Barry Ritzholtz Thinks WWII Was a Permanent Entitlement Expense

At least that's the logical conclusion of his argument.  He has criticism for John Maudlin's commentary as follows:

[Maudlin:] As I continuously argue, the most important issue facing the US is dealing with its deficit, just as that is the defining issue in much of Europe and will soon be in Japan. [BR: This is a s political, not economic or Fiscal assumption. While we need to deal with the deficit, it is not nearly the issue made out by the far Right -- the US has had bigger deficits, i.e., WW2, and resolved them]

Really, so Medicare/Medicaid/SS and all the other standing entitlement programs are equivalent to WWII spending?  The one thing that was pretty certain about WWII was that it would end, and therefore the borrowing expense could be paid down.  In fact, the US ran balanced budgets through the 1960s--an "austerity" program-- for twenty years following WWII in order to pay for it.  The current deficit is structural, because unless we start a new credit bubble going or the political will to address entitlement spending it's going to get worse and worse.  Economists are howling over any talk of austerity to address the deficit.  How exactly is the WWII one-time expense comparable to our current situation?

Dean Baker Discovers That Debt and Logic Don't Matter

Dean Baker has discovered a way for governments to go infinitely into debt and not worry about paying back.  The idea is that because Treasuries are ultimately sold to banks and other players whose principals will be dead in the future, and future bankers are part of the next generation, then spending now and hitting our children's tab technically isn't accurate.  No, such debt is not a burden on the entire next generation.  Only 99.9999 percent of it.  Ergo, debt doesn't matter.

He follows up this remarkable sophistry by saying that the real legacy to the future is climate change.

I modestly propose combining his observations.  The US government can borrow $100T to purchase a like quantity of solar panels.  This will not only provide more than enough clean electricity, but also ensure full employment for awhile.  Assuming indefinite 2% interest rates (because any other assumption is unthinkable), the future P&I burden per household might be around $10,000 per month.  Fortunately, in the Dean Baker future, this will be offset by each household having $10,000 per month in income from their multi-million dollar T bond portfolio, because "it's money we owe to ourselves".  We could repeat this to solve all other social problems.

Greg Mankiw on the Burden of Debt

Greg Mankiw refers us to an old paper he wrote with Lawrence Ball on the burden of national debt.  I have a couple of disagreements with his conclusions:

1. Mankiw writes:

In many developed economies, the average growth rate over long periods has exceeded the average interest rate on government debt. In the United States, for example, average growth of nominal GDP from 1871 to 1992 was 5.9 percent, and the average interest rate on debt was 4 percent. If these trends continue, a policy of rolling over the debt (and using taxes to pay for current government services) will cause the debt to grow more slowly than GDP.

Economists (Mankiw is far from the only perpetrator) often dismiss debt burden by simply comparing interest rates and growth rates; if the latter is larger then everything is ok.  This misses some important dynamics.  Since Mankiw and Ball wrote this paper, the debt to GDP ratio has risen past 100% in a very low rate environment.  This is because the rate of new borrowing--new principal--has exceeded GDP growth for most recent years.

The marginal productivity of debt both public and private (increase in GDP for each unit increase in debt) has declined since the 1950s and reached negative, interestingly, in 2006.

The selection of years going back to 1871 lets one capture the highest growth rates in US history into the average.  The trendlines for the past 20 and 10 years respectively have been 2.6% and 1.6% respectively.  It's a good thing the Fed has subsidized interest rates...what happens if they lose control?

Finally, averages of rates do not tell the whole story, because interest rates are mostly constant while GDP can fluctuate into negative territory.  Even if a depression is followed by a growth spurt, GDP growth doesn't catch up the growth comes from a lower baseline than the monotonically increasing debt.

In conclusion, comparing 140-year averages of GDP growth and interest rates doesn't really provide very good support that the US government can continue its, in Mankiw's words, "Ponzi" game.

2. This is more of an ongoing criticism of the entire GDP equation that economists treat as fundamental.  Mankiw writes:

When budget deficits reduce national saving, they must reduce investment, reduce net exports, or both.  The total fall in investment and net exports must exactly match the fall in national saving.

This assumes a world where credit doesn't exist.  In such a world, every dollar in existence must either be invested or put under a mattress, and a great many of them are earned from exports.  This completely ignores the effect of private credit.  In any given year, significant amounts of credit are pumped into the economy, disrupting the classic S = I + NX equation.  This allows both current-year S and I to be pumped up irrespective of NX, with the caveat that a future year liability is created.  


GDP equations, in my opinion, are at best incomplete as a reasoning model because of their exclusion of credit and finance. This is why the economics profession keeps being surprised by financial crises.  They aren't random "black swans" or "sudden psychological collapses in aggregate demand"; they are predictable outcomes of debt-financed excess consumption and malinvestment.