Mr. Chairman and other members
of the committee, I am pleased to be here today as you begin your
discussion of using general revenue transfers to shore up social
security and Medicare. A thorough consideration of the options
available for placing these programs on a firmer fiscal footing is
essential given the pressures that loom in the not-too-distant
future. I commend the committee for your efforts to advance this
important discussion.
As you are well aware, the
dramatic increase in the number of retirees relative to workers
that is set to begin in about ten years makes our pay-as-you-go
social security and Medicare programs, as currently constituted,
unsustainable in the long run. Eventually, social security and
Medicare will have to undergo reform. The goal of this reform must
be to increase the real resources available to meet the needs and
expectations of retirees, without blunting the growth in living
standards among our working population and, presumably, without
necessitating sizable reductions in other government spending
programs.
The only measures that can
accomplish this goal are those aimed at increasing the total
amount of goods and services produced by our economy. As I have
argued many times before, any sustainable retirement
system--private or public--requires that sufficient resources be
set aside over a lifetime of work to fund an adequate level of
retirement consumption. At the most rudimentary level, one could
envision households saving by actually storing goods purchased
during their working years for consumption during retirement. Even
better, the resources that would have otherwise gone into the
stored goods could be diverted to the production of new capital
assets, which would cumulatively produce an even greater quantity
of goods and services to be consumed in retirement.
From this perspective, it
becomes clear that increasing our national saving is essential to
any successful reform of social security or Medicare. The
impressive improvement in the budget picture since the early 1990s
has helped greatly in this regard. And it appears that both the
Administration and the Congress have wisely chosen to wall off the
bulk of the unified budget surpluses projected for the next
several years and allow it to build. This course would boost
saving, raise the productive capital stock, and thus help provide
the wherewithal to meet our future obligations.
The idea that we should stop
borrowing from the social security trust fund to finance other
outlays has gained surprising--and welcome--traction. It has
established, in effect, a new budgetary framework that is centered
on the on-budget surplus and the way it should be used. The focus
on the on-budget surplus measure is useful because it offers a
clear objective that should help to strengthen budgetary
discipline. Moreover, it moves the budget process closer to
accrual accounting, the private-sector norm, and--I believe--a
sensible direction for federal budget accounting.
Under accrual accounting,
benefits would be counted when they are earned by workers rather
than when they are paid out. Under full accrual accounting, the
social security program would have shown a substantial deficit
last year. So would have the total federal budget. To the extent
that such accruals are not formally accounted for in the unified
budget--as they generally are not--we create contingent
liabilities that, under most reasonable sets of assumptions,
currently amount to many trillions of dollars for social security
benefits alone. The contingent liabilities implicit in the
Medicare program are much more difficult to calculate--but they
are likely also in the trillions of dollars. For the federal
government as a whole, an accrual-based budget measure would
record noticeable unified budget deficits over the next few years
and increasing, rather than decreasing, implicit national
indebtedness.
The expected slowdown in the
growth of the labor force, the direct result of the decrease in
the birth rate following the baby boom, means that financing our
debt--whether explicit debt or the implicit debt represented by
social security and Medicare's contingent liabilities--will become
increasingly difficult. I should add, parenthetically, that the
problem we face is much smaller than that confronting the more
rapidly aging populations of Europe and Japan. Nonetheless,
pressures will mount, and I believe that the growth potential of
our economy is best served by maintaining the unified budget
surpluses presently in train and thereby reducing Treasury debt
held by the public. The resulting boost to the pool of domestic
saving will help sustain the current boom in
productivity-generating investment in the private sector. Indeed,
if productivity growth continues at its recent pace, our
entitlement programs will be in much better shape. Saving the
surpluses--if politically feasible--is, in my judgment, the most
important fiscal measure we can take at this time to foster
continued improvements in productivity.
The vehicle through which we
save our surpluses is less important than the fact that we save
them. One method that has been proposed, and that is the focus of
today's hearing, is to transfer general revenues from the
on-budget accounts to the social security trust fund. These
transfers in themselves do nothing to the unified budget surplus.
