OK here are the labour productivity statistics as promised.
go to http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/surveymost?pr
and click on “Nonfarm Bus. Output per hour of all persons”
Check out the statistics for the 70’s,80’s and 90’s. First not that there is an outlier in 83 which is purely cyclical (and actually 84 also is partly cyclical). But if you take the next 5 years labour productivity growth is distinctly unimpressive, it’s roughly the same as the 73-78 period and lower than the 96-2000 period. It’s much lower than any five-year period before 73.
Note that productivity growth is most miserable in the 87-89 period when marginal taxes were at their lowest.
The investment/GDP figures tell a similar story. They were lower in the late 80’s than the late 70’s.
pman2: *But in the long run, private wealth tends to multiply at 8-10% per year. So while the results of individual stewards vary widely, in the aggregate the private sector is a couple of orders of magnitude better stewards than the SS Administration. *
Emphasis added. Look, nobody is saying that private investments don’t on average have higher rates of return than SS. But SS is not just about making as much money as possible on average, it’s about providing a secure form of social insurance. (Gee, got enough bolding there, kimstu?) Your definition of “better stewardship” as “higher average rates of return plus higher risk” is a pretty idiosyncratic one, and not, IMHO, the best one to use for a national social insurance policy.
Error alert. I read the HHS report to state that employment would be reduced by 1%. Thus, if employment was at 96%, the reduction would be .96%, not 1%.
Not much of a difference, except for one thing - the unemployment rate does not reflect how many people in the U.S. of working age do not have jobs. Instead, it reflects how may people looking for work do not have jobs - stay-at-home parents, the idle rich, people who have given up, etc., are not included in the stat.
The HHS report does not indicate which employment stat it is using for the 1% reduction. Considering that it noted one study that found a 10% reduction in employment upon a 10% increase in the minimum wage, if HHS was talking about straight employment/unemployment, and we have had 10% increases in the minimum wage in the recent past, a study would have had to at least alleged that the umemployment rate went from (say) 6% to around 15.4% due to the increase, and none of us noticed.
Why not let the individual decide what’s best for herself? One person might be happy to accept higher risk in exchange for a higher return; another might prefer a lower return in order to avoid risk.
I am pro-choice on both abortion AND Social Security.
Because you can’t get higher risk for yourself without also inflicting that higher risk on everyone else as well. The changes necessary to give you private accounts are structural, as such they increase the risk for everyone.
Well yes, I also said that you could reduce benefits. Happy now? :rolleyes:
No. it’s not economic policy. It was Greenspan who pointed out that the question of whether or not to privatize SS has no connection at all with the program’s solvency. I’ll agree that there are aspects of SS that constitute economic policy, but we are discussing privatization, which is not one of them. When I make this point I’m quoting Greenspan. Privatization is a zero sum game relative to non-privatization.
Now it’s not that privatization will have no impact on the economy, of course it will. But it can’t increase the SIZE of the economy, it can only shift money from one part of it to another. It doesn’t matter what games you play with this; if you somehow increase the amount of the GNP that gets used as SS benefits, without increasing the size of the GNP overall, then something will take a hit. Who or what gets harmed depends on precisely how you structure privatization.
Look there’s only two ways to increase GNP. You increase the size of the labor pool, or you increase individual productivity. Now since the crisis with SS is due directly to an impending decrease in the size of the labor pool, solutions that involve increasing labor are oxymoron.
Greenspan’s point is that privatization can’t possibly increase the productivity of the labor pool, so it can’t increase the GNP. Thus it can’t be a solution. (or rather, it can only be a solution at the expense of something else).
I realize this is a subtle point, but I think you can handle it. Stop thinking about how markets have traditionally performed and thing about what markets are. The amount of capital that the US market can absorb and make use of at any one time is finite. When you exceed that, you don’t make the market more efficient, you make it less so.
Now 30 years from now, the size of the labor pool will be smaller than it is now, and thus the amount of capital that the labor pool can make use of will also be smaller, just when it needs to be larger.
A good guess of what would take a hit is a simple thought experiment. If you try to dump several extra billion dollars into the stock market, what is going to happen? Status quo? Or does the average price per share go up? Ok, now the boomers retire, and begin taking their money out of the market more than they put it in. What happens to the prices of the shares? They go down.
So the net result is that boomers get a much lower return on their stock investment than history would indicate. Why? Because the labor pool wasn’t big enough to actually absorb the excess capital that privatization pushed into it. The excess just sort of floats on top, inflating stock prices and actually harming the efficiency of the market until it is finally withdrawn. At which point the inflated prices retreat to ‘proper’ levels. The early boomers probably see excellent gains, while the later ones see poor, or even negative ones. It all depends on where you are in the population bulge.
The only guranteed winner is the stock broker.
Every bit of money that brokers earn, it money that SS recipients don’t. Thus, in practice, privatization would be a net harm to SS on average.
because they can only put funds in your private account by reducing general funds. Everyones guranteed minimum SS benefit would have to be reduced in order for privatization to be funded.
I have to admit that I can see a severe problem with privatized Social Security:
Most investments balance risk/reward. Most higher-returning investments carry the most risk. But if Social Security is going to GUARANTEE an outcome, then the effect is that it will make it rational for people to invest in the highest-risk things, because the government will pick up the cheque if they lose.
That means that the government will have to come up with a list of ‘approved’ investments, and that will have a distorting effect on the capital markets.
Either that, or we accept that people who lose their private retirement money will not be reimbursed in any way. But I don’t see that as being politically feasible. I can just see a situation 30 years from now where an economic crisis will wipe out a whole bunch of high-risk investments, and suddenly there will be huge political pressure to give those people some form of handout to bring them back up to a minimum retirement income.
