Raising the age of eligibility for full benefits might not hurt investment bankers, doctors, lawyers, and other well-educated professionals. But doing so for those in the middle and near the bottom is another matter, especially since many people no longer have good pension plans from their employers. Rivlin also signaled that upper-income wage earners may see some adjustment in the way their benefits are calculated. Was the word “adjustment” another code word? Did she mean reducing benefits for the higher earners or means-testing them? That’s what some Social Security supporters fear could destroy the program’s social solidarity, with ramifications for workers now in their thirties, forties, and fifties. The Squawk Box segments sure raise a lot of questions for reporters to answer.
Campaign Desk
04:54 PM - June 16, 2010
Are All Americans Living Longer?
CNBC didn’t ask the right questions
‘See you on the other side’ - Meet Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend what little time she had practicing journalism
#Realtalk: This is the best moment to be in journalism - The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay
Streams of consciousness - Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
Sticking with the truth - How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism
An ink-stained stretch - Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?
This is the best moment to be in journalism (25)
The WSJ editorial page hits rock bottom (19)
Reporter deemed ‘co-conspirator’ in leak case
The Reyes affidavit all but eliminates the traditional distinction in classified leak investigations between sources, who are bound by a non-disclosure agreement, and reporters, who are protected by the First Amendment as long as they do not commit a crime
“At some point you have to say, a law that people don’t obey is a bad law”
Ben Mathis-Lilley’s defense of new media
Take off the nostalgia-tinted lenses
21 questions with David Remnick
What grammar mistake do you find most annoying?
Are you sure that question is grammatical?
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank
How hard did you giggle when you typed that?
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 16 Jun 2010 at 08:33 PM
Hey, ye who is fond of the scholarship produced by Reason magazine, are in no position to throw stones at EPI.
Partisan, in the age of the Heritage Foundation and the like, means making stuff up and not knowing what you are talking about.
EPI's work is solid. Their perspective is wholistic.. it's the rest of the economics profession, the George Mason U wing to be specific, which is partisan.
For instance:
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/06/08/the-perils-of-studying-economics/
exhibit a:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282190930932412.html
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 17 Jun 2010 at 11:00 AM
EPI's work is solid. Their perspective is wholistic.. it's the rest of the economics profession, the George Mason U wing to be specific, which is partisan.
It must be quite a comfort to know that you are right and everyone else, regardless of the quality of their work or the level of thief accreditation, is wrong. Perhaps you can dig through EPI’s papers and find something to bolster your half assed argument that public sector employees don’t make more than the private sector or that their compensation hasn’t outpaced inflation or that their numbers haven’t outpaced population growth. Run along now and find all of life’s answers which can only be found in the sacred tomes of progressive scripture.
Incidentally, I never questioned EPI’s numbers, just Mrs Lieberman’s description of them being “non-partisan”, so you can take your strawman and stuff it where the welfare don’t shine, which is a very small plot of real estate these days.
#3 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Thu 17 Jun 2010 at 01:40 PM
And to answer Mrs Liberman's questions, yes All Americans are living longer, even by her own "non partisan" (LOL) numbers.
#4 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Thu 17 Jun 2010 at 08:43 PM
"It must be quite a comfort to know that you are right and everyone else, regardless of the quality of their work or the level of thief accreditation, is wrong."
Yes, on the myriad examples where organizations like Heritage and Reason have been completely wrong : Iraq, the housing bubble, the Community Reinvestment act, government spending's role during a deflationary cycle, the risk of offshore drilling, the danger of financial deregulation, climate change, etc etc it's a real f'in comfort to be right all the time.
The problem is the people who are right most of the time are not taken seriously because the people who are wrong most of the time dominate the discussion. One would think that disaster after disaster alone would be enough to discredit these douchebags, but no - it takes more than that. You can't just point out the error you have to ridicule the maker, because being polite about frequent mistakes is just not getting the job done when it comes to averting disaster.
You want to ridicule EPI's work for being partisan? Go fer. But do realize that the stuff you read at Reason is partisan and stupid for the most part.
Exhibit A:
http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/01/do-liberals-suffer-from-arrest
"Liberals just want to divide everything equally amongst everyone regardless of effort."
Yes, that's not a straw man at all. It goes on:
"Liberals are morally immature. Libertarians are so much more morally mature because they're just like liberals, except without the compassion. Libertarians are so much smarter than ten year olds, unlike liberals."
It's because of crap like this that libs have to fight for legitimacy in discussions that, based on records of past accuracy, they should be dominating. Why? Because you guys think compassion is partisan, whereas a lack of compassion is a mark of non-partisan good research, good business, and good policy.
Sociopaths lack compassion. When you define good objective practice as separate from compassion, it's not surprising when your institutions begin to act less like responsible actors and more like sociopaths.
