Mary Katherine Ham performs the math and demonstrates that total confiscation of all the assets of the rich would not, in fact, solve the federal entitlement spending problem.

This week, Michael Moore offered a simple and elegant solution to our debt problem.

Calling the assets of wealthy Americans a “national resource,” he suggested our problems would all be solved if we could just have access to all that money.

“What’s happened is that we’ve allowed the vast majority of that cash to be concentrated in the hands of just a few people, and they’re not circulating that cash. They’re sitting on the money,” Moore said. “That’s not theirs, that’s a national resource, that’s ours. We all have this… we all benefit from this or we all suffer as a result of not having it.”

“America’s not broke,” he told a cheering crowd of pro-union protesters in Wisconsin. ...

The United States of America has about 400 billionaires. Moore calls them “400 little Mubaraks.” About half of those have less than $2 billion each, and those with a net worth in the double-digit billions is an exclusive club of about 30.

Still, as Moore says, “there’s a ton of cash out there.”

The grand total of the combined net worth of every single one of America’s billionaires is roughly $1.3 trillion. It does indeed sound like a “ton of cash” until one considers that the 2011 deficit alone is $1.6 trillion. So, if the government were to simply confiscate the entire net worth of all of America’s billionaires, we’d still be $300 billion short of making up this year’s deficit.

That’s before we even get to dealing with the long-term debt of $14 trillion, which if you’re keeping score at home, is between 10 to 14 times the entire net worth of all of the country’s billionaires, combined. That includes the all-powerful Koch brothers ($40 billion between them), the all-powerful George Soros ($14.5 billion), all the Walton family (of the Wal-Mart fortune), Steve Jobs, Oprah (at a paltry $2.7 billion), the Google Founders, Michael Bloomberg, and the Mars family (of the candy bar empire).

Contrary to the left’s favorite talking point, our economic problems do not have anything to do with inequality. The problem is actually the reverse: government is taking away from its rightful owners (and redistributing) so large a portion of this country’s economy that investment, enterprise, opportunity, and economic confidence have been depressed.

The real solution is for government to restrain its appetite and stand aside in order to allow the economy to function and to grow, increasing the general prosperity, lowering costs of goods and services, and making everybody better off.

Andy Kessler argues that the gods of economics have turned their faces against mere sloppers, sponges, slimers, and thieves, i.e., persons working in support and service and professional capacities. The number of available openings for them will dwindle and their bargaining power is doomed to decline. The future, and the lion’s share of income, will belong to the creators.

With a heavy regulatory burden, payroll taxes and health-care costs, employing people is very expensive. In January, the Golden Gate Bridge announced that it will have zero toll takers next year: They’ve been replaced by wireless FastTrak payments and license-plate snapshots.

Technology is eating jobs—and not just toll takers.

Tellers, phone operators, stock brokers, stock traders: These jobs are nearly extinct. Since 2007, the New York Stock Exchange has eliminated 1,000 jobs. And when was the last time you spoke to a travel agent? Nearly all of them have been displaced by technology and the Web. Librarians can’t find 36,000 results in 0.14 seconds, as Google can. And a snappily dressed postal worker can’t instantly deliver a 140-character tweet from a plane at 36,000 feet.

So which jobs will be destroyed next? Figure that out and you’ll solve the puzzle of where new jobs will appear.

Read the whole thing.

Daniel J. Mitchell posted the above chart from Heritage and offered the following observation.

This is a remarkable image, but let’s start with some disclaimers. There are lots of factors that impact economic performance, and many of them are outside the control of politicians. Moreover, it is impossible to know what would have happened in the past two years or in the early 1980s if Obama or Reagan had chosen different policies.

But even with these caveats, it is difficult to look at this chart and not conclude that Obama’s big government policies are much less successful than Reagan’s small government policies.

