My latest reading of Bruce Bartlett's The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward scared me, to tell you the truth.
I
usually get scared when I think about the ballooning of federal
entitlements. Bartlett, like others, contends that, in the future, in
order to take care of the increasing number of people who will be
receiving Medicare and Social Security, payroll taxes will have to go
up----and that will affect all sorts of people, including the middle
class. Or we can borrow or print the money to help pay for the
entitlements, in which case we'd probably have to put up with inflation
and higher interest rates. (And, whereas I have read economists
set high interest rates against inflation, as if high interest rates
cure inflation or an abundant money supply keeps interest rates low,
Bartlett actually makes the point that inflation can lead to high
interest rates. If I lend you money, and I realize that the money that I
will get back from you when you pay me back will be worth less than
what I loaned you, I may just increase interest rates so that I can get a
decent amount.)
We have a deficit, and we have debt.
Bartlett argues that we're in a worse situation now because other
countries own a sizable amount of our Treasury securities, and Bartlett
contends that this situation makes Americans less wealthy and could
increase the trade deficit. Moreover, other countries will be
reluctant to buy our securities, which are a significant source of our
government's revenue, if they think that we won't pay them back.
How
can we solve this problem? Bartlett says that even going so far as to
eliminate every domestic discretionary program would not have been
sufficient in 2008 to get rid of the deficit. Regarding
entitlements, Bartlett talks about raising the retirement age so that
people could qualify for Social Security and Medicare later in life, but
he doesn't appear to think that even that would be enough.
I
haven't finished this chapter, but, in what I have read so far, Bartlett
supports the Value Added Tax as a way to bring in a lot of government
revenue. On page 179, he explains what that tax is by telling a story
about the making of bread. Suppose that you have a farmer who sells his
wheat to a miller. The farmer pays a tax on the wheat's sale price,
and that tax is a part of the wheat's price, presumably because the
farmer is passing the cost of the tax on to the miller who's buying the
wheat. The miller then makes flour out of that wheat and sells it to
the baker. There is a tax on that sale, too, but the miller "subtracts
the tax he paid when he bought the wheat." And yet, the baker in buying
the flour from the miller is paying the tax that was "included by the
miller, which also includes the tax paid by the farmer." The baker then
makes bread and sells it, and in selling the bread he "gets credit for
all the previous taxes paid." But, ultimately, the tax's "full
burden...falls on the final purchaser, the consumer."
I'm a little
confused here. Why would the full burden fall on the consumer, if the
baker was able to get a credit for the previous taxes that he paid (in
the form of higher prices)? The baker wouldn't have to pass on
to the consumer the tax paid by the farmer, and the tax paid by the
miller, for the baker is getting credit for those taxes, right?
Another
point that Bartlett makes is that a tax on consumption----such as the
Value Added Tax----has less of an impact on the economy than the income
tax because the VAT does nothing to savings, which Bartlett calls "the
wellspring of growth" (page 177). Bartlett also says that consumption
taxes are "less burdensome because people can usually choose to reduce
their consumption to avoid the tax" (page 177). But, earlier in
the book, Bartlett criticizes the tax rebates during George W. Bush's
Administration because people saved them rather than spending them (page
138). Doesn't that imply that spending----consumption----is important
when it comes to stimulating the economy? And would a VAT discourage
consumption?
On the issue of entitlements and the
deficit, I hope that there's a way for us to keep our commitments to
people and not throw them out into the cold, while also avoiding a lot
of the financial burdens that would negatively impact so many of us. Is
this possible? I don't know. One thing that comes to my mind is the
argument that a single-payer system is less costly than what the U.S.
has.