But yeah, incentivized sociopathy isn't the real problem, it's welfare and public sector unions and big teat government supporting dumb guaranteed entitlements that were paid for through payroll taxes, but somehow got spent on income and property tax cuts and unfunded wars - things we have no complaint with. You got it all figured out, doncha'.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 17 Jun 2010 at 09:22 PM
you could add this: social security would be fine with no changes whatsoever.
if the next generation does live longer than the last, and still wants to retire young enough to enjoy it, and get a monthly benefit equal in replacement value to what people get today (but about 160% in real value, keeping up with rising standards of living) they can pay for it with a payroll tax increase that amounts to twenty cents per week each year, while incomes are going up ten dollars per week each year. and yes the numbers have been verified by the people whose job it is to verify numbers for the Social Security Administration. Can't imagine why the Rivlin's and Walker's don't tell you.
Maybe it's the same reason they lie about everything else. The people they work for can squeeze about 90,000 dollars per worker per year out of you by making you work past normal retirement age. Until you are ready for the rest home.
keep in mind, social security has NOTHING to do with the deficit. you pay for your own retirement yourself.
#6 Posted by coberly, CJR on Fri 18 Jun 2010 at 04:43 PM
A major reason for Social Security back in 1935 was that it encouraged those reaching age 65 to give up his/her job for a younger person. We were in the Great Depression at the time. 75 years later, we are at nearly 10% unemployment. So, it makes sense to tell older workers to stay on the job until they drop? I think not. Living longer means that retirees have an opportunity to live longer in retirement. By age 65 the money should have been made, the Social Security should have been accumulated. Working longer makes little sense for most of us. It's a dumb idea. Let those who want to or must work longer, but let the rest of us be off the hook. It's scapegoat stuff; that's all it is.
#7 Posted by George Fulmore, CJR on Sat 19 Jun 2010 at 03:09 AM
Let the smoke of counter arguments continue, confusing what passes for the opposition's stance all the while giving the notion that serious people have already decided the fate of the working stiffs.
Thanks for all that, but I, for one, discount all talk of deficit lowering and budget seeking unless and until talk begins and continues concerning the cost of our ever expanding empire. That's the elephant and the five hundred pound gorilla in the room that nobody on the right or the center, especially the "think" tanks, ever seem to bring up in any discussion. Cut "defense" spending, or at least call it what it is; that is, empire spending.
#8 Posted by dpjbro, CJR on Sat 19 Jun 2010 at 12:36 PM
Mcclatchy and Mother Jones's Kevin Drum have reads on the retirement age issue:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/09/97271/no-full-social-security-benefits.html
"A bipartisan national commission is weighing strategies to reduce the national debt, and the Washington buzz is that everything — even former untouchables such as higher taxes and cuts in Medicare and Social Security benefits _will be considered.
This week the International Monetary Fund urged the U.S. to cut future Social Security benefits, among other painful steps that it said were necessary to avoid unsustainable debt and an increased risk of global economic instability.
"If we could address Social Security reform," said Peter Peterson, the founder and chairman of a foundation that works for federal debt reduction, "it would provide a much-needed confidence builder with our valued foreign lenders ... so they don't lose faith that we can manage our own fiscal affairs."
Raising the retirement age for full eligibility would have two benefits, Gordon Mermin and Eugene Steuerle argued in a 2006 Urban Institute paper.
"In addition to helping Social Security," they wrote, "working longer would also improve individuals' own retirement finances by generating more retirement wealth and reducing the number of years their wealth needs to fund.""
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/07/raising-retirement-age
"Via Ezra Klein, Here's a chart from Larry Mishel that's pretty astonishing. It shows that since 1972 the life expectancy of men with low incomes has increased by two years while life expectancy for men with high incomes has increased by more than six years. That fact that the haves are healthier than the have-nots doesn't surprise me, but the magnitude of the difference is pretty stunning.
The context here, unsurprisingly, is Social Security and whether we should raise the retirement age...it should be accompanied by an explicit acknowledgement that disability retirements will be routinely available at the same age as now to workers who perform body-draining physical labor. If you put these things together it's not clear that this change is even worth pursuing, which I think is the whole point. If we insist on addressing Social Security in the near term, there are better ways of doing it than fiddling with the retirement age."
Duncan Black mentions: "A bit tired of the whole "well, maybe we can raise the retirement a bit as long as we ease up on disability eligibility" line because that second part isn't ever going to happen."
Wouldn't be prudent. Too compassionate.
#9 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 10 Jul 2010 at 02:21 AM
We shall soon see the failure of FDR’s folly with social security.
Ten citizens, one poor. The right solution is to take 10¢ from each of nine, and give 90¢ to the poor one.
Instead, FDR perpetrated a fraud, took $1 from each of the nine, and then gave EVERYONE 90¢.
That sort of scheme has multiple bad effects. First, it hides the net cost of 10¢ behind the shell game of take a dollar and give some back. Second, it creates a deleterious dependency on all 10 people, making all of them believe (wrongly) that government can actually give them something. Finally, it creates too much latitude for further bureaucratic tampering and interference.
Note it is this fraud that Lieberman cites as "social solidarity." That is in fact just a term for duping taxpayers with the nine-for-one shell game.
Remember, politicos are in the re-election business, bureaucrats are in the bloat business, and only those two groups benefit from this sort of manipulation – back then with Social Security, and today with efforts to promote socialized medicine.
#10 Posted by Robert Arvanitis, CJR on Mon 6 Sep 2010 at 12:32 PM