Social Security Meta-Archive: 1996

[Part of The Earth-Based Initiative: Social Security Meta-Archive]

5/1
The Biggest Deal
Robert Dreyfuss, in The American Prospect, on the funding behind lobbying the drive to privatize.
7/12
Making Social Security Secure
Slate "committee of correspondence" including Herb Stein, Henry Aaron and others.
9/13
The Choice[PDF]
Economist James K. Galbraith in The Texas Observer:

Here is what the President said:

“Let us proclaim to the American people we will balance the budget, and let us also proclaim we will do it in a way that preserves Medicare, Medicaid, education, environment, the integrity of our pensions, the strength of our people.”

Does this sound like a promise to protect Social Security to you? To me, it sounds like a promise to “reform” it.

The financiers have been ogling the Social Security Trust Fund for years now. Privatize it! they say. It will be more efficient! Earn a higher return! What they mean is: let us get our sticky fingers on the cash flow.

In simple terms, privatization of Social Security probably means that some part of your payroll tax gets dumped into a mutual fund. You will pay a manager to invest it for you. He will make a fantastic income for some of the easiest work on the planet. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has recently written, in Le Monde Diplomatique, that Clinton and the Democrats have been losing investment bank political contributions since 1994. This giveaway would almost surely get them back.

Ah, but isn’t the Social Security System in crisis? Isn’t tottering on the edge of bankruptcy? It absolutely is not. As the great economist Robert Eisner wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week, just a few accounting changes, long overdue, could end such talk for decades.

The problem is greed, pure and simple. Social Security is a rich target. I am not making this up: there is other evidence that preparations for a bipartisan Social Security “rescue” after the election are underway. That sly euphemism, “the integrity of our pensions,” was not accidental.

In some ways, Social Security might be safer under Bob Dole. Dole is, after all, an elderly, disabled man. He is a conservative Republican, but he has an honorable track record on Food Stamps and other safety net issues. More important, if Dole became President, the Democratic Party might come back into existence. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin from Goldman, Sachs would leave office. Social Security would have real defenders once again.

10/16
The Second Clinton-Dole Presidential Debate

MR. FLECK: President Clinton, my name is Jack Fleck. I'm retired Air Force pilot. Sir, it's officially forecast that our annual Medicare and Social Security deficits are measured in the trillions of dollars next century. Depending on who you listen to, Social Security will be bankrupted in either or . I feel this is grossly unfair, especially to our younger generation who are losing faith in the system. My question is this: Assuming you agree that our entitlement programs are on an unsustainable course, what specific reforms do you propose?

CLINTON: First of all, there are two different things. Social Security and Medicare are entirely different in terms of the financial stabilities. Let's talk about them separately. Social Security is stable until, as you pointed out, at least the third decade of the next century. But we'd like to have a Social Security fund that has about 70 years of life instead of about 30 years of life. What we have to do is simply to make some adjustments to take account of the fact that the baby boomers, people like me, are bigger in number than the people that went just before us and the people that come just after us. And I think what we'll plainly do is what we did in 1983 when Senator Dole served, and this is something I think he did a good job on when he served on the Social Security commission and they made some modest changes in Social Security to make sure that it would be alive and well into the 21st century. And we will do that. It's obvious that there are certain things that have to be done and there are 50 or 60 different options, and a bipartisan commission to take it out of politics, will make recommendations and build support for the people. Medicare is different. Medicare needs help now. I have proposed a budget which would put ten years on the life of Medicare trust fund. That's more than it's had a lot of the time in the last years. It would save a lot of money through more managed care, but giving more options, more preventative care and lowering the inflation rate and the prices we're paying providers without having the kind of big premium increases and out-of-pocket costs that the budget I vetoed would provide. Then that would give us ten years to do with Medicare what we're going to do with Social Security; have a bipartisan group look at what we have to do to save it when the baby boomers retire. But now we can, we ought to pass this budget now and put ten years on it right away so no one has to worry about it.

