Megan McArdle (or, as she likes to be called, McStupid), has decided to attack social security,, which is rather a mistake as her manipulations are easily refuted.
Every since the early eighties, when the Greenspan commission kicked the can down the road with a combination of tax increases and later retirement ages, analysts have been awaiting the day when the system would finally go into deficit. That date has been sliding around between 2016 and 2020 for some years now, but the suspense is finally over: the system is going into deficit this year.
Not doing a bit of research, I remember this was known and planned for.
Now, we all know that this week, McArdle said one of the stupidest things a grown human can say. ("Tyranny of the Majority") My friends, this week she tops herself. She's become quite the Jonah Goldberg.
This is the canary in the coal mine; if Social Security's finances are in trouble, Medicare's will also be looking worse. While I was at the Kauffman Foundation's economics blogger forum last Friday, a show of hands indicated that about 80% of the people there thought America would have a serious fiscal crisis in the next two decades. This is how it starts--not with a bang, but with a moderate decline in revenues.
I'll have to read a lot about Social Security to respond, but if she's going to operate on this level of clumsy misdirection and feeble lying, it'll be fun.
9 comments:
The Greenspan commission was always a robbery waiting to happen.
1) Raise taxes on working people to create a surplus for 30 years
2) When the surplus quits growing, cut benefits for retirees.
And the $3 trillion or so accumulated? Just numbers on pieces of paper. Can't raise taxes on our lords & masters to pay the obligation, can we?
A show of hands? Is that the new "hypothetical?"
aimai
I'll have to read a lot about Social Security to respond
But that will give you an unfair advantage.
But that will give you an unfair advantage.
LOL
Props to Emily.
Also.
"1) Raise taxes on working people to create a surplus for 30 years
2) When the surplus quits growing, cut benefits for retirees..."
You forgot "Steal the Social Security funds to pay for other Gov 'projects', like wars.
Heh!
I predict that they won't end Social Security, they'll just reform it, and in the end we'll all be forced to pay for it but we'll get less and less and less until it disappears like the smile of the Cheshire Cat.
Who would have thought that Lewis Carroll would write the perfect guides to our times.
These fiscal conservative assholes piss me off. Why is it okay to go like 500 billion to a trillion dollars of off-the-books emergency deficit spending to bomb brown people in a foreign land, but it's the collapse of the entire government and all our freedoms if we need to run a short-term deficit of a few million while revenues are low from a harsh economic recession? AGH!
Parrotlover, we're bombing brown people over there so we don't have to give them health care over here.
It really does sum up movement conservatism and Randism...
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