Readers of Investor’s Business Daily were treated to an op-ed recently by columnist Michelle Malkin, who was apparently making a plea for raising Social Security’s retirement age to seventy. Malkin, whose work skews conservative, was once a commentator on Fox News and writes a syndicated column. In her op-ed, she argues for “a 21st century retirement age. If 40 is the new 20 and 50 is the new 30, why shouldn’t 70 be the new 65?”
There may be good reasons for raising the retirement age someday, but Malkin’s op-ed didn’t make the case—and, if anything, perpetuated the lopsided reporting that has gone on for months. Op-ed writers, of course, can argue any side they want, but this piece is a stand-out for contributing to the misinformation, disinformation, and lack of information that has characterized the Social Security discussion so far.
She argues that we’re living longer, working longer, and “in general” are holding jobs that are less physically demanding than workers of earlier generations. Well, yes, there has been an increase in longevity in the U.S., though the stats of other countries are much better than ours. There’s more to the story. Those U.S. gains in longevity are not distributed equally among the population. Much of the gain in life expectancy has accrued to people in the top half of the income scale, and in particular to white men. Malkin assumes that what’s possible for some is possible for all. A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics study shows that one in three Americans over age fifty-eight work in a physically demanding job, and that large percentages of people between the ages of fifty-five and sixty experience chronic pain at work.
Malkin talks about the dwindling number of workers to support retirees, an argument that has recently surfaced to bolster the argument for cutting Social Security benefits. Again, there’s more to the story. As Campaign Desk has recently pointed out, no less a figure in Social Security’s history than Robert M. Ball, who knew more about the program than anyone on the planet, warned of Social Security opponents who would use “an accurate statistic to make a highly inaccurate charge.” In letter to me in 2004, Ball wrote: “the demographic changes that have been taking place throughout Social Security’s history were anticipated and understood when the program was being established and have been taken into account in its funding ever since.” Obviously, the ratio of workers to retirees was going to change, Ball wrote, and the designers of Social Security fully anticipated such changes.
Malkin exhorted federal employees and elected officials to “get with the times.” “Americans can no longer feel entitled to some 20 to 30 years of subsidized retirement,” she argued. “Raising the traditional and early retirement ages will mean extending workers’ taxable earning years, fueling economic growth, and putting a dent in our unfunded-liabilities crisis by delaying payouts.” But what happens when a sixty-year-old is thrown out of work or a sixty-five-year-old cannot find a job he or she desperately needs, which is often the case today? They will hardly fuel economic growth, and may well struggle to pay for medical care under the current system or in a new arrangement where a voucher eventually replaces Medicare and is insufficient to buy decent health coverage from a private insurer.
About the time I was reading Malkin’s op-ed, some e-mails came in from the real world. A fifty-eight-year-old woman in Florida who had worked all her life often in well-paying managerial positions had to leave her job of nineteen years because she was having panic attacks due to job-related stress. She said her health was suffering and wanted to know when she could collect Social Security. She was having trouble finding work and worried that her savings and 401(k) plan, worth about $50,000, was inadequate for the long haul.
Hmmm .. another “Ignore the Iceberg, full steam ahead” story in Social Security. Imagine my surprise.
Far from being out of the mainstream, Malkin’s points are all valid and well agreed upon, so lets score this piece and see how well Trudy did debunking her.
She argues that we’re living longer, working longer, and “in general” are holding jobs that are less physically demanding than workers of earlier generations.
“In general”, as you admitted to later in the paragraph, Malkin is right. Although life expectancy gains haven’t been universal in their quantity, ALL demographics have seen then, all be it some more than others. Whiles some people, even older people, do still work physically demanding jobs, both the absolute and relative numbers are down significantly. So, as Malkin argued, people are living longer and working less physically demanding jobs.
Malkin 1, Lieberman 0
Malkin talks about the dwindling number of workers to support retirees, an argument that has recently surfaced to bolster the argument for cutting Social Security benefits. Again, there’s more to the story.
You cannot have a serious debate about this subject without bringing this up. Citing Robert Ball as some kind of silver bullet just doesn’t cut the cake. His argument, essentially, is that the narrowing worker/retiree demographic isnt an issue because it was taken into account back in 1983 and the long term financing of the program was shaped to reflect this. As argued many times before though how Social Security was financed and how it actually works are two different things. While SS is supposed to have a “trust fund” it has operated for its entire existence as a pay as you go program.
