I hate to blog about things I really don’t understand, but what the heck is going on with the public discussion of Social Security? I mean, I heard Atrios<\/I> on NPR the other day, for cryin’ out loud.\n
Look, and again, Your Humble Blogger understands all of this only on the MegaBloks level, all of the conversation about Social Security seems to be taking place outside of the entire point of Social Security, which is to actually provide social (that is, economic) security. Right? Whether there is or isn’t a “Social Security crisis” has to be talked about in that context, right? It’s not a system for racking up economic viability points, it’s actual public policy to address an actual society.\n
Now, either you think that Social Security is separate from the federal government in some non-accounting based way, or you don’t. If you do, then there isn’t a Social Security crisis: it’s been lending money for decades to the federal government, and as long as the federal government is willing to pay that money back, and to (as it agreed to do at the beginning of their little business relationship) lend a little money back (and comparatively, we’re really talking about a trifle) in advance of the big Baby Bump entering their prime earning years, then the whole thing is fine. In other words, there will be a few years of deficit, during which they will stop lending and start collecting, and then there will likely (but not definitely) be a few years when they have collected all the money owed them and have to start actually borrowing, before the cycle begins again and they start paying off those debts and lending out more. This is perfectly tenable as long as they are guaranteed the income from the upcoming generation, which will be even bigger than the Baby Boom. Sure, nobody likes the moment when your indebtedness is higher than your assets, but many individuals and companies consider such moments inevitable.\n
The only real problem with this scenario is that some members of the federal government seems to be unwilling to pay back its contracted debt to the Social Security Administration. It’s hard for me to believe that they will be allowed to prevail; surely if they won’t pay that debt, then my own savings bonds aren’t far from worthlessness, and that is just not going to happen. The US government, up against it, is going to raise the money to pay the debt. That may well mean a huge deficit in the relevant years; in fact, it probably will mean one. And we’ve dealt with deficits before, right? Either we swallow ’em (my preferred method) or we raise revenue, or we reduce spending in a variety of ways.\n
If, on the other hand, you think of Social Security as just part of the federal government, then you can skip all the above steps and say that as there isn’t any Social Security, there can’t be a crisis, and that the problem is just a deficit crisis, as said above.\n
OK, so where does that lead us? Oh, yes, to the point. Which, as far as I can tell, is that there will be a few years between the Baby Boomers’ retirements and the Next Generation’s peak earning when it will be very difficult for us to produce enough, you know, production to have enough tax revenues to do everything we want to do. OK, that<\/I> could be a problem. It’s possible that we, as a society, are going to have to decide if we want to guarantee security for the elderly and the disabled, and widows and orphans. Or at least to what level we want to provide such security. I should really phrase that as how high a priority it is for us to do that; we may decide we’d like to do it, but we’d rather spend that money fighting terrorism or educating children or something.\n
I do agree with the floating discussion that it would be advantageous to have discussion about all this before it actually happens. I just don’t understand why it helps to have discussion that so carefully misses the point. How many times, in all the discussion, has anybody said “taking care of the elderly is expensive, and we’re going to have a lot more elderly”? That’s the starting point of the discussion, isn’t it?\n
Of course, all of the methods that occur to me as easy are probably wrong. Granting statehood to anyplace that has its population bump conveniently opposite ours, forced-growth cloning to have the new generation ready to enter the work force in ten years, cryogenic freezing of retirees (and possibly not reviving them), or simply wholesale slaughter of little old ladies, these are policies which directly address the issue. I’m not sure how some sort of mandatory IRA program does.\n
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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