Debate density … and vacuum

The debate about whether and how to allow young people to invest part of their Social Security taxes in personal accounts is off to a fascinating start.

Some initial rhetoric and legislative action have been informative and constructive, and some deceptive and destructive. Unfortunately, it is hard to find any middle ground between insightful candor and devious fraud. So, I thought it might be annoyingly useful to take on the role of a grumpy old professor and start handing out grades.

On this list (there will be others), President Bush gets the only “A” — for daring to push hard for dealing with a festering problem before it gets really nasty. But not just any Social Security reform bill will do, and most I’ve seen will earn low grades for a few quirky features. So, the president’s grade may yet slip by the time something is signed into law.

• Ignoring incentives and markets: D. Los Angeles Times editor Michael Kinsley recently wrote that “to work, privatization must generate more money for retirees than current arrangements. … Where does this bonus come from? There are only two possibilities — from greater economic growth or from other people.”

The latter “other people” theme was superfluous, but sure to be garbled once he called privatization “the notion of putting Social Security money into stocks, instead of government bonds, because stocks have a better long-term return.” Social Security money is not invested in “government bonds.” Ninety-five percent of Social Security money, soon to exceed 100 percent, is but a transfer payment from Social Security taxpayers (many over age 65) to retirees (many under 65).

In any event, Mr. Kinsley envisioned no chance of greater economic growth because, he theorized, “Increased growth can come only from higher private investment or smarter private investment.” Economists would describe that as a production function with only one factor of production — privately owned buildings and machines (public schools and highways must be even worse than I thought). There are no workers, managers, students or entrepreneurs in Mr. Kinsley’s growth model, or their behavior doesn’t matter. If that made sense, it would not matter to the economy if all U.S. workers, managers, students and entrepreneurs were suddenly replaced with a random assortment of illiterate peasants from Bangladesh or Chad.

By contrast, Nobel Prize laureate Ed Prescott finds “promises of payments to the current and future … can be honored by reducing the effective marginal tax rate on labor and moving toward retirement systems with the property that benefits on margin increase proportionally to contributions.”

Putting 12.4 percent of your paycheck into the Social Security slush fund to be redistributed by political whim is far more demoralizing to lifetime work incentives than letting folks put some of that money into assets they really own.

Mr. Kinsley also imagines privatization “can’t possibly work, even in theory” because he theorizes the return on investments must fall whenever there are more investors. “The money newly available for private investment,” he says, “would bid up the price of (and thus lower the return on) stocks.” If so, the return on stocks should have been falling continually since at least 1980, when IRS Section 401(k) first became effective and the Dow was around 900. In fact, “money newly available for private investment” has been growing since about 1933. Yet stocks continue to do quite well.

The value of stocks is not determined by the volume traded, but by their expected return (capital gains and dividends) in comparison to many alternative investments. Besides, nobody says personal accounts must be invested in stocks.

• Proving Social Security is risky: D. Democratic Strategist Bob Beckel recently proposed on Fox News that anyone with an annual income higher than about $50,000 at retirement age should get nothing from Social Security. Could Congress really do that? Yes, it could. Social Security’s promises are subject to change without notice.

Benefits have already been cut by raising the eligibility age to 67 and raising the amount of benefits subject to tax from zero to 85 percent. That was barely a hint of what opponents of private accounts now have in mind. Most are less candid than Mr. Beckel, yet they also advise slashing benefits for those frugal enough to save for retirement or industrious enough to keep working. Most would also increase Social Security tax rates on the same politically disfavored group. If this ever happened, frugality and industriousness would become foolhardy and therefore rare.

“Saving Social Security” by Peter Diamond and Peter Orszag, for example, relies on increased taxes on higher earners for 42 percent of the hoped-for reduction in unfunded debt. Yet benefits to the top 15 percent would also be cut by a third. The other half of their savings comes from “a universal legacy charge on future workers and beneficiaries, roughly half in the form of benefit reductions for all beneficiaries becoming eligible in or after 2023, and the rest in the form of … increases in the payroll tax from 2023 onward” (forever).

Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, recently told the Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress: “I would support means-testing as a component of reforming Social Security. Means-testing is part of the mix of true reform.”

Mr. Graham also proposed raising the income level subject to Social Security tax from $90,000 to as much as $200,000. That is the most dangerous idea so far. Leftists who want no limit at all on annual Social Security taxes would find it much easier to sell Congress on that terrible next step. And that, in turn, could push combined federal-state tax rates on professionals and managers to European levels (above 50 percent) — with the disastrous economic effects Mr. Prescott and others have documented. Western Europeans may enjoy their tax-induced indolence, but it means their governments are running out of suckers to tax.

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