Testimony of Federal Reserve Officials

Federal Reserve Bulletin, May, 2001

Testimony by Alan Greenspan, Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, before the Committee on the Budget, U.S. House of Representatives, March 2, 2001

I am pleased to appear here today to discuss some of the important issues surrounding the outlook for the federal budget and the attendant implications for the formulation of fiscal policy. In doing so, I want to emphasize that I speak for myself and not necessarily for the Federal Reserve.

The challenges you face both in shaping a budget for the coming year and in designing a longer-mn strategy for fiscal policy have been brought into sharp focus by the budget projections that have been released in the past month and a half. Both the Bush Administration and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) project growing on-budget surpluses under current policy over the next decade. Indeed, growing on-budget surpluses were projected even under the more conservative assumptions of the Clinton Administration's final budget projections.

The key factor driving the cumulative upward revisions in the budget picture in recent years has been the extraordinary pickup in the growth of labor productivity experienced in this country since the mid-1990s. Between the early 1970s and 1995, output per hour in the nonfarm business sector rose about 1 1/2 percent per year, on average. Since 1995, however, productivity growth has accelerated markedly, about doubling the earlier pace, even after one takes account of the impetus from cyclical forces. Though hardly definitive, the apparent sustained strength in measured productivity in the face of a pronounced slowing in the growth of aggregate demand during the second half of last year was an important test of the extent of the improvement in structural productivity. These most recent indications have added to the accumulating evidence that the apparent increases in the growth of output per hour are more than transitory.

It is these observations that appear to be causing economists to raise their forecasts of the economy's long-term growth rates and budget surpluses. This increased optimism receives support from the forward-looking indicators of technical innovation and structural productivity growth, which have shown few signs of weakening despite the marked curtailment in recent months of capital investment plans for equipment and software.

To be sure, these impressive upward revisions to the growth of structural productivity and economic potential are based on inferences drawn from economic relationships that are different from anything we have considered in recent decades. The resulting budget projections, therefore, are necessarily subject to a relatively wide range of uncertainty. CBO, for example, expects productivity growth rates through the next decade to average roughly 2 1/2 percent per year--far above the average pace from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, but still below that of the past five years.

Had the innovations of recent decades, especially in information technologies, not come to fruition, productivity growth during the past five to seven years, arguably, would have continued to languish at the rate of the preceding twenty years. The sharp increase in prospective long-term rates of return on high-tech investments would not have emerged as it did in the early 1990s, and the associated surge in stock prices would surely have been largely absent. The accompanying wealth effect, so evidently critical to the growth of economic activity since the mid-1990s, would never have materialized.

In contrast, the experience of the past five to seven years has been truly without recent precedent. The doubling of the growth rate of output per hour has caused individuals' real taxable income to grow nearly two and one-half times as fast as it did over the preceding ten years and has resulted in the substantial surplus of receipts over outlays that we are now experiencing. Not only has taxable income risen, with the faster growth of GDP, but the associated large increase in asset prices and capital gains created additional tax liabilities not directly related to income from current production.

The most recent projections from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and CBO indicate that, if current policies remain in place, the total unified surplus will reach about $800 billion in fiscal year 2010, including an on-budget surplus of almost $500 billion. Moreover, the admittedly quite uncertain long-term budget exercises released by the CBO last October maintain an implicit on-budget surplus under baseline assumptions well past 2030 despite the budgetary pressures from the aging of the baby-boom generation, especially on the major health programs.

These most recent projections, granted their tentativeness, nonetheless make clear that the highly desirable goal of paying off the federal debt is in reach and, indeed, would occur well before the end of the decade under baseline assumptions. This is in marked contrast to the perception of a year ago when the elimination of the debt did not appear likely until the next decade. But continuing to run surpluses beyond the point at which we reach zero or near-zero federal debt brings to center stage the critical longer-term fiscal policy issue of whether the federal government should accumulate large quantities of private (more technically nonfederal) assets.