‘Truce’ in budget wars? Good, but not an end in itself, economists say.

Economists from across the spectrum are warning against a continuing rise in public debt, but most are not in any rush to impose big spending cuts and take the wind out of the recovery.

|
J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File
The US Government Printing Office in Washington prepares copies of President Barack Obama's budget plan for FY2014, April 8, 2013.

The political world of Washington has taken an election-year pause on the idea of big fiscal reforms to control the national debt.

For Republicans, that means agreeing to raise the nation’s debt limit without struggling to attach strings like entitlement cuts or tax reform. For President Obama, it means stepping back from a controversial proposal to stabilize Social Security in part by hitching annual benefits to a cooler gauge of inflation.

Finance experts say the new truce in partisan budget wars isn’t a bad thing, but it shouldn’t be taken as a cause for complacency.

At a policy conference in Washington Monday, economists from the political left to the right raised warnings about the long-term risks of a status quo fiscal policy that would see the nation’s public debt continue to rise.

Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), painted a forecast for the economy to grow more slowly over the next decade than it has in prior decades.

The nation’s debt, relative to the size of the overall economy, is already historically high, Mr. Elmendorf said at the annual conference of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE).

The CBO projects that the US economy’s potential economic growth over the next decade is about 2.1 percent per year, compared with a 3.3 percent average from 1950 through 2013. Part of that downdraft is rooted simply in slower growth of the nation’s labor force, but also in a changed landscape for fiscal policy (taxes and spending), plus lingering effects of the recession on the economy.

That slower outlook for growth, in turn, means the CBO’s forecast of federal deficits has grown more negative. Even as the White House staff talks about deficits falling now “at the fastest rate since the end of World War II,” the CBO has boosted its tally of cumulative federal deficits over the next decade to about $8 trillion, up $1 trillion from projections a year ago.

He says the nation’s large and growing federal debt raises the risk of serious negative consequences, such as slower growth and the danger of a crisis that shakes investor faith in the dollar, over the long term.

“The long-run deficit problem is because of demographics,” said Alice Rivlin, a former budget director in the Clinton administration, also speaking at the NABE conference Monday. She said the problem of baby-boomer health costs isn’t wiped away by some recent positive fiscal signs, such as the decline of current-year federal deficits and a slowing pace of medical inflation.

Similarly, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former economic adviser to the presidential campaign of Republican Sen. John McCain, offered a warning about the risk that fast-growing federal spending on health care poses for the economy.

All this doesn’t mean that professionals, if they could set policy with a magic wand, would suddenly impose big spending cuts or tax hikes to bring deficits into line.

A poll of some 230 NABE member economists conducted early this month and released Monday found a sizable share of them (39 percent) worried that fiscal policy was “too restrictive” – in other words, that declines in federal deficits are essentially sucking some potentially helpful wind out of a still-weak economic recovery.

That compares with 21 percent of the economists who said fiscal policy is “too stimulative” and that deficits should be curbed more swiftly, and 37 percent who said fiscal policy is “about right.”

Instead of instant belt-tightening, what many economists call for are long-term reforms that would boost the nation’s growth rate (such as by streamlining the tax code and regulations, or reforming immigration law) and reform entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security so that federal spending grows more slowly in future years.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to ‘Truce’ in budget wars? Good, but not an end in itself, economists say.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2014/0224/Truce-in-budget-wars-Good-but-not-an-end-in-itself-economists-say
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe