Introduction:

In the ebb and flow of Middle East diplomacy, the two interrelated issues of an Israeli-Syrian peace settlement and Washington’s bilateral relationship with Damascus have gone up and down on Washington’s scale of importance. The election of Barack Obama raised expectations that the United States would give the two issues the priority they had not received during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. Candidate Obama promised to assign a high priority to the resuscitation of the Arab-Israeli peace process, and separately to “engage” with Iran and Syria (as recommended by the Iraq Study Group in 2006).

In May 2009, shortly after assuming office, President Obama sent the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, and the senior director for the Middle East in the National Security Council, Daniel Shapiro, to Damascus to open a dialogue with Bashar al-Asad’s regime. Several members of Congress also travelled to Syria early in Obama’s first year, including the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, John Kerry, and the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Howard Berman. In addition, when the president appointed George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East, Mitchell named as his deputy Fred Hof, a respected expert on Syria and the Israeli-Syrian dispute. Last summer, both Mitchell and Hof visited Damascus and began their give and take with Syria.

And yet, after this apparent auspicious beginning, neither the bilateral relationship between the United States and Syria, nor the effort to revive the Israeli-Syrian negotiation has gained much traction. Damascus must be chagrined by the fact that when the Arab-Israeli peace process is discussed now, it is practically equated with the Israeli-Palestinian track. This paper analyzes the difficulties confronting Washington’s and Jerusalem’s respective Syria policies and offers an approach for dealing with Syria. Many of the recommendations stem from lessons resulting from the past rounds of negotiations, so it is important to understand what occurred.

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In the wake of the U.S. military departure from Iraq and in the midst of Iran’s continued defiance of the international community over its nuclear program, is a new security arrangement for the Gulf in order? If so, is the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) capable of such a task, or should other institutions be considered?

In the Saban Center’s newest Middle East Memo, Security in the Persian Gulf: New Frameworks for the Twenty-First Century, Saban Center Senior Fellow Kenneth Pollack examines the possibility of developing a new security architecture for the region.

Pollack analyzes security arrangements in other parts of the world and focuses on two options:  expanding the GCC and turning it into a formal military alliance and creating an arrangement modeled on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. In weighing each option, Pollack finds that the latter can better furnish a path toward peace and security.

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• Security in the Persian Gulf: New Frameworks for the Twenty-First Century

For decades, we have been hearing that the baby-boom generation was like a pig moving through a python–bigger than the generations before and after.

That’s true. But that’s also a very misleading metaphor for understanding the demographic forces that are driving up federal spending: They aren’t temporary. The generation born between 1946 and 1964 is the beginning of a demographic transition that will persist for decades after the baby boomers die, the consequence of lengthening lifespans and declining fertility. Putting the federal budget on a sustainable course requires long-lasting fixes, not short-lived tweaks.  

First, a few demographic facts.

As the chart below illustrates, there was a surge in births in the U.S. at the end of World War II, a subsequent decline, and then an uptick as baby boomers began having children.

Although the population has been rising, the number of births in the U.S. the past few years has been below the peak baby-boom levels, possibly because many couples chose not to have children during bad economic times. More significant, fertility rates–roughly the number of babies born per woman during her lifetime–have fallen well below pre-baby-boom levels.

Meanwhile, Americans are living longer. In 1950, a man who made it to age 65 could expect to live until 78 and a woman until 81. Social Security’s actuaries project that a man who lived to age 65 in 2010 will reach 84 and a woman age 86.

Put all this together, and it’s clear that a growing fraction of the U.S. population will be 65 or older.   

The combination of longer life spans and lower fertility rates means the ratio of elderly (over 65) to working-age population (ages 20 to 64) is rising. As the chart below illustrates, the ratio will rise steadily as more baby boomers reach retirement age–and then it levels off.  

Simply put, this doesn’t look like a pig in a python.  

So what do these demographic facts portend for the federal budget?  In simple dollars and cents, the federal government spends more on the old than the young. More older Americans means more federal spending on Social Security and Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly. On top of that, health care spending per person is likely to continue to grow faster than the overall economy.

The net result: 85 percent of the increase in federal spending that the Congressional Budget Office projects for the next 10 years, based on current policies, will go toward Social Security, Medicare and other major federal health programs, and interest on the national debt.