Hans Rosling

Mortimer B. Zuckerman identifies the real significance of the enormously expanded Obama-era deficit. It is not only capable of putting a dent in Americans’ consuming lifestyles. It promises to change permanently American capabilities and America’s role in the world. Some of us believe the permanent transformation of the United States into another militarily impotent welfare state would fulfill both the domestic and foreign policy goals of the radical left’s agenda.

The majority of Western governments are running fiscal deficits of 10 percent or more relative to GDP, but it is increasingly clear that there will be no quick fixes, that big government and fiscal deficits will not bring us back to the status quo ante. Indeed, the tidal wave of red ink has meant that the leverage-led or debt-led growth model is dead.

Developed countries will be forced to deal with their debt on every level, from the personal to the corporate to the sovereign. Being able to borrow may have made people feel richer, but having to repay the debt is certainly making them feel poorer, particularly since the unfunded liabilities that many governments face from aging populations will have to be paid for by a shrinking band of workers. (Ecoutez, mes amis!)

Demography is destiny. As a result, there is a burgeoning consensus that we are witnessing an inevitable rise of the East and a decline of the West.

The prognosis for America is especially discouraging. We have relied too heavily on surplus savings from abroad on top of running massive current account deficits. Until recent times, we ran deficits of this order only when we were engaged in a titanic war; otherwise we sought to achieve budget balances over a complete business cycle. But now we are running annual deficits of $1.4 trillion, about 10 percent of the total economy. We have compounded the deficits we accumulated over the last decade, so they now reach 61 percent of GDP. Only once before has the ratio of federal debt to GDP come in above 60 percent. That was after World War II. And our federal debt ratio today doesn’t even take into account Social Security and Medicare. Total liabilities and unfunded promises for Medicare and Social Security were about $62 trillion at the end of the last fiscal year, tripling from the year 2000, according to the calculations of former Comptroller General David Walker. Sixty-two trillion dollars is $200,000 per person and $500,000-plus for the average household. As Walker put it, the problem with these trust funds is “you can’t trust them [and] they’re not funded.” Therefore, he asserts, we ought to count them as a liability, which would bring the debt-to-GDP ratio to 91 percent.

The present model of global growth had served excess Western consumption with inexpensive products from the East. The result is plain to see: The West has excessive debt, while China has excessive capacity and inadequate consumption, as well as high levels of savings and our debt.

The deficits we face are a dagger pointing at the heart of the American economy. They threaten that the United States will evolve into another aging welfare state, where fiscal expenditures shift from defense to social welfare, and America’s power in the world will shrink. It has clearly happened in Western Europe, which can no longer defend itself but relies on the United States.

Robert J. Samuelson warns that the United States has a very good chance of duplicating the Japanese experience. Like Japan, the US has an aging population and consequently a shrinking domestic market, problems producing affordable exports, and a tax and regulatory regime not encouraging to new start-ups.

It’s hard to remember now that in the 1980s Japan had the world’s most-admired economy. It would, people widely believed, achieve the highest living standards and pioneer the niftiest technologies. Nowadays, all we hear are warnings not to repeat Japan’s mistakes that resulted in a “lost decade” of economic growth. Japan’s cardinal sins, we’re told, were skimping on economic “stimulus” and permitting paralyzing “deflation” (falling prices). People postponed buying because they expected prices to go lower. That’s the conventional wisdom – and it’s wrong.

Just the opposite is true: Japan’s economic eclipse shows the limited power of economic stimulus and the exaggerated threat of modest deflation. There is no substitute for vigorous private-sector job creation and investment, and that’s been missing in Japan. This is a lesson we should heed.

Japan’s economic problems, like ours, originated in huge asset “bubbles.” From 1985 to 1989, Japan’s stock market tripled. Land prices in major cities tripled by 1991. The crash was brutal. By year-end 1992, stocks had dropped 57 percent from 1989. Land prices fell in 1992 and proceeded steadily downward; they are now at early 1980s’ levels. Wealth shrank. Banks – having lent on the collateral of inflated land values – weakened. Some became insolvent. The economy sputtered. It grew about 1.5 percent annually in the 1990s, down from 4.4 percent in the 1980s.

