And very cold Tonight lows ten to fifteen ACUA the real field scepter falling below zero with those strong winds that it's still going to be windy through Tomorrow, mostly sunny and very cold to I, I have twenty five real fields and the single digits plustery and bitterly cold. Tomorrow night clear to part the cloudy lows near ten sun will be followed by increasing cloud's Wednesday a high
twenty nine and then mainley cloudy. Thursday will be cold at the period of snow likely which could accumulate one to three inches, especially near and south of Boston. Storm track even farther south could even mean less snow for the area and then not as cold into Friday. I'm accuate with the Vida realogist Brian Hopson WBZ, Boston's News Radio.
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The Four Nations Face Off tournament underway now in Boston at the TD Garden this afternoon, Canada beating Finland five to three. Canada will play for the championship Thursday night at the Garden against Team USA, who have already qualified for that big game. USA, though still has a preliminary game to play tonight against Sweden. After one period of play, USA ahead one to nothing. NBA has been on its All Star break, but now teams getting ready to begin
the stretch run leading up to the playoffs. Celtics getting back to work on Thursday night when they traveled to Philly to play the seventy six ers. WBZ News time is nine oh seven. Back now to Dan Ray and Nightside. I'm Al Griffith.
It's Night Side with Danray on WBZ Costin's News Radio.
Welcome back everyone, Thanks you very much.
Al.
We have heard a lot of talk recently about, certainly in the last month, cuts in Washington, DOGE, the Department of Government Deficiency, Elon musk As the head of that, and I think it's time for us to sort of take a couple of steps back and talk to someone who knows a lot more about the status of our federal debt than any of us. Someone who I have had on this program on several occasions, want to welcome back Professor Jeffrey Myron of Harvard University. Professor Myron, how are you tonight?
Fine? Thank you, nice to be here.
Great to have you back. You're at Harvard. You are a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in Harvard's Economics department. You also are you have a position with the Cato Institute, which many of my many of my listeners are familiar with. And it's this is a very difficult issue for people to get their arms around, and I would like to just to try to start from from this perspective. To get to one billion, you need to have a thousand million. That gets you to one billion.
Then to get to one trillion, you need a thousand billion. And we're at about thirty six trillion in debt. Are we well? I think technically we're underwater. But is that a debt that that we need to be as concerned about to me, it's it's one of them. It's one of the most one of the things that worries me most. Not for my generation I'm a baby boomer, but for subsequent generations. Am I a war reward?
You know? I think you're right to be worried. I would emphasize that it's not just the level of the debt. Of course, the level of debt is a relevant thing to know, but it's that it's likely to be growing at a fast rate, at a much faster rate than the economy is likely to grow, and so it's going to get worse and worse and worse. So debt per
se is not necessarily bad. Billions of people are in debt because they all on their mortgages, but they have enough expectation of future income they think they'll be able to pay it back. The US is in a position where we in effect have such a huge mortgage in terms of commitments to future programs like storal security, medicare, that we're never going to be able to pay for them.
Okay, so let's go to the end of the road. If we get to that point where the debt now again trillion dollars trillion, here trillion. There it's thirty six point two trillion zero, getting towards thirty seven. Our national domestic product, our GDP gross national product is about twenty seven trillion, So our debt dwarfs the the amount of economic activity that we have in the United States in an entire year. It would be as if someone was making one hundred thousand dollars and their debt now was
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Is that too simplistic a way to look at it? Is it? Or is it even worse than that?
I think it's worse than that. I mean, we can easily imagine someone who has the expect a has a job as an expectation the job will continue, and say is going to earn one hundred thousand dollars a year just to take a nice simple round number and purchase as a house worth a million by taking out an eight hundred thousand dollars mortgage. Well, that's a case where the debt is way greater than the rate of income
for that individual. But assuming this person doesn't spend a whole hundred thousand each year, say some each year pays off the mortgage over twenty thirty years, everything will be totally fine. The problem is not just the leafe levels, it's the growth rates. It's the projections, which of course
will never be perfect. But if anything are being too optimistic, it's projections that expenditure, especially on Medicare and Social Security, are going to keep growing faster than GDP, and so that makes our ability to service that debt at some point impossible.
