More Social Security Sanity and Fiscal Shenanigans

Paul Krugman, great columnist for the New York Times, is back and is taking on Social Security Reform as well. Today he takes on some of the scaremongering that President Bush and his confederates are engaging in.

Here's the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund.

When benefit payments start to exceed payroll tax revenues, Social Security will be able to draw on that trust fund. And the trust fund will last for a long time: until 2042, says the Social Security Administration; until 2052, says the Congressional Budget Office; quite possibly forever, say many economists, who point out that these projections assume that the economy will grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.

Simple, concise and easy to understand. But not scary. That's the downside, it's easier for vast groupings of Americans to get in their minds that Social Security is doomed and there's nothing to be done but phase it out, because fear is an easy emotion to hold onto, even if it turns out that the object of fear isn't really all that scary.

By the way, for years Rush Limbaugh and others have been describing Liberals as fear-mongers for pointing out that some Conservatives Republicans would like to shut down Social Security. Of course the difference between that and this is that some Conservative Republicans actually would like to shut down Social Security.

In other news, we find that President Bush plans to cut the deficit in half by using a projection of the deficit rather than the deficit. The projection was for $521 billion and the actual deficit was for $413 billion. So if you squint your eyes just right, it looks like the deficit has already been cut nearly 20%.

This is kind of like my trip to the plastic surgeon. I went in, and he came out with a picture his receptionist had drawn of me (based on my description over the phone). I won't describe it but the word "Quasimodo" springs to mind. Anyway he looked at the picture, looked at me, and promptly charged me $650, on the basis that I had already improved 75% over the picture.

Anyway, Andrew Sullivan (a proponent of some kind of private accounts) made a good comment on these fiscal shenanigans, "All of this is as much a moral failure as an economic one, which is why I'm still befuddled by the anemic conservative outrage. Or is sex the only area in which Republicans care about morality?"