The on-budget surplus is reduced, but the off-budget surplus
increases commensurately. The transfers have no effect on the debt
held by the public and, hence, no direct effect on national
saving. But transferring monies from the on-budget to the
off-budget social security accounts could make it politically more
likely that the large projected unified surpluses will, in fact,
materialize. Given that our record of sustaining surpluses for
extended periods of time is not good, any device that might
accomplish this goal is worth examining.
Using general revenues to fund
social security is an idea that has been considered previously but
rejected. Indeed, the commission that I chaired in 1983 was
strongly opposed, for a variety of reasons, to the notion of using
general revenues to shore up social security. One argument was
that using general revenues would blur the distinction between the
social security system, which was viewed as a social insurance
program, and other government spending programs.
Both social security and, for
that matter, Medicare part A are loosely modeled on private
insurance systems, with benefits financed out of worker
contributions. Like private insurance systems, they are intended
to be in long-term balance. But the standard adopted for social
security and Medicare part A--that taxes and other income are to
be sufficient to pay benefits for 75 years--falls short of the
in-perpetuity full funding standard of private pension plans, and,
in many years, social security and Medicare have not met even this
less stringent standard.
Furthermore, the requirement
that social security and Medicare be in long-term balance does not
mean that each generation gets in benefits only what it
contributed in taxes plus earnings. Indeed, most social security
beneficiaries to date have received far higher rates of return on
their contributions than that available, for example, on U.S.
Treasury securities. But the reduction in the birth rate following
the baby boom and the continued increase in life expectancy beyond
age sixty-five mean that the social security system will no longer
provide workers with such high returns.
Although the analogy between
social security and private insurance has never been that tight,
the perception of social security as insurance has been widespread
and quite powerful. Many supporters of social security feared that
breaking the link between payroll taxes and benefits by moving to
greater reliance on general revenue financing would transform
social security into a welfare program.
But now, when payroll taxes are
no longer projected to be sufficient to pay even currently
legislated benefits, moving toward a system of general revenue
finance raises the concern that the fiscal discipline of the
current social security system could be reduced. Once the link
between payroll taxes and social security benefits is broken, the
pressure to reform the social security system may ease,
particularly in this environment of budget surpluses. For example,
Medicaid and Medicare part B--both of which will face increasing
demands as the population ages--are already financed with general
revenues, and, consequently, there has been much less pressure to
date to reform these programs.
The availability of general
revenue finance when the baby boom generation begins to enter
retirement and press on our overall fiscal resources could make it
more difficult to argue for program cuts, regardless of their
broader merits. As I have testified on many previous occasions,
there are a number of social security benefit reforms--such as
extending the age of full retirement benefit entitlement and
indexing it to longevity, altering the benefit calculation bend
points, and adjusting annual cost-of-living escalation to a more
accurate measure--that should be given careful consideration. The
potential for enhancing efficiency by restructuring the Medicare
program is probably even greater than in social security. Relaxing
fiscal discipline in the Medicare program by expanding the use of
general revenues before the underlying program has been tightened
could take the steam out of efforts to improve the way health
services are delivered.
That said, I think it is
important to note that most government programs are funded through
general revenues, so allowing general revenues to finance some of
social security or Medicare part A is clearly an idea that would
not necessarily eliminate all fiscal responsibility. It might be
feasible, for example, to legislate temporary general revenue
transfers that would end long before the baby boom generation
starts to retire, without opening the possibility of completely
eliminating the need for program cuts in social security or
changes to Medicare.
It is, of course, difficult to
predict the political and economic environment that will be facing
policymakers fifteen or twenty years in the future. Legislation
passed today that affects the distribution of resources between
future workers and retirees could easily be changed later. That is
why the most important decision facing policymakers today is not
about the distribution of future resources but about the level
of future resources available for future workers and retirees. The
most effective means of raising the level of future resources, in
my judgment, is to allow the budget surpluses projected in the
coming years to be used to pay down the nation's debt. The
Congress and the Administration will have to decide whether
transferring general revenues to the entitlement programs is the
best way to preserve the surpluses, or whether better mechanisms
exist.