Fred Hiatt got out his crayons today to take on Social Security supporters who "pursue a maddening strategy of minimizing the existence of any problem and accusing those who seek solutions of trying to destroy Social Security."
Dean Baker responds:
The piece begins by telling readers that: "THIS YEAR, for the first time since 1983, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than it receives from payroll taxes -- $41 billion. This development is not an emergency, but it is a warning sign (emphasis in original)." It certainly is a warning sign. The falloff in Social Security tax revenue is a warning that the economy is seriously depressed due to the collapse of the housing bubble. Double digit unemployment leads to all sorts of problems, including the strains that it places on pension funds like Social Security.
In a sane newspaper the next sentence would be pointing out the urgent need to get back to full employment. Instead the Post tells readers:
"Too soon, this year's anomaly will become the norm. By 2037, all the Social Security reserves will have been drained and the income flowing into the program will only be enough to pay 75 percent of scheduled benefits. If that sounds tolerable, consider that two-thirds of seniors rely on Social Security as their main source of income. The average annual benefit is $14,000. Those who care most about avoiding such painful cuts ought to be working on ways to bolster the program's finances -- and soon, when the necessary changes will be less drastic than if action is postponed."
Let's see, it would be intolerable to have Social Security pay 75 percent of scheduled benefits in 2037, but one of the Post preferred cuts is raising the retirement age to 70, a 15 percent cut in benefits when fully phased in. So the Post thinks it would be just fine to have beneficiaries get 85 percent of scheduled benefits in 2037.
Of course doing nothing today, or for the next decade, or even the next two decades, does not imply that beneficiaries will see their benefits cuts by 25 percent in 2037. The Post may not be familiar with the way Congress works, but it tends to wait until issues require action. They would know this if they had heard about the Greenspan Commission, which was established in 1982 to deal with Social Security's last crisis. It produced a set of fixes which is now expected to keep the program solvent for 54 years, and no one missed a check....
That is not a good environment in which to debate substantial changes to the country's most important social program. Since there are several decades until the program faces any real problems, it is entirely reasonable for those who support the program to focus on educating the public about the program's financial health and to seek to delay any major changes until the Peterson-type misinformation campaigns have been defeated.
Social Security is for the little people, don't you know. Hiatt and crew are not going to be trying to survive in their dotage on Social Security alone, but they sure want the rest of us to have tighten our belts and work until we drop.
Meanwhile, the rest of us weigh in on the issue in the form of an AARP poll.
The poll, which was provided exclusively to HuffPost, finds that 85 percent of adults oppose cutting Social Security to reduce the deficit; 72 percent "strongly oppose" doing so.
Numbers like that simply don't appear in surveys of almost any other national issue that is subject to debate.
In fact, the AARP survey turns conventional wisdom about taxes on its head: half of all non-retired adults said that they would be willing to pay higher payroll taxes to ensure that Social Security will be there for them; 57 percent of adults under 50 would be willing to pay such a tax....
The strong support for the program isn't ideological but personal and visceral. Cutting Social Security would bring real pain, survey respondents said. Just shy of two-thirds say that their family would be hit hard if Social Security were cut. Eighty percent of Americans say that Social Security alleviates the financial burden of taking care of parents. Prior to the enactment of Social Security, the elderly consistently drained the savings of their children in their waning days or were shipped off to homes known as "poor houses" -- a phrase that survives today as a cliché disconnected from its original use.
The Social Security denialists aren't the ones who argue for taking a measured approach to reforms of the system. The real denialists are the ones who think it's politically popular to start messing with this American institution in the name of deficit reduction.