This article is a part of the The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic symposium.
[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.
This post is authored by Sam Bowman, (Director of Competition Policy, ICLE).]
No support package for workers and businesses during the coronavirus shutdown can be comprehensive. In the UK, for example, the government is offering to pay 80% of the wages of furloughed workers, but this will not apply to self-employed people or many gig economy workers, and so far it’s been hard to think of a way of giving them equivalent support. It’s likely that the bill going through Congress will have similar issues.
Whether or not solutions are found for these problems, it may be worth putting in place what you might call a ‘backstop’ policy that allows people to access money in case they cannot access it through the other policies that are being put into place. This doesn’t need to provide equivalent support to other packages, just to ensure that everyone has access to the money they need during the shutdown to pay their bills and rent, and cover other essential costs. The aim here is just to keep everyone afloat.
One mechanism for doing this might be to offer income-contingent loans to anyone currently resident in the country during the shutdown period. These are loans whose repayment is determined by the borrower’s income later on, and are how students in the UK and Australia pay for university.
In the UK, for example, under the current student loan repayment terms, once a student has graduated, their earnings above a certain income threshold (currently £25,716/year) are taxed at 9% to repay the loan. So, if I earn £30,000/year and have a loan to repay, I pay an additional £385.56/year to repay the loan (9% of the £4,284 I’m earning above the income threshold); if I earn £40,000/year, I pay an additional £1,285.56/year. The loan incurs an annual interest rate equal to an annual measure of inflation plus 3%. Once you have paid off the loan, no more repayments are taken, and any amount still unpaid thirty years after the loan was first taken out is written off.
In practice, these terms mean that there is a significant subsidy to university students, most of whom never pay off the full amount. Under a less generous repayment scheme that was in place until recently, with a lower income threshold for repayment, out of every £1 borrowed by students the long-run cost to the government was 43.3p. This is regarded by many as a feature of the system rather than a bug, because of the belief that university education has positive externalities, and because this approach pools some of the risk associated with pursuing a graduate-level career (the risk of ending up with a low-paid job despite having spent a lot on your education, for example).
For loans available to the wider public, a different set of repayment criteria could apply. We could allow anyone who has filed a W-2 or 1099 tax statement in the past eighteen months (or filed a self-assessment tax return in the UK) to borrow up to something around 20% of median national annual income, to be paid back via an extra few percentage points on their federal income tax or, in the UK, National Insurance contributions over the following ten years, with the rate returning to normal after they have paid off the loan. Some other provision may have to be made for people approaching retirement.
With a low, inflation-indexed interest rate, this would allow people who need funds to access them, but make it mostly pointless for anyone who did not need to borrow.
If, like student tuition fees, loans were written off after a certain period, low earners would probably never pay back the entirety of the ‘loan’ – as a one-off transfer (ie, one that does not distort work or savings incentives for recipients) to low paid people, this is probably not a bad thing. Most people, though, would pay back as and when they were able to. For self-employed people in particular, it could be a valuable source of liquidity during an unexpected period where they cannot work. Overall, it would function as a cash transfer to lower earners, and a liquidity injection for everyone else who takes advantage of the scheme.
This would have advantages over money being given to every US or UK citizen, as some have proposed, because most of the money being given out would be repaid, so the net burden on taxpayers would be lower and so the deadweight losses created by the additional tax needed to pay for it would be smaller. But you would also eliminate the need for means-testing, relying on self-selection instead.
The biggest obstacle to rolling something like this out may be administrative. However, if the government committed to setting up something like this, banks and credit card companies may be willing to step in in the short-run to issue short-term loans in the knowledge that people could be able to repay them once the government scheme was set up. To facilitate this, the government could guarantee the loans made by banks and credit card companies now, then allow people to opt into the income-contingent loans later, so there was no need for legislation immediately.
Speed is extremely important in helping people plug the gaps in their finances. As a complement to the government’s other plans, income-contingent loans to groups like self-employed people may be a useful way of catching people who would otherwise fall through the cracks.