Okay, so you focus on Medicare and Social Security, which are I guess, the pillars of the retirement couch. For most baby boomers, they have a little social Security coming in, they have Medicare available. What is the problem, as you see it, with those the exponential growth of those two programs, I guess is what you're saying to me. Explain it so everybody understands it.
It's that we have promised to make payments to say, support a level of retirement income that is not affordable given the size of our economy and the likely growth rate of our economy. Same thing, we've committed to paying more and more for healthcare for the elderly under Medicare, at to a degree that we can't possibly afford because there just won't be enough tax revenue to possibly pay all of those expenditures. Now, to be clear, we do
not need to eliminate these programs. Nobody is talking about eliminating those programs, but they need to be growing at non surely slower rates than they're currently growing, and unfortunately, no politicians are talking about even doing that, even making modest tweaks to those programs so that they're not bankrupt f in the economy at nearly the same rate.
Now, are these programs Medicare and soci security? Are they what is referred to as unfunded liabilities?
Yes, they can certainly be preferred that also often referred to as entitlements. There's roughly two kinds of programs with the federal government runs under those which are renewed every single year. The Defense budget is are authorized every year, the Department of Transportation, Housing most of the things that we think about, but source security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare. They have been created in a way that they keep spending money every single year at higher, higher rates, even if
Congress does nothing at all. So Congress has to actively step in to adjust the rate that they're spending money. So far, Congress seems to have zero appetite for doing that because, of course for all the people getting them and people expecting to getting them in the near future. These programs are super popular, but at some point they're going to be gone.
Okay, So at some point right after this break, we're going to talk about these programs, going to talk about what is being undertaken by the newly inaugurated Trump administration. They are coming up on their one month anniversary later this week, so they've been in business now for four weeks, actually four weeks this very day. The Trump administration has been in office. They're getting tremendous criticism from their efforts to ask federal employees to resign except severance packages. We
know a little bit about all of this. You know a lot about all of this. We'll talk about this. We'll talk about what can be done.
Now.
Back to Dan Ray live from the Window World of Legs sist Year. I'm doing BSY News Radio.
Talking with Professor Jeff Myron of Harvard Universities and an economist and someone who this is what he lives when we talk about one thing which I think a lot of people get confused, Professor, and this is such an elementary question for you. I'm almost hesitant to ask it. The difference between the federal deficit and the federal debt. Many people use those those terms interchangeably. Just a quick clarification, difference between deficit and debt.
Sure, the deficit is what's happening in this period, say this year. So this year the government had some revenue, it had some expenditure, and the difference is the deficit. Okay, The debt is adding together all the past deficits. So in one year, if you had a deficit of one hundred billion dollars, that at the end of that year,
your debt would also be one hundred billion. But the next year you have another deficit of another one hundred billion, your debt is two hundred billion dollars, because it's the past deficit plus any new deficit that you've accumulated going forward a year, and you just keep adding that up. So the debt is the sum of all of our
past deficits and surpluses. And the fact that we have such a large debt relative to GDP means that on the whole, we've almost always had deficits, and increasingly, in the last sort of ten years, bigger and bigger deficits. So that the death is just going to keep getting bigger and bigger.
Yeah, it's growing exponentially. So again, these are just some figures that I know figures are tough on radio, but just your comment on these. Nineteen seventy that's obviously long time ago, that's fifty years ago, but it's within the memory of many people in my audience. Our federal debt was about a third three hundred and seventy one billion dollars.
It was the third of the trillion dollars. Now our debt has ballooned to thirty six point two trillion dollars as of last month, and it just seems to grow. In two thousand, it was up to five trillion. In twenty ten, more than double it was two. It was thirteen trillion twenty twenty. Another ten years, it was twenty six trillion two thousand and twenty four. Obviously COVID had a big part to do with this. It really exploded to thirty five, which is what we're concerned about. How
we get out of this. We talked earlier today, and you have kind of a dystopian view that that even what what Elon Musk is attempting to do is not going to make a huge difference.
Correct, Correct, I don't think it's just my view. I think of that majority of that.
