Robert Samuelson Calls for Eliminating Social Security, the Internet and the Wheel
Okay, that's not exactly right. In fact he just wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. Apparently he thinks the world was better back in the days when people over age 65 couldn't get health care insurance and mostly lived in poverty.
Since he considers those days so great, Samuelson no doubt thinks we would be better off without the Internet and the wheel also. After all, if we got rid of the Internet we wouldn't have any more problems of Internet porn. And think how many traffic fatalities could be avoided if we didn't have the wheel.
Samuelson is upset because out broken health care system is projected to cause Medicare to deplete its trust fund in 8 years. Serious people would look to fix the health care system. Samuelson wants to tell the elderly and disabled to die in the streets.
And, the latest projections from the SS trustees show that in just 28 years its trust fund will be depleted. According to these projections, if we don't raise taxes on workers who will be earning 30 percent more than current workers, we will not be able to pay full scheduled benefits. This should get people about as scared as the fact that we will have to repave Interstate 95 some time in the next 20 years.
If Samuelson had any clue about the topics on which he wrote he would know that Medicare and SS are both great success stories. They do what they were designed to do in ensuring a decent standard of living for the elderly and the disabled. They are both more efficient than their private sector counterparts.
I suppose with the decline of the traditional media, this sort of nonsense from Samuelson is the best that Newsweek can afford.
Actually, he calls for no such thing. He merely says that unless changes are made - and SOON - a precipitating major event will force radical and probably unpleasant choices on politicians and the public in 2017 and 2037 - unless changes are made to the systems now
"Like General Motors and Chrysler, we continue self-defeating habits because we can—temporarily. These are not easy issues. But procrastination is a bad policy. The longer changes are postponed, the more wrenching they will be. The hurt for retirees and taxpayers alike will only grow with time. Social Security last faced a forcing event in 1983, when a dwindling trust fund prodded Congress to make changes. The counterintuitive lesson: a "crisis" is just what we need."
Sorry - that doesn't seem all that radical to me. And given the demographics and the probably inflation and rising costs over the next 20 years, I don't see a call for a better and more comprehensive system as all that bad.
May 24, 2009 2:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hmmm, I thought it was only Republicans who played up fear-mongering and guilt. I guess not...
May 24, 2009 4:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
The way I read Samuelson is that he wants a crisis of a collapse in Social Security and Medicare. He thinks nothing will happen about securing the programs until we face a big crisis point.
First, that would raise opportunities for politicians to make all kinds of radical moves that may have nothing to do with Social Security. I agree with Naomi Klein about how this process works.
Plus, I think I detect a hit or two that if those programs went away, Samuelson would be happy enough anyway. I can't detect how serious he is about a couple of his proposals.
Dean Baker proposes that we fix the health care system because that is the underlying cause. If we are serious, that's what we would do. But what's really scary is that our political system is so dysfunctional that it may not be able to fix the underlying problem.
Bob Spencer
May 24, 2009 6:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Could it be that our political system is the underlying problem? There's no question about it being dysfunctional.
May 24, 2009 3:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Whatever problems Social Security may have are quite easily fixed. All we need to do is eliminate the income cap on payroll taxes. This has the added benefit of making the system less regressive as well, as lower income workers pay far more proportionally than wealthier people. Establishing a universal national healthcare system with the power to negotiate drug prices and set fair prices for medical procedures would accomplish even more for medicare. There is absolutely no need to "overhaul" (i.e., gut and destroy) social security and medicare.
May 24, 2009 8:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
DrDick. Absolutely. And furthermore, why is there a crisis in the first place? We are by far the richest nation in the history of the world and we still have millions living on the streets, millions without healthcare insurance, etc. Why? The reason can be summed up in one word. Greed. The greedy are running the show.
May 24, 2009 9:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree wholeheartedly, DrDick! The percentage per paycheck could even be reduced if the cap was eliminated. Why should a person with a $106,800 salary pay 6.2% of their salary, and a person who has double that salary pays only 3.1% on his/her entire salary? Because starting with $106,801, there is no tax witheld on the rest of the income. How about someone who makes $1,000,000? The percent comes to more like .3%. Benefits are not means-tested, but contributions are.
This tax is embarrassingly regressive, and the annual "Social Security Is Going Belly UP" could end once and for all by making the obvious changes.
May 24, 2009 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I get the impression that Samuelson wants us to raise the retirement age or something like that. That's all, not a claim to eliminate Social Security and Medicare entirely.
I also need to point out that the "Trust Fund" running out really doesn't mean that much. Ultimately, the "trust fund" is loaned to the general fund and is paid back out of the general fund. So the real issue is when the receipts become negative (i.e. when Medicare and Social Security become net liabilities rather than net assets to the Gernal Fund), which comes a lot sooner. There is essentially no difference in practical terms between the General Fund giving Social Security or Medicare, say, $50 billion out of the "Trust Fund," or giving them $50 billion after the "Trust Fund" is depleted.
May 24, 2009 9:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know why Dean's upset with Robert.
Samuelson supports Baker's favored idea that the "Trust Funds" (a phrase which, as Glaivester makes clear, should always be ringed with scare quotes) are really trust funds.