Despite massive stimulus, rapid growth hasn’t resumed two decades later.

from Rico via Theo.

Arnold Kling examines the feasibility of maintaining current US level of entitlement spending for seniors and arrives at highly pessimistic conclusions.

Most Americans would be happier if the outlook for the budget could be taken care of without having to make major changes to entitlement programs. Certainly, politicians would have it easier if this were the case.

Unfortunately, arithmetic and prudence imply a need to tackle entitlements. What this paper has shown is that various alternative solutions to the budget problem are largely myths. Social Security is not protected by its trust fund. The trust fund contains no real assets. It is simply an accounting device that indicates the promises that have been made to current workers to provide benefits to them in retirement. There is no way to avoid having Social Security absorb a large share of
the budget during the years when the Baby Boomers are collecting benefits.

Raising taxes on high earners (those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution) is not a reliable way to deal with the budget deficit. Increasing the effective tax rate requires much more than just raising marginal rates because individuals have the opportunity to shift income into forms that are taxed at lower rates. Structural reforms to the tax system could reduce the ability of high earners to shelter income, but only with adverse effects on capital accumulation, entrepreneurship, and risktaking. In any case, even doubling the effective tax rate on high earners would not make the budget problem disappear.

Health care spending is rising as a share of GDP. This is true all over the world, reflecting the high income elasticity of the demand for health care. As people get wealthier, they are willing to spend more to remain healthier. Certainly, greater efficiency in health care management and delivery is both desirable and possible. However, the potential for pure efficiency gains is limited, and it will not solve the problem of ever-increasing Medicare spending. The only way to address Medicare specifically and health care spending more generally is to change the way that Americans make choices about the utilization of medical services. This will require either a stronger move toward government rationing or a shift toward more consumer sharing of the costs and responsibility for decisions about which procedures to undertake and which procedures to forgo.

Broad-based tax increases, bringing rates in line with those seen in Europe, will only solve the budget problem if there is minimal response of labor supply. However, there is notable evidence that higher taxes produce significant long-run reductions in hours spent engaging in market work, with households substituting home production for taxable labor. Higher tax rates could result in a large loss in consumer well-being with little or no increase in government revenues.

Finally, it is true that we faced a higher ratio of debt to GDP at the end of the Second World War. However, our current position does not resemble that of 1945, when we could look forward to sharp declines in government spending and large primary surpluses. Instead, the outlook over the next two decades is for increased spending and ever-widening primary deficits. Certainly, if productivity growth greatly exceeds the 1.6 percent per year embedded in current projections, the prospects for the budget would be brighter. However, it is most prudent to align our promised entitlement benefits to realistic projections, not to optimistic hopes.

Today, the American people must face up to significant structural changes in entitlement programs that reduce promised benefits. We have exhausted the alternatives.

Peter J. Wallison, at AEI, debunks the Baily-Eliott thesis, which attempts to deflect the responsibility for the housing market bubble from government social policies by dispersing shares of the responsibility to financial institutions for failing to manage risk, to insufficient regulatory oversight, to reckless and naive consumers, and even to the actions and inactions of “many outside the United States.”

Exculpating social engineering policies emplaced by the Clinton Administration was vital for the defense of the Progressive political agenda, and it was the Baily-Elliott interpretation of events that led to passage of the Dodd-Franks Act.

Last November, two highly respected Brookings Institution scholars, Martin Neil Baily and Douglas J. Elliott, published a paper entitled “Telling the Narrative of the Financial Crisis: Not Just a Housing Bubble.”

Baily and Elliott make a strong case for explaining the financial crisis as the result of a general decline in risk aversion because of the effect of the great moderation—the period from 1982 to 2007 when it seemed that we understood the causes of financial crises and had found a way to avoid or mitigate them. The evidence for a general weakening in risk aversion coming out of this period is plausible. But the Baily-Elliott narrative assumes that the 1997–2007 housing bubble was also caused by this factor, and that seems implausible. The extraordinary lengths to which the government went to force private-sector lending that would not otherwise have occurred—through affordable-housing requirements for Fannie and Freddie as well as demands on FHA and on the banks under CRA—shows that the housing bubble that ended in 2007 was not a natural occurrence or the result of mere risk aversion. If it had been, there would have been no need for these government programs.

