News & Comment

President Obama definitely had a bad night when he faced Gov. Romney in Denver for the first presidential debate. However, for many listeners the worst moment was not due to his atypical inarticulateness. Rather the worst moment was when he quite clearly told the country that there was not much difference between his position on Social Security and Gov. Romney's. He also expressed his desire to "tweak" Social Security to improve its finances. This is very bad news to the tens of millions of people who depend on Social Security now or expect to in the near future. It's also bad news to the hundreds of millions of people who have been counting on the Social Security system to provide a degree of financial security to their retired or disabled family members. read more »

Here is Mitt Romney’s proposal to cut Social Security benefits, from the Romney campaign website: First, for future generations of seniors, Mitt believes that the retirement age should be slowly increased to account for increases in longevity. Second, for future generations of seniors, Mitt believes that benefits should continue to grow but that the growth rate should be lower for those with higher incomes. In other words, cuts in benefits. In the first debate, I was waiting for President Obama to go to town on this. Instead, Obama had this to say: "You know, I suspect that, on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position." He’s got a similar position to Mitt Romney’s? On Social Security? Does this man just want to hand the presidency to Romney on a platter? read more »

Pete Peterson, the billionaire former private equity mogul, is quietly funding a noisy bus tour to whip up debt hysteria across the land. The “Ten Million a Minute Tour” headed by the Peterson Foundation’s former CEO, David M. Walker will end this week in Washington, DC after traveling coast to coast to alert America about the myriad of alleged dangers posed by government debt and deficits. Really, it should be called the “Million an Hour” cavalcade because that’s about how much Peterson and company made, in part, through obscene tax loopholes designed for private equity firms and hedge funds. If there really is a debt problem, then Peterson and his fellow tax-evading financial moguls have contributed mightily to it. But America does not face a debt crisis. Nor are we likely to face one in the next 100 years. In fact, we are the last country on Earth that needs to worry about its public debt. read more »

Republicans came into this campaign believing that it would be a referendum on President Obama, and that still-high unemployment would hand them victory on a silver platter. But given the usual caveats — a month can be a long time in politics, it’s not over until the votes are actually counted, and so on — it doesn’t seem to be turning out that way. Yet there is a sense in which the election is indeed a referendum, but of a different kind. Voters are, in effect, being asked to deliver a verdict on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, on Social Security, Medicare and, yes, Obamacare, which represents an extension of that legacy. If the polls are any indication, the result of that referendum will be a clear reassertion of support for the safety net, and a clear rejection of politicians who want to return us to the Gilded Age. But here’s the question: Will that election result be honored? read more »

They call it the "fiscal cliff," but it's Social Security that's going to be pushed over it, unless we speak out now. The forces of austerity in Washington are using the prospect of automatic spending cuts and tax increases at the end of the year to pressure Congress into a "grand bargain," slashing Social Security benefits in the name of deficit reduction. read more »

There are many fine passages in Obama's speech tonight, of course. I would expect nothing less. He's great at this stuff and I'm sure he fired up the base and brought over some undecideds too. But you had to know that I was going to look at what he said about deficits. Here's the main passage. It's very interesting. He promised not to cut the safety net in return for tax cuts. read more »

Their opponents shouldn't be too quick to call Republicans "crazy." It makes more sense to employ that time-honored investigative principle: Follow the money. Sure, they've said crazy things -- in their speeches and in their official platform. But crazy? read more »

Tuesday, David Brooks channeled a deeply flawed presentation by the Third Way to argue that while the federal government used to spend money on things that improved national “dynamism” it now just spends on “entitlements.” You’d have to look hard to find a bigger fan of public investments than me. But, the economic benefits of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are absolutely enormous. They provide a service (insurance against risk, and people value insurance quite highly) much more efficiently than do private-sector providers. In the case of Social Security, this efficiency is mainly in low administrative costs and the government’s ability to provide actuarially fair insurance without needing the compensation that private-sector insurance providers would demand. read more »

Ghosts have nothing on some of the ideas that come out of Washington when it comes to rattling chains and knocking pictures off the wall to terrify the common people. Case in point: the privatization of Social Security. One would have thought that this proposal was done in by two major stock market crashes since 2000, not to mention the generally noisome odor arising from almost everything that Wall Street has touched in recent years. Yet ever so stealthily it's creeping back into the public debate via the presidential campaign. Both members of the Republican ticket, Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), have expressed great enthusiasm for the idea in the past; in 2004, Ryan even sponsored a bill in Congress that was so reliant on private accounts that it was rejected by the Bush White House as too extreme. read more »

At a campaign stop in south central Virginia this past Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden said to a relieved coffee shop patron that, "Number one, I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you." read more »