DOLE: Well again, if you're somebody thinking about the future, I think it's fair to say that it'll be -- we'll work it out. This is a political year, and the President is playing politics with Medicare. After this year is over, we'll resolve it just as we did with Social Security in `83. It's a nonpartisan commission. Ronald Reagan got together with Tip O'Neill and Howard Baker, two Republicans and one Democrat. They appointed a commission I was on that commission. We resolved, we rescued Social Security. We suggested -- I think it has been over a year ago now -- we do the same with Medicare, and the White House called it a gimmick. Now last week I guess it was Donna Shalala said well we'll cut Medicare a hundred billion and appoint a commission. It will probably have to be done by a commission. Take it out of politics. I think if I were a senior citizen I would be a little fed up with all these ads scaring seniors, scaring veterans and scaring students about education. When you don't have any ideas, you don't have any agenda, and all you have is fear, that's all you can use. We have ideas in the Dole-Kemp campaign and we will rescue Medicare as we did Social Security.

More:

MS. SIEFERT: Iris. Senator Dole, we talked about Social Security for us baby boomers. But shouldn't we be saving and investing for our own retirement as well? Are you planning any incentives to encourage us to take care of ourselves rather than to rely on the government and on Social Security when we retire?
DOLE: Well, we have in our economic pack, -- individual retirement accounts where we think it will encourage savings. You can also use those accounts for health care or education or a first home. We're doing that precisely, and I think one thing sooner or later we're going to have to consider is take a look at the Social Security system. Because we've got a lot of people advocating we don't want to put our money into Social Security. You have to be very careful of that because you have to protect the people who are already in the pipeline. It's something you might consider. I'm not suggesting it will be done, but at least we ought to look at it. It's been looked, When I was chairman of the finance committee which handled Social Security we looked at all these options, and one thing we've got to make certain, when I used to go home my mother would tell me all I've got is my Social Security, don't touch it. And we didn't touch it. We preserved it. And I'm an optimist. Your your Social Security is going to be there when you retire. We will fix it. It will probably happen in the year 2012 or 2015. In 1983 we thought we had a 75 -year fix. It didn't work. Much, much less, but at least we fixed it for some time and 37 to 40 million people get their checks on time. So we need to preserve the system. And we need to make it stronger. But we also need to look at some options, whether or not we -- depending on what the options are. In fact, they have got a commission right now in Congress, a bipartisan commission, looking at all the different options they will present to the next Congress. so I think we will wait, see what they present, take a look at it.

CLINTON: Iris, this is one where we have some agreement, I think. Only about half the people in this country have pension plans. And Social Security is not enough for a lot of people to live on, or at least is not enough for them to maintain anything like their previous lifestyle. So we've got to figure out how are we going to have more people with pension plans, and pension coverage has been declining as more and more people work for small businesses and fewer people work for big businesses. So what, what is in my plan and I think it's almost identical in Senator Dole's plans is we make more people eligible to save in an IRA and let couples, married couples save more and then they could withdraw from it tax-free if they needed to, for medical emergencies or buy a home or education, also save to supplement retirement. In addition to that, we just passed a sweeping business reform that makes it easier for small business people to take out 401 K plans for themselves and employees and much easier for employees to carry it from job to job. My best friend from grade school is a computer software salesman and he told me last time he changed employers it took him nine months to figure out how to transfer his 401K plan. Now none of that will happen anymore. I hope over the next ten years you will see a big increase over the percentage of people that have pension plans, plus a secure Social Security system.

November
The Great Social Security Scare
Jerry L. Mashaw and Theodore Marmor write in The American Prospect.
The end of Social Security as we know it?
Robert Dreyfuss, in Mother Jones, on the drive to privatize.
Déjà views
In the same Mother Jones issue, Theda Skocpol asserts conservatives unsuccessfully fought for a more poor-centric version of Social Security in a bid to pre-empt its long-term middle-class appeal.
12/1
Local Solutions to a National Problem
Local prototypes for Social Security reform.
12/14
Social Security: From Ponzi Scheme to Shell Game
Michael Kinsley in Slate.

