I need some help here. Just about any media junkie knows by now that there are two wildly different narratives floating out there about the sustainability of Social Security and Medicare as the 77 million baby boomers begin to retire. One of them, clearly embraced by conservatives, but also put forth by no small number of liberals and moderates, non-partisan foundations, and mainstream economists, says that entitlements in their current form will spell doom for the budget in the coming decades. In response, a number of mostly progressive pundits, bloggers, and economists have portrayed this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric (and the numbers these folks trot out) as propaganda meant to scare the public into embracing the privatization of social security.
Quite frankly, I'm seriously confused. I'm not an economist, but I can read, and I can count, and I have no idea at the moment who's spinning me, or if both camps are, and the answer lies somewhere in between. The apocalyptic crowd tells us that between now and the middle of this century we face either 25 and 45 trillion in unfunded liabilities (I've seen both figures in mainstream publications - 25 trillion in the Post and 45 trillion in this month's Atlantic), and that most of those liabilities are directly related to SS and Medicare outlays. (According to the aforementioned piece in the Atlantic, even if we eliminated the entire federal government tomorrow, with the exception of Social Security and Medicare, we would still have to raise taxes to cover entitlement benefits in the coming decades).
Now, what is certain is that 77 million baby boomers will begin to reach the age of early retirement in 2008, and begin to be eligible for full benefits in 2011. Yet, according to figures (for instance) from calpundit (http://www.calpundit.com/archives/002472.html) the severity of the situation has been wildly exaggerated by the right in order to promote their own privatization agenda. That conservatives have a vested ideological interest in hyping the threat posed by the retirement of the baby boomers (the hyping of threats seems to be a theme for theme) but is it genuinely that bad? Clearly there are variables - the health of the economy, when the boomers kick the bucket - but can't anyone give us a clear accounting of this issue? I'm just lookin' for some truth here. And from a political point of view, even if Democratic pols are afraid to get out ahead of this issue, we need to start doing so for them. The right is clearly gaining ground.