The housing bubble that finally burst in 2007 was driven by a U.S. government social policy that was intended to increase homeownership in the United States and was thus not subject to the usual limits on the length and size of asset bubbles. As such, it was far larger and lasted far longer than any other bubble in modern times, and, when it deflated, the vast number of poor-quality mortgages it contained defaulted at unprecedented rates. This drove down U.S. housing values and caused the weakening of financial institutions around the world that we know as the financial crisis.

Market participants were certainly taking risks as the bubble grew, and it may well be, as Baily and Elliott posit, that this private risk taking was greater than in the past. But the facts show that the bubble was inflated by a government social policy that created a vast number of subprime and Alt-A mortgages that would not otherwise have existed. And the risks associated with this policy—which could produce losses of more than $400 billion at Fannie and Freddie alone—were being taken by only one unwitting group: the taxpayers.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Matthew Ridley, in the Saturday Wall Street Journal Review section, offers a summary of a new and valuable article on the biases fueling endless government expansion and bad policy.

Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about [the psychology and neuroscience of government]. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that “in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence.” Public servants are human, too.

Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence.

In the last case, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand. The Swedish health economist Hans Rosling once gave students a list of five pairs of countries and asked which nation in each pair had the higher infant-mortality rate. The students got 1.8 right out of 5. Mr. Rosling noted that if he gave the test to chimpanzees they would get 2.5 right. So his students’ problem was not ignorance, but that they knew with confidence things that were false.

The issue of action bias is better known in England as the “dangerous dogs act,” after a previous government, confronted with a couple of cases in which dogs injured or killed people, felt the need to bring in a major piece of clumsy and bureaucratic legislation that worked poorly. Undoubtedly the rash of legislation following the current financial crisis will include some equivalents of dangerous dogs acts. It takes unusual courage for a regulator to stand up and say “something must not be done,” lest “something” makes the problem worse.

Motivated reasoning means that we tend to believe what it is convenient for us to believe. If you run an organization called, say, the Asteroid Retargeting Group for Humanity (ARGH) and you are worried about potential cuts to your budget, we should not be surprised to find you overreacting to every space rock that passes by. Regulators rarely argue for deregulation.

The focusing illusion partly stems from the fact that people tend to see the benefits of a policy but not the hidden costs. As French theorist Frédéric Bastiat argued, it’s a fallacy to think that breaking a window creates work, because while the glazier’s gain of work is visible, the tailor’s loss of work caused by the window-owner’s loss of money—and consequent decision to delay purchase of a coat—is not. Recent history is full of government interventions with this characteristic.

“Affect heuristic’” is a fancy name for a pretty obvious concept, namely that we discount the drawbacks of things we are emotionally in favor of. For example, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill certainly killed about 1,300 birds, maybe a few more. Wind turbines in America kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds every year, generally of rarer species, such as eagles. Yet wind companies receive neither the enforcement, nor the opprobrium, that oil companies do.

If lawmakers are to understand how laws get applied in the real world, they need to know and understand the habits of mind of their officials.

Ever have a personal experience of some irrational and unnecessary federal regulation?

I can remember, decades ago, when I was still a student working at factory jobs during the summer, spending weeks and weeks installing OSHA-mandated improvised barriers on machine tools of every sort.

The activity was pointless. The rods, bars, and pieces of sheet metal I was attaching were simply nuisances that would only get in the way. No one wanted them. No one needed them. No one thought they were desirable. But someone in Washington, undoubtedly someone who had never operated a machine tool or worked in a factory, had decreed that a symbolic sacrifice of convenience and efficiency to the safety gods must be performed, and every factory and machine shop in the land was obliged to genuflect and sacrifice.