Plan A from Outer Space

Josh Marshall's November 26, 2003 post on the firing of Tom Warrick of the State Department's prescient Future of Iraq Project - the government's best expertise shelved to facilitate contemplation of One Giant Cakewalk For Mankind - was put into devastating context by George Packer's extensive November 1993 New Yorker article on the Bush administration's post-war "planning:"

Erdmann’s view that rebuilding Iraq would require a significant, sustained effort was echoed by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Throughout 2002, sixteen groups of Iraqi exiles, coördinated by a bureau official named Thomas S. Warrick, researched potential problems in postwar Iraq, from the electricity grid to the justice system. The thousands of pages that emerged from this effort, which became known as the Future of Iraq Project, presented a sobering view of the country’s physical and human infrastructure—and suggested the need for a long-term, expensive commitment.

The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeld’s battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didn’t coördinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feith’s team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeld’s aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war. “You got the impression in this exercise that we didn’t harness the best and brightest minds in a concerted effort,” Thomas E. White, the Secretary of the Army during this period, told me. “With the Department of Defense the first issue was ‘We’ve got to control this thing’—so everyone else was suspect.” White was fired in April. Feith’s team, he said, “had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.”

This was the view held by exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi. The exiles told President Bush that Iraqis would receive their liberators with “sweets and flowers.” Their advice led policymakers to assume that Iraqi soldiers and policemen would happily transfer their loyalty to the Americans, providing a ready-made security force. “There was a mistaken notion in certain circles in Washington that the Iraqi civil service would remain intact,” Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of the Iraqi Kurdish administration and a strong advocate for the overthrow of Saddam, said. A week before the war, he discussed the problem of law and order with a senior member of the Administration. “They were expecting the police to work after liberation,” Salih told me. “I said, ‘This is not the N.Y.P.D. It’s the Iraqi police. The minute the first cruise missile arrives in Baghdad, the police force degenerates and everybody goes home.’”

In the Pentagon’s scenario, the responsibility of managing Iraq would quickly be handed off to exiles, led by Chalabi—allowing the U.S. to retain control without having to commit more troops and invest a lot of money. “There was a desire by some in the Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon to cut and run from Iraq and leave it up to Chalabi to run it,” a senior Administration official told me. “The idea was to put our guy in there and he was going to be so compliant that he’d recognize Israel and all the problems in the Middle East would be solved. He would be our man in Baghdad. Everything would be hunky-dory.” The planning was so wishful that it bordered on self-deception. “It isn’t pragmatism, it isn’t Realpolitik, it isn’t conservatism, it isn’t liberalism,” the official said. “It’s theology.”

On January 20th, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive No. 24, which gave control of postwar Iraq to the Department of Defense. At the end of the month, the Pentagon threw together a team of soldiers and civilians, under the leadership of retired General Jay Garner, in the newly christened Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. orha would administer Iraq after the end of hostilities. The war was only seven weeks away.

In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, Garner had led the largely successful effort to save Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. Garner and his inner circle of generals and ambassadors essentially used the same template for the war in Iraq. orha was divided into three “pillars,” as Garner called them: humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, and civil administration. Garner’s experience in northern Iraq led him to focus on the potential for a humanitarian disaster: displaced populations, starvation, outbreaks of disease, prisoners of war, and, above all, chemical-weapons attacks. The U.N. was warning of the possibility of half a million deaths. orha thoroughly prepared for each of these nightmares—and if any one of them had come to pass Garner’s foresight would have been applauded.

But in concentrating on possible emergencies he failed to consider the long view. On February 21st and 22nd, some two hundred officials gathered in an auditorium at the National Defense University, in Washington, for a “rock drill”—a detailed vetting of the plans that had been made so far. The drill struck some participants as ominous.

“I got the sense that the humanitarian stuff was pretty well in place, but the rest of it was flying blind,” one orha member recalled. “A lot of it was after hearing from Jay Garner, ‘We don’t have any resources to do this.’” Plans for running the country’s ministries were rudimentary; orha had done little research. At Douglas Feith’s insistence, his former law partner Michael Mobbs was named the head of the civil-administration team. According to Garner and others, Mobbs never gelled with his new colleagues. Yet this “pillar” would turn out to be the one that mattered most.

