Kotlikoff Joins the Presidential Fray

If knowing public finance cold were the criterion, Kotlikoff would win the election in a landslide. He's an expert on Social Security and generational accounting, which is essentially the study of how much debt the current generation is heaping onto future ones. The $199 trillion fiscal gap that he highlights is how much the government expects to pay in the future minus how much it projects to receive, stated in today's dollars.

Kotlikoff has a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate from Harvard University. He's an endowed professor at Boston University and a fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His company, Economic Security Planning, created the software used for the calculations in his 2015 best-seller, Get What's Yours: The Secrets of Maxing Out Social Security. Written with Philip Moeller and Paul Solman, the book spent five months in the top 10 on the New York Times list of advice, how-to, and miscellaneous best-sellers. The book brought so much attention to two lucrative Social Security strategies that Congress stirred itself to kill them last year, a turnabout covered last month by Bloomberg's Ben Steverman.

Kotlikoff's positions on the issues are intriguing whether or not you think he has a prayer of reaching the White House. A sampling from his platform: "Our true fiscal indebtedness is 15 times larger than the $18 trillion you've been told our government owes. Its tremendous size can be summarized with these five words: Our government is dead broke."  "Social Security, with its maddening rules within rules within rules, [is] like a million Russian nesting dolls." "Legal immigration is … fueling a veritable population explosion. Unless we reduce legal immigration, our population will rise by one-third – over 100 million people – in just 45 years." "I [will] eliminate the corporate income tax, the personal income tax and the estate and gift tax. In their place, I institute a business cash flow tax, also called a value added tax (VAT), a progressive personal consumption tax, an inheritance tax and a tax on carbon." "Traditional banking is unsafe at any speed. … You [should] just make all the financial intermediaries operate as 100 percent equity-financed mutual funds."

Kotlikoff doesn't have a background in foreign policy or social issues, but he does have ideas. "As president," he writes, "I would deliver a clear message to North Korea that our patience has run out and that we will permit no further testing of nuclear weapons." He states unequivocally that the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms before raising a question: "But does it permit us to own tanks and drive them around town or, for that matter, jet fighters?"

Kotlikoff is obviously more into policies than polling. During an interview he grabbed a piece of paper to sketch out a graph of lifecycle consumption patterns. "What people are going to hear from me is the truth," he said, "and that's going to be refreshing." Hmmm. Maybe Kotlikoff has a future in politics after all.