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March 29, 2005

Social Security Slam Dunk

Many people who have been following the debate about Social Security privatization know that the trustees use very pessimistic estimates about the economy when they predict impending doom for social security. At the same time, the privatizers use optimistic economic estimates when crowing about how great the returns will be in private accounts.

The flipside of this is that if the trustees used the optimistic estimates, social security's impending bankruptcy date would be non-existant, and if the privateers used the pessimistic estimate, private accounts would no longer look so attractive.

The reality is there can not be two separate worlds where if we stick with social security we have a pessimistic economic future but if we go with privatization we don't. Either we decide that things are pessimistic and we look for a real solution to save future benefits or we decide things are more optimistic and social security is no longer in crisis (ironically for the wingnuts, add-on private accounts would probably be a much easier sell if people were assured social security was otherwise not in trouble).

As you can see, this is kind of hard to understand, which Bush and his ilk are counting on. So I've been trying to think of a way to get this point across, and today it hit me. Imagine that the social security trustees are basically telling the country that they are a 5 foot tall overweight person. And the privatizers are promising that if that person buys their shoes they'll be able to jump high and dunk a basketball. Well, either the person is not really 5 feet tall and overweight (afterall shoes don't make that much of a difference) or the privatizers are making a claim about their product that is far-fetched and unrealistic.

Posted by Chris at March 29, 2005 10:51 AM

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