Additionally assumptions made in 1983 about things like COLA increases, worker productivity, economic growth etceteral may or may not have followed the predicted trend lines. Divergence effects the programs finances positively or negatively so a better question to ask, and one more relevant to this debate is how have the initial assumptions made by Ball and Co in 1983 deviated? For example, disability enrolment went from 2 million in 1982 to over 10 million today, how has this effected the long term financial outlook of the 1983 report? Another more recent example about the uncertainly of long term projections is the 2005 SSA report that stated the program would have to start withdrawing money from the “surplus” in 2017. Turns out they had to start withdrawing money in 2010.
So you are right MRs Lieberman, there is more to the story, too bad you didn’t take the time to dig into it. Malkin identified a key driving force for the day to day financing of Social Security, one that is shared with hundreds of prominent economists and pundits.
Malkin 2, Lieberman 0
Malkin exhorted federal employees and elected officials to “get with the times.” “Americans can no longer feel entitled to some 20 to 30 years of subsidized retirement,” she argued.
Considering Malkin’s point here is more an appeal to emotion and you use nothing more than hypothetical anecdotes, no one scores here.
Malkin 2, Lieberman 0
All you verbal acrobatics aside Mr’s Lieberman the longer we wait to rework Social Security (and Medicare, Medicaid, disability, survivors benefits and all that gub’mint cheese) the more likely we come to its sudden and catastrophic end.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Fri 22 Apr 2011 at 12:53 PM
We already have one Media Matters. CJR continues to try to compete with it.
Malkin's lopsided reporting? Lieberman's reporting on Social Security and Medicare has been all beer and skittles for the left-wing positions. The government can do more of it, the government can do it better, and it ain't costing anybody except a few shadowy gazillionaires anything - that's the tone. She still cannot bring herself to acknowledge the regressive nature of Social Security taxes, for instance, and their role in distributing income from relatively poor young people to relatively-well off Winnebago jockeys headed for Branson
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 22 Apr 2011 at 01:02 PM
raising the retirement age is a good idea if you don't work for a living (like miss malkin),your body's all busted up,cant afford the new Medicare so you die early witch takes you off the `govmentcheese`,give all the money to the rich cause they know how to spend it.
#3 Posted by newscorp, CJR on Fri 22 Apr 2011 at 01:40 PM
That 58 year old lady with panic attacks needs to file a Social Security disability claim forthwith instead of worrying about when she files a retirement claim.
#4 Posted by Charles Hall, CJR on Fri 22 Apr 2011 at 03:42 PM
Um, where are the young people to get jobs if the old boomer people (of which I'm one) don't ever leave? Of course, those idle young can't contribute since they don't have a job.
#5 Posted by Sarah, CJR on Fri 22 Apr 2011 at 04:02 PM
Oh look, the right wing parade is back. Didn't we just go over this route?
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/a_good_social_security_storyat_last.php
Oh well, you guys can be the ones who tell the middle class that conservatives shook down the middle class with payroll tax increases for a program that the middle class supported, but that conservatives never planned to pay for because they were too busy passing tax cuts for their corporate sponsors and golfing buddies.
You tell them that the program could be supported to promised levels with a few tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, but conservatives are such sons of bitches that they will fight to the death over Bush tax cuts, but will not shed a tear over grandma's reduced retirement checks + postponed retirement.
As long as you take the electoral consequences for your words and actions, please say and do what you want. Drown that government baby in a bathtub. Let's see how the public reacts.
It will make Wisconsin look like a sandbox scuffle.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 23 Apr 2011 at 01:48 AM
Funny how the arguments attacking Social Security can turn on a dime. A few years ago, the argument was that recipients could do so much better by just investing the money themselves. "If you took the money from the FICA tax and just invested it in the stock market . . ." was a typical argument. In fact, that logic was one of the main rationales for private accounts.
Now we are being told that Social Security is "distributing income from relatively poor young people to relatively-well off Winnebago jockeys . . ." and that raising the retirement age is only fair since the beneficiaries are "subsidized"
Both these arguments can't be correct. In fact they are so fundamentally opposed to each other that you would expect the two sides to be at each other's throats. Instead, you find a lot of people who were telling us that Social Security recipients were to be pitied because they would we richer investing on their own, are now telling us that these same people are being subsidized and their subsidies should be cut.
All of which leads me to suspect that the proponents of these contradictory arguments have other motives than the ones they proclaim.
#7 Posted by Bob Gardner, CJR on Sun 24 Apr 2011 at 06:02 PM
Bob..
How is the argument that private investment is better than Social Security "fundamentally opposed" to the argument that raising the retirement age is necessary?
I don't see your logic.
We could (and should, in my opinion) do both.
#8 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 24 Apr 2011 at 06:20 PM
The key here is Trudy's lament that gains in life expectancy aren't "equally distributed" demographically...