It’s very likely that decades of payment into a mutual fund will be ahead of vanilla SS. Even if the market goes down in a single year, the decline is unlikely to offset 29 years of growth. (IIRC there is no 30 year period where the DJ Industrial Averge was lower at the end than at the beginning. In fact, I think there may be no such 10 year period.)
At most 20% can be privately invested. E.g. if the invested portion was, say, 30% below SS, the differece in total fund for a recipient would be only 6% if the recipient had made full use of the investment option.
This is a joke right? Surely you understand by ‘depends on the terms’ that I mean a specific cost/benefit analysis of the terms of private accounts.
Or, more specifically, if I opt for a private account, what do I give up? Surely you don’t think that the money for private accounts just magically appears when you opt in? It would be expected that I have to relenquish some benefit of equal value.
Or are you saying that the portion of payroll taxes associated with private accounts would be optional? In that case, I would likely opt to not pay the tax. Once again, it would depend on the terms of the deal.
This is not a possibility, it’s a virtual certainty if high risk investments are tolerated. Human nature being what it is after all.
Nor has there been a 30 year period where the market has been distorted by an excess of investment and not enough labor. Not only is the past not an indication, it’s pretty much a gurantee of what won’t happen. The last 30 years has been the peak productive years of the population bulge.
This is nonsensical. There is no such thing as typical return on investment in the normal SS funds. The bulk of your benefit is determined by the last 10 years of working life. The correlation to your total contribution is incidental at best.
Don’t be naive. Investers know that it isn’t their risk. The prospect of millions of destitute seniors is untenable, as long as they do the same as all of their friends, they know that the goverment will cover their bets. Because the seniors will have too large a voting block to be ignored..
Sure, lets say payroll taxes are 10%. A truly optional privatization plan would let me choose to pay 10% payroll taxes and then not have a private account, or 12% and have the extra 2% go into my private account.
The alternative, that the payroll tax is fixed (at 10% say) means that in order for me to have a private account, the general SS accounts would have to have less money to pay guranteed benefits.
Thus, the minimum benefit would have to be reduced and thus the risk increased.
Not “destitute”. As I showed, even in a highly pessimistic scenario some retirees might have up to 6% less than they otherwise would have had. Furthermore, those who chose to take the risk of private investments will tend to be the richer retirees, who have other assets.
Uh, no. You said “if they do 30% less well than SS”. That’s not pessimistic. Pessimistic is “If they loose their shirt”. which give us a 20% reduction in benefits.
If you disallow risky investments so that 30% less than SS is your worst case, then 30% more than SS would also be a reasonable best case. All of this for 6% improvement Where’s the beef?
And there is no reason to believe that only the wealthy would go high risk if high risk was available. The poor play lotto after all.
december: *1. It’s very likely that decades of payment into a mutual fund will be ahead of vanilla SS. Even if the market goes down in a single year, the decline is unlikely to offset 29 years of growth. (IIRC there is no 30 year period where the DJ Industrial Averge was lower at the end than at the beginning. In fact, I think there may be no such 10 year period.) *
I kinda doubt that’s true. Check out this 1997 article by John Mueller, a self-described conservative, anti-tax Reagan Republican who was in favor of SS privatization until he actually looked at the numbers. As Mueller notes,
If you’ve got three 20-year periods in under 100 years where the average real total return is zero, I bet you’ve got some 10-year periods in there where it’s less than zero.
*2. At most 20% can be privately invested. E.g. if the invested portion was, say, 30% below SS, the differece in total fund for a recipient would be only 6% if the recipient had made full use of the investment option. *
This doesn’t sound to me like a very convincing argument for privatization. “Let’s privatize Social Security so we can make much more money!” “But won’t that decrease the security of retirement planning?” “Yeah, so we’ll only privatize it a little bit and not make so much more money.” Once you add up the increased risk, the limitation on the amount of private investment, the extra overhead due to investment transaction costs and so forth, the “bailout money” that Sam Stone predicts (wisely, IMHO) will become a political necessity when numerous investors’ private SS portfolios take a bad hit from the market just when they start needing to cash them out, and so on—add up all that, and I think you’d have to be getting some extra hefty average rates of return to make privatization a good deal.
*3. The investors know it’s their risk. *
Nah, as other posters have pointed out, when old people lose much of their retirement savings in the stock market, neither the politicians nor the voters are going to be comfortable saying “Sorry Grandma, but you knew it was your risk.” Moreover, many people are not in fact very good assessors of risk: as finance professor Terrance Odean discovered, the portfolios of American households and investment clubs on average underperform the stock market by about 4% annually. So even the “average” rate of return has to be adjusted downward to reflect the real average that we could pragmatically expect from tax-funded private SS accounts. Or else we have to put into place some kind of investor-education system to try to improve investors’ decisions, which of course requires more money.
4. Chances are only bonds will be permitted.
And this helps how? It’s true that bonds tend to be much safer investments than stocks, but they also have significantly lower rates of return, further weakening the “let’s make more money” argument for privatization. Furthermore, as Mueller’s report points out, there have been long periods where the average rate of return on long-term government bonds was also zero or negative. As Mueller says, SS privatization “is one of those issues which are more attractive, the less you know about them.” But it seems that the more we really get down into the details, the more we see problems that will either cost money directly or reduce the expected rates of return.
Mind you, I don’t claim that privatized SS wouldn’t be good for anybody: I think it would be a tremendous windfall for investment professionals, a source of vastly increased retirement savings for some workers (especially among the wealthy and well-educated), and a source of modestly increased savings for many more. But considering the burden of conversion costs and “bailout money”, etc., plus the inevitable financial losses for many investors, I think it fails pretty miserably as a social insurance program.