During the rock drill, Gordon W. Rudd, a professor from the Marine Corps’s Command and Staff College, who had been assigned to Garner’s team as a historian, noticed that a man sitting four rows in front of him kept interjecting comments during other people’s presentations. “At first, he annoyed me,” Rudd said. “Then I realized he was better informed than we were. He had worked the topics, while the guy onstage was a rookie.”

It was Tom Warrick, the coördinator of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, and his frustrations had just begun. Two weeks after the rock drill, after a meeting at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld asked Garner, “Do you have a guy named Warrick on your team?” Rumsfeld ordered Garner to remove Warrick from orha, adding, “This came from such a high level I can’t say no.” Warrick, who had done as much thinking about postwar Iraq as any other American official, never went to Baghdad.

The war between State and Defense continues: For months, Feith’s office has held up the appointment of other senior State Department officials to the C.P.A., even as the organization remains fifty per cent understaffed. The reports of the Future of Iraq Project were archived. In Baghdad, I met an Iraqi-American lawyer named Sermid Al-Sarraf, who had served on the project’s transitional-justice working group. He was carrying a copy of its two-hundred-and-fifty-page report, trying to interest C.P.A. officials. Nobody seemed to have read it.

The Administration was remarkably adept at muffling its own internal tensions. On only two occasions did dissenting views become public. The first was on the subject of money: a reporter from the Wall Street Journal quoted Lawrence Lindsey, the President’s chief economic adviser, floating a figure of up to two hundred billion dollars for the war and the reconstruction. This was at odds with the Administration’s projection—stated publicly by Vice-President Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz—that the cost of reconstruction would be largely covered by Iraqi oil revenue. By April, the White House had requested only $2.4 billion for postwar rebuilding.

The second rift was over troop deployment. In February, General Eric Shinseki, the Army’s chief of staff, testified before the Senate that the occupation of Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops. This prediction prompted Wolfowitz to get on the phone with Thomas White, the Army Secretary. “He was agitated that we in the Army didn’t get it,” White recalled. “He didn’t give arguments or reasons. Their view was that it was going to go the way they said it was going to go.” Two days later, Wolfowitz appeared before the House Budget Committee and said that so high an estimate was “wildly off the mark.” He explained, “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his Army. Hard to imagine.”

---

[Added to the Iraq Chronicle]

Social Security Meta-Archive: 2000

[Part of The Earth-Based Initiative: Social Security Meta-Archive]

Social Insecurity
Economist John Shoven of Stanford says Social Security is doomed, and proposes a two-tiered reform.

A Ponzi Problem: The U.S. Dependency Ratio, Social Security Solvency, and the False Panacea of Immigration
2000[PDF]
The Federation for American Immigration Reform

March
SOCIAL SECURITY: THE PHONY CRISIS
Excerpts from Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot's book appearing in The Washington Spectator.
3/1
What Social Security Trust Fund?
Michael Kinsley on the politics of paying for the Trust Fund
3/6
Making the Rich Richer
American political philosopher Richard Rorty laments the fact that Social Security is not means-tested.
Re: Richard Rorty and social security
In a discussion list, economist Max Sawicky responds:

a basic feature about Social Security that seems to be under-appreciated is that it is already 'means-tested' to a degree. It's not an either/or proposition. First of all, the benefit formula is redistributive, which is the same thing for practical purposes as 'means-tested.' It just happens that "means" is defined as past earnings, not present earnings or present income. Second, SS benefits are taxed under the progressive personal income tax. Third, although nobody here may believe it, the payroll tax is progressive up to the ninth income decile, according to CBO estimates of past years (when CBO was a more reliable institution than presently). Fourth, we have an Earned Income Tax credit, the base for which is the same as that for the payroll tax, so there is already an offset to the payroll tax for those with incomes below $30K or so. Fifth, Medicare is 'super-progressive' in the sense that the same substantial benefit package goes to all who qualify, irrespective of their past earnings.

More:

Getting rid of the earnings limitations has not been a major part of the debate, it has nothing to do with privatization, and it has been a bi-partisan cause. It is wrong to depict this as some reactionary idea that the Dems are caving on. The late Robert Eisner, our most staunch mainstream liberal in defense of Social Security (author of "Social Security: More, Not Less"), argued strongly the earnings test. Any implication in the Rorty column that Soc Sec should be means-tested is weak at best.

