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Merit Motives and Government Intervention: Public Finance in Reverse

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Casey B. Mulligan
Tomas J. Philipson

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Abstract

A common view in public finance is that there is an efficiency-redistribution tradeoff in which distortions are tolerated in order to redistribute income. However, the fact that so much public- and private redistributive activity involves in-kind transfers rather than cash may be indicative of merit motives on the part of the payers rather than a preference for the well-being of the recipients. Efficiency-enhancing public policy in a merit good economy has the primary purpose of creating distortions and may only redistribute income from rich to poor in order to create those distortions the reverse of the conventional efficiency-redistribution tradeoff. We discuss why the largest programs on the federal and local level in the US including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Public Schooling seem consistent with the reverse tradeoff rather than the classic one. Transfers are not lump sum in a merit good economy, and explicitly accounting for this when calculating tax incidence reduces the estimated progressivity of government policy. As one example, we calibrate the conventional life-cycle model to show how the amount of over-saving induced on the poor by Social Security hurts them at least as much as the progressive' benefits help them. When the distortions outweigh fiscal transfers in this manner, the classic efficiency-redistribution tradeoff cannot justify the program and the program is far less progressive than conventional analysis suggests.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 7698.

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Date of creation: May 2000
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7698

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H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
H22 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Incidence

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Casey B. Mulligan & Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 2002. "Social Security in theory and practice wth implications for reform," Discussion Papers 0203-01, Columbia University, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  2. Casey B. Mulligan, 2000. "Induced Retirement, Social Security, and the Pyramid Mirage," NBER Working Papers 7679, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Paola Profeta, 2002. "Retirement and Social Security in a Probabilistic Voting Model," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer, vol. 9(4), pages 331-348, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Casey B. Mulligan & Ricard Gil & Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 2002. "Social Security and democracy," Discussion Papers 0102-63, Columbia University, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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