Saving Our Children from Themselves
By David Rosnick and Dean Baker
Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)
December 2009
Understanding the Deficit
One of the most popular causes among Washington political insiders is reducing the budget deficit. The conventional story in these circles is that current and projected future deficits will place an unbearable burden on future generations. Their argument is that the need to reduce the deficit is a question of intergenerational equity.
The leading spokespeople for this position, such as David Walker, the President of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, often refer to the country’s $62.1 trillion “real federal financial hole.”
However, it seems that very few people have a clear understanding of this debt figure. This figure is not in any way a measure of money transferred from younger generations to older generations. In fact, rather than being a measure of how much debt older generations will pass on to today’s young people, to a large extent this ominous debt figure is actually a measure of the debt that today’s young people are projected to run up given the current structure of existing programs, most importantly Medicare. In other words, the huge debt numbers that are being used to scare the country – especially the young – are largely projections of how much debt today’s young will pass onto future generations.
The Cause of the Projected Debt
There are two reasons why later-age cohorts are projected to add more to the debt than the generations that preceded them. First, life expectancy is increasing decade by decade and is projected to continue to do so. Life expectancy after age 65 is currently 18.9 years. It is projected to be 23.2 years in 2085. If the tax and benefit formulas for Social Security and Medicare remain unchanged, then the benefits received in these programs will rise through time, as workers collect benefits for a longer period of time.
However, increasing longevity is a relatively minor factor in the rising deficit projections. The main factor is that per person health care costs are projected to far outpace the rate of per capita GDP growth. In other words, the main reason that today’s young and those yet to be born are projected to impose a far larger burden on the government than their parents and grandparents is that their health care is projected to be far more costly.
If the United States had health care costs that were in line with those of other wealthy countries, then the projections would show enormous surpluses, not deficits. Figure 3 shows long-term budget projections for the United States and then adjusts these projections under the assumption that it has the same per capita health care costs of Germany, Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
As can be seen in all of these cases, the United States is projected to run enormous surpluses. For example, if the United States had the same per capita health care costs as Canada, its budget surplus would be equal to 0.13 percent of GDP by 2050. By 2080, its budget surplus would be 2.52 percent of GDP. In short, the budget problem facing the United States is almost entirely an issue of dealing with an out of control health care system, not the old stealing from the young.
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/taming-the-deficit-2009-12.pdf
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
It has been said the the profligacy of our boomer generation, in wanting to keep our Medicare and Social Security benefits, is resulting in an intergenerational transfer that will drown our children and grandchildren in debt racked up by the tsunami of federal budget deficits caused by these two programs.
The potential is very real, but the framing is flat out wrong because it leads to advocacy of policies that could not be more damaging: cut Social Security benefits and make even deeper cuts in Medicare benefits.
Social Security is not a problem. The program requires little more than a few tweaks to make it solvent forever.
Medicare is the problem, but it is not due to our overuse of health care services. Our level of use is comparable to other nations. It is the outrageous rate of health care inflation that is the driving force that will create intolerable deficits in the future. We do not need to eliminate beneficial health care services. We need only to tame health care inflation, just as every other nation has already done by adopting some form of social insurance.
Because we are way behind schedule, with health care inflation already taking a heavy toll, we should not accept the less efficient models of social insurance but instead try to make up with a more efficient version – a single payer Medicare for all.
This report should be downloaded since it is invaluable as a resource to educate others. In fact, right now click on the link and quickly look at Figure 3 (cited above). That alone should motivate you to retain this report and share it with others.
We do have an obligation to our children and grandchildren, though it is not in declining the intergenerational transfer to finance our programs that provide us with security in retirement. Our obligation is to create and transfer to them a health care financing program that will ensure that they always will have the security of health care without the insecurity of mounting debt to pay for it. We need to transfer to our progeny a financing system which will save them from THEIR deficit.