I'm not just contributing it to you. I apologize.
I mean, and it's pretty simple arithmetic. If you take the salaries of all federal employees, all of them, for every possible department, divisions, agency, and get something like four hundred billion dollars, but the government expenditure is something close
to seven trillion dollars. So you could cut every single employee, eliminate their salaries, eliminate their pensions, and you still would make a very very small dent in the amount that we're spending per year because of very large percentage of what we spend is medicare, another large percentage of so security, another large percent is the interest on the debt that we've already accumulated, plus government spending, and then all the other stuff that Dooze is worrying about, some of which
should absolutely go. I'm not that's a different question, but in terms of balancing the budget, it's going to make it most a tiny difference.
So if we're spending seven trillion, we're only taking in how many trillion are we taking in in all taxes, what for maybe four trillion, five trillion.
And I think it's a little higher than that, but I don't think we're out quite deficits of two trip. But yes, in that ballpark. I mean, so we have that it's trillions of dollars per year each year we're coming short in terms of having expenditure that's greater than revenue by several trillion. That starts to add up at a really fast rate.
Okay, So if if Elon Musk came to you that said, what can I do to really have an impact? I mean, he's got people marching in the streets right now because they're asking for people to take a severance package. There's a lot of people out there would like a severance package who are ready to retire. And you mentioned that some of the people who have taken the severage package were prepared to retire within a couple of months and now they're going to be get a severance to September.
What you're saying is something's going to be done with soci security, something's going to be done with medicare. What can be done with social security realistically or unrealistically, take whichever you want.
Well, at some level. Almost everything sounds unrealistic because it's put all the changes that would go in the right direction are politically unpopular, but things that one can imagine would be slowly, not all at once, but gradually phasing in slightly higher ages of eligibility for people to start collecting Social Security paths its. First of all, that happened once in the United States, in nineteen eighty six, we passed the law that has been over the past roughly
forty years, phasing in higher and higher ages. Roughly, it used to be everybody's got it at sixty five. Now people's age of full benefits is postponed to sixty seven, sixty eight, et cetera. So that goes in the right direction. You could have the rate at which benefits go up not be quite as big, a slightly less generous formula than has been the case in the past.
As a cost a living increase. Right.
Other two pieces, Once you start collecting benefits, the benefits you get per year goes up with the consumer price index, but the amount that we pay the new beneficiaries goes up with the rate of growth of wages, which is typically sort of one to two percent higher than the rate of growth of prices, So you could imagine cutting that back a little bit. And the point is that would be have a very very small effect on people retiring in the next you know, three to five years.
They have a slightly bigger effect on people retiring pay ten years from now. So it would not be crushing anyone. It would not be yanking the rug out from under in a major way. It would be spreading the adjustment over decades and decades over generation. And you could do analogous things with medicare. Instead of everybody getting in sixty five, people who are say sixty or younger don't get it
till there's sixty five and a half. They not ideal, obviously from the perspective of those people, but not catastrophic. And then people who are fifty five and younger face a little bit longer delay and things like that. So these are things which you know, economists think are sort of natural, but they don't pull well. No politicians seems
to want to endorse them. So it's hard to figure out what sucks are going to happen until we just get to some crisis so huge that we end up kind of defaulting on the debt and that's a form of a huge tax levee. But it's not. It's a painful way to do it. There will be a lot of chaos and a lot of waste resources that go along if we do it that way.
Okay, let's assume that we wrote we increase taxes, and we taxed literally at the rate of ninety of of you know, an immense number of people. Or let's say we taxed everybody at one hundred percent. That would have an impact, but not going to have a great impact besides destroying the economy. Correct.
I think that would have a very counter productive impact. Because if you have tax rates that are above some range, it's probably not much different than the current range. People start evading and avoiding, moving to Canada, moving to Europe, finding Swiss back. They will do all manner of things to avoid having to pay those super high tax rates. So you will have made the economy less productive, you
won't collect any extra tax revenue. You will be on the wrong side of the Laffer curve if you increase rates by those sort of amounts. And so that's not a sensible thing to do that because a it won't work. It's just it's it's incredibly counterproductive.
