Kick the Can or Kick the Habit?

President Obama's dire alarms over the approach of the federal debt ceiling, and subsequent calls for $4 trillion in debt reductions over 10 years, are starkly lacking key ingredients: substance and coherence as to what such a fiscal package should contain.

House Republicans, by contrast, have a program for long-term economic stewardship — Cut, Cap and Balance — that would deliver much larger savings than anything the president has put on the table. Before appreciating why such a program would be better, one must consider why a deal to achieve $4 trillion in savings over the next decade — whatever its contents — would be insufficient.

Given the weak economy, budget savings of $4 trillion will not be implemented immediately, but will be back-loaded with a multiple-year lag. However, estimates made by the Social Security and Medicare trustees and actuaries suggest that those two programs face cumulative, inflation-adjusted, long-term (75-year) fiscal gaps totaling $39.2 trillion. This implicit debt will accrue interest and grow larger over time. The cumulative interest cost of that shortfall over 10 years, under a conservative, inflation-adjusted interest rate of 2.9 percent per year (the rate used by the Social Security actuaries), amounts to $13 trillion — implying that not making any fiscal adjustments for the next 10 years will increase the budgetary imbalance to $52.2 trillion. Thus, scheduling a heavily back-loaded reduction of those costs by just $4 trillion through 2020 is unlikely to...

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Article from CATO Institute

By Jagadeesh Gokhale