When someone like Debra Saunders takes it into her head to write about Social Security, you just know it won't end well. She starts with a summary of a Christopher Buckley novel (Christopher Buckley being, of course, one of our finest and most incisive thinkers on thorny socio-economic questions)...and it goes downhill from there:
According to Harry Zeeve of the bipartisan budget watchdog group, the Concord Coalition, Boomsday falls some time next year, as the first Baby Boomers become eligible for early retirement at age 62 in 2008.Stop and savor the jaw-dropping chutzpah of this. Bill Clinton, whom Saunders hates with a fiery passion, built up a budget surplus in order to fund Social Security. Gore, whom she hates even more than Clinton, would have kept the surplus safe for exactly that purpose. Bush, whom Saunders defends more often than she (ever so mildly) rebukes, blew the wad on tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. Clinton and Gore: in favor of the bequeathing; Bush: opposed. These are the three basic, essential facts without which any discussion of Social Security is an exercise in willful ignorance. Saunders ignores all of them.
Things will only get worse. The Concord Coalition figures that by 2018, Social Security will spend more than it takes in. (Medicare already spends more than it takes in.) In 1960, there were 5.1 workers for every 1 retiree. Today, the ratio is 3.3 to 1. By 2040, it will shrink to 2.1 to 1....
President Bush has made matters worse -- by pushing yet another entitlement, a prescription drug program that spends more than it takes in. With the 2008 presidential election looming, Washington won't touch entitlement reform until 2010 -- if then.
It doesn't help that Washington politicians know that older people -- the folks most likely to get more money from Social Security than they paid into the system -- vote. Which means Washington may not try to implement reforms to avoid federal bankruptcy until it is so late that any fix will be exceedingly painful. And extremely necessary, as the Congressional Budget Office estimates that entitlement spending and interest payments will consume 100 percent of federal revenues in 2020....
The Concord Coalition argues that Washington needs "a fiscal wake-up call." But as long as the Un-Greatest Generation produces politicians who get elected to higher office by spending more than the government takes in, that call will never happen....
And: "What happened to the concept of bequeathing our children a better world?" The answer: That was for the last generation. Not us.
But, as I said, we knew this would end badly. Less expected and more depressing: that the Chronicle would devote an entire page to ill-informed and misleading anti-Social Security propaganda, including charts helpfully provided by the Concord Coalition and a stunningly shallow and ignorant commentary by one Caille Millner, who apparently (god save us) is a Chronicle editorial writer. Some excerpts to give you the general flavor:
ALL RIGHT, Boomers. Even if you haven't read Christopher Buckley's satirical novel "Boomsday," you've probably read about how your generation is on the verge of bankrupting the ones who come after you....Yes, we're talking stereotypes so broad and simple-minded that your average braindead wingnut gibe would be ashamed to be seen with them.
I'm sure you're shaking your heads as you read this, thinking how terrible, what a shame, but you still have no plans to give up your Social Security checks. After all, it's not as if the Boomers created the system, they just have to live with it (It's so tough to be a Boomer, isn't it? How do you manage to function, always getting victimized by the Man?).
Enter Mr. Buckley, who perhaps feels the same sort of resentment toward his generation as others do (Why will they never pack up their psychedelics, their self-righteousness, their dreadful Grateful Dead albums and their habit of insisting that the Vietnam War was the *worst*thing*ever -- and move offstage?)....
We don't want to fight the Man -- we want to be the Man....No doubt these beliefs were formed in response to the Boomers' hypocrisy and self-absorption, just as the Boomers' beliefs were shaped in reaction to what they deemed the stodginess of their parents....
Some experts have projected that, in order to maintain Social Security at its current benefit level, Congress would need to raise payroll taxes to 50 percent or more...Can you see my generation, obsessed as we are with making money and having families, agreeing to that? I can't.
And so that leaves us with only one option -- to default....We're not going to kill you off, Boomers, as much as we'd like to sometimes, but we're not going to pay for your old age, either. All the more reason to not only accept but lobby for cuts in benefits now -- before you turn to younger workers for a handout, and realize that we've fled for higher ground.
Note that both Saunders and Millner conclude that the 'only' solution is to cut benefits--because the 'only' alternative is confiscatory payroll taxes. Both, whether dishonestly or stupidly, buy into the imaginary accounting that arbitrarily disallows funding Social Security from anything but payroll taxes (I think for Saunders it's more of the former, and for Millner more of the latter).
But the dishonesty goes much further than just how to fund Social Security. As Ezra Klein points out (repeatedly), the problem is not Social Security (which is 'insolvent' only under the most pessimistic assumptions, and only at a date that each year moves further into the future) but Medicare (the cost of which is spiralling out of control). Just for perspective: according to the (exceedingly pessimistic) Social Security Trustees' Report, Social Security can be 'fixed' with a 16% increase in payroll taxes; Medicare would take a 122% increase to fund over the long run.
And as Ezra further points out, when we talk about the problem of Medicare, we're really talking about the problem of health care costs in general--the non-Medicare portion of which is rising even more rapidly than Medicare costs. The real problem won't be 'fixed' by cutting benefits or increasing payroll taxes, but by massive change in the health care system as a whole.
All of this said, Millner is almost right in one respect: there really is a tremendous inter-generational injustice being perpetrated here. It's the shifting of the tax burden from taxpayers today to taxpayers in the future (and, more to the point, from wealthy taxpayers to middle- and lower-class taxpayers). This shift is not just something Bush did, it's GOP policy; it's not just GOP policy, it's their fundamental raison d'etre. This is the core of Millner's astonishing stupidity: there is an egregious injustice and an easily identifiable culprit, and Millner never notices either one.
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