So we're in a conundrum here from which politically there's going to be You won't have enough members of the four hundred and thirty five members of the House or the one have been members of the Senate who would bite the bullet in maybe maybe right the end of their political career. Is that's really the problem, as I see you outlining it.
That is exactly the problem. And sometimes weird things happen. Maybe when people start to get really scared, there will be some grand bargain that will address the issue, but in a way that doesn't kick in for ten or twenty years, so it's not so relevant or the current members of Congress. But we haven't seen that many countries ever do that. We've seen a lot of countries have
fiscal meltdowns where they did default on their debt. They did have huge disruptions to their economy because they kept kicking the can down the road until all of a sudden there was nowhere left to kicket.
And when there's nowhere left to kick it, the currency is devalued. Is that not the to move?
So I mean it is in one level of solution. If the government starts printing more and more money that creates higher inflation. That inflation reduces the value of the debt we owe, and so it's a form of a tax increase, but it does likely lead to such high rates of inflation that it's incredibly disruptive of the economy. So you'll not only have this tax increase, but you'll have all sorts of counterproductive behavior going on as people
try to avoid this inflation. Dex will be like Argentina was, and lots of other countries have been that ended up in hyperinflations. So that's not an ideal way to address the issue, either, doing something like slowing the growth of expenditure in a gradual way that doesn't throw people out on the street, but that still over decades, does get the growth rate down. I think that's the least bad thing to do given where we.
Are, and it's still there's still time, but time in that hourglass is quickly slipping away. According to what I hear from you and from what I know, you firmly believe yes.
And I think what bothers a lot of economists is that it's been hard to predict in past episodes in various countries when the hour glass is going to run out, and you can sort of see it coming, and yet things are going along okay, and they keep seem to go along okay, and then people start to say, gee, you've been crying wolf for years now and everything's okay, and so you keep going. But then boom, out of nowhere,
something pushes you over the edge. And that has happened to lots of economies over the centuries.
My guest, my extraordinary guest, is my friend, Professor Jeffrey Myron of Harvard University. Now he's the senior lecturer, director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard's Economic Department. We will take questions for the callers right after the break. Professor, thank you so much for your time tonight, and I'm going to try to prevail upon you to stick with us until the end of the hour. I know, I I assume classers are back tomorrow, so I'm probably.
Probably have I'm happy, happy to stay well.
I'll tell you you're reaching a lot of people, and these are people who are hearing what you say. You explained it so clearly. It is truly a gift that you have. But it's a gift that my audience now can enjoy. We'll get to phone calls. The only line that is, I only have one line six one, seven, nine, three, one,
ten thirty. All the other lines are full up. I'll let you know when they open up, but right now six one, seven, nine, three, one, ten thirty and again, questions not speeches, please everyone coming back on Nightside.
It's night Side with Dan Ray on w B Boston's news radio.
My guest, Professor Jeffrey Meran of Harvard University. We'll go to phone calls. Here we go. We're going to start off with Andrea in Newton, Massachusetts. Andrea, welcome to Nightside. You're on with jeff Myron of Harvard University.
Go ahead, Andrea, Hi, good evening, Thank you for taking my call. CAN certainly stand what you're saying. My house budget doesn't work if I work in a deficit. I
understand that. But what I don't understand is why part of the conversation on my question is part of the conversation isn't that all these boomers that are responsible for this raging increase have been paying into this involuntary government investment account for forty five years in the understanding that they would have so security and medicare at the end
of it. Why wouldn't it be a subject of a class action suit for having taken all this money from these taxpayers and psycho payers for all these years and not find it at the end when they were expecting to get it.
Well, that's the cause of action. There is sort of a contract argument, Professor. At the same time that our government doesn't have very deep pockets. I don't know how you're going to get any more, honey, how you going to get blood out of a stone. I understand Andrew's question, and I think it's a great question. Andrew. I'm a baby boomer like you are. We paid in all of these years. It would have been great if we could have voluntarily taken that money that went to Social Security
invested in the stock market. I think we would have had a better rate of return. Jeff Myron going Professor.
