September 06, 2010
That mammoth waterfall of ignorance, Thomas Friedman, is at it again. The NYT allowed him to show his ignorance on economics in his Sunday column.
Friedman tells readers that the United States will be in bad financial shape because of all the money needed to bail ourselves out of the recession and also due to the growth in cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
The first point requires a knowledge of intro econ. It actually costs us zero to bail ourselves out the recession. The government can simply run deficits to boost demand. (Friedman apparently does not understand the problem is too little demand right now — we can produce more goods and services than people are buying.)
The government can sell the bonds needed to finance the debt to the Fed (which it is already doing to some extent). The Fed then simply holds the bonds indefinitely. This creates zero burden on the government, since the Fed refunds the interest earned on these bonds to the Treasury. My intro econ students all used to understand this — I guess Friedman never took econ 101 or didn’t have a very good teacher.
Friedman then repeats what his “tutor and friend Michael Mandelbaum” told him:
“‘In 2008’, Mandelbaum notes ‘all forms of government-supplied pensions and health care (including Medicaid) constituted about 4 percent of total American output.’ At present rates, and with the baby boomers soon starting to draw on Social Security and Medicare, by 2050 ‘they will account for a full 18 percent of everything the United States produces.'”
Wow — did Mandelbaum really say this? Did the NYT really allow Friedman to repeat it in its pages? Okay, in the real world, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid accounted for 9.4 percent of GDP in 2008. The projections show that the vast majority of the projected increase in costs in these programs is due to health care costs. However, people who want to cut Social Security lump the program in with the health care programs to advance their agenda.
The post health care reform projections actually show a much slower rate of growth for Medicare and Medicaid. Apparently, Mr. Friedman was not aware of the reform. If the U.S. paid per person health care costs that were comparable to those in any other wealthy country, then the country would be looking at huge long-term budget surpluses.
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