A Pandemic Trust Fund

The Coronavirus Pandemic may be the most warned about event in human history. Surprisingly, we even did something about it. President George W. Bush started a pandemic preparation plan and so did Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in CA but in both cases when a pandemic didn’t happen in the next several years those plans withered away. We ignored the important in favor of the urgent.

It is evident that the US government finds it difficult to invest in long-term projects, perhaps especially in preparing for small probability events with very large costs. Pandemic preparation is exactly one such project. How can we improve the chances that we are better prepared next time?

In a short paper for the Center for Growth and Opportunity I offer a different funding mechanism to address the problem:

…we would like organizations tasked with protecting the public from low-probability, high-cost events to be funded on a permanent basis that is not subject to budgetary discretion or degradation. Instead of yearly appropriations, it’s preferable to have a one-time appropriation to finance a stream of investments. The financial means of doing this is to buy a bond with an earmarked revenue stream. That is, instead of selling bonds the government buys long-term safe bonds which pay out dividends that are earmarked to a program, in this case to pandemic preparation.

There is a well-known example of such a financing scheme, the social security trust fund. The social security trust fund was established in 1937. It buys long-term safe bonds that pay dividends that are used to finance social security payments. Unlike the pandemic trust fund I propose, the Social Security Trust Fund buys bonds on an ongoing basis but that is a relatively unimportant difference.

The Social Security Trust Fund buys the safest form of government bonds, which has given rise to a long-standing controversy over whether the trust fund is a “fiction.”10Of course, the trust fund is a kind of fiction but so are federalism, checks and balances, and the Constitution. Fictions can be powerful because they create shared understandings that govern behavior and determine equilibrium action. The trust fund does what it says—it increases trust by indicating that Social Security payments are higher in creditor priority than other spending. Just as Section 507 of the Bankruptcy Code increases trust by indicating that secured bondholders get paid before unsecured creditors such as a company’s suppliers. Since 1937, the Social Security Trust Fund has always held net assets, and when it briefly ran deficits in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Greenspan commission was established to shore up the system.11 That is, the simple existence of the Trust Fund as an accounting entity created an awareness, which made it easier to act to maintain the Fund.

A Pandemic Trust Fund would begin with a $250 billion investment in bonds earmarked to pandemic preparations. At current effective rates of interest of about 3%, this is enough to support spending of $7.5 billion annually.12 Note that $7.5 billion is nowhere near enough to address the current pandemic, but that is because we did not invest enough in pandemic preparation. Had we invested $7.5 billion in pandemic preparation every year for the last two decades, for example, we would be in much better shape today. The $7.5 billion is for annual ongoing preparation.

…A Pandemic Trust Fund invested in $250 billion of government bonds is an accounting fiction that may be readily agreed upon today at the height of the crisis because it has few current costs. Yet, as we have discussed, accounting fictions can have real power in changing the future allocation of resources.

Read the whole thing, it is also includes some interesting info on clever DOD contracts that have advanced pandemic preparations.

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