Perhaps that would make people like Robert Samuelson happy:
It's increasingly obvious that Congress and the president (regardless of which party is in power) will deal with the political stink bomb of an aging society only if forced. And the most plausible means of compulsion would be for Social Security and Medicare to go bankrupt: trust funds run dry; promised benefits exceed dedicated payroll taxes. The sooner this happens, the better.
That the programs will ultimately go bankrupt is clear from the trustees' reports. On pages 201 and 202 of the Medicare report, you will find the conclusive arithmetic: over the next 75 years, Social Security and Medicare will cost an estimated $103.2 trillion, while dedicated taxes and premiums will total only $57.4 trillion. The gap is $45.8 trillion. (All figures are expressed in "present value," a fancy term for "today's dollars.")
The Medicare actuaries then dryly note what would happen once the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare's hospital insurance program are depleted: "No provision exists under current law to address the projected [Medicare] and [Social Security] financial imbalances. Once assets are exhausted, expenditures cannot be made except to the extent covered by ongoing tax receipts." Translation: benefits would fall. Social Security checks would shrink; some Medicare bills wouldn't be paid in full—and the shortfalls would progressively worsen. Retirees would scream. Hospitals might shut. No president or Congress would abide the outcry; even the threat of imminent bankruptcy would rouse them to action. But restoring the programs' solvency would confront Congress and the White House with fundamental questions.
In 1940, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was 61.4 years for men, 65.7 for women; by 2008, the comparable figures were 75.4 and 80. So, as health and longevity improve, when should people stop working and be entitled (from which comes the noun "entitlement") to receive government retirement subsidies? Stripped of popular euphemisms ("social insurance," "entitlements"), that's what Social Security and Medicare mainly are. If that's so, how much should wealthier retirees be subsidized?
Or: how much should obligations to the old displace other national needs—for, say, defense, education, research, housing, transportation or adequate family incomes? In 1990, Medicare and Social Security represented 28 percent of federal spending; in 2019, their share will be almost 40 percent, projects the Obama administration. As this spending grows, pressures to raise taxes, increase budget deficits or cut other programs intensify. What's the right balance between the past and the future?
Indeed. So why not just set a mandate that all baby boomers must be exterminated? The only question is at what age they should round us all up. 50? 55? 62, the earliest age at which one can collect Social Security? After all, aren't we hogging all the jobs? And aren't we going to hog all the money?
People like Robert Samuelson, and like Pete Peterson -- the main voice of the Kill Social Security Now movement and someone who is never for one minute going to have to worry about what he's going to live on when he's old, present the Social Security dilemma as if it's always been there and absolutely nothing has been done to anticipate the elephant being digested by a snake that is the baby boom generation. In fact, the Social Security reforms of 1983 were designed to front-load the system to insure its solvency as this huge influx of aging people entered the system in the new millennium. The problem is that governments both Republican and Democratic couldn't leave this nice fat chunk o'money alone, and raided the fund for various purposes, primarily tax cuts for the wealthy and wars. What's sitting in there now is a bunch of IOUs, which as we now see, aren't worth the paper on which they're printed.
In the early 1980's, Ronald Reagan, the smiling benign patriarch of the Republican Party, told Americans that you could cut taxes, increase spending, and balance the budget. This started us on the road towards the "You can have whatever you want and it's all free through the magic hand of the markets" mentality that has dominated American economic discourse for nearly three decades. It's the mentality that fueled the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, and the orgy of credit card spending that has had obsessed Americans relentlessly pursuing bigger, better, higher, taller, more luxurious consumer goods, and it's what has brought us to where we are now.
But the reality is that we are ALL affected by the collapse of the American economy. And frankly, the only people who have a leg to stand on in bashing prior generations are those currently in their teens and early twenties, because they had no opportunity to try and mitigate the profligacy of the largely Republican rule of the last thirty years. For Gen-X to bash the boomers makes no sense, because they too worked on Wall Street in the 1980's and wore expensive suits and worked for Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980's.
But unless we're prepared to either see upwards of twenty million people (allowing for early deaths) living on the streets, or round us all up for mass extermination, we'd better face up to the fact that most of us working today, and indeed most baby boomers, have paid into that system at the higher post-1983 level. And that a clearheaded assessment of just what the future prospects of said system are, without the agendas of those who represent the interests of the wealthiest americans, is going to require a multigenerational effort.
Or you can just elect the guy who wants mass extermination. You know there'll be one.
(h/t)
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