Leave it to the Bush administration to help move America seamlessly from crisis to crisis. Remember when we had to <b>invade Iraq right now or "the smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud</b>?" Well, until we invade Iran, there's still the looming insolvency of the Social Security system.

Oh, didn't you hear? According to our president and his cronies at various think tanks (Cato, I'm looking in your direction), Social Security will implode in some sort of cataclysmic fireball after choking on that demographic lump-in-the-snake we call Baby Boomers. As quoted in Time magazine:
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"First step," Bush told TIME last month, "is to make sure everybody understands we have a problem." The President last week surrounded himself with citizens ranging from children to an 80-year-old and warned that the Social Security system will be "flat bust, bankrupt" by the time workers in their 20s retire. As early as 2018, Bush said, "you're either going to have to raise the taxes of people or reduce the benefits." At another appearance intended to promote federal standards for testing high school students, Bush went off script to warn a group of teenagers, "The system will be bankrupt by the year 2040."
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At the rate Bush is going, the whole government will probably be broke by 2008, so this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Is Bush intimating that soon we will have to tap the Social Security reservoir to cover mounting deficits? Oops! We did that already, several times. Let's be clear: the greatest danger to the Social Security system is George W. Bush and his record deficits.

You heard me. That whole line about Social Security being in crisis is patently bullshit. For example, when the system was in danger in the early 80s, we just raised the retirement age and some taxes and we were OK for the next 60 years. More about this in a minute.

What people are fretting about now is that the Social Security Administration estimated recently that in 2050, there will be 2.1 workers per retiree, as opposed to the 4.5 we have now, assuming we maintain the current growth rate. Since current workers pay the benefits of near-future recipients (acutally, the lag between when your money leaves and when it comes to grandma depends on the size of the Trust Fund, currently at 1.2 trillion), the system needs to maintain a certain level of contributions. This level is maintained either by higher taxes, or having more workers pay in. Of course, privatization is guaranteed to wreck the system in a way which will require some serious government spending to maintain benefits for those reitrees currently receiving, which everyone is politely calling "transition costs."

Let's return to our very own bull in the china shop:
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As early as 2018, Bush said, "you're either going to have to raise the taxes of people or reduce the benefits."
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Faulty argument fans everywhere have already noted that this is a classic example of <i>bifurcation</i>–narrowing the audience's rhetorical choices to two unacceptable options. Because there's one very important option Bush isn't talking about, and it's staring everyone in the face: increase immigration. How deviously simple! Considering that the whole root of the problem is a demographic imbalance, we could actually solve the problem by addressing (and I don't want to shock you here) the source of it. Why even the Bloomberg News Corporation makes this point.

Enough arguing about sensible solutions to the slowly impending Social Security crisis. Bush, always a decisive actor, has decided he needs to fuck this up <b>now</b> before the Democrats can take credit for saving it again in 30-odd years.

Scratch the surface of a Social Security reformer (again, I'm looking at you, Cato) and you'll find that the 2040 thing has little to do with the privatization proposals. It's exactly the same as Bush's tax cuts, which were heralded as the answer to both our deficit and surplus problems. And the reason is that Bush supporters see this as a moral issue rather than a fiscal one. They'll tell you themselves; "the people" ought to keep more of their money. I'll have to address this in another post, but for now, I plead with SS reformers to be honest about their motives.

So, we're probably going to screw up Social Security now, whether it's a good idea or not. When Bush releases more details about the plan, I'll be able to critique it more specifically, as opposed to making general points about the so-called crisis.

But let's get down to brass tacks. What should I do right now? As the president warned us, we twenty-somethings are going to get fucked come retirement age. That's why I'm <b>taking the initiative and retiring now</b>, before my Social Security payments are jeopardized. It'll be great–it's just like being unemployed, but with much more cachet.