Nicole V. Crain and W. Mark Crain, in the Wall Street Journal explain that regulations have continued to increase over the years, by now amounting to a serious portion of our national income.

The annual cost of federal regulations in the United States increased to more than $1.75 trillion in 2008, a 3% real increase over five years, to about 14% of U.S. national income. This cost is in addition to the federal tax burden of 21%, for a combined cost of 35% of national income. One out of every three dollars earned in the U.S. goes to pay for or comply with federal laws and regulations, and new policies enacted in 2010 for health care and financial services will increase this burden.

Megan McArdle argues that the era of unionized public sector pension benefits keeping retirees living on full salary for decades is over. Demographics giveth and demographics taketh away.

It was nice that a combination of rising life expectancy and broader pension coverage allowed a large segment of American workers to take what amounted to a multi-decade vacation. (Though this was never quite as widespread as people now “remember”). But this was never going to be sustainable. Retirement experts typically say that retirees should shoot for 75-90% of their working income in retirement (the theory being that some expenses fall, but other expenses rise, and you don’t need to save for retirement when you’re already retired).

That’s fine when the ratio of workers to retirees is 1:12, as it was within the Social Security system in the early years. But by the time you get to 5:1, it starts to pinch—assuming everyone has the same income, each worker has to toss at least 15% of their own income into the pot to support the retirees. Once you get to 2:1—which is where we’re rapidly headed—33% of your income is going to support someone in retirement. Woe betide you if you also have kids.

It’s important to note that this is true no matter how retirement is funded. Whether you collect a dividend check, get a corporate pension, or live off your social security, your retirement is funded by real claims on the output of people in the workforce. Private pensions have a couple of advantages: the investments that fund them actually help make the economy more productive, unlike transfer payments; and they aren’t necessarily indexed to inflation, so over time, as incomes grow, it becomes easier to support the older retirees. But they don’t eliminate the problem; they merely mitigate it.

Mathematically, society simply cannot have a high and growing dependency ratio—at least, not if the retirees expect to be supported in the style to which they have become accustomed. (I take it that this is what is meant by “a decent living and a stable retirement”). We can warehouse people in spartan old folks homes (or treat them like kids and move them into the spare bedroom), in which case they can enjoy a lengthy retirement. Or they can retire for less time, and live more lavishly. But there is no conceivable system that is going to allow the vast majority of the population to spend a full third of their adult life in retirement, at anything like the same standard of living they had when they were working.

The Washington Examiner says it’s time for democrats in Washington to quit kidding themselves. Their economic policies don’t work.

[T]he stimulus bill has proven to be an extraordinary waste of borrowed money that has failed to create jobs, generate economic growth or do much of anything other than line the pockets of White House political allies. That and give $308 million in subsidies to BP before the Gulf oil spill disaster, and subsidize a study on what happens when monkeys snort coke.

As [Christina] Romer [chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, who retired on Friday] fades back to her teaching post at Berkeley, Obama is adding to the economic misery by creating an environment of regulatory uncertainty. The Wall Street reform law Obama recently signed potentially requires 533 new regulations, 60 studies and 93 reports, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has 29 active rulemakings, and there are 100 new rules on the Labor Department’s agenda and 26 at the Transportation Department.

Add Obama’s determination to raise everybody’s taxes by allowing the Bush cuts from 2001 and 2003 to expire Jan. 1, 2011, and it’s easy to why banks, businesses and consumers are hoarding trillions of dollars that could otherwise spur economic growth. And we haven’t even addressed the destructive effect on economic growth of Obama’s nationalization of major portions of the economy, including the banks, health care and the auto industry.

The economy is stalling, unemployment seems stuck at European levels of idleness, the federal deficit and the national debt are at historic highs, public confidence in Congress is at its lowest-ever level and big majorities of Mainstream Americans say Obama has the country on the wrong path. Obamanomics has failed miserably and it’s time for everybody in this town to admit it so we can move on.

