Brad DeLong has had a string of posts referring to the possibility that some or all of the US Social Security fund should be invested in stocks rather than, as at present, in US Treasury bonds, of which the most pertinent is this one. This idea first came up in a major way in Clinton’s 1999 State of the Union speech, and has since had some play on the Republican side, especially now that privatization individual accounts seem to be off the agenda.

The key fact that makes the idea attractive is the equity premium, the fact that, historically the rate of return to investment in stocks has been well above that in bonds. This used to be explained by the fact that stocks were riskier than bonds. But ever since the work of Mehra and Prescott in the 1980s it’s been known that no simple and plausible model of the social cost of risk that would be generated by efficient capital markets can explain more than a small fraction of the observed premium. The immediate response, that of finding more complicated, but still plausible models hasn’t gone very far. The alternative explanation is that capital markets don’t do a very good job of spreading risk. For example it’s very hard to get insurance against recession-induced unemployment or business failure, even though standard models imply that this should be available.

Simon Grant and I have done a fair bit of work on this, with some specific attention to the Social Security issue. In this paper (large PDF file), published in the American Economic Review, we argued that substantial gains could be realized by investing Social Security funds in the stock market. We didn’t put a number on it, but I don’t find Brad’s half-embraced suggestion of $2.4 trillion in present value implausible.

An important point, though, is that investing in stocks will generally not be the best way to go, at least if the amount invested is large. A government agency holding, say 20 per cent of the shares in Ford and General Motors, would seem to have big problems. Leaving aside the specific institutional issues of the US Social Security fund, the obvious implication of the equity premium is that, unless there are large differences in operating efficiency between private and public enterprises, government ownership of large capital-intensive enterprises like utilities will be socially beneficial. The case is strengthened if monopoly or other problems mean that the enterprises have to be tightly regulated in any case. Again, Simon Grant and I have written this up, this time in Economica (PDF version available here)

My post a week or so ago considering (and ultimately rejecting) the hypothesis that the 2004 election might be a good one for the Democrats to lose raised plenty of eyebrows, but the ensuing debate helped to sharpen up my thinking on the underlying issue, that of the unsustainability of current US fiscal policy and the appropriate Democrat response.

In the original post drew the conclusion that the only campaign strategy that would give a Democrat, once elected, any real chance of prevailing over a Republican congress, was that (supported by Dean, Gephardt, Kucinich and Sharpton) of repealing the entire Bush tax cut and starting from scratch. To the extent that primary voters considered this issue, they didn’t see it this way. With the possible exception of Lieberman, Kerry was the candidate most supportive of the tax cuts.

Like Bush, Kerry promises to cut the deficit in half over four years. He proposes to scrap the cuts for those earning more than $200 000, but to expand them for ‘middle-class families’, a group normally taken to include about 95 per cent of the population[1]. When other spending proposals are taken into account, the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution) estimates that Kerry’s proposals will yield a net increase in the deficit of $165 billion over four years , or $40 billion a year. (Of course, Bush will almost certainly spend more once the unbudgeted costs of higher defense spending and even more tax cuts are factored in). As I show below, this is relative to a baseline of around $550 billion.

I think it’s safe to say this won’t happen. The problem for Kerry, then, is when to discover the deficit. There are three basic options:

fn1. It’s evidence of the startling lopsidedness of the Bush tax cuts, and the explosion of income inequality over the past two decades, that there is, nonetheless, a substantial revenue gain from repealing the cuts for the rich and ultra-rich. About half the benefits of the Bush tax cuts go to those on incomes over $200 000 per year.

UpdateBrad de Long points to Kerry’s appointment of Roger Altman as his budget priorities advise as evidence that Kerry will choose Option 1. Kevin Drum is underwhelmed. He supports Option 2 and expects Opinion 3.
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Before I argue that the Borda voting system is fatally defective, it may be worth considering what kinds of weaknesses could justify such a verdict. We know from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem that any nontrivial voting system will encourage strategic/insincere voting in some circumstances and will not always elect the right candidate (unless ‘right’ is defined to coincide with the outcome of the voting system in question). So a fatal defect must be a lot worse than this. I claim that the Borda voting system is so vulnerable to strategic manipulation that it would be completely unworkable, provided only that there are no restrictions on candidacy.

Note: I did a Google before writing this and couldn’t find anything similar, but of course, when I checked again after doing the work, I found this almost perfect anticipation of my counter-example. But having done the work, I thought I’d post it anyway.
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I didn’t get around to posting on the recent higher education reforms at the time, but they seem to be working out pretty much as I expected. In particular, the outcome of HECS flexibility is that (nearly) all universities are raising charges across the board by the full 25 per cent allowed under the policy. The explanation is simple. The top universities want the money and all the others need it too desperately to forgo it. Given that there is a lot of unfilled demand, and that the changes to repayment rules have lowered the effective cost to students (particularly those who don’t expect to earn lots of money after uni), there’s no economic reason not to increase charges.

The exceptions to the general pattern are essentially ideological and fall into two classes. First, some universities that oppose the whole idea have refused to increase charges, effectively betting on a change of government before the new charges apply. This group particularly includes those who see themselves as serving relatively low-income communities. If the government is re-elected, though, I expect most of them will raise charges over the next few years and mostly by the full 25 per cent.

Second, some universities that support the changes have made token exceptions, for example by selecting a few ‘socially desirable’ courses and offering free or low-cost entry to those courses. As regards these exceptions, three points are worth noting
1. In every case I’ve seen, the number of places affected is small or negligible
2. The discounts have nothing to do with any notion of responsiveness to student demand
3. This is just a rebranding of the existing practice of offering scholarships to appeal to currently dominant ideology

Looking at the substantive merits of the policy, I’d regard it as a second-best option. The match between HECS contributions and net social cost was pretty good before the increases, so an increase in the government contribution would have been a preferable policy. But since that wasn’t going to happen on an adequate scale, there was no real alternative to higher charges.