May 24, 2009 5:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
In fact he just wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare.
Really? I couldn't find evidence of that in the article. For Social Security, he wants gradually introduced means testing and a gradually raised eligibility age. For Medicaire, he speaks vaguely of an "overhaul".
Personally, I'd be happy to overhaul Medicaire out of existence if that was the result of the introduction of a socialized national health plan.
May 24, 2009 10:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ouch, Dan,
Don't you know what the Democrats will do instead? They will "reform" Medicare and "mandate" that the elderly buy an "affordable" insurance policy from their favorite corporations giving them several "choices" of care and then a year later they will get a "tax credit" to pay for the premium and all the deductibles they paid the previous year for their "affordable" policy.
After all, Dan, we're Democrats. We do not believe that healthcare should be universal. Oh, no, we don't. That would not be "moderate" or "centrist" and somebody might call us a "socialist" if we were committed to an "entitlement". And single-payer? That's "impossible", Dan. Haven't you been listening? Heck, you can get arrested for trying to tell Congress that you support something radical like that!
Medicare is actually an impossible program that Americans despise because it is not centrist and does not adequately stimulate the free market. Get with the program! We'e pragmatic now. No more of this retro 30's and 60's stuff.
May 24, 2009 11:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
He's going about it from the wrong direction. Instead of raising eligibility age, means testing, etc -- take away the cap and LOWER the witholding. Social Security is easy - it is simple math. Once the wealthy have to contribute an equal percentage of their wages to the middle class, the problem will be solved.
May 24, 2009 5:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Means testing will turn Social Security into a welfare program which will weaken support for it. (I suspect that's the idea.)
In interviews Samuelson speaks of "we" as if he too fears spending his golden years bagging groceries. Uh huh. More likely he fears being taxed to help other older folks avoid same.
May 24, 2009 8:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Samuelson's sins are too many to list.
First there is no such program as SocialSecurityMedicareMedicaid. All of the efforts to lump them together in some sort of concocted 'entitlements crisis' is cover for the seventy-four year campaign to kill Social Security. Alf Landon ran specifically against it in 1936 and the mainstream Repubican Party has continued running against it ever since. And it hasn't been about the money, neither the financing or the profits from privatizing, the argument over Social Security is not at heart an economic one.
THEY HATE SOCIAL SECURITY FOR WHAT IT IS.
Until we get that straight there never will be an advance in this debate. Some people want to kill Social Security and there biggest nightmare is that it will prove to be solvent over time. Which is why they never actually put 2017 in numeric context. How much money are we talking about? Odds are about 100% that you don't know because people like Samuelson always use words like 'bankrupt' to describe what is initially in actual budgetary context quite small amounts of money. True the sums get bigger if you extrapolate them as the crisismongers do to HEAT DEATH OF THE SUN, which is after all what 'PV over the Infinite Future Horzion' implies.
But President Bush formed his Commission to Strengthen Social Security he took the simplest means of doing so right off the table. He would not even allow discussion of an across the board payroll tax, which left most people under the impression that this would require some crippling economy crushing sum. Instead the reason is that he didn't want people to do the math.
Well too bad. Using the Trustees own Intermediate Cost assumptions you can fix Social Security with an initial 0.20% tax increase in 2010, another 0.10% in 2011 and then another series of 0.20% increases from 2026-2036. That's it, done, fixed.
Make the median household income? Don't particularly want to work until you are seventy? You think you might be willing to pay an extra $1 a week starting in 2010 and then an extra 50 cents in 2011 and then hold your FICA rate steady until 2026 instead? You can read back through a decade or more of mainstream coverage of Social Security and never have it expressed in terms of actual impact on the average paycheck. Because some one doesn't want the guy moving cement for $12.50 cents an hour being asked if he chose paying an extra 50 cents a week to avoid three extra years of work. No instead the Samuelson's of this world insist "Hey you'll be living longer! Why not spend it out on the construction site?"
$1 a week for the median income household. Then maybe we can move on to something important. Like maybe the disfunctioning health care system. Really it is time for the heirs of Alf Landon to just get over this one. FDR won, you lost, let's insert a minor fix to Social Security and Move On.
NW Plan for a Real Social Security Fix: DI and OAS Triggers
May 24, 2009 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm looking forward to Mr. Samuelson making sure his time as a retired man don't burden the rest of society. He clearly doesn't believe that it is moral to burden society that way. The former head of S. Korea provided Mr. Samuelson with one of many alternative solutions to the moral dilemma he will face.
No,I don't wish Mr. Samuelson any ill will. But, I do think one should be consistent in his philosophy, and I do get tired of people like him trying to divide us into us and them.
May 25, 2009 12:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe.
Or it could be the continuation of the MSM being the platform for the pro-business propaganda of their corporate brethren.
May 25, 2009 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well the Republicans are about to have their starving the beast experiment in California. So we'll see what happens when the government collapses and all the vital services get cut or eliminated.
It's too bad for the people who are going to suffer, but they voted (or consented by default) to make examples of themselves.
May 25, 2009 12:41 PM | Reply | Permalink