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The Fake Crisis (Rolling Stone mag interviews Paul Krugman)
Rolling Stone ^ | Jan 13, 2005 | ERIC BATES

Posted on 01/27/2005 8:40:16 AM PST by t_skoz

The Fake Crisis

Economist Paul Krugman explains Bush's latest con -- social security

By ERIC BATES

To hear George Bush tell it, Social Security is about to go broke. Since his re-election, the president has launched a full-scale campaign to convince the public that the retirement system will run out of money starting in 2018. "The system goes into the red," Bush told reporters on December 20th at a rare press conference. "Many times, legislative bodies will not react unless the crisis is apparent, crisis is upon them. I believe that crisis is." Social Security, he concluded, "can't sustain that which has been promised to the workers."

To save Social Security, Bush wants to destroy it -- replacing government-guaranteed retirement benefits with private accounts that will be subject to the whims of the stock market. It's an expensive plan. Allowing workers to divert even a small portion of their payroll taxes into private investments, as Bush is proposing, would require the government to borrow at least $2 trillion to make up the immediate shortfall. It's also completely unnecessary, according to Paul Krugman, a prize-winning professor of economics at Princeton University. In a blistering series of columns in the New York Times, Krugman has marshaled the economic data to show that Social Security is not only solvent, it's in much better financial shape than the rest of the federal government. "The people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary weapons," Krugman wrote recently, "are now trying another bum's rush."

At his tree-shaded home in Princeton, New Jersey, Krugman took a break from working on a new economics textbook to explain why the crisis is phony -- and what's wrong with Bush's plan "to convert Social Security into a giant 401(k)."

What would you say to college students and young workers who are convinced they'll never see a dime of the money they put into Social Security?

You've been sold a scare story. Right now Social Security has a large and growing trust fund -- a surplus that has been collected to pay for the surge in benefits we'll experience when the baby boomers start to retire. If you're twenty now, you'll be hitting retirement around 2052. That's the year the Congressional Budget Office says the trust fund will run out. In fact, many economists say it may never run out. If the economy continues to grow at an average rate, the trust fund could quite possibly last forever.

But what happens if it doesn't?

Even if the trust fund does run out, Social Security will still be able to pay eighty percent of promised benefits. The actual shortfall would be a pretty small part of the federal budget, quite easily made up from other sources. Once the whole baby-boomer generation is into the retirement pool, Social Security's share of the gross domestic product will only increase by about two percent. Well, President Bush's tax cuts are more than two percent of GDP -- and they're happening right now, not fifty years from now. So the idea that there's this Social Security thing that is a huge problem is just wrong.

But if the trust fund does run out, the government would have to raise taxes or cut benefits, or some combination of both, to keep Social Security solvent.

Yes, if the trust fund is ever depleted, then something will have to be done. But you need to have some perspective on the seriousness of this whole thing. On the day the trust fund is exhausted, Social Security revenue will cover about eighty percent of the cost of benefits. Right now -- today -- if you look at the U.S. government outside of Social Security, revenue covers only about sixty-eight percent of total government spending. So on the day the trust fund is exhausted, forty-seven years from now, Social Security will be in better financial shape than the rest of the U.S. government is today.

So if there's no crisis in Social Security, why is President Bush pushing so hard to privatize it?

It's politics. Since the days of Barry Goldwater, the Republican right has really wanted to dismantle Social Security. And now they have a degree of political dominance that lets them push it to the top of the agenda -- even though no rational analysis of the actual problems facing the U.S. government would say that it belongs there.

Why do they want to dismantle it?

It's hard to understand why anyone would want to return us to the days before the New Deal, when millions of elderly people lived in poverty. But if you really dislike the notion that the government provides a safety net for the poor, then Social Security is the prime target. The U.S. government is a big insurance company, with a side business in national security. Social Security is the biggest social-insurance program that we have. It's been highly successful, and it's extremely popular. It's one of the things that makes people feel somewhat good about government -- and so, therefore, it must go.

