I frankly haven’t been paying much attention to President Bush’s Social Security reform, ehrm, thingie (hard to call it a proposal because I don’t think he’s really proposed anything concrete), but I gather that the spineless wimps in Congress are coalescing like a school of jellyfish around a “bipartisan” proposal to raise the hell out of taxes and do absolutely nothing to create private ownership. Sounds like I, personally, can look forward to paying several thousand dollars more per year to support Social Security.
Business as usual in Washington. Just think how much worse it would be if John Kerry had won! (Sadly, I’m not sure if I mean that ironically or not.)
In the relentless, frantic spinning that passes for political discourse among our anointed masters, though, the frothing anti-Bushie Paul Krugman sets a new high. Krugman frantically lets us know that under Bush’s latest Social Security thingie “the average worker–average pay now is $37,000–retiring in 2075 would face a cut equal to 10 percent of pre-retirement income.”
That’s right, folks – we should swat down whatever the evil Chimpler McBushiburton proposed because it might cause people who aren’t even born yet to take a 10% reduction in income when they quit working for their money.
It seems I’ve gone on about this ’til I’m blue in the fingers (here and elsewhere) – when you’ve got a present value $47 trillion in liabilities and ‘responsiblities and $1.4 trillion in assets, someone, somewhere, sometime, is going to take it in the shorts. There’s no other way around it. The only question is who and when, internal or external. The only other solution is to eliminate the defined health and welfare programs, reneging on the promises exchanged for premiums, but again someone takes it in the shorts. Unsettled transfers and coerced, lopsided transactons have to work themselves out. There simply is no easy solution. The hacks on either side of the issue are just blind ideologues.
3 cheers for the Tool!
If Social security was a private commercial venture, it would fall under the preview of the FBI Fraud Unit. I think Ponzi is the word I’m looking for.