CAR – nice rundown of the interview. I was interested in the general revenue sharing to state and local governments that Shiller mentioned. Maybe that’s something that could help for a couple of years. Not sure. Tried to do some reading and came upon this. Revenue sharing again?
Excerpt:
As Shiller notes, GRS was a Richard Nixon initiative. What Shiller doesn’t say, however, is that Nixon proposed it right after the U.S. had a $3.2 billion budget surplus in fiscal 1969. That was the year the Social Security and other trust funds were added to the rest of the budget to create the “unified” presentation recommended by the 1967 President’s Commission on Budget Concepts. That year the approximately $3.8 billion surplus in the trust funds overwhelmed the $507 million on-budget deficit (“millions” seem quaint by today’s standards) to create the unified surplus. But in the immediate years that followed, the growing spending for the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia meant the trust fund surplus wasn’t large enough to offset the on-budget deficit. In fact, there wasn’t another surplus until the Clinton administration in 1998.
Seems to me it’s easy to bail someone out if you have the money to do it.