Restraining future deficits and the size of the federal debt mean restraining spending on these programs or raising taxes–and probably both. One-time savings or minor tweaks won’t suffice. Nor will limiting the belt-tightening to annually appropriated spending.

The fundamental fiscal problem is not coping with the retirement of the baby boomers and then going back to budgets that resemble those of the past. The fundamental fiscal problem is that retirement of the baby boomers marks a major demographic transition for the nation, one that will require long-lived changes to benefit programs and taxes.

Social Security faces a financial shortfall. If Congress does nothing about it, current projections indicate that benefits will be cut automatically by 21 percent in 2034. Congress could close the gap by raising revenues, lowering benefits, or doing some of both. If benefits seem generous, Congress is likely to lean toward benefit cuts more than revenue increases. If they seem stingy, then the reverse.

Given the split between the two parties on whether to cut benefits or to raise them, evidence on the adequacy of benefits is central to this key policy debate. Those perceptions will help determine whether Social Security continues to provide basic retirement income for workers with comparatively low earnings histories and a foundation of retirement income for most others or it will become just a minimal safety-net backstop against extreme destitution?

Down-in-the-weeds disagreements among analysts often seem too arcane for anyone other than specialists. But sometimes they are too important to ignore. A current debate about the adequacy of Social Security benefits is an example.

The not-so-simple question is this: are Social Security benefits ‘generous’ or ‘stingy’? To answer this question, people long looked to the Office of the Social Security Actuary. For many years that office published estimates of something called the ‘replacement rate’—that is, how high are benefits paid to retirees and the disabled relative what they earned during their working years. A 2014 retiree with median earnings had average lifetime earnings of about $46,000. That worker qualified for a benefit at age 66 of about $19,000, a replacement rate of about 41%. Replacement rates vary with earnings. Dollar benefits rise with earnings, but they rise less than proportionately. As a result, replacement rates of low earners are higher than replacement rates of high earners.

As you might suppose, there are many ways in which to compute such ‘replacement rates. Because of analytical disputes on which method is best, the Social Security trustees in 2014 decided to stop including replacement rate estimates in their annual reports.

In December 2015, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) offered what it considered a better measure of the generosity of Social Security. It estimated that replacement rates for middle income recipients were about 60%–dramatically higher than the 41% that the Social Security Trustees had estimated.

The gap between the estimates of CBO and those of Social Security is even larger than it seems. To see why, one needs to recognize that to sustain living standards retirees on average need only about 75% to 80% as much income as they did when working. Retirees need less income because they are spared some work-related expenses, such as transportation to and from work. Those are only average of course; some need more, some less.

If one believed the SSA actuaries, Social Security provides median earners barely more than half of what they need to be as well off as they were when working. Benefit cuts from that modest level would threaten the well-being for the majority of retirees who are entirely or mostly dependent on Social Security benefits—and especially for those with large medical expenses uncovered by Medicare.

On the other hand, if one accepted CBO’s estimates, Social Security provids more than three-quarters of the retirement income target. Against that baseline, benefit cuts would still sting, but they would pose less of a threat, and not much of a threat at all for most retirees who have some income from private pensions or personal savings.

When the CBO estimates came out, conservative commentators welcomed the findings and cited CBO’s well-established and well-earned reputation for objectivity. They correctly noted that many retirees have additional income from private pensions, 401ks, or other personal savings, and asserted that there was no general retirement income shortage. By inference, cutting benefits a bit to help close the long-term funding gap would be no big deal. Social Security advocates were put on the defensive, hard-pressed to challenge the estimates of the widely-respected Congressional Budget Office.

But earlier this year, CBO acknowledged that it had made mistakes in its Decameter estimates and revised them. The new CBO estimate put the replacement rate for middle-level earners at around 42%, almost the same as the estimate of the Social Security actuaries, not the much higher level that had sent ripples through the policy community. One conservative analyst, Andrew Biggs, who had trumpeted the initial CBO finding in The Wall Street Journal, promptly and honorably retracted his article.

Two aspects of this green-eyeshade kerfuffle stand out. The first is that policy debates often depend on obscure technical analyses that are, in turn, remarkably sensitive to ‘black-box’ methods to which few or no outsiders have ready access. The second is that CBO burnished its reputation for honesty by owning up to its own mistakes — in this case, a whopping overestimate of a key number. Such candor is all too rare; it merits notice and praise.