Myron, So, I completely understand the question, and it's completely reasonable. Unfortunately, despite the hype, despite the way that politicians have tried to portray Source Security, it is not an investment vehicle. It is not a savings mechanism. The money that people are paying in in their taxes in the years that they're working, is flowing out more or less instantly within months or year to people who are already retired collecting benefits. So it is the lingo in economics is it's a
pay go system. Pay as you go. We take money from the working and transfer it, not invest it, not say that we train answer it to people who are eligible to collect benefits. And so the frustration of people as anders is completely reasonable and understandable, But I don't think they have any legal course of action because that's not the structure of the system. It's the hype that politicians have perpetuated to make people think that they're investing their money. But they have quick comment.
When Social Security began in the nineteen thirties, how many workers were supporting how many pensioners? And what is that correlation today?
Oh, the ratio of people working to receiving was much much much higher. Was I don't remember exactly, but ten or twenty to one. That's because initially very few people were eligible, but everybody was initially subjected to the taxes.
Now I think it's down to something like two to one, and it just keeps getting worse because on average, COVID is disruption aside, we are living longer, so there are more people who are above the age of eligibility, and rates are low, so there are fewer and fewer people in the working age population relative to the total number who are eligible. So the demographics definitely made it worse and worse over time.
Andrew, you asked a great question. I hope you realize the answer is totally accurate in terms of what our options are.
I do understand what you're essentially saying. Is that not an investment but in fact an additional tax Closer to where you said, it's an untenable tax rate.
It's a transfer program. It's transferring funny from the working age population to the retired age population. And that may be good or bad for various reasons, but that's the structure of the existing program.
You know, Andrew, you've heard the phrase living is the best revenge. The baby boomers a living, and some would argue it was a Ponzi scheme. I don't know if Jeff Myron would go that far, but.
I don't think I would haul at that. I'm not sure that helps illuminate, but it has been missold. So I would simply say politicians wanted people to think of it as saving and investing because that sounded better than the reality. But the reality is, unfortunately, it's just taxing and transferring.
Well, we remember when al Gore in two thousand referred to social security was in a lock box, but no one could find the locked box. I would reply, if it wasn't so, I would laugh if it wasn't so sad. Great questions.
Thanks Andrea, Thank you.
You're welcome. Let me go next to Dina in Boston. Dina, you are next one. Nice. I have a professor Jeff Myron of Harvard University.
Go ahead, Dina, thank you for hacking my call. If sorry, I have a question, when what do we learned to the previous call. I am on social Security and on Medicare. But the tax taxing our social security, and when we get our social Security check, we have to pay a certain amount of Medicare, so in we're like almost contributing to what we're getting.
To get you and going is what you're saying, Dane, go right ahead, professor.
I mean what you said is certainly is correct. The unfortunate is that to some degree people are not being taxed enough and or are getting not being asked to pay big enough premiums to make the system solvent, to make it, you know, to make it balance out over time. Now, there's specific ways in which economists would suggest adjusting the cause and benefits that you get from being in, say
the Medicare program. So not necessarily raising the premiums you have to pay, but we're increasing the copays and deductibles. And the reason for that is that if people face big copais and deductibles, then for initial levels of expenditure, it's out of pocket and they will think a bit
harder about do I really need this or not. That means less expenditure under the program, and maybe also somewhat better choices about whether people should get all the medical care that's being pushed on them by the healthcare system. But that's still negative for the people who's the beneficiary, there's no question. But that's the reality. We can't afford what we've promised ourselves, and so somebody has to bear that that cut.
It's just funny because when I've turned sixty five, I got comments from the previous you know, the next generation saying, well, now you have free insurance, so.
Absolutely it is not free.
I mean it's supplemental or they'll fign you for the rest.
Of your life. Yes, I means to provide it does provide a benefit. You're getting more, you're getting something which you wouldn't get if you had no insurance. But instead calling it free is absolutely not right. That's right if I could just.
