The man just can't help himself.
Alan Simpson reached out to a recipient of one of his angry letters on Tuesday night, insisting that he did not mean to personally attack Merton and Joan Bernstein but instead intended to send the letter directly to the Huffington Post.
The letter, dated June 2nd, was mailed to the Bernsteins in Massachusetts in response to a May piece they published in HuffPost....
The note Simpson sent isn't so much the issue, except of course for the fact that Simpson made the effort to hunt down the Bernsteins to send it to them. HuffPo has a copy of it, and it is "aggressive," but not as insulting as Simpson can certainly be.
But the follow-up phone call, now that's something.
Merton Bernstein told HuffPost that he picked up the phone Tuesday night and the caller told him: "You don't know who I am."
"Oh, yes I do," Bernstein said he told Simpson. Bernstein, who was a senior consultant to the 1983 commission that reformed Social Security, said he used the opportunity to try to educate Simpson.
The commission, chaired by Alan Greenspan, reformed Social Security so that it could handle the onslaught of the pending baby boom retirements. Simpson was unaware of what the commission had done, said Bernstein.
"That's not true," Bernstein said of Simpson's claim -- which he has made in the past and repeated to Bernstein -- that the commission did not account for baby boomers. "They very clearly and explicitly addressed that issue. That's why they built in a surplus." Bernstein told him that he was in the room with Bob Ball and other commission leaders when they made the decision to account for the pending wave of retirements.
"Then why are they in such trouble now?" Simpson responded. Bernstein responded that they are not in fact in trouble today. The surplus is now over $2 billion and is projected to reach $4.6 billion.
"Well, don't you pay attention to the trustee's report?" Simpson responded, as Bernstein recalled. Bernstein told him that he does pay attention to such reports, and that the most recent report found that Social Security was in no worse shape this year than it was last year, despite the recession. The program is on track to pay full benefits at least until 2037, at which point most surviving boomers will be in their late 80s and 90s.
Bernstein also tried to explain to Simpson that his proposals to means-test benefits to restrict them to low-income seniors would not save money because of the high administrative costs of such an effort. "He didn't seem to understand that," said Bernstein.
It's probably less that Simpson doesn't understand these basic truths about Social Security than he doesn't give a shit, has his agenda, and is going to stick with it. There's little else to explain why he remains so steadfastly obstinate in his belief that the only way to "save" Social Security is to drastically slash its benefits.
That and the "lesser people" like seniors, disabled veterans and the troops just cost too damn much.