Larry Kotlikoff

Hello, everyone.

It's Larry Kotlikoff.

I'm back with Economics Matters.

I've got a great guest today, Raj Chetty.

Hello, everyone.

It's Larry Kotlikoff.

I'm back with one of my favorite economists and longtime friend, Gene Sterling.

I don't know when we met Gene, but it was a while ago.

That's called either a tax increase or a benefit cut.

If I take other parts of the budget, such as the discretionary part of the budget, there we measure winners and losers either by whether the nominal amount of income grows or in some cases the real amount, but never relative to some growth rate.

So now if I took a world and I took... 4% growth in social security and healthcare and reduced it to three and bumped up education spending to one, the language in the press would be that Gene Sterling or Larry Kotlikoff cut benefits for elderly people and other people like that and then they finance some education spending.

And that's not right.

When you're dealing with an advisor, you work on these strategies.

I also know that we've done a lot of shows with Larry Kotlikoff, pretty sure Boston got pretty sure that Congress will come up with something because we vote.

I don't think they're going to let Social Security go under.

So there's one you can't I mean, you can plan about when you're starting.

But it turns out that's an underestimate.

If you ask someone like Larry Kotlikoff, who is the expert on this, I bet you his guess, when I asked him instead, he sent me to something that I couldn't understand.

But I bet he'd be guessing near $300 trillion.

Yeah, that's about right.

And just as, uh, the, the question is I hear lots of noise about doing huge conversions while in the window of age prior to RMDs or Social Security and pension starting.

And that idea of doing the huge Roth conversions, I think that's an idea that came from Larry Kotlikoff.

He wrote some articles about that, and I replicated what he was talking about in his articles and agreed.

[chuckles] Yes.