I’ll be writing more about this in weeks to come, but I guess I’d better say something right away about the implications of a declining labor share in GDP. Again, the data so far look like this:

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(By the way, some commenters, weirdly, think that this is not the basic BEA data. It is; just check the sourcing at FRED).

So, if the recent plunge in the labor share is the shape of things to come, what difference might it make?

The short answer is that it will pose problems for the current mechanisms by which we fund social insurance programs; but it will not undermine our ability to afford those programs, and it would in fact be cruel and basically irrational to slash social insurance in response to a declining labor share.

OK, maybe that was too quick. Let me take it more slowly: a substantial part of our social insurance system — Social Security and the hospital insurance portion of Medicare — is funded through dedicated payroll taxes. If payrolls lag behind overall national income, this will tend to leave those programs underfunded given the way the laws are currently written.

But America as a whole won’t have gotten poorer: the money is still there to support the programs, it’s just coming in the form of capital rather than labor income. There would be no problem, at least in economic terms, in continuing the programs by adding revenue from general taxation, maybe even from dedicated taxes on capital income.

And consider the alternative, in which we slash Social Security and Medicare not because the nation can’t afford those programs, but merely because workers are taking a smaller share of national income. What we would be doing in that case is doubling down on the damage to workers — they’re already hurting because income is shifting away from labor, and we’re going to hurt them even more by cutting the benefits they depend upon.

Actually, something like that is already happening, although it’s mostly coming from rising inequality of earned income. Remember, back in the 1980s the Greenspan Commission supposedly fixed Social Security’s finances for 75 years, that is, until 2060. Why, then, do most projections show the trust fund running out well before then? Not because life expectancy is rising — that was already built into the projections. No, the big reason is rising inequality, which has led to a growing share of income coming above the payroll tax cap, so that SS revenue lags behind overall compensation. And yet the conventional wisdom is that we should respond to a financing issue caused by rising inequality by slashing benefits, further increasing inequality.

We should keep this line of argument in mind — and when somebody talks about the need to rein in entitlements, we should always ask whose interests, exactly, are being served.