The economy is a disaster, the federal government is operating at a deficit unequaled in the history of the Republic, it is essential to find a way of coping with the National Debt in order to restore economic confidence, and the democrats naturally want to raise taxes.

Scott A. Hodge looks at the options for taxing our way back to a balanced budget.

To erase this year’s estimated $1.5 trillion deficit, we would need either to:

Enact a 25% VAT (Greece is still a mess with a 19% VAT);

or,

Take 130% of the taxable profits earned by U.S. companies this year (that’s what you call net opperating losses);

or,

Raise the top three tax brackets (28%, 33%, and 35%) to 100%. Actually, this would still not raise enough money to erase the deficit – of course, assuming all the wealthy taxpayers didn’t flee to Switzerland.

or,

Take 100% of the business income earned by individual taxpayers in 2008.

In other words, new taxes are not the solution to Washington’s deficit problem. That is, unless we want to wreck our economy for decades to come.

Hat tip to James Pethokoukis via the News Junkie.

In debt? Having trouble making ends meet?

J. Kennerly Davis Jr., at the Richmond Times Dispatch, points out that you may have forgotten to add your household’s share of federal debt and unfunded obligations to your personal deficit. Add a negative $1,069,100.

Currently, federal, state, and local government debt, in the form of bonds and other securities, totals approximately $16 trillion. As staggering as this figure is, it doesn’t capture the full scope of the threat that confronts us.

In addition to selling bonds and other securities to borrow money, government at all levels also has made enormous financial commitments over the years, without providing funds to back up these commitments. Currently, the unfunded commitments of the federal government to programs such as Social Security and Medicare total almost $109 trillion.

It’s difficult to grasp the significance of such huge numbers and the real threat they pose to you and your family.

Let’s consider the case of a family living in Richmond. Call the parents Michael and Jennifer. They have been married 10 years, live in the Fan, and have two young sons who attend William Fox Elementary School.

They both graduated from college and have good jobs. Jennifer is a high school teacher and Michael is a corporate financial analyst. Last year they had a combined earned income of just under $125,000, the median income for the typical American two-income professional couple. They are hard-working and financially responsible.

Last year they were able to save approximately $1,500. They took one family vacation trip to Sandbridge. In 2003, they purchased their house in the Fan for $380,000. They are current on their mortgage payments and other monthly bills.

Over the past year or so, Michael and Jennifer have become very concerned about their financial situation. Recently, after reviewing some financial advice columns in The Times-Dispatch, they decided to draw up a household balance sheet to get a snapshot of all their financial assets and liabilities.

Like most Americans, Michael and Jennifer’s home is by far their most valuable asset. Its current market value is approximately $450,000. Their savings and in vestments total just under $76,000. The combined value of their two cars and other personal property is approximately $45,000.

So, altogether, their household assets are worth more than $570,000. The liabilities on their balance sheet are limited as a result of their responsible lifestyle. They owe $266,000 on their mortgage, and approximately $34,000 on their car loans.

When Michael and Jennifer compared their assets to their liabilities, they were pleased to see that the value of their total assets exceeded their total liabilities by about $270,000. They were proud that they had been able to build up this much net worth.

But wait! The balance sheet that Michael and Jennifer prepared does not begin to accurately represent the family’s real financial health and future financial prospects. It does not take account of their household share of federal, state, and local government debt and unfunded commitments.

In round figures their share is:

Federal debt: $108,000 Federal unfunded obligations: $907,100 Virginia debt: $3,100 Virginia unfunded obligations: $30,200 Richmond debt: $16,000 Richmond unfunded obligations: $4,700.
So this young family’s total share of government obligations and debt is $1,069,100.

When these obligations are added to their other liabilities their household ends up in a deep financial hole. Despite all their hard work and responsible financial behavior, decades of financial mismanagement by the government have effectively wiped out the net worth of $270,000 they thought they had. Instead, they owe almost $800,000.

How about you? What does your household balance sheet look like when you factor in $1,069,100 of additional liabilities?

Hat tip to Paul Mirengoff.