| 摘要 | The centerpiece of President Clinton’s fiscal policy is his intention to use the budget surplus to save Social Security. Yet eight weeks after he submitted a budget of 405 pages, supplemented by the 616-page “Analytical Perspectives on the Budget” and 280 pages of related historical tables, that policy remains a mystery. The administration has failed to explain it, though it has a duty to do so.
The riddle starts with the first table in the budget on page 2, titled “Receipts, Outlays, and Surplus.” The first two lines are receipts and outlays, from 1998 to 2009, in which the receipts exceed the outlays in every year. You might naively think that the excess of receipts over outlays would be the surplus. But no, the excess is called “Reserve Pending Social Security Reform.” The “Surplus” in the next line is exactly zero in each of the 12 years. This raises four questions:
1. What is this “Reserve Pending Social Security Reform” that reduces the surplus to zero? Is it the amount of tax reductions and expenditure increases that the president proposes? If so, why aren’t they reflected in the lines for receipts and outlays? Are they amounts that the president hasn’t decided what to do with? Are they amounts he has decided what to do with but doesn’t want to tell us?
2. What is this zero surplus? Some parts of the government don’t seem to know that the surplus is zero. The historical tables that go with the budget show large surpluses from 1998 to 2004, which is as far as the tables go. For the past 33 years we have had definitions of an “on-budget surplus” (the government excluding the Social Security and Medicare trust accounts) and an “off-budget surplus” that added up to a “unified-budget surplus.” But now, on page 12, we have large on-budget surpluses and large off-budget surpluses that add up to zero.
3. Why does this reserve reduce the surplus exactly to zero? In all the history of the republic there has never been a surplus or deficit of exactly zero, let alone for 12 years in a row.
4. What does all this have to do with “saving Social Security”?
The mystery is made especially bizarre by the treatment of 1998, a year in which it is commonly assumed that we had a surplus. But now we are informed that although receipts actually exceeded outlays by $69 billion in that year, there was a “Reserve Pending Social Security Reform” of that amount, which reduces the surplus for that year to zero! How a Social Security reform that is still pending is going to change the accounts for a prior year is a puzzle. I suppose the administration can call the surplus anything it wants. But what we thought was the surplus of 1998 was used to retire debt. Are we going to put that back? Maybe it’s a misprint.
The first clue to what is going on here comes on page 377, in a table titled “Framework for Social Security Reform and Long-Term Fiscal Discipline.” As in earlier tables, this one shows the same Reserve Pending Social Security Reform, although it now covers 15 future years instead of 10. It also shows the “Use of Reserves.” For 2000 to 2004 there is a reserve of $828 billion to be used as follows: Social Security, $445 billion; Medicare, $124 billion; Universal Savings Accounts, $96 billion; military readiness and other critical national needs, $138 billion. Total use of reserve: $803 billion. Financing costs: $24 billion. Total reserve: $828 billion.
I suppose the “financing costs” are the interest costs resulting from failure to reduce the debt as much as it would have been reduced without the proposed expenditures. That seems to me a use of the reserve as much as the expenditures are.
But what do military readiness and other critical national needs have to do with Social Security reform? Why weren’t they included in the total of proposed expenditures before the “reserve” was calculated? The same question can be asked about the Universal Savings Accounts and the financing costs.
Then, too, what does the administration mean when it says that this money is to be “used” for Social Security and Medicare? Certainly it will not be used to pay Social Security and Medicare benefits in this five-year period. Presumably it will be “saved” for Social Security and Medicare. But how it is to be saved is not yet revealed.
The bigger mystery has to do with the debt. According to this table, all but $24 billion of the total reserve has been allocated to various purposes. And yet during this same period the debt held by the public is to be reduced by $380 billion. How is that possible?
Things become clearer when we get to page 389, with a table called “Federal Government Financing and Debt with Social Security Reform.” There, I believe for the first time, what was before coyly called “Reserve Pending Social Security Reform” is called “Surplus Pending Social Security Reform.” This is just the conventional unified budget surplus, which totals $827.7 billion for 2002 to 2004. There are $258.5 billion of expenditures for “critical needs” and the like that should have been counted as expenditures in the first place, which would leave a conventional surplus of $569.2 billion.
This conventional surplus is expunged by economically meaningless transfers from the Treasury to the Social Security Trust Fund ($445.4 billion) and to the Medicare Trust Fund ($124 billion). This yields a zero surplus in a hybrid budget unlike any seen before. It is similar to the conventional unified budget, in which intragovernment transfers do not affect the surplus, because there are offsetting receipts and expenditures — except that a certain number of transfers do count because the administration says so. These transfers are just big enough to make the surplus in the hybrid budget zero.
The $569.2 billion that I call the true surplus has some indirect connection with Social Security. It is an amount that is returned to the private capital markets by retirement of federal debt, loans to private persons and — as proposed in this budget — purchase of equities. Private investment of these funds will add to the national stock of productive capital, and raise the incomes of the next generation. It will make it somewhat easier for the income-earners of the next generation to bear the costs of the Social Security and Medicare benefits that are promised for the old people of that generation.
This result does not depend on the transfers to the trust accounts. So what is the point of doing that and seeming to reduce the budget surplus to zero?
One theory is that stuffing more government paper in the trust accounts will increase the confidence of workers that they will receive their benefits when they retire. It costs the government nothing to put more government bonds in the trust funds, so it may as well do it. The only question here is why the size of the transfers should be just enough to reduce the hybrid surplus to zero.
The other theory is that the purpose of the transfer is to reduce the apparent surplus to zero so that the existence of the surplus cannot be used as justification for cutting taxes. That explains why the transfer is of the size it is. I suppose both theories played some part in the fiscal picture.
But however one chooses to interpret it, the president’s budget seems to have been written with a purpose to obscure. That is not good government.
Mr. Stein , a former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, is author of What I Think. |