This liberal/commie position only goes so far, of course...
Women outlive men in the United States by more than five years. Applying the Marxist/Lieberman logic... Women should have to wait five years longer than men to start receiving social security benefits.
Somehow I don't think we'll see Trudy conceding this point any time soon.
#9 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 25 Apr 2011 at 07:37 AM
One more thing, Ball may not agree with Malin when it comes to the worker - retiree ratio but you wouldnt believe who does:
Generous benefits for the elderly are feasible as long as there are relatively few retirees compared with the number of taxpaying workers — which is the current situation, because the baby boomers swell the workforce. In 2010, however, the boomers will begin to retire. Every year thereafter, for the next quarter-century, several million 65-year-olds will leave the rolls of taxpayers and begin claiming their benefits.
The budgetary effects of this demographic tidal wave are straightforward to compute, but so huge as almost to defy comprehension. Mr. Peterson, the chairman of the Blackstone Group, a private investment bank, informs us that ”the combined Federal cost of Social Security and Medicare, expressed as a share of workers’ taxable payroll, is officially projected to rise from the already burdensome 17 percent in 1995 to between 35 and 55 percent in 2040. And this figure does not include the many other costs — from nursing homes to civil service and military pensions — that are destined to grow along with the age wave.”
But aren’t Social Security and Medicare basically pension funds, in which workers’ contributions are invested to provide for their retirement? Hardly. A private pension fund that planned to pay the benefits these programs promise would be accumulating huge reserves. In fact, the so-called ”trust funds” are making barely any provisions for the future. In another spectacular statistic, Mr. Peterson notes that if Medicare and Social Security had to obey the same rules that apply to private pensions, the reported Federal deficit this year would be not its official $150 billion, but roughly $1.5 trillion.
In short, the Federal Government, however solid its finances may currently appear, is in fact living utterly beyond its means. While the present generation of retirees is doing very nicely, the promises that are being made to those now working cannot be honored.
- Paul Krugman
#10 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Tue 26 Apr 2011 at 03:18 PM
an old book review of a Pete Peterson "Medicare is going to kill us all" screed isn't the same as in-depth research into those topics near 30 years later.
Old Pete's work has been proven one part hackish, two parts obsessive and Krugman has shed several of his old positions over the Bush years that he held while he was a viable advisor to Reagan.
A 30 year old book review of a hack's life work does not an argument make.
#11 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 26 Apr 2011 at 07:26 PM
I don't often agree with Rush Limbaugh's oversimplifications...
But in this case, he's unquestionably right. The government is out of money and the leftist agenda is doomed as a consequence.
For the last fifty years, the left has depended on borrowing money to prop up its agenda and now we've hit the credit card limit. The only way the left can survive now is to snatch money or property from the "rich" - redistributing it to the "poor" - and as the recent elections and current polling clearly demonstrates, there just isn't the political support to do this.
It's time to cut back, and the only place to do this and make any real difference is in entitlement spending.
If we eliminated the entire defense budget, we would still have a TRILLION dollar deficit. If we eliminate all of the Obama tax cuts entirely, we would lose less than half of this remaining deficit (not to mention the chilling effect of tax increases on the economy and revenues).
Eliminating defense spending entirely and eliminating ALL of the Obama tax cuts still leaves a deficit greater that any deficit under any past administration.
The problem we have is not a complicated one - we are spending too much money and it will have to stop. It just can't continue. If we try to keep it up, we will ruin our economy.
#12 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 07:32 AM
an old book review of a Pete Peterson "Medicare is going to kill us all" screed isn't the same as in-depth research into those topics near 30 years later.
Of course Thimbles .. after all Paul Krugman has always been at war with East Asia.
#13 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 12:18 PM
Krugman himself wrote in the NY Times in 1996 that Social Security's problems are so huge as to defy comprehension. Krugman's amen chorus at CJR can look it up. He should not to be held to 100% consistency, but his extreme self-righteousness about those who disagree with whatever his policy prescription is of the moment ought to cause him to at least be held to his own standards.
#14 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 12:41 PM
Yeah Mark and Mike, I'll get back to you on that when conservatives stop flip flopping on the evils of the individual insurance mandates they invented, their plans to gut medicare right after they won elections pretending to defend it, how acceptable it is to threaten government default while troops are still out in their fields fighting their wars, and a whole bunch of etcetera on things ranging from handling government surpluses to political transparency and corruption.
Show me a consistent republican sometime and then we'll talk about Paul Krugman's book reviews.
Until then, let's talk about the data on entitlements today and not the view of columnist A or political party b from 30 years ago versus now. It's a little fricken silly.
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 09:08 PM