Jump in being it for one question, for one quick question for Professor Myron, and that is that I know that this question might sound a little off the wall, but I remember talking to a heart surgeon in New York who told me that there were people who arrive in New York, maybe not every day, but with some frequency, who are well into their seventies or eighties and who
are in need of heart surgery. They've never lived in this country before, they appear at the airport, they collapse when they come off the plane, and they are taken to some of the best heart surgeons in the world. I mean, we do have a lot of people who come here at an advanced age and they have never contributed to any of these programs, and I'm not mistaken they still benefit from them.
That Professor I did not think one was eligible for Medicare unless one had been a resident and participating in the social security system for some number of years. I might be wrong about that, but I think.
Well security, so security free care, right free care, free care.
And now again some would say, well, this is anecdotal, And I used to criticize John Sober for using anecdotal evidence. Now that i'm his age, I will use this. But I have a friend of mine, as a Heartschurger in New York, has told me that that people have arrived, and he's told me the countries. I'm not even going to mention the countries, but they come here and it's like they they collapse, and they know before they got here that they have serious heart problems and maybe even
have some Clark gunderies. We're not going to let him die at the airport, is what We're a generous exactly, Professor Iron on this, Professor.
I just I just looked at up okay, and so I'll tell you. And this is from the government's website, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Just to be eligible for Medicare, you must be sixty five or older, be a US resident, and either a US citizen or an alien who has been lawfully admitted for permit residence and been residing in the United States for five continuous years prior to the month of filing an application for Medicare. So there is some residency requirement if you're not a
US resident, US citizen. So now there may well be hospitals that choose to donate their services to people coming conversities for whatever reason, but that's a separate question.
And they donate services that yeah, okay, so they donate this services and decided to do pro bono, arguably they're not going to be compensated for it. Okay, right, okay, okay, thank.
You, thank you, Okay, thank you, Yes, thank you very much.
Tonight, take a quick break. My guess is Professor Jeff Myron. He looks things up. I'm thank you, professor. I have been I've had been corrected here many times in my program, but never as quickly or as thoroughly as I just was corrected. Thanks so much. Back at nights Side with Professor Jeff Myron of Harvard University right after this.
Now back to Dan ray Mine from the Window World Night Side Studios on.
W b Z News Radio. My guest Professor Jeff Myron of Harvard University Professor. One little comment that I like to make is that in the US, it is my understanding hospital emergency rooms are required to provide treatment regardless of insurance or ability to pay. And I think that is the loophole by which a lot of people do receive medical care, whether it's Medicare or are not Medicare in America.
So I think that's right, but I think it doesn't necessarily apply it all possible care. It applies to emergency, right.
So if you get off play in New York and you and you have a couple of arteries blocked, you might you might be as for open heart surgery. Is what that doctor had told me. So anyway, but but I thank you for that, for that correction. Let me get real quickly, Heather in Arlington a lot of women callers, which is always great here on nightside, Heather, you run with Professor Jeff Myron.
Oh, hi, how are you?
And Dan? I know what you're thinking of. So if somebody does go into the er and they are having, like say, needed open heart surgery, they the hospital will look and see do you qualify for free care? What do you qualify for? Do you do you need math health to do a math health application, then if it's math health, which is like Medicaid, then you can back build to the date of when the application was done.
Gotcha, Thank you. What's your question for Professor Myron?
So my question is what I wanted to ask, is you know how they Trump has his tax break that he's going to be giving to the wealthier to corporation. So if that if you tax corporations, say the same that where tax like regular medical Middle America, would that help with the deficit or what would that look like?
So moderate tax increases relative to where we are will certainly tend to help the deficit. They'll be more revenue coming in. If you try to reduce the deficit a substantial amount and therefore over time reduce the debt by substantial amount with tax increases, you'd find that it ended up being counterproductive because much higher tax rates will induce more evasion and avoidance, people moving to other countries, people hiding their activities, and he's going underground, and so on.
In terms of corporations, economists don't make as big a distinction between corporations versus people because corporations are owned by people, and they employ people, and they sell their goods to people. So if we try to raise tax revenue by taxing corporations, the impact the incidents of that will be on several different groups, partially on the shareholders of the corporation, but also on these other groups like the employees and the
people who buy the product. In the extreme case, to take one example, if you had a very very high corporate income tax rate, a lot of corporations are going to move overseas. They're going to stop employing US workers and employ people in Ireland or Thailand or whatever. So that might have a distributional consequence which people wouldn't like. So that's not an obvious way. I mean, I'm not
saying the current rate is exactly the right rate or not. Actually, I think in my view, ideally the corporate tax rate should be zero and we should be that they were always taxing people and tax them directly, and you can still have a very progressive system that tax is hiring the people more heavily, but do it by directly taxing people.
