2008: Charles Krauthammer does it again. In today's essay,
The Same Old Saw On Social Security, he writes:
There is no trust fund. The past Social Security surpluses were spent the year they were created. The idea that in 2017, when the surpluses disappear, we will be able to go to a box in West Virginia to retrieve the money we need to make up the shortfall (between what Social Security takes in and what it pays out that year) is a deception. There is no money there. It will have to be borrowed or garnered from new taxes.
But things are worse than that. The fiscal problem starts to kick in not in 2017 but in 2009. The Social Security surplus, which Congress happily spends every year, peaks in 2008. Which means that starting in four years (and for every year thereafter) a budgetary squeeze begins, requiring new taxation or new borrowing.
If in 2010 tax revenue and spending remain exactly the same as in 2009, the Treasury will not end up with the same size deficit. It will end up with a larger deficit, because the amount of money it was receiving free and "borrowed" from the Social Security surplus will have shrunk.
That surplus shrinks from its peak in 2008 to zero in 2017 and goes negative after that. That is a very serious fiscal problem that starts not in 50 years, not even in 12 years, but in four.
Let's ignore for the moment the claim that "there is no trust fund" - which there
is, by the way. We will be able to go to a box in West Virginia to retrieve the money we need, by redeeming the bonds.
Of interest is Krauthammer's concern that the surplus will peak in 2008. After that, Krauthammer worries, there will be less Social Security surplus paying for general federal expenditures. Yeah. So where is Krauthammer's call for higher income or corporate or inheritance taxes to make up the difference? Where is Krauthammer's complaint that the deficits are the result of Bush's tax cuts?
There are none, which shows the intellectual dishonesty of the man.
posted by Quiddity at 5/06/2005 06:58:00 AM
Actually, you have it exactly backwards: Kraphammer is perhaps the most honest Republican hack pundit in print today. In the cited piece, he has pretty much said that all those payroll taxes you poor dupes have been coughing up for the last 22 years have been part of a massive Republican scam. Although we told you that your were paying into Social Security, in actual fact you were just paying 6.2% additional taxes that upper-income people did not have to pay!
Now we're getting close to the time when the deception can no longer be maintained, so we'll just tell you that you've been had. The whole thing was a scam, a con game.
Frankly, I think that's the most intelectually honest thing that any syndicated pundit has written about Social Security.
Derelict
The now apparently brain dead Wm. Buckley wrote a similarly hysterical column, blaming the terrible AARP and those nefarious citizens plotting to collect a bonanza in the future. NO MENTION of the 1/3 of recipients who are surviving spouses, dependent children and the disabled of course.
Jon in NY