And some people stand to profit from abolishing it. Wall Street poured a lot of money into both of Bush's campaigns, hoping he will divert Social Security into the stock market.

That's a factor, but I don't think it's the reason behind it. Attacking Social Security is a lot like attacking Iraq -- just because a lot of people stood to get lucrative contracts from it, that doesn't mean that's why they did it. If you privatize Social Security, there's going to be a tremendous amount of income for the mutual-fund industry. That's one reason there is a constituency for this on Wall Street. And that's one of the important reasons why this is really gonna work very badly.

What do you mean? Those who are pushing privatization say that our financial markets are one of our greatest strengths -- that private investment will work better in the long run than government-managed accounts with lower rates of return.

There are two problems with that. First, the fees charged on private accounts will be a significant drain on returns. In a typical portfolio, we're probably looking at a return of four percent. But fees are likely to take at least one percent, like they do in Britain. So now we're down to a return of three percent or less on private accounts. And since Bush wants to borrow $2 trillion to pay for the transition, we're talking about borrowing at interest rates of three percent to establish private accounts that will yield three percent -- with a lot of additional risk. So it's a lose-lose proposition, except for the mutual-fund industry.

The second problem with the market is that some people -- probably many people -- will end up getting much less than they would have under the current system, depending on which funds they pick and how the market does. A lot of people will hit age sixty-five with very little in their private account -- and that means a big return of poverty among the elderly, which is exactly what's happening in Britain right now. As a result, the government will have to step back in and rescue people. We'll have more suffering and bigger bills. People will ask: Where did all that money go? The answer will be: It basically went into mutual-fund fees.

But what if stocks do well? Isn't it possible that privatization would work?

The only possible way that stock returns can be high enough to make privatization work is if the U.S. economy grows at three to four percent a year for the next fifty years. But Social Security's own trustees expect the economy's growth rate to slow to 1.8 percent. If that happens -- if their own assumptions are correct -- then privatization would be a disaster. And if that doesn't happen -- if the economy continues to grow at a steady rate -- then the trust fund is good for the rest of the century, and we don't need privatization.

In selling the idea that there's a crisis, Bush has a lot of powerful words on his side: "choice," "freedom," "ownership society." What words do you have to counter his sales job?

Scam. Three-card monte. I've been thinking a lot about flying pigs. The privateers are claiming that you can have something for nothing. They're basically saying, "Let's assume that pigs can fly." And when you say, "You know, it's not good to assume that pigs can fly," they respond by saying, "What's wrong with you? Don't you understand the enormous advantage of flying pigs?"

The only reason they talk about how wonderful an ownership society would be is because we managed to win the battle over the word privatization. The Cato Institute -- which is the intellectual headquarters for all this stuff -- founded something in 1995 called the Project on Social Security Privatization. But focus groups don't like that word, so in 2002 they changed the name to the Project on Social Security Choice. They didn't announce a name change -- they just went back and scrubbed their Web site, so there's no indication that it was ever called "privatization."

If there's no crisis in Social Security, why aren't the Democrats saying that more clearly and forcefully?

There's a lot of timidity. They're desperately afraid of seeming like "Oh, well -- we have our heads in the sand, and we're not active." I would like to see them step up to the plate and say that these claims that we're going to have a crisis sometime in the next fifteen years is just garbage. Bush is handing them an opportunity by making this the centerpiece of his agenda. Democrats should treat privatizing Social Security the way Republicans treated Clinton's health-care plan -- they should say, "This is a disaster, and we will stand against it." Social Security is simply not the biggest problem facing the government today.

What is?

If you really want to get scared about something that can happen between now and 2052, you should talk about Medicare and Medicaid. The entire system of private health insurance is gradually collapsing. And as the share of people getting medical insurance through their employers continues to decline, the number of people who have to rely on the government for health insurance keeps going up. At the same time, medical costs keep on rising, because doctors keep on figuring out new stuff to do -- procedures that didn't exist ten or twenty years ago.

