IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/10953.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Has the Unified Budget Undermined the Federal Government Trust Funds?

Author

Listed:
  • Sita Nataraj
  • John B. Shoven

Abstract

In order to ease the burden on workers during the retirement of the baby boom generation, the 1983 Social Security Reforms set payroll taxes above the level needed to pay current benefits, thus partially prefunding the baby boomers' retirement. The military and civil service retirement programs followed suit in the mid-1980s and switched from pay-as-you-go financing to funded systems. The excess income generated by these retirement programs was held in the federal trust funds, which have accumulated almost $3 trillion since the reforms took place. However, this paper presents evidence that the trust fund build-up may not help future generations due to the adoption of the Unified Budget in 1970. The Unified Budget includes trust fund receipts as income and trust fund payments as expenditures. The empirical evidence suggests that attempts to balance the Unified Budget while the trust funds were generating surpluses has led to increased government spending and personal and corporation income tax cuts within the rest of the federal government. There is no evidence of increased government saving as a result of the trust fund accumulations. An alternate theory of increased national saving is also explored, where increased payroll taxes accompanied by decreased income taxes induces higher personal saving. This mechanism, suggested by Diamond, also does not appear to have significantly enhanced the wealth of future generations.

Suggested Citation

  • Sita Nataraj & John B. Shoven, 2004. "Has the Unified Budget Undermined the Federal Government Trust Funds?," NBER Working Papers 10953, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10953
    Note: EFG AG PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10953.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bosworth, Barry & Burtless, Gary, 2004. "Pension Reform and Saving," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 57(3), pages 703-727, September.
    2. Kent Smetters, 2003. "Is the Social Security Trust Fund Worth Anything?," NBER Working Papers 9845, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sylvester J. Schieber, 2010. "Aging Populations, Pension Operations, Potential Economic Disappointment and Its Allocation," NBER Chapters, in: Demography and the Economy, pages 293-325, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Jagadeesh Gokhale & Kent Smetters, 2005. "Measuring Social Security’s Financial Problems," Working Papers wp093, University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center.
    3. Robert Grafstein, 2009. "Antisocial Security: The Puzzle of Beggar‐Thy‐Children Policies," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 53(3), pages 710-725, July.
    4. Marcelin Joanis & Claude Montmarquette, 2005. "La problématique de la dette publique au Québec : causes, conséquences, solutions," CIRANO Burgundy Reports 2005rb-06, CIRANO.
    5. Liu, Liqun & Rettenmaier, Andrew J. & Saving, Thomas R. & Wang, Zijun, 2017. "The effects of trust fund surpluses on the rest of the federal budget," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 228-237.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Liu, Liqun & Rettenmaier, Andrew J. & Saving, Thomas R. & Wang, Zijun, 2017. "The effects of trust fund surpluses on the rest of the federal budget," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 228-237.
    2. Sylvester J. Schieber, 2010. "Aging Populations, Pension Operations, Potential Economic Disappointment and Its Allocation," NBER Chapters, in: Demography and the Economy, pages 293-325, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. David Robalino, 2005. "Pensions in the Middle East and North Africa: Time for Change," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 7427, December.
    4. Shantanu Bagchi, 2023. "Means Testing and Social Security in the U.S," Working Papers 2023-01, Towson University, Department of Economics, revised Mar 2023.
    5. Timm Bönke & Markus M. Grabka & Carsten Schröder & Edward N. Wolff, 2020. "A Head‐to‐Head Comparison of Augmented Wealth in Germany and the United States," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 122(3), pages 1140-1180, July.
    6. Eduardo Walker & Fernando Lefort, 2002. "Pension Reform And Capital Markets: Are There Any (Hard) Links?," Abante, Escuela de Administracion. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile., vol. 5(2), pages 77-149.
    7. Sergey A. Budko & Dmitry Yu. Fedotov, 2017. "World Experience and Russian Practice of the Pension System’s Revenue Formation: Mathematic Methods of Estimation," Journal of Tax Reform, Graduate School of Economics and Management, Ural Federal University, vol. 3(3), pages 199-215.
    8. Takashi Oshio, 2004. "Social Security and Trust Fund Management," NBER Working Papers 10444, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Gary Burtless, 2004. "The Age Profile of Income and the Burden of Unfunded Transfers in Four Countries: Evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study," LIS Working papers 394, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    10. El Mekkaoui de Freitas, Najat & Oliveira Martins, Joaquim, 2014. "Health, pension benefits and longevity: How they affect household savings?," The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, Elsevier, vol. 3(C), pages 21-28.
    11. Bagchi, Shantanu, 2019. "Differential mortality and the progressivity of social security," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 177(C), pages 1-1.
    12. repec:dau:papers:123456789/9826 is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Jagadeesh Gokhale & Kent Smetters, 2003. "Fiscal and generational imbalances: new budget measures for new budget priorities," Policy Discussion Papers, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, issue Dec.
    14. Jung, Juergen & Tran, Chung, 2022. "Social health insurance: A quantitative exploration," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    15. repec:dau:papers:123456789/12130 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Kent Smetters, 2003. "Is the Social Security Trust Fund Worth Anything?," NBER Working Papers 9845, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Oshio, Takashi, 2004. "Social security and trust fund management," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 18(4), pages 528-550, December.
    18. Karen E. Smith & C. Eugene Steuerle & Pablo Montagnes, 2004. "Providing Guarantees in Social Security," Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College 2004-21, Center for Retirement Research.
    19. Heikki Oksanen, 2009. "Setting targets for government budgets in the pursuit of intergenerational equity," European Economy - Economic Papers 2008 - 2015 358, Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission.
    20. Roel Beetsma & Heikki Oksanen, 2007. "Pension Systems, Ageing and the Stability and Growth Pact," CESifo Working Paper Series 2141, CESifo.
    21. Bagchi Shantanu, 2017. "Can removing the tax cap save Social Security?," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 17(2), pages 1-28, June.
    22. Zandberg, Eelco & Spierdijk, Laura, 2013. "Funding of pensions and economic growth: are they really related?," Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, Cambridge University Press, vol. 12(2), pages 151-167, April.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H0 - Public Economics - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10953. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.