The United States is on a glide path to fiscal disaster, with experts projecting that the federal government will take in far less money than it spends—indefinitely. Although in our experience business leaders have a general sense that this state of affairs is dangerous, they’re unclear on exactly how fiscal policy shapes the competitiveness of the nation and of their companies. The current policy is eroding competitiveness in several ways, and business conditions in the United States will deteriorate if there’s no change in direction. A better understanding of how fiscal policy and competitiveness are linked may make such a change more likely.
Macroeconomic Policy and U.S. Competitiveness
In this piece, the authors examine how U.S. fiscal policy relates to three drivers of productivity: improving human capital, increasing physical capital (equipment or software, for example), and using these forms of capital more efficiently. Government spending for many public goods, such as education and infrastructure, contributes directly to one or more of them, whereas spending on health care and entitlements does little to enhance competitiveness directly. Taxes are needed to fund public goods, but they sometimes distort the allocation of human and physical capital. And large government deficits put upward pressure on the cost of borrowing for companies. The authors propose a plan—they call it “20/21 by 2021” — to reduce the deficit from 3.8% of GDP (the Congressional Budget Office’s most likely scenario) to just over 1%.