So what needs to be done to shore up Medicare?

In our system, we have huge administrative costs -- which are mostly driven by insurance companies spending huge amounts of money trying to avoid covering people. Our health-care costs are eighty percent higher than those in other advanced countries. The best way to contain those costs is to go to a single-payer system, one in which the government insures everyone. That would probably cut the cost of health care by at least twenty-five percent.

But there's no way that will happen under Bush.

He actually wants to do the opposite. If he manages to privatize Social Security, he'll try to privatize Medicare next. He'll try to strip away guaranteed health care and turn it into some kind of system of individual health accounts. The right says that what we need is more choice, more competition. But every piece of evidence suggests that health care is an area in which privatization actually raises costs. If they succeed at dismantling both Social Security and Medicare, then you're pretty much back, on domestic policy, to the days of Warren Harding -- which is exactly where they want to go.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events; Philosophy; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: communist; damnedlies; dontbogarttheweed; high; idiocy; idiots; krugman; lies; rolling; smugman; socialist; stone; stoned
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I decided to look at the Rolling Stone website today for a laugh, remembering that the last 3 times I picked up that rag in the past 3 years I felt like I wanted to barf. Do they even do music reviews any more? They're giving Socialist Workers Weekly a run for their money!
1 posted on 01/27/2005 8:40:18 AM PST by t_skoz
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To: t_skoz
But if the trust fund does run out, the government would have to raise taxes or cut benefits, or some combination of both, to keep Social Security solvent.

Yes, if the trust fund is ever depleted, then something will have to be done.

Uh, Krugman, in order to redeem the bonds in the trust fund, the government will have to raise taxes or borrow more money. What a weasel.

2 posted on 01/27/2005 8:42:40 AM PST by dirtboy (To make a pearl, you must first irritate an oyster)
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To: t_skoz

Well, imagine the absurdity of making government smaller. I'd like to go back to the days of silent Cal, Rolling Stone Magazine


3 posted on 01/27/2005 8:44:00 AM PST by arawlin2
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To: t_skoz

These people are all such liars! Two workers for each retiree, around 2020, means much higher taxes and/or massive debt and/or millions of tax-paying immigrants - or the system simply crashes. They can do all the accounting finagles they want, but you can't get payroll taxes out of workers who weren't born.


4 posted on 01/27/2005 8:44:49 AM PST by Tax-chick (Wielder of the Dread Words of Power, "Bless your heart, honey!")
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To: t_skoz; 537cant be wrong; Aeronaut; bassmaner; Bella_Bru; Brian Allen; cgk; ChadGore; ...
not really a R&R ping so much as a mass stupidity and Kool-Aid Ping!

Rock and Roll PING! email Weegee to get on/off this list (or grab it yourself to PING the rest)


OH YEAH!

5 posted on 01/27/2005 8:45:01 AM PST by t_skoz ("let me be who I am - let me kick out the jams!")
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To: t_skoz

Prior to Bush being president there are a bunch of Krugman quotes where he says that social security is a crisis.


6 posted on 01/27/2005 8:47:32 AM PST by Rodney King (No, we can't all just get along.)
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To: arawlin2; Tax-chick; dirtboy
"At his tree-shaded home in Princeton, New Jersey, Krugman took a break from working on a new economics textbook to explain why the crisis is phony..."

I feel sorry for the poor bastards who have to read this guy's textbook!

"We've secretly switched the text of Krudman's ramblings with Freidrich Hayek's Road To Serfdom, let's see if the students notice!"

7 posted on 01/27/2005 8:48:55 AM PST by t_skoz ("let me be who I am - let me kick out the jams!")
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To: t_skoz

Why didn't Rolling Stone front cover Kerry like they did Al Gore with the caption: "I got wood!"


8 posted on 01/27/2005 8:49:36 AM PST by Semper Paratus
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To: t_skoz

LOL!


