I agree. The 'manufacturing' of a crisis is a true strength of this administration. Fear and crisis is what they do best (heaven knows it isn't governance). I think the American public has finally figured out they simply can't believe the 'boy who cried wolf' anymore. Therefore, the secret is out. There really was never a crisis, there was just a big push at doing real harm to Americans.

Just to make you feel better, I will create a winger reply. Perhaps it will soothe your nerves while you wait for the indictments:

Because of the criminalization of conservatism, the liberal media has had to back off of... wait... um, back off of helping the Democrats carry out their irresponsible evasion of the social security crisis to spend more time dealing with the um, the criminalization! Anyway, forget all this complicated stuff. The question still remains... why do you hate America? 

Get with the times, Matt. The idea that 'crisis' describes some sort of objective reality is just so 20th century. So, for that matter, is the idea that there is any objective reality; 'reality' is what the Bush administration creates by managing perceptions.


So here's how it works: when they were warning about a crisis, there was a crisis because they were warning about a crisis. Now that they aren't warning about a crisis, there is no crisis because they aren't warning about a crisis. You see? No inconsistency at all.

Um...I can't speak for Howard, but it sure looks to me like he was slamming the pundit class for their complaisance on issues like Social Security--not attacking Matt for his observation.

I gotta go with Howard on this one because I think he got to the "why" of the question, in a funny way.

I think a lot of the pundits, who bled ink over Social Security a year ago but have not since written columns about, "Hey, what happened to that supposedly serious issue?" actually see there jobs as one where you do, in fact, schmooze with people in power and then report on what they tell you.

So, they're schmoozing with these people and a year ago, all these folks wanted to talk about what the Social Security Crisis.  Then, they stopped talking about it.  The pundits, too used to reporting what these guys are saying, have forgotten a key part of their jobs:

Reporting about what these guys are NOT saying.

Even more important than that, these guys have forgotten to report on what the powerful have STOPPED TALKING ABOUT!

You know, I sometimes think that an effective political columnist would at least occasionally write things like: "Today, the new CEO of bankrupt Delphi announced a 70% reduction of wages for the auto part's makers employees.  I happened to have been out with several economists from the administration and the national chamber of commerce and, unless the subject was brought up directly, none of them seemed to care.  When the subject did come up, they muttered something about globalization and wandered away towards the underpaid waiter walking around with the plate of chicken satay and mango sauce."

At least it'd be revealing.

Re: On the other had, if the median American could be convinced that the US vision of the middle east is immoral and not worthy of exertion at any cost the war would have been averted.

The average American also has no contact with the war in the Middle East, so it does not resonate with him as Social Secuirity does. Of course maybe he's beginning to suspect that the run-up in gas prices has something to do with Bush's bungling in the region, although the Left, strangely, has failed to bring that fact out in the open where it should be-- oil prices are about 1/3 over what market factors alone would suggest, and since OPEC's cartel power does not appear to be the cause of this, the most likely reason are security fears occasioned by the US blundering about over there like the proverbial bull in the china shop. Back in the 70s the GOP tagged the nation's energy woes quite effectively to Carter and the Democrats. It's time for richly deserved turnabout on that one

Scott Burns is one.

Burns is a nationally-syndicated financial columnist whose home base is The Dallas Morning News.

A week ago Sunday, he wrapped up a five-part column on generations of the Burns family from his grandparents through his grandchildren. The series included financial demographics and sidebars for each generation depicted that week.

In the last one, about his granddaughter, he tried to play up a continuing "entitlement crisis."

I e-mailed him back about that:

You say, "Since Bobby was born in 1940, our government has promised to pay out benefits that exceed the $48.8 trillion net worth of all American households."

I infer that you imply that all this debt is going to come due at one drop-dead date.

First of all, some of that debt's already been paid. People who became eligible for Social Security in 1941, a year after your magic date, have long since left the scene. Ditto for the magic year of 1966; many people who were in the front of Medicare eligibility have died many moons ago, as well.

You say that we exceed all consumer net worth by $23.2 trillion. But you nowhere state how much of this debt is still outstanding and how much is already off the books.

Finally, as noted above, you leave the implication this is all coming due at some date "X." Well, of course it's not. And federal entitlements have always been a "pay as you go." Therefore, without the margin of difference, perhaps, I probably could have written a graf like yours a couple of decades ago.

