If there’s a better government program than Social Security, I’d like to know what it is.
So he begins his column, Raising False Alarms
There is so much in here, for example, ammunition against false arguments:
As the Economic Policy Institute has explained, Social Security "is emphatically not the cause of the federal government’s long-term deficits, since it is prohibited from borrowing and must pay all benefits out of dedicated tax revenues and savings in its trust funds."
He reminds us it is not Medicare, and that the problems caused by Medicare are a result of the greater health crisis in this country.
You should read. All of it.
I will offer a few quotes that stand out, and a few thoughts of my own, if you choose to keep reading.
Without Social Security today, nearly half of all Americans aged 65 or older would be poor. With it, fewer than 10 percent live in poverty.
Take those words to heart. Consider their condition without Social Security, what Herbert calls "ghastly, Dickensian conditions of extreme want." Consider also that the current average benefit is around $14,000/year, hardly overly generous.
Yes, it is true that those of us of the baby boom generation turn 65 this year and will soon begin retiring. Were I to retire at 66 my benefit will be around $2,100/mo - still far from generous. But there is money in the trust fund to cover us, despite the demagoguery from the Right.
If you are over 65, 9 times out of ten some of your family income will come from Social Security.
For more than half of the elderly, it provides the majority of their income. For many, it is the only income they have.
We are in a time when defined benefit pensions are disappearing. Back during the Reagan administration corporations were allowed to withdraw "excess funds" from the pensions they administered. Until the Enron disaster corporations could invest all of their pension funds in their own stocks, making them vulnerable. Even those with 401Ks and 403Bs (public employee equivalents) have found their assets diminished and their income stream shriveled as a result of the financial disasters of the previous administration. Without Social Security many elderly would have been homeless, unable to pay for heat and electricity, perhaps unable to eat properly.
We are also in a time when the remaining defined benefit pensions are often either in corporations that get to abandon them at least partially, as we saw with the auto company bailouts, or are under attack as 'too generous' for those of us in government employment - remember, public school teachers are government employees, and our pensions are now very much under attack, and if states and localities are allowed to declare bankruptcy we will see millions of us without any economic guarantees beyond Social Security.
We need a reality check. Attacking Social Security is both cruel and unnecessary. It needs to stop.
Why does it continue?
There has always been feverish opposition on the right to Social Security. What is happening now, in a period of deficit hysteria, is that this crucial retirement program is being dishonestly lumped together with Medicare as an entitlement program that is driving federal deficits.
Let's be clear. There is a very real issue of how we pay all our bills. But the drivers of our deficit are not social programs, even with the expenses of Medicare. Rather they are tax expenditures - to corporations and the wealthy - and our obscene expenditures on the military and our unnecessary expenditures especially in Iraq and Afghanistan (to say nothing of the many billions spent on "intelligence" activities that are hidden from view, upon military and paramilitary operations in hundreds of nations). But Herbert puts it far more bluntly:
The country is drowning in a sea of debt because of the obscene Bush tax cuts for the rich, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have never been paid for and the Great Recession.
Remember - under Bush the expenditures for Iraq and Afghanistan were off budget. Under current Republican doctrine, tax cuts, even for the wealthiest, do not have to be paid for. But those same Republicans insist that the infrastructure rebuilding they opposed (and then tried to get for their districts and states and claimed credit for when the Federal funds arrived) had to be paid for, even though dedicating current tax revenues to such efforts undermined their overall stimulative effects. And now some even want schools to return the portions of ARRA used to keep teachers employed! Of course, that is part of their attack on public schools, but I won't go off on that, even though my own livelihood and those of the teachers I represent are thereby threatened.
Some years ago in a class on social issues, I gave my students 20 articles on the possible Social Security crisis, ranging from the likes of people who write in The Nation to those who write in National Review. Some were well-known names, some were lesser names. All except one of the students in the class (and she was an extreme libertarian who did not believe in government programs) came up with the same solution. These kids were 16-18 years old. It is interesting to read that solution in Herbert's column:
One obvious step would be to raise the cap on payroll taxes so that wealthy earners shoulder a fairer share of the burden.
What do the American people think?
A Gallup poll taken recently found that 90 percent of Americans ages 44 to 75 believed that the country was facing a retirement crisis. Nearly two-thirds were more fearful of depleting their assets than they were of dying. The fears about retirement are well placed — most Americans do not have enough to retire on.
All of that is true, but does not mean Social Security is in jeopardy, but if Republicans and Neo-liberals can scare people, then they can undercut Social Security. That is why it is sad that while the President has apparently agreed that the retirement age should not be raised - for those who do manual labor even 66 may be too old as a minimum - it is frustrating that he apparently has not yet rejected the idea of cutting benefits. Consider - even at 2100/mo, that comes out to 25,200/year (and my benefits would be somewhat higher than those of the average American). Now consider the 201 Federal minimum wage of $7.25. Assume one worked 40 hours per week for 50 weeks. 2000 hours at that rate is 14,500, or around the average current benefit. Does anyone expect our elderly to survive on that? My projected benefit of 25,200 equals only $12.10/hour. How many could manage on that, even without payroll taxes being deducted?
Some would say that people should have been saving for their retirement. Perhaps, but how can they do so when while employed they often have no health insurance, so medical incidents are expensive? How about when they tried to save and invest their worth was wiped out by the shenanigans of those abusing the financial sector? What if they avoid all that, only to discover that interest on savings is less than inflation, so that the mere act of saving puts them further behind?
I will, as I often do, here again quote Hubert Humphrey:
It was once said that the moral test of government is how that
government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children;
those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are
in the shadows of life -- the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Remember, many of our seniors fit into two of those three categories. Our failure to sustain Social Security will mean we have failed that moral test.
And now?
I will let Bob Herbert have the last words, using those with which he ends his column:
The folks who want to raise the retirement age and hack away at benefits for ordinary working Americans are inevitably those who have not the least worry about their own retirement. The haves so often get a perverse kick out of bullying the have-nots.
All I can add is this:
Yep!