Last month, Morgan Stanley published a research report projecting that U.S. labor force growth will exceed Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections starting in the 2020s, and also asserting that this faster growth “should” delay Social Security’s insolvency, “perhaps by decades.” Specifically, the report stated that “a faster increase in the pool of covered workers is an important factor in the Social Security Trustees’ ‘low cost’ scenario, which would delay the date at which the Social Security trust fund reserves could become depleted from 2034 to 2062.”

My recently-published estimate of the federal costs of Medicare for All (M4A) continues to receive widespread public and press attention.  The ongoing discussion has prompted a number of common questions about the study, which this article attempts to answer. 

Last week the Mercatus Center published my estimates of the cost of the Medicare for All (M4A) bill introduced in the US Senate by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) along with 16 co-sponsors. Although my work on the study began several months ago, the moment of its publication was fortuitous, coinciding with the embrace of M4A by several political candidates across the country. As a result, the level of press attention and public commentary on the study has been overwhelming. AP provided the initial coverage on Monday, leading to several other good articles, such as this one in The Hill. On Wednesday I published a summary of the results in the Wall Street Journal. Countless pieces have been published about the study, including particularly insightful ones from Megan McArdle in the Washington Post and Chris Deaton at The Weekly Standard.

The 2018 Social Security and Medicare trustees’ reports have been released.  For the first time in several years they contain some big (in addition to their usual bad) news: the combined Social Security trust funds and the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund will begin drawing down their reserves this year, on their respective ways to eventual depletion.  In the case of Medicare HI, that depletion is now projected to occur in just eight short years, by 2026.

Last week’s New York Times column by David Leonhardt, asserting that “Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility,” garnered many comments from those predisposed to agree with him.  Leonhardt, rather than analyze how specific policy choices have contributed substantively to the federal fiscal imbalance, instead offered a sweeping characterization of the supposedly contrasting fiscal behaviors of the two major political parties.  The column’s focus on partisan distinctions over policy choices undercuts its informational value, but beyond that its evaluations of the two parties’ historical fiscal policy behaviors are very wrong.

One of the leading economic policy challenges of our time is the persistent decline in workforce participation among working-age Americans. Economists from left to right have cited declining workforce growth as one of the principal barriers to our future economic growth, and thus to our future prosperity.  It’s important to understand the causes of declining workforce participation if we are to take effective action to mitigate it.  Unfortunately, economists are still struggling to fully understand – let alone offer consensus solutions to – this problem.

One needn’t support the recently-enacted tax legislation to be disturbed by the tenor of much criticism of it.  Many opponents, and indeed some press reporting, took for granted that if one voted for a significant tax cut after having expressed longstanding concerns about federal deficits, one must be an irredeemable hypocrite.  But lower taxes and smaller deficits can coexist.

Reports are that America’s pension plans may be on the agenda as President Trump and the Congressional leadership work out an end-of-year deal to keep the government running beyond the two-week stopgap measure passed last week.  It is yet unclear what such pension discussions might involve, but the financial stakes in this policy area are enormous.  Massive underfunding currently threatens the solvency of workplace pension plans, in turn threatening pensioners with severe benefit cuts, employer sponsors with crushing obligations, and insolvency of the entire pension insurance system operated by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).

The Congressional Budget Office has issued a new report on the projected effects of terminating cost-sharing reduction subsidy payments under the Affordable Care Act, as President Trump has repeatedly threatened to do.  These findings are counterintuitive and surprising.