Arguably, federal entitlements need a look-see. Arguably as well, they need a more minor tweak than anything you've proposed in the past.

By not contexting your $72 trillion in total post-1940 federal debt, nor the $23.2 trillion after consumer assets, I think you're skewing the story and painting with a doomsday brush.

It was a clear and gathering looming. Social Security, orange alerts, WMD all follow the same MO.

It is amazing how out of one lie a whole plethora of lies based on the original lie spring into being. The throng is quick to follow and jump on the band wagon, what ho! Before you know it strange loomings appear before our very eyes.

One looming threat I have noticed is the tendency for some newspapers to actually reverse the importance of order and prominence of their various articles. When I read my local paper I have learned to read the back page first because that is where anything of importance will be situated. The front page I usually put under the cat box making it a much more useful item. When they mention the troubles of the congenial Karl Roves it is relegated to a small paragraph and is well hidden but a promotional on the local soccer team gets splashed all over the front page complete with giant color pictures. Hip, hip hoorah, rah, rah, boom-dee-yay, rah, rah. Here kitty, kitty!

I live for the day when the front page of the New York Times reads “Bush is a Liar, he lied to all of you, and He is Still Lying to you” – I know this may sound simplistic but it might be a good step in the right direction. One thing for certain, it isn’t looming.

Aint that the truth. We all sit here and discuss topic o da week based on what the administration puts out, because after all, "they're the party in power and they get to set the agenda." We fine. That worked for SS and we won, as we should have. Maybe its time we start setting the agenda.

"Consider Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson?s smug optimism back in 1967: "The beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in....How is this possible? It stems from the fact that the national product is growing at compound interest....Always there are more youths than old folks in a growing population....A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived.""

""When population growth slows down, so that we no longer have the comfortable Ponzi rate of growth or we even begin to register a decline in total numbers," a chastened Paul Samuelson wrote in 1985, "then the thorns along the primrose path reveal themselves with a vengeance."

Lindsey is right on target:

http://www.reason.com/0203/fe.bl.social.shtml

The crisis is there, leftist crooks and liars. It's just stretched over many generations, it's "boiling the frog", sort of.

Samuelson himself has admitted that much. Economists are pretty much in consensus: the changing demographics can easily ruin PAYG "retirement" scam-schemes. It's not a gain, it's a Ponzi scheme - and such a fringe publications as The Economist has compared this to a Ponzi scheme indeed. Interesting data point - want to see Japanese bonds being rated in terms of probability of those being repaid like bonds of Egypt are being rated today (and yes, unviability of s.s., the "unfunded liabilities" are one of the reasons)? If it's all the rhetorics of a few Republican spinmeisters, how come the markets start to sweat over the issue.

There are countries in the world where s.s. tax (because it is essentially a tax, not "contribution) approaches half, e.g. in some postcommie countries it is 49.5% of gross (brutto) wage, and that is before taxes - communism acted as sort of accelerated aging in the economy of democratic country while the demographics has changed in similar ways.

The numbers you had published that s.s. scam are merely product of standard leftist tactics of self-deception: seek the best news possible, e.g. comparing productivity growth and payroll tax - and let's ignore the fact that such comparisons are based on highly imperfect definitions and numbers, hence there's GIGO problem with such day-dreaming - and rig the numbers in your own favor. Try watching s.s. systematically - whatever comes out of govt, is always inflated in its own favor, no matter who holds the office, because that is mandated by interest of particular bureaucracy, not this or that political party.

If s.s. schemes were solvent, they would not produce such steady stream of increases in s.s. taxes:

http://www2.economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=97568
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"Americans worry about a Social-Security contribution rate of 12.4% of pay, but Germans have to put up with 19.1%, and even that does not make German pensions self-financing: without a subsidy from general taxation, the contribution rate would have to be 25%. In Italy, the contribution rate is an astonishing 33% of eligible pay."

It's easy to deceive yourself with simplistic numbers like the left always loves to do. If you torture data long enough, they will tell whatever you want them to tell. Since the left doesn't want to know the truth, but only to have the progressivist sentiment confirmed, it gropes in the dark at all time. Socialism is just fine, Erich Honecker quipped a few weeks before collapse of GDR. And so you do, a few generations before collapse of s.s.

