{"id":1187,"date":"2004-10-20T15:25:25","date_gmt":"2004-10-20T23:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/10\/20\/the-myth-of-social-securitys-bankrupcy-blame-clinton-too\/"},"modified":"2004-10-20T15:25:25","modified_gmt":"2004-10-20T23:25:25","slug":"the-myth-of-social-securitys-bankrupcy-blame-clinton-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1187","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of Social Security's Bankrupcy: Blame Clinton, Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n

Out of all the possible problems to address in America, Social Security is probably not even in the top ten. It’s solvent for at least the next 40 years, and possibly the next 50, even if we do absolutely nothing. Some very minor adjustments on either the tax or benefit side would keep it solvent forever. (For example, the Social Security Advisory Board says that even if you addressed the problem solely by tax increases, you’d only have to raise the current payroll tax from 6.2% to 7.1%. That’s not exactly Armageddon, but of course you don’t learn that until page 21 of this report, which on page 3 talks about Social Security’s “looming financial shortfall.”)<\/p>\n

So why do Republicans waste time pushing private accounts? Because lots of people \u2014 especially young people \u2014 are convinced Social Security won’t be around by the time they retire. But why are they afraid it won’t be around? Because Republicans keep peddling scare stories about how Social Security is heading toward bankruptcy.<\/p><\/div>\n

Kevin’s correct to say that Social Security is in no real danger (except the danger that Republicans will “fix” it by destroying it). But he should reserve at least some of the blame for Democrats, and in particular Clinton. After all, republicans have been calling Social Security an unworkable ponzi scheme for decades. As long as Democrats were arguing that SS was fine and only needed minor fixes, they still had the better side of the argument, and removing or privatizing SS was something that few serious candidates could advocate.<\/p>\n

What changed all that, and what made “SS is going bankrupt” the Conventional Wisdom, was Clinton deciding to seek a short-term advantage in the tax policy debate by claiming that SS was going bankrupt and needed to be saved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum writes: Out of all the possible problems to address in America, Social Security is probably not even in the top ten. It’s solvent for at least the next 40 years, and possibly the next 50, even if we … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics-and-the-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}