Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Tom Teepen tells it like it is about the Social Security crisis. W's Chicken Little impersonation is galling. As if he has to worry about living in retirement. If this is (fair & balanced) quackery, so be it.

[x Cox Newspapers]
Social Security ain't broke; why are they trying to fix it?
by Tom Teepen

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

And all the alarms to the contrary aside, Social Security ain't broke. True, within a dozen or so years it will have to tap its surplus to make up the difference between what it owes retirees and current payroll taxes and by about 2042 it will have to start fudging benefits if it is to stay solvent.

This prospect plainly calls for preventative action but it does not present a catastrophe that therefore calls for, in effect, beginning to dismantle the system altogether.

And don't be misled. Dismantling it in the long run is the real agenda behind President Bush's push to bankroll personal, private investments with part of the Social Security taxes. The resulting Nirvana that we are encouraged to imagine has today's younger workers retaining Social Security's fail-safe benefits while icing the cake with swag from their years in the stock market, a get-rich-slowly scheme born of an ideological animosity, not of necessity.

The political quarters drumming this plan are the current version of the same politics that denounced Social Security originally in the 1930s and have lived with it all these years only with gritted teeth and quiet fuming.

The game now is to misuse the accumulating stress on the system, which is indeed real, to create fear of a total collapse and to sell younger workers on the notion that they somehow should have a right to make investments for their personal gain, which they are led to fancy would be cannier and more remunerative than investments the government makes.

But Social Security is not an investment scheme and was never meant to be. It is a social insurance program, and as that it has succeeded beautifully. Where poverty had been the common condition of old age, it is now a relative rarity, and Social Security operates with awesome efficiency, with only about 1 percent overhead. The real case the right has against Social Security is not that it has failed but that it has worked. The right just hates that.

Social Security can continue working. Substantial adjustments are necessary. We need to move the retirement age up incrementally to reflect modern longevity. Incrementally, too, payroll taxes should be extended to higher earnings. Annual Social Security increases should be pegged to an index that would slow them.

Painful, to be sure, but there is no freebie at hand. Bush's radical proposal would have the government borrowing one to two trillion dollars to float the transition — and that, of course, is in addition to the deep deficits he has already run up and that he is using to begin cutting federal support for education, scientific research, environmental protection and other productive investments in our future.

Privatizing Social Security would turn retirement into a crapshoot, with the brokerage houses the only sure winners. A cohort with the bad luck to be retiring in a recession would face a financially cramped old age or would have to turn to the government in hopes of being rescued by federal revenues after all.

Social Security has confronted shortfalls in the past and each has been forestalled by adjusting the system rather than by overthrowing it. A truly conservative president would learn from that past rather than dismissing it.

Tom Teepen writes an editorial page column for Cox New Service twice a week. He is also a contributing columnist to the publication Liberal Opinion Week. He was editorial page editor of Cox Newspapers' Atlanta Constitution for 10 years until his move to Cox in 1992. Teepen had earlier been editorial page editor of Cox's Dayton Daily News.

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