As fraction of wage that is taken by s.s. tax increases, so does unwillingness of businesses to hire people, the unemployment, the tax evasion, the corruption and the informal economy. It is estimated that a third of GDP is created in completely illegal, "underground" sector in Italy. There goes a good number of assumptions that your silly extrapolations rely on - people respect the law, but only if it doesn't cost them too much.
s
The crisis isn't averted, it's still there, no different than before - it is merely stretched in time to such a slow motion that it allows you to pretend it's not there. It's still there all right!

One noble attempt of President Bush to at least get people to consider their future before getting hurt as usual, and no, your usual leftist mantras are anything but hard thinking about future, a cold realization by quite a number of people that something needs to be done about it - and you ruined it because you are too emotional and too focused on pleasant self-deception.

No matter, you don't want to learn the smart way, you'll learn the hard way. You didn't listent to Frederic Hayek, pissed on it, got burned, had to eat your words - you do the same thing today with critics of "principles" behind s.s, you'll get the same fate.

From article in The Economist:

"Americans worry about a Social-Security contribution rate of 12.4% of pay, but Germans have to put up with 19.1%, and even that does not make German pensions self-financing: without a subsidy from general taxation, the contribution rate would have to be 25%. In Italy, the contribution rate is an astonishing 33% of eligible pay."

This is not future, not prognostics - this is here and now. So yes, your numbers have to be rigged in this way or another, intentionally or unintentionally, because the practice proves that your pitiful extrapolations are rooted in wishful thinking wrong - since it is already not working in so many countries, it can hardly be counted on to work in USA. You're basically relying on miracle to happen. As my friend who happens to be a doctor says, miracles do happen, but I would not rely on them.

Unsurprisingly, high unemployment and tax and s.s. evasion are the norm, not the exception. Guess how much respected the rule of law becomes. Most people hold the half of their wage as more precious than the rule of law. And once the rule of law is not respected.


The old democracies are in for the same fate.

The crisis is there, it's persistent, pervasive, it didn't go away and it will not go away. All that was stopped was the talking about it, because the reform is no longer the subject of the day. That didn't make the crisis go away by any means.

As we move away from the beginning of the Ponzi scheme to the middle of it,  smugness and being happy for supposedly getting something for nothing start to transform into fear and panic, it's going to come back more and more frequently. The debate you've seen was just the first, weak tinge. s.s. will go the same way as "social market economy" of Germany or vague "third way" scenarios based on hollow wishful thinking or the "cradle to grave" welfare state. s.s. is today in terms of health where the welfare states were at the end of 1970s - not  long in historical terms before admitting defeat.  

Incidentally, the IOUs are worthless not in terms of reliability - likelihood of them being repaid - but of economic value: a dollar put in bank represents capital (wealth, not money) _saved_. A dollar in fictitious "trust fund" represents capital _spent_, used up. PAYG reduces capital accumulation in the economy. This alone costs society a good chunk of development and the standard of living in the long term.

And don't say that stealing my, worker's, money, is "social gain". It isn't. You call it "social gain" only bc most people are emotional and ignorant of underlying economics. But they are catching up to it. And when they do, I would not want to be in your shoes.

Give me back my money that you STOLE from me supposedly for my "retirement", thieves.

And last but not least, there comes the issue of morality - since you have no morality, you want people FORCED into the scheme. That is "civilized", because you seem to love this forced collectivism, even if it is less brutal than that of commie regimes. The program is so good that people have to be forced into it, which you cover merely by heaping on empty rhetorics, questioning opponent's character and other vile tricks, to conceal the fact that MOST PEOPLE WOULD NEVER AGREE TO RETIREMENT SYSTEM OF SUCH TERMS AND FEATURES COULD THEY GO FOR IT VOLUNTARILY. Talk to a leftist about individual rights, get forced into the scheme that, you see, is "good for you".

Well, it's none of your business if it's good or bad for me. If you need my money for your beloved programs, work it out yourselves, thieves, as opposed to stealing the money from those who don't support those programs.

Most workers would have shot you had they any interest in hard-headed, unromantic economics. Sooner or later the reality will catch up with them - don't want to learn smart, you'll learn the hard way - and then no person with self-preservation instinct will admit in public they have leftist views.