But there is a broader lesson as well. Technical issues of comparable complexity surround numerous current political disputes. Is Bernie Sanders’ single-payer plan affordable? Will Marco Rubio’s tax plan cause deficits to balloon? To vote rationally, people must struggle to see through the rhetorical chaff that surrounds candidates’ favorite claims. There is, alas, no substitute for paying close attention to the data, even if they are ‘down in the weeds.’

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Fortune.

The past few months have seen a flurry of reports on discouraging trends in life expectancy among some of the nation’s struggling populations. Different researchers have emphasized different groups and have tracked longevity trends over different time spans, but all have documented conspicuous differences between trends among more advantaged Americans compared with those in worse circumstances.

In a study published in April, Stanford economist Raj Chetty and his coauthors documented a striking rise in mortality rate differences between rich and poor. From 2001 to 2014, Americans who had incomes in the top 5 percent of the income distribution saw their life expectancy climb about 3 years. During the same 14-year span, people in the bottom 5 percent of the income distribution saw virtually no improvement at all.

Using different sources of information about family income and mortality, my colleagues and I found similar trends in mortality when Americans were ranked by their Social-Security-covered earnings in the middle of their careers. Over the three decades covered by our data, we found sizeable differences between the life expectancy gains enjoyed by high- and low-income Americans. For 50-year old women in the top one-tenth of the income distribution, we found that women born in 1940 could expect to live almost 6.5 years longer than women in the same position in the income distribution who were born in 1920. For 50-year old women in the bottom one-tenth of the income distribution, we found no improvement at all in life expectancy. Longevity trends among low-income men were more encouraging: Men at the bottom saw a small improvement in their life expectancy. Still, the life-expectancy gap between low-income and high-income men increased just as fast as it did between low- and high-income women.

One reason these studies should interest voters and policymakers is that they shed light on the fairness of programs that protect Americans’ living standards in old age. The new studies as well as some earlier ones show that mortality trends have tilted the returns that rich and poor contributors to Social Security can expect to obtain from their payroll tax contributions.

If life expectancy were the same for rich and poor contributors, the lifetime benefits workers could expect to receive from their contributions would depend solely on the formula that determines a worker’s monthly pensions. Social Security’s monthly benefit formula has always been heavily tilted in favor of low-wage contributors. They receive monthly checks that are a high percentage of the monthly wages they earn during their careers. In contrast, workers who earn well above-average wages collect monthly pensions that are a much lower percentage of their average career earnings.

The latest research findings suggest that growing mortality differences between rich and poor are partly or fully offsetting the redistributive tilt in Social Security’s benefit formula. Even though poorer workers still receive monthly pension checks that are a high percentage of their average career earnings, they can expect to receive benefits for a shorter period after they claim pensions compared with workers who earn higher wages. Because the gap between the life spans of rich and poor workers is increasing, affluent workers now enjoy a bigger advantage in the number of months they collect Social Security retirement benefits. This fact alone is enough to justify headlines about the growing life expectancy gap between rich and poor

There is another reason to pay attention to the longevity trends. The past 35 years have provided ample evidence the income gap between America’s rich and poor has widened. To be sure, some of the most widely cited income series overstate the extent of widening and understate the improvement in income received by middle- and low-income families. Nonetheless, the most reliable statistics show that families at the top have enjoyed faster income gains than the gains enjoyed by families in the middle and at the bottom. Income disparities have gone up fastest among working-age people who depend on wages to pay their families’ bills. Retirees have been better protected against the income and wealth losses that have hurt the living standards of less educated workers. The recent finding that life expectancy among low-income Americans has failed to improve is a compelling reason to believe the trend toward wider inequality is having profound impacts on the distribution of well-being in addition to its direct effect on family income.

Over the past century, we have become accustomed to seeing successive generations live longer than the generations that preceded them. This is not true every year, of course, nor is it always clear why the improvements in life expectancy have occurred. Still, it is reasonable to think that long-run improvements in average life spans have been linked to improvements in our income. With more money, we can afford more costly medical care, healthier diets, and better public health. Even Americans at the bottom of the income ladder have participated in these gains, as public health measures and broader access to health insurance permit them to benefit from improvements in knowledge. For the past three decades, however, improvements in average life spans at the bottom of the income distribution have been negligible. This finding suggests it is not just income that has grown starkly more unequal.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Real Clear Markets.