This December, as part of CSIS’s National Security Bad Ideas series, I critiqued Adm. Mullen’s argument that “the most significant threat to our national security is our debt.” The core of my argument is that in recent decades, persistent low interest rates and an economy recovering from a series of shocks mean that the debt is presently not at problematic levels right now:
In absolute and percent of GDP terms, the debt has grown over the last decade and especially under the Trump administration. The deficit was projected to hit $1 trillion in 2020 even before the pandemic occurred, but ended up near $3 trillion due to the ensuing economic recession and stimulus measures. Despite all this, there is no debt spiral, and an assessment of the cost of debt as a share of GDP shows that fears that the deficit would crowd out other spending and investment — while justified in the early 1990s — are misplaced. At its peak in late 1995, debt interest accounted for nearly 5 percent of all economic output. Yet the recent peak in the second quarter of 2020 was still under 3 percent and has since dropped.
I had the honor of a 35 tweet rebuttal from Chris Preble, co-director of the Atlantic Council’s American Engagement Initiative which hosts many great pieces and events. I’ve rolled it up here for ease of reading. His concerns on the deficit are not dependent on who is President, and he has been making the case for years that at the margins we should draw down conflicts and invest more in domestic spending.
Preble aptly summarizes my core point and gamely concedes that there may be particular cases where one can be overly focused on the deficit and that the research does not tie deficits to growth. He then gives a nuanced reading of Eisenhower's the Chance for Peace speech and his larger, balance-oriented governing philosophy. I’d encourage reading the speech, or at least the summary in tweets 6-11. Even if you know the highlights, the speech is quite bracing as one considers the Sino-U.S. security dilemma and the risk that we will both trade away a brighter future. He also captures Eisenhower’s larger philosophy of balance:
But that did not imply hostility to all forms of government spending – only spending that did not increase productivity, or which was not offset by adequate revenues. /15
— Christopher Preble (@capreble) January 22, 2021
Preble then develops the idea of fiscal discipline as a key strategic planning technique, a point also made by Gordon Adams. Strategy is about trade-offs, and if limitations are not front and center it is easy to overextend. Moreover, polling gives good reason to believe that budget-wide fiscal displace would favor domestic investment: butter, not guns. He accurately critiques way that Overseas Contingency Operations undercut the discipline the Budget Caps were intended to engender, and concludes that a sustained expectation of discipline might be the best way to prompt actual thinking and action to resolve present U.S. strategic insolvency.
Balance is the Wrong Approach to Recessions
I think Eisenhower's philosophy of balance makes a great deal of sense when large numbers of workers are not sitting idle. But after the blow suffered by the great recession and as we endure the pandemic and build back after vaccination, I think Furman and Summers make a good case for copious investment.
If you’ll indulge me in an analogy that was cut from my piece, in October I underwent surgery to remove a benign tumor the size of a grapefruit. The health advice I received once I woke up post-surgery strictly limited my exercise. Nothing more strenuous than a good walk for 8 weeks after the hospital. When it came to food, I was on a liquid and then a soft diet. When I tried light aerobic exercise, my doctor said I was scaring him. I cut back and not long thereafter my surgical wound finished closing. In that situation, exercise was bad and ice cream was good. A recessionary economy where interest rates are low, limiting the boost that can be provided by monetary policy, needs spending. As Furman and Summers argue, the Bowles-Simpson attempt at a grand fiscal bargain was the wrong approach:
The Bowles-Simpson plan would over time have represented about a 4 percent of GDP annual shift towards austerity by the end of the decade. Given that for much of the period unemployment was above its sustainable non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) level, this would have adversely impacted aggregate demand. For 5 years during this decade the federal funds rate was at its lower bound and at no point did it exceed 2.5 percent. It is therefore not remotely plausible that a lower rate path could have offset more than a small fraction of the reduction in aggregate demand the fiscal contraction would have produced. The result likely would have been even more economic slack and inflation further below target.
This is of course a hypothetical calculation. Had a major recession ensued, fiscal policy responses would surely have been implemented. The point is that with our current economic environment, fiscal policies need to be set with a view to maintaining full employment.
This would be best done by automatic stabilizers rather than what Matt Yglesias calls an ice cream for everyone party. But we live in a second best world, which brings me to my next point.
How to Sequence Discipline and Domestic Investment
If Furman and Summer are right, and the U.S. budget has slack even outside of recessions, let alone during them, then this strengthens the fiscal sustainability portion of Friedman’s and Logan’s 2012 diagnosis of “foolish but sustainable:”
But reason does not determine U.S. military strategy. Opportunities and constraints do. Americans tolerate waste and foolishness in the name of security primarily because we can afford it. It is not a great over simplification to say that we do what our wealth and relative power allow and call the product a security strategy.
Interest rates can explain why the peace dividend in the 1990s had endured at least in part through 9/11, despite a policy prone towards humanitarian intervention, but that 2013’s budget caps did not hold. Adm. Mullen does not explicitly invoke “debt spiral” when he makes his diagnosis, so I don’t know the exact mechanism he had in mind. But most using that rhetoric point to CBO projections of rising interest rates, which have consistently failed to materialize. I’d argue that the increasing exploitation of the Overseas Contingency Operations account was not so much a failure of will or drafting, but a side effect of the fact that the invisible bond vigilantes never decloaked.
As a result, in the present environment, the primary constraint on the U.S. fiscal budget is political, not economic. We are a sclerotic kludgocracy with many veto points, high polarization, and little trust. Moreover, with increasingly divergent swings between powerful executives, it remains quite tempting to wait out an administration rather than make hard choices. When the constraints are a lack of political agreement rather than true economic hard limits, credibly enforcing discipline is hard as there’s always the slack left in the budget. The magnitude of Ike’s tradeoffs remain stark, but if we want to, we can build both houses for 34,000 Americans and another DDG destroyer rather than having to choose.
I would propose an alternate mechanism that would both give the American people what they are asking for with the secondary effect of applying fiscal discipline via personnel costs: full employment. I think Karl Smith has a credible argument that President Trump came as close to re-election via the electoral college as he did because the economy approached full employment during his term and people remembered that even after the bungled the pandemic contributed to an economic downturn. If we could achieve any sort of bipartisan consensus, I think we should first use it to actually make domestic investments and let that set the stage for discipline.
Once our labor markets are not slack and we start making productive investments, then we will begin to encounter the most relevant of Ike’s observations on genuine limits on military capacity:
“This world in arms is not spending money alone.
— Christopher Preble (@capreble) January 22, 2021
“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. 9/
In general, the national security enterprise is labor-intensive, personnel costs are disproportionately up, and Baumol’s cost disease cannot be overcome by services contracting alone, even if uncrewed systems improve productivity. A medic freed from wartime injuries could be treating the sick at home, anyone that meets the military physical health standards is likely well suited for a wide range of jobs at full employment, and acquisition types could get to address our horrendous transit capital costs. Yglesias also makes plausible argument that policies I favor will likely raise inflation and interest rates over time, getting us back to a more conventional economic system and healthier and more fiscally disciplined place to hash out a better strategy. When economic rather than political factors are the constraint, the fiscal discipline is more credible and can be informed by a new edition of Preble’s The Power Problem, updating Ike’s trade-offs once again in a way that accounts for higher labor costs.
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