I am glad to see everybody against means-testing. But consistency would dictate that you should then stop criticizing the 'regressive' payroll tax. It's not as if high-income people can't see the commonality between means-testing benefits and taxing salaries over the $76,200 cap.

Another fact is that the SS estimates arise from the economics profession, not from politicians. The Repugs were scarcely aware of these until relatively recently, when they thought they could use the projected shortfalls to attack Medicare. They failed miserably. Clinton used "protecting Medicare" (i.e., paying down unrelated public debt) as a weapon against big tax cuts. Big tax cuts are dead, at least for the time being. The source of these projections is the Brookings/Urban Institute/AEI combine. In other words, mainstream neoclassical macro-economics. It is from these economists -- centrists like Henry Aaron and Charlie Schultze -- that the deficit panic first arose. The only cross-current in this has been the Brookings opposition to privatization (arguably on the grounds that it would reduce net national saving, their be-all and end-all).

4/5
What Social Security crisis?
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, says Merrill Goozner.
4/17
latimes.com: On key issues, Bush sounds more like a centrist Democrat than Gore
5/18
LOOKING BACK AT SOCIAL SECURITY
Online NewsHour discussion with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Haynes Johnson.
6/20
RETIREMENT SAVINGS
Newshour with Jim Lehrer transcript.

"Bush and Gore advisers talk about the candidates' Social Security and retirement savings plans."

7/1
Securing Social Security
Transcript of a Think Tank broadcast featuring Larry Lindsey, Alan Blinder and Alicia Munnell.
August 2000
How should we insure longevity risk in pensions and social security?[PDF]
Jeffrey R. Brown, writing for the Center for Retirement Research.
8/24
Bush's Shaky Retirement Plan
Alan Blinder in the Washington Post.
Fall 2000
A Simple Exposition of the Social Security Trust Fund
William L. Holahan and Mark C. Schug in the JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC EDUCATION.
9/7
Letter to Governor George W. Bush
Alicia Munnell, Professor
Henry J. Aaron, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies
Robert Ball, Former Social Security Commissioner
9/25
Inequality and Social Security
Richard C. Leone in The American Prospect.
10/3
The First Gore-Bush Presidential Debate:

MODERATOR: I thought we cleared this up a while ago. New question on Social Security. Both of you have Social Security reform plans, so we could spend the rest of the evening and two or three other evenings talking about them in detail. We won't do that. But --

GORE: Suits me.

MODERATOR: Many experts, including Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan, Vice President Gore, say that it will be impossible for either of you, essentially, to keep the system viable on its own during the coming baby boomer retirement onslaught without either reducing benefits or increasing taxes. You disagree?

GORE: I do disagree. Because if we can keep our prosperity going, if we can continue balancing the budget and paying down the debt, then the strong economy keeps generating surpluses. Here is my plan. I will keep Social Security in a lockbox and that pays down the national debt. And the interest savings I would put right back into Social Security. That extends the life of Social Security for 55 years. Now, I think that it's very important to understand that cutting benefits under Social Security means that people like Winifred Skinner from Des Moines, Iowa, who is here, would really have a much harder time. Because there are millions of seniors who are living almost hand to mouth. And you talk about cutting benefits. I don't go along with it. I am opposed to it. I'm also opposed to a plan that diverts 1 out of every $6 away from the Social Security Trust Fund. Social Security is a trust fund that pays the checks this year with the money that is paid into Social Security this year. The governor wants to divert 1 out of every $6 off into the stock market, which means that he would drain a trillion dollars out of the Social Security Trust Fund in this generation over the next ten years, and Social Security under that approach would go bankrupt within this generation. His leading advisor on this plan actually said that would be okay, because then the Social Security Trust Fund could start borrowing. It would borrow up to $3 trillion. Now, Social Security has never done that. And I don't think it should do that. I think it should stay in a lockbox, and I'll tell you this. I will veto anything that takes money out of Social Security for privatization or anything else other than Social Security.