9 posted on 01/27/2005 8:56:33 AM PST by Tax-chick (Wielder of the Dread Words of Power, "Bless your heart, honey!")
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To: t_skoz

My memory is not what it used to be, but I seem to recall that not too many years ago the lefties were throwing the word 'crisis' around in reference to Social Security the way they throw the word 'liar' around today.


10 posted on 01/27/2005 8:57:54 AM PST by CaptRon (Pedecaris alive or Raisuli dead)
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To: t_skoz

Didn't they used to be a band?


/sarc


11 posted on 01/27/2005 9:09:50 AM PST by rockrr (Revote or Revolt! It's up to you Washington!)
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To: CaptRon
"medical costs keep on rising, because doctors keep on figuring out new stuff to do -- procedures that didn't exist ten or twenty years ago. " I guess Krugman thinks we should stop this too.
Its too bad that a "noted" economist doesn't even take the time to read the trustees report on social security before spouting off about it. Seems the numbers I read in the report and the ones he is quoting are different.
12 posted on 01/27/2005 9:11:02 AM PST by bt-99 ("it's not ours to give")
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To: t_skoz
No, the crisis is not fake. Krugman is a fake. He has real degrees, but as an economist he is a fake. He has a real column in the New York Times, but as a political commentator, he is a fake.

Rolling Stone may be useful as a commentator on music and related culture. But when it comes to commenting on the real world, Rolling Stone is also a fake, as witness this breathless article that takes Krugman as legitimate.

Did I miss anything?

Congressman Billybob

Click for latest, "Social Security, AARP and Coots"

13 posted on 01/27/2005 9:21:35 AM PST by Congressman Billybob (Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.)
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To: t_skoz
"Crisis? What crisis?"


14 posted on 01/27/2005 9:22:08 AM PST by Choose Ye This Day (The crusader taunted Faisal: "He who is to be smelt it, is one who dealt it!" -- (Iowahawk))
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To: t_skoz
The best way to contain those costs is to go to a single-payer system, one in which the government insures everyone. That would probably cut the cost of health care by at least twenty-five percent.

Yeah. Government is so effective, efficient, and frugal. This guy's head isn't in the sand, it's in a major orifice.

15 posted on 01/27/2005 9:25:32 AM PST by Choose Ye This Day (The crusader taunted Faisal: "He who is to be smelt it, is one who dealt it!" -- (Iowahawk))
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To: t_skoz

"We've secretly switched the text of Krudman's ramblings with Freidrich Hayek's Road To Serfdom, let's see if the students notice!"

Isn't it a felony to mention Hayek on a college campus these days?

I think the last time I really wanted to bust somebody in the mouth was also the last time I mentioned Hayek to somebody who claimed to be well educated in economics.

Bloody fool still thinks Keynes was right, even after watching his policies fail again and again in Japan, two or three times a year for the past 17 years.

I mean, how many times does a theory have to fail--and fail every time its tried--before a true believer gives up on it?


16 posted on 01/27/2005 9:27:34 AM PST by dsc
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To: Congressman Billybob
Rolling Stone may be useful as a commentator on music and related culture.

No, it's even worse at that.

17 posted on 01/27/2005 9:33:37 AM PST by Jhensy
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To: t_skoz

Help me please! This article was such a crock. I just about ripped it to shreds when I first read it. But I think the librarian would have had a fit.


18 posted on 01/27/2005 9:33:57 AM PST by junaid
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To: Choose Ye This Day

Terrorism was never a crisis either...


19 posted on 01/27/2005 9:36:33 AM PST by Wristpin ( Varitek says to A-Rod: "We don't throw at .260 hitters.....")
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To: Wristpin

"Al Qaeda? What Al Qaeda? Pass me another slice of pepperoni, Monica."


20 posted on 01/27/2005 9:39:42 AM PST by Choose Ye This Day (America is a great country. 38 million illegal aliens can't be wrong.)
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