solve fiscal woes."
After months of wrangling and weeks of brinksmanship, the U.S. congress passed a bill raising the debt ceiling and President Obama signed it into law. The compromise calls for an immediate increase in the legal limit on federal borrowing by 2.4 trillion dollars and imposes reductions in federal spending by the same amount over the next 10 years.
It will be interesting to see how congress interprets the word "reduction." For most of us a reduction is an absolute drop. Congress, however, reduces spending by comparing the new forecast level of spending with the amount that was forecast before the agreement was reached, the so-called "baseline". There is no legal reason for using this baseline as opposed to some other measure. Some proponents of spending reform prefer a "zero baseline", where any change in policy is compared to a case where all future spending is assumed to remain at this year's levels. This latter baseline is a more accurate measure of how spending will actually change over time, but the former is a better reflection of the impact of a particular act of legislation.
If this was the only difference, baselines would not matter all that much. But when congress actually begins to implement the mandated spending cuts, the definition used will become very important. For example, if spending were forecast to rise by 10% per year over the next ten years, and we slowed that growth to only 5%, then (ignoring inflation) by the first definition we would have achieved a savings of just over 21%, but we would still have increased spending almost 26% from a zero baseline.
Credit agencies and financial markets are unimpressed by the debt-limit agreement. It is a good start; probably preferable to having the U.S. Treasury default on its debt payments. It may even be the best possible agreement one could hope for with a divided government. But it is only a start.
One of the more pithy, but accurate, descriptions of the deal came from Senator Rand Paul, who said, "The current deal to raise the debt ceiling doesn't stop us from going over the fiscal cliff. At best, it slows us from going over it at 80 m.p.h. to going over it at 60 m.p.h."
To the extent that the debt ceiling debate had focused the attention of the political class on the issue of spending it has done some good. But in a broader sense, the debt ceiling is a red herring. As I learned years ago from my college professor, Jim Kearl, the government has three fundamental ways of raising revenue: it can tax, borrow, or create money. And the effects of each of these, while not exactly identical, is roughly the same. In all cases the government extracts real resources from people in the economy which it then uses to buy goods and services and/or spend as transfer payments.
When it taxes the government uses the threat of force to extract resources. Failure to pay required taxes can result in imprisonment. When it borrows the government cajoles people into voluntarily surrendering resources by offering a sufficiently high repayment in the future. Of course, far enough in the future the government will be forced to raise taxes to pay for these interest payments, so the repayment is not as high as it may seem. Finally, when the government (via the Federal Reserve, in the case of the U.S.) creates money it taxes unilaterally without an explicit threat by reducing the real value of existing money holdings.
It is possible, by clever redefinition of terms to avoid a debt limit in the short run by turning debt into taxes. For example, suppose the government were to impose a surtax on households this year based upon estimated income from 2012. Tax revenue would rise, and the government debt would fall (or rise more slowly). But over time, everyone will end up paying the same amount as if the surtax had never been imposed.
The pressing problem with federal government finances is not the amount of money that is borrowed, but rather the size of the real resources the government extracts; in other words, the size of government. Right now there is no national consensus on how big the government should be. Until a consensus is reached and ultimately communicated to our political leaders, problems will continue to loom regardless what has happened or will happen to the debt limit.
After months of wrangling and weeks of brinksmanship, the U.S. congress passed a bill raising the debt ceiling and President Obama signed it into law. The compromise calls for an immediate increase in the legal limit on federal borrowing by 2.4 trillion dollars and imposes reductions in federal spending by the same amount over the next 10 years.
It will be interesting to see how congress interprets the word "reduction." For most of us a reduction is an absolute drop. Congress, however, reduces spending by comparing the new forecast level of spending with the amount that was forecast before the agreement was reached, the so-called "baseline". There is no legal reason for using this baseline as opposed to some other measure. Some proponents of spending reform prefer a "zero baseline", where any change in policy is compared to a case where all future spending is assumed to remain at this year's levels. This latter baseline is a more accurate measure of how spending will actually change over time, but the former is a better reflection of the impact of a particular act of legislation.
If this was the only difference, baselines would not matter all that much. But when congress actually begins to implement the mandated spending cuts, the definition used will become very important. For example, if spending were forecast to rise by 10% per year over the next ten years, and we slowed that growth to only 5%, then (ignoring inflation) by the first definition we would have achieved a savings of just over 21%, but we would still have increased spending almost 26% from a zero baseline.
Credit agencies and financial markets are unimpressed by the debt-limit agreement. It is a good start; probably preferable to having the U.S. Treasury default on its debt payments. It may even be the best possible agreement one could hope for with a divided government. But it is only a start.
One of the more pithy, but accurate, descriptions of the deal came from Senator Rand Paul, who said, "The current deal to raise the debt ceiling doesn't stop us from going over the fiscal cliff. At best, it slows us from going over it at 80 m.p.h. to going over it at 60 m.p.h."
To the extent that the debt ceiling debate had focused the attention of the political class on the issue of spending it has done some good. But in a broader sense, the debt ceiling is a red herring. As I learned years ago from my college professor, Jim Kearl, the government has three fundamental ways of raising revenue: it can tax, borrow, or create money. And the effects of each of these, while not exactly identical, is roughly the same. In all cases the government extracts real resources from people in the economy which it then uses to buy goods and services and/or spend as transfer payments.
When it taxes the government uses the threat of force to extract resources. Failure to pay required taxes can result in imprisonment. When it borrows the government cajoles people into voluntarily surrendering resources by offering a sufficiently high repayment in the future. Of course, far enough in the future the government will be forced to raise taxes to pay for these interest payments, so the repayment is not as high as it may seem. Finally, when the government (via the Federal Reserve, in the case of the U.S.) creates money it taxes unilaterally without an explicit threat by reducing the real value of existing money holdings.
It is possible, by clever redefinition of terms to avoid a debt limit in the short run by turning debt into taxes. For example, suppose the government were to impose a surtax on households this year based upon estimated income from 2012. Tax revenue would rise, and the government debt would fall (or rise more slowly). But over time, everyone will end up paying the same amount as if the surtax had never been imposed.
The pressing problem with federal government finances is not the amount of money that is borrowed, but rather the size of the real resources the government extracts; in other words, the size of government. Right now there is no national consensus on how big the government should be. Until a consensus is reached and ultimately communicated to our political leaders, problems will continue to loom regardless what has happened or will happen to the debt limit.
