Kevin Drum beat me to the most obvious problem with Andrew Sullivan's latest attack on Social Security: to call benefits of $12,000 a year "gold plated" is worthy of one of the rich guys in Ruben Bolling's "Lucky Ducky" cartoons. Adding to the comedy is Sullivan generously noting that "I'd rather settle for a lower sum because we planned for it than because we let the system collapse into insolvency." Well, of course he would, given that he'll almost certainly have a private pension that will be rather more "gold-plated" than Social Security, but his situation is hardly typical. Moreover, the idea that Social Security is in serious danger of "collapse into insolvency" because in several decades current payroll taxes may not cover 100% of Social Security expenditures is ridiculous.
Meanwhile, the silly Amity Shales op-ed he links to of course repeats the beloved-by-privatizers factoid that "As long as a decade ago, a much-publicized poll suggested that more members of Generation X believed they would see a UFO than believed that Social Security would help them when they retired." I dunno, maybe this is because people like Sales and Sullivan keep waxing hysterical about a program that's in perfectly good shape, and don't hear enough from people understand that as the economy expands we can afford to (and should) adjust benefits accordingly.
--Scott Lemieux
