The Manufactured Social Security Crisis

Amidst all the forecasts of doom regarding the budget deficit, I keep hearing about how politicians have screwed up social security so badly that it's out of money and we have to make huge changes to fix it.  We got some of this from Simpson-Bowles of course, and I keep hearing it from my conservative correspondents too.  Social Security is paying out more than it's taking in!  The Trust Fund is a fiction!

But think about it this way: Social Security is just a Math problem, and a really simple one at that.  We pay a certain rate to Seniors.  Workers pay a certain percentage of their salaries to fund benefits.  A percentage of people get on Social Security Disability at a younger age.  All of these formulas can change.  So the ways to fix Social Security are:

1. Increase the tax rate for FICA for everyone (we just lowered the rate in 2011 from 6.2% to 4.2% as part of the lame duck tax deal)
2. Increase that tax rate for high income people only (currently we only tax the first $106,800 of income- we could increase that)
3. Decrease the benefit level slightly
4. Increase retirement age
5. Means-test benefits, so rich people don't get paid out
6. Toughen up requirements for disability

And of course we could go with some combination of more than one of the above solutions.  These are tough choices of course, and my preference is to go with #2, but reasonable people could disagree.  I am strongly opposed to #5, which would lead to erosion of support for Social Security over time as it would come to be seen like welfare, in which poor people are seen by the Right as sponging off the hard-working. The reason SS has been so successful for so long is that we're all in it together.

So there's really no "crisis" in Social Security.  There's a demographic change because baby boomers are retiring and the population is going to get much older, so there are fewer workers to pay benefits.  That's not because we've become a lazy country or there's some moral failing- just blame those WW II GI's making all those babies at the same time when they got home.

So yes, Social Security needs to be fixed, and can't be left as is.  But there are lots of ways to do it, all of which will definitely work.  It's just a question of enough people in Congress and the President agreeing about our priorities.  All big problems should be so easy and un-complex.

Republican Response

Paul Ryan drives me crazy.  Why?  Because he has managed to get himself considered the "responsible" Republican on spending.  Meanwhile he voted for tax cuts that weren't paid for, Medicare drug benefits that weren't paid for, and it goes on and on.  He says he wants spending cuts first- sounds great! But of course there are no details there at all, and I predict he won't actually propose realistic spending cuts that can pass- he knows spending cuts are much less popular than tax increases on the Rich when you actually start cutting stuff- everyone likes cuts in the abstract, until it affects them.

State of the Union

I'm really really trying to watch and listen to the SOTU tonight, but it's so hard to do. Last administration I thought I just hated listening to GW Bush talk (which I did).  But now I realize that it's just hard to sit through political speeches in general.  Maybe it's just me, but I don't find political speeches exciting or inspiring- I'm much more a creature of the written word.

But as to the content: more of what we've learned to expect from Obama; playing the role of the Reasonable Adult in a room full of squabbling children.  And I guess that's appropriate for SOTU, which isn't a time for Fire and Brimstone.  I just hope that comes later when he hits the road.  I was glad to hear the push to end the tax cuts eventually.  I was less glad to hear about freezing government spending, as I think that just cedes too much ground to Republicans right now.

But it's so hard to listen to, that I couldn't pay full attention.  Got my checkbook balanced, though!!

Our Idiotic Punditry

I was talking with a colleague at work today about the Arizona shooter.  Both my colleague (PT) and I are mental health professionals with lots of experience with quite mentally ill people.  PT noted that he had seen some television pundits on the air talking about mental illness and what could have or should have been done with Jared Loughner and might have stopped the shooting.

First of all, under current mental health law and practice, being psychotic isn't enough to get someone locked up involuntarily.  A person has to be a danger to self or others, or so impaired that he/she can not take care of him/herself (that's the wording in my state, but I believe they're all similar).  Loughner was acting strangely, but not dangerously; yet talking heads that PT saw were claiming someone should have seen the signs and locked up this guy.  Of course those of us who work in psychiatric settings know that even if an ill person is locked up and medicated properly, there's nothing to stop him from discontinuing his medication as soon as he gets out, and the cycle repeats.  We see it all the time.

So the pundits (whom I didn't see- don't know who), generic TV talking heads, have no idea what they're talking about, as anyone who has worked in mental health could have told them.  That doesn't stop them from spouting off, of course.

But I want to make a larger point about TV punditry.  They don't know much about anything. Except politics and media.  And when I say politics, I mean it very narrowly: they understand how Democrats and Republicans frame arguments and play the games of electoral politics.  But they don't know much about policy.  That's why it's so hard to find out by watching television anything factual about something like the Affordable Care Act.  Since the media only uses their tired formula- "he said, she said", they allow one side to frame the debate with lies or distortions if they so choose.  With health care, that side is the Right of course, but the Left can just as easily benefit.

And the pundits can't really cut through the crap because most of them don't understand or try to understand the intricacies of policies.  They're not wonks, and they're proud of it.

So for all the mainstream media's heckling of basement-dwelling bloggers, the internet is really the place to go to get policy facts and actually learn something about the policies that affect us every day.  Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn and Jonathan Chait and Matt Yglesias and Paul Krugman actually know something about policy, not just about politics.  I don't know nearly as much as any of them (hey I only do this in my spare time!), but I think I know a lot more about health care policy than Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity, and James Carville.  And it shouldn't be that way- those guys should be learning about policy and telling us about it, but they don't.

A Note About this Blog (posted by DT)

Well, my former partner in crime, AS, has faded from view here on this section of the intertubes, and I have decided to try to soldier on alone.  Hopefully he'll comment from time to time, but for now I have obtained full control of this little kingdom.

Shooting in Arizona (posted by DT)

I know you're all dying for my thoughts about the shooting of a congresswoman in Arizona the other day.

I don't think that the actions of one quite crazy man can be pinned on the "political discourse". Republican hyperbole about health care in particular is indeed reprehensible, but this guy doesn't seem to be acting in reaction to any of that- his political views were, one might say, quite quirky.

But the issue that comes up for me is that it's so easy to buy a semi-automatic gun that any lunatic can get one- legally! I know Gun Control is a lost cause in the USA, and yes it's true that criminals are going to find a way to get a gun no matter the laws, but this shooter is just the kind of guy who might not know where to find one so easily the day he decides to make a name for himself. There should be many more controls on gun purchases- too bad nobody who lives more than 100 miles from an ocean agrees with me.

Income Inequality (posted by DT)

So I read that the rich are comparitively richer compared to the middle class than ever before:

The richest 1% of U.S. households had a net worth 225 times greater than
that of the average American household in 2009, according to analysis conducted
by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. That's up from the
previous record of 190 times greater, which was set in 2004.

So this is what I don't understand: why are the wealthy and their conservative shills so upset about the tax code and what Democrats are doing to them? They're winning the policy war! And they act like they're losing it.

The right wing machine is so good at politics and so focused, that they can keep liberals on the defensive even in the face of every fact. How do they do it???

(source: http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/23/pf/rich_wealth_gap/index.htm)