Sooner or later the US will find itself grappling with an immense fiscal problem. The recession and stimulus have combined to produce record-breaking deficits, and economic recovery will not come close to restoring balance. US voters have big questions to answer about the entitlements they demand and the taxes they are willing to pay.

This dismal outlook might not seem the ideal setting for a call to new ambition in US social policy. But that is exactly what Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, scholars at the Brookings Institution, issue in their new book, Creating an Opportunity Society.

Unreal as such a summons might seem just now, the authors should be congratulated for refusing to be deflected – and not only because their book is full of excellent analysis and proposals. In two ways, their effort turns out to be well timed after all.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.

My new column for National Journal agrees with the Fed that bankers’ pay needs to be supervised, but warns that by itself this will do little to improve financial safety.

The pay changes that the Fed proposes are worth making, but by themselves are insufficient. Other regulatory reforms in the works would do more to promote safety — and, indirectly, curb the excesses of Wall Street pay at the same time. Regulators are proposing to increase the capital that banks and other financial firms are required to set aside against the risk of loans or other assets going bad. They are also considering new rules on leverage (the amount of borrowing a firm can do as a multiple of its equity) and liquidity (the amount of easily salable assets it must hold). A financial institution with more capital, less leverage, and more liquidity would be a safer operation — and a less profitable one.

In thinking about future financial regulation, that is the fundamental trade-off. Taxpayers have learned that Wall Street’s profits, and the fabulous pay that went along with them, have come partly at their expense. In effect, the industry has enjoyed a disguised public subsidy, in the form of a promise to underwrite its losses when things go wrong. Heads we win, tails you — the taxpayer — lose. In demanding a safer financial industry, as we should, we will be withdrawing that subsidy and thus insisting on a somewhat smaller and less profitable industry as well.

This, in turn, will mean less-outlandish pay. Shareholders in banks and Wall Street firms have given their employees a very generous deal in recent years — far better than they have had themselves — handing over about half of their revenues in pay. If finance shrinks, pay in finance will shrink. Reviewing the wreckage of the past two years, both of those things look eminently desirable.

Adair Turner of the UK Financial Services Authority gave a very good speech on the causes and implications of the financial crisis yesterday in Washington. The event was hosted by National Journal and the Economic Club of America. Video here for National Journal subscribers. Transcript here.

The speech drew on a new FSA discussion paper, prepared for a conference in London on Monday: well worth reading. I think I have already recommended this earlier discussion paper, which I still think gives one of the best overviews of the entire shambles.

This morning I took part in an event organized by Georgetown Law and the Aspen Institute: a conversation with Ken Feinberg, special master for executive compensation at firms receiving assistance under the TARP, followed by a panel discussion on some of the issues he raised, featuring Mike Oxley, Chris Brummer, John Olson and Nell Minow. Following last week’s announcements on pay, the session was very well-timed.

Perhaps it is stating the obvious, but Feinberg is an extremely impressive man, with a remarkable appetite for difficult assignments. This may be his hardest job yet. I thought his comments were interesting. If you have a couple of hours to spare, you can watch video of the entire event here.

In a new column for National Journal I ask what needs to happen before this problem is taken seriously.

The public debt stands at nearly $8 trillion and within 10 years, according to Congressional Budget Office projections, it will be more than $14 trillion. Getting to that second figure in one piece depends on two things. Some optimistic economic assumptions need to hold, and investors need to be willing to lend the government another $6 trillion. Taking either of these things for granted would be foolish.

Almost everybody in Washington agrees that the fiscal outlook is scary. Almost everybody says that something must be done. But the options for confronting the problem come down to spending cuts or tax increases, and as soon as you mention either, an embarrassed silence descends.

The politicians are not as worried as they say they are. And the same is true of the public. If you believe the polls, voters are more anxious about public borrowing than their politicians are — but not so worried as to welcome a rise in taxes (their own taxes, I mean) or cuts in Social Security or Medicare. They may be nervous about policies that would add to the fiscal problem — hence their hesitation over health care reform — but meaningful subtractions from the problem are a different matter.

