Parade Magazine decided to subject tens of millions of readers of its Sunday newspaper insert to an anti-Social Security diatribe headlined: "Can We Save Social Security?" Since Social Security is not in any real danger this headline would be like saying "Can We Save Apple or the New York Yankees?" It should not be hard, since all three are quite healthy at moment. The article then wrongly asserts that: "lawmakers agree that something needs to be done—and fast. They even agree on the broad outlines of a solution." The article presents absolutely zero evidence for either part of this assertion. There is no on the record statement showing that either members of Congress agree that something must be done fast or on what should be done. Since the Congressional Budget Office's projections show that the program will be fully solvent for 35 years into the future and can always pay far higher benefits than what current beneficiaries receive, even if nothing is ever done, it is hard to see why lawmakers would agree that something needs to be done quickly. There are obviously far more pressing problems -- the need to do something with Social Security is an invention of Parade Magazine. The piece also implies that there is a consensus around raising the retirement age and that people oppose raising taxes for "ideological" reasons. There is zero evidence for either proposition. Most likely people oppose raising taxes primarily because they don't want to pay more taxes. There is no obvious reason to believe that there is any greater issue here. And, many people strongly oppose raising the retirement age since this would primarily hit less affluent workers. They especially oppose raising it in the near future as the article absurdly claims. This would primarily hit the people who saw their retirement accounts and home equity destroyed in the collapse of the housing bubble. There are few politicians who are openly seeking to hurt these people even more.
--Dean Baker