| Tyrone Slothrop |
12-21-2004 02:57 PM |
Too much choice
Quote:
Originally posted by sgtclub
But given the demographics, it can't work indefinitely.....
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- There is no Social Security crisis.
Until very recently, I believed, as most of my generation still does, that Social Security was facing a crisis. Thanks to a declining birthrate and increasing longevity, at some point during my lifetime the program was going to go bankrupt and people my age were going to wind up with nothing after a lifetime of payroll taxes. I was -- and the bulk of young people still are -- the victim of a massive fraud, perpetrated by Social Security abolition advocates and unfortunately re-enforced from time to time by liberals seeking an argument against Republican tax cuts. This fraud, which is ongoing and in which a lazy media has been complicit, is crucial to understanding the politics of Social Security.
Democrats charge the president with submitting a plan that will cut benefits and force people to rely on the vicissitudes of the stock market to ensure a dignified retirement. This is true. But if you believe that Social Security is currently headed for self-destruction, it's also irrelevant. Smaller benefits and an investment portfolio that may or may not pay off sound like an excellent deal compared with a pension plan that's going to go bankrupt. It is only if you try to see the truth -- that there is no crisis -- that criticisms of the Bush plan become compelling.
Some Social Security proponents have been convinced by consultants that turning around young peoples' attitudes on this question is impossible. It is possible, and if the program is to be saved, it must be done. For if Social Security is not eliminated in 2005, its enemies will simply try again later. Over time, the older Americans who are currently the bulwark against privatization will die off and be replaced by the younger, pro-privatization bulwark. Saving Social Security means at least getting started on the work of changing people's minds. It shouldn't be that hard to do.
Social Security is healthy and successful. There is no crisis. The president and the Republicans in Congress are trying to scare the American people in order to destroy the most successful program in American history -- a program that presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Harry Truman to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have been committed to preserving.
George W. Bush wants to break Social Security's bipartisan promise to the American people, and now he's making up stories to try to persuade voters to go along with it. These scare stories are based on a pessimistic assessment of the country's potential for future economic growth, an assessment the president does not embrace in any other context. Nor is it an assessment that he should embrace. Instead, we should be working to ensure robust future growth by improving America's health care, education system, and basic infrastructure while devising policies that make it easier for couples to have and raise children and remaining open to immigration from the rest of the world.
But even if the president's pessimism about America's potential proves warranted, his scare stories are not. As this chart clearly demonstrates, even if we do absolutely nothing to change the system or prevent economic growth from slowing, Social Security checks will never stop flowing, and benefit levels will always be higher than what today's retirees enjoy. The Social Security pessimists have been proven wrong again and again in the past, and even under their "doomsday" scenario, the system can continue to exist in its present form while still providing a decent benefit to all.
Young people, though supposedly immune to the liberal message on retirement security, are, in fact, going to be the biggest victims of the Bush plan. The president proposes to offer us a guaranteed cut in benefits and $2 trillion in debt, plus the possible burden of supporting our parents if the stock market underperforms, in order to forestall the mere possibility that benefit growth may have to be curtailed sometime in the 2040s. This is, when stated clearly, a horrible deal for Generation Y, and liberals need to have some confidence in our ability to make our case.
Advocates of eliminating Social Security argue that this is wrong and that the program holds no "real assets" instead of "mere IOUs." These IOUs, however, are U.S. Treasury bonds, considered far and wide to be the safest investment in the world. In times of grave national crisis, from the Revolutionary War to World War II, the federal government has financed its activities be issuing these bonds -- and they've always been repaid.
The president has chosen to finance a series of tax cuts for people earning more than $100,000 a year by selling these bonds to the central banks of China and Japan, and to Social Security. Now he says that he doesn't want to pay back what he's borrowed from my generation's retirement fund. That's just wrong. Worse, what kind of message does it send to the Chinese and others that Bush plans to offer an additional $2 trillion in bonds when the U.S. government takes the position that these are just IOUs that don't need to be repaid?
Faced with current projections, the responsible thing to do is to close the massive hole in the government's non-Social Security budget while thinking of ways to prevent the dramatic slowdown in economic growth that forms the basis of the president's doomsday scenario. Instead, Bush wants to tell scary stories to young people in the hope that we'll panic and abandon our support for the most successful, and most fiscally sound, program our government runs today.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
Quote:
This is a bait and switch. Pure GOPers propose cutting programs, not enacting them.
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I guess we need a new name for the ruling party we've got. |