Can anything be done? We have been here before. Washington has a time-honored procedure for such cases. Rather than thinking about entitlement reform or tax reform, it thinks about process reform.

And I go on to argue that process reform–despite the risk that it will degenerate into mere displacement activity–is not to be despised. In the past it has been a qualified success. Better that than having to deal with an otherwise unavoidable train wreck. You can read the whole column here.

Further to the previous post, this column by Ross Douthat is on the same page regarding the financial consequences of health reform. He advocates a more limited form of universal access–to coverage with a very high, income-related deductible, or so-called catastrophic insurance. As he says, this has been proposed by Martin Feldstein and Brad DeLong, conservative and liberal respectively, so the idea has cross-party appeal.

There’s certainly a lot to be said for this approach. Feldstein and DeLong differ in important ways (DeLong wants to shut down private health insurance altogether) but they agree that the taxpayer should pay for healthcare expenses above a high threshold, and that the tax deduction for employer-provided insurance (which costs more than $200 billion a year) should be abolished to pay for it. Either of their plans would strengthen the individual incentives to economise up to the threshold. I only wonder if a deductible as high as they envisage (15% of gross income; DeLong favors an income-tax increase of 5 percentage points on top of that) could be made to stick.

I think this FT leader is very good. First it says that public money underwrites the bonuses banks are getting ready to hand out. That is a familiar point but one that deserves to be emphasised. Then it puts its finger on something mentioned less often. These huge bonus pools are diverting funds that could be used to build capital, which the industry as a whole urgently needs to do.

The problem is not limited to the bonuses on which political debate has unhelpfully focused. It is widely agreed that variable pay must be designed to discourage risks to the economy. But current plans for regulating pay will not limit the total amount bankers extract from profits, which could instead be added to capital.

In principle, other planned regulation – strong insolvency regimes and risk-sensitive capital requirements – can limit banks’ profits from risks underwritten by others. But it will take years before these are credibly enforced.

Yes. At the present rate of progress, in fact, one wonders if they will ever be credibly enforced. In any event, regulation of the overall level of bankers’ pay, not just its design with respect to risk-taking, is evidently going to be needed–something I never expected to say.

An excellent column by Henry Aaron and Isabel Sawhill.

So here is what we propose: Congress should enact a value-added tax, the equivalent of a broad-based sales tax on all goods and services. It should take effect only after unemployment has fallen to a predetermined level or in, say, five years, whichever comes first. Congress should link revenue from the new tax and other sources directly to public health-care spending through a newly created health-care trust fund. The trust fund would pay for all federal health-care spending. This framework would mean that Americans would get the health care they are willing to pay for. If spending outpaces projections, Congress will have to choose between raising taxes and finding ways to slow the growth of spending.

By balancing revenue and health-care spending, such a reform would help solve America’s long-term fiscal problems. In the near term, it would also support and sustain the economic recovery. Consumers would be encouraged to buy now, before the tax takes effect. And by showing financial markets that Congress is determined to put our fiscal household in order, it would help keep interest rates low and encourage investment. The trust fund mechanism would strengthen incentives to institute reforms that will actually bend the health-care cost curve, because measures to slow the growth of health-care spending would avoid unpopular future tax increases that would otherwise be necessary.

This is a good idea.

Last year, by the way, I praised a book by Zeke Emanuel which makes the same points while laying out a basic blueprint for healthcare reform. Healthcare, Guaranteed is still the best thing I’ve read on the conjoined issues of tax reform and healthcare reform. The policy in the works is not going to be like this, needless to say, but the country might get there in the end. For the reasons Aaron and Sawhill say, it had better. Unfortunately Emanuel has been silent on the subject since going on to the White House payroll (where he has faced a lot of brainless criticism on the “death panels” issue). I think he would be more valuable educating the public than advising the president.