Great question, Heather, great question, Thank you. We've had three great callers. Great questions. Thanks Heather. Let me get Joe and Bellmont here. Joe, you got to be quick for me getting tight on time.
Go right ahead, Dan, It is better to light a candle than to curse the doc.
Now, do me a favor. Just ask whatever question you want Joe with Professor Myron.
Okay, I just wanted to take fifteen seconds to give you more encouragement than three things you're very good at patriotism number one, do.
Me a Joe. Save that for another night. I don't want to waste Professor's time. All with all deference to you, I appreciate you have a question for the professors.
The question is, doctor, uh, do you if printing of money is causing the depth? Why does the government meant print more money? And what are for other ten reasons for the thirty six trillion?
Okay, good, gotcha, professor. Why are we continuing to print money? I guess we I guess the government feels it's necessary.
Printing money is one way a government can raise revenue, because when the government prints the money, it owns the money, so that then it can go and buy stuff that would otherwise have to pay for it by having raised other kinds of taxes. The question with any tax is how high should it be and how should it be balanced against other kinds of taxes, and the experience for a long long time is you print tons of money, you get inflation that's out of control and that's very disruptive for e comedies.
Thanks Joe for the question. Appreciated. Let me go to Jay in Boston. J got about less than a two minutes. Go right ahead. You're on, Professor Jeff Myron.
I'll make it real quick, Dan, I'll make it real quick.
Thank you.
So I was looking at up twenty two percent of the federal budgets going toward Social Security right now. So my question is forty six and they've been talking for years there. You know, by the time you reach retirement age, you're not going to have Social Security. So I mean just a ballpark, I mean estimate, going the route we're going right now with social Security? How long do you think we have left? I mean because I always thought
it was self funded. I didn't realize that the government actually borrowed from it back in like nineteen eighty two. So I'm just curious, like what your thoughts are, like they did they ever pay back that money? And how long we have left to Social Security?
Like what do you what do you think to give is he needs some time to answer the question. I believe that right now that sociecurity runs out in a few years.
Yeah, and about ten years. So under the current rules, if there's no change in any of the parameters, we will start having deficits in the Social Security Trust Fund approximately twenty thirty three thirty four. And at that point, the rule says that all benefit payments have to be cut so that the ratio of revenue coming in to payments going out is not exceeded. And that number looks
like it'll be about seventy five percent. So benefits starting in about ten years are going to be cut about twenty five percent for everyone already retired and to be retired later. So that's not nothing. Seventy five percent is more than zero, but it's a noticeable cut.
Jay, great question, Thank you, Dain.
Always a pleasure, guys, thank you so much. Great show, Thank you, thank you.
Absolutely great, great hour with a great guest. To the callers in the line, I apologize you got a call earlier, Professor Jeff Myrone. There's no way I can thank you for the clarity of the and the accuracy of the information you have once again provided for us and thank you so much. There's nothing more I can say other than I owe you greatly.
My pleasure to be here. I really enjoyed it.
Thank you so much. We'll talk again. I'd love to get you on at some point, maybe a few months from now, and see how this administration is doing, if they're if they're being successful or not. Professor, By the way, do you have a recent book that we could mention, because what can I help you?
You could mention my substack that's called libertarian Land and that discusses these and all sorts of other.
Interesting issues on sub stack Liberty. Yes, okay, thank you so much, appreciate it very much. All right, and we get back. We're going to talk about the weather, a little simpler topic to deal with and one that all of us can relate to. Although Jeff Meyern did a great job, and I really believe me when I say these one of my favorite guests. We're going to be talking with Isaac Longley of ACU Weather. How long is
this going to last? And I don't remember February ever being this cold, and I've been around this part for a long time. Back on Night Side, right after the ten o'clock news,