Social Security Isnt Broken - Road to the Middle Class

COLUMNIST Charles Krauthammer is right , of course. Social Security is a disgusting fraud. Yet of all the entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, “Social Security is the most solvable.” So it’s a scandal that the Obama administration doesn’t want to fix it.

But Social Security isn’t broken. When OMB Director Jacob Lew says that: “At the moment, we look out and we see it solidly funded until 2037, and we think it is important to make the commitment to current retirees and workers, who are future retirees, that the system will be sound,” he is right.

The simple fact is that Social Security payments are about 4.9 percent of GDP right now and they will rise to 6.2 percent of GDP by 2037 if nothing is done, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In the chart of the CBO Long Term Budget Outlook below, Social Security is the horizontal blue section. Medicare and Medicaid are the bright red section, the one that’s going to eat the budget at 10 percent of GDP by 2037, 12.3 percent by 2050. Click the link if you want to look at the numbers.

Because “Social Security is the most solvable” of the entitlements, at a mere 5-6 percent of GDP, it might seem like a good idea for reasonable people to work on a solution in a spirit of civility. But President Obama is signaling that he’s eager to use Social Security as an election issue for 2012.

We are never going to fix Social Security, anyway, until it is broke. What does “broke” mean? It does not mean that Social Security itself would be broke; it would mean that the government was broke. It would mean that the federal government can’t sell its next debt issue and it’s afraid to get the Fed to print it, and therefore it can’t send out the entitlement checks any more. If you add President Obama’s intransigence to the to the recent Wisconsin farce you realize that the liberals won’t cry “uncle” on entitlements until then.

Until then, the right thing to do is for conservatives to engage their moderate friends in civil conversation, one-on-one, and persuade them get off the liberal train before it is too late.

Then, when the train wreck comes, we’ll have a political majority and a mandate for genuine reform.

The hole in the government finances, the utter mess of ObamaCare, the coming Medicare maelstrom: how did we get in this mess? The short answer is that it all started in about 1850 when sensitive people started worrying about the poor suffering workers. Oh no, they cried. We have to do something. They were sensitive, those people, but they were not smart. Their “do something” always ended up as some centralized administrative government program, with government taking money from its least favorite citizens and giving it to its most favored citizens, and calling the result compassion.

Earth to sensitive people. Scientists have not called humans “social animals” for nothing. “Society” is not an administrative mechanism but a living organism in which each human participates in complex acts of cooperation, social mores, and, as a last resort, force. The “trick,” as climate scientists put it, is to get as many people as possible acting out of cooperative and moral motives.

Let’s put this in evolutionary, Darwinian terms for our liberal friends. The reason that all human societies have adapted to feature cooperation and religion is because these social inventions reduce the need for force and its administrative horror show. In our age we are foolish enough to put this to the test. We have created a mechanical monster, the modern centralized administrative state, to rumble over society, tearing up its complex social interactions with unstoppable force. Pay for the government’s Social Security plan or go to jail. Join the government’s universal health plan or go to jail. Send your kid to government school or go to jail. The result is like an Asian tsunami, a debris field of broken dreams and promises.

Since government often gets rather slack about shoving people in jail, especially its supporters, the administrative state is an open invitation to free-riding. That’s why the low-income culture in the welfare state has become a nether-world of off-the-books work and benefit fraud. That’s why you can see ads all over the place from lawyers anxious to help you qualify for Social Security disability benefits.

No, Social Security isn’t broke. It’s worse than that. Social Security is a bottle on a shelf of social narcotics that kill the social instinct and poison people with an addictive sense of entitlement to the fruits of other peoples’ labor.

In the life after liberalism, when liberal power has collapsed, we’ll reconstruct all the social ties that liberals have so energetically broken up. Today, as we live through the decline and fall of the liberal empire, and endure the truculence of its leaders and its rank and file, it’s the time to think, to organize, and to plan.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close