BUSH: I thought it was interesting that on the two minutes he spent about a million-and-a-half on my plan, which means he doesn't want you to know what he's doing is loading up IOUs for future generations. He puts no real assets into the Social Security system. The revenues exceed the expenses in Social Security until the year 2015 which means all retirees are going to get the promises made. For those of you who he wants to scare into the voting booth to vote for him, hear me loud and clear. A promise made will be a promise kept. You bet we want to allow younger workers to take some of their own money. That's the difference of opinion. The vice president thinks it's the government's money. The payroll taxes are your money. You ought to put it in prudent, safe investments so that $1 trillion over the next ten years grows to be $3 trillion. The money stays within the Social Security system. It's a part of the Social Security system. He claims it will be out of Social Security. It's your money, it's a part of your retirement benefit. It's a fundamental difference between what we believe. I want you to have your own asset that you can call your own. That you can pass on from one generation to the next. I want to get a better rate of return for your own money than the paltry 2% that the current Social Security Trust gets today. Mr. Greenspan I thought missed an opportunity to say there's a third way, and that is to get a better rate of return on the Social Security monies coming into the trust. There is $2.3 trillion of surplus that we can use to make sure that younger workers have a Social Security plan in the future. If we're smart and if we trust workers and if we understand the power of the compounding rate of interest.

GORE: Here is the difference. I give a new incentive for younger workers to save their own money and invest their own money, but not at the expense of Social Security, on top of Social Security. My plan is Social Security plus. The governor's plan is Social Security minus. Your future benefits would be cut by the amount that's diverted into the stock market. If you make bad investments, that's too bad. But even before then the problem hits because the money contributed to Social Security this year is an entitlement. That's how it works. And the money is used to pay the benefits for seniors this year. If you cut the amount going in 1 out of every $6, then you have to cut the value of each check by 1 out of every $6 unless you come up with the money from somewhere else. I would like to know from the governor -- I know we're not supposed to ask each other questions -- but I'd be interested in knowing, does that trillion dollars come from the trust fund, or does it come from the rest of the budget?

BUSH: No. There's enough money to pay seniors today in the current affairs of Social Security. The trillion comes from the surplus. Surplus is money -- more money than needed. Let me tell you what your plan is. It's not Social Security plus, it's Social Security plus huge debt. That is what it is. You leave future generations with tremendous IOUs. It's time to have a leader that doesn't put off tomorrow what we should do today. It's time to have somebody to step up and say look, let's let younger workers take some of their own money and under certain guidelines invest it in the private markets. The safest of federal investments yields 4%. That's twice the amount of rate of return than the current Social Security Trust. It's a fundamental difference of opinion here, folks. Younger worker after younger worker hears my call that says I trust you. And you know what, the issue is changeing. Seniors now understand that the promise made will be a promise kept, but younger workers now understand we better have a government that trusts them and that's exactly what I'm going to do.

GORE: Could I respond to that, Jim? This is a big issue. Could we do another round on it?

MODERATOR: We're almost out of time.

GORE: Just briefly. When FDR established Social Security, they didn't call them IOUs, they called it the full faith and credit of the United States. If you don't have trust in that, I do. If you take it out of the surplus in the trust fund, that means the trust fund goes bankrupt in this generation within 20 years.

BUSH: This is a government that thinks a 2% rate of return on your money is satisfactory. It's not. This is a government that says younger workers can't possibly have their own assets. We need to think differently about the issue. We need to make sure our seniors get the promise made. If we don't trust younger workers to manage some of their own money with the Social Security surplus, to grow from $1 trillion to $3 trillion, it will be impossible to bridge the gap without it. What Mr. Gore's plan will do causing huge payroll taxes or major benefit reductions.

10/5
The Lieberman-Cheney Vice Presidential Debate

MODERATOR: This question is for you, Senator. We all know Social Security is the backbone of the retirement system in our nation. Can either of you pledge tonight categorically that no one will lose benefits under your plans?

LIEBERMAN: Yes, indeed. I can pledge to the American people categorically that no one will lose benefits under our plan for Social Security as far forward as 2054. And let me come back and say, Bernie, that Al Gore and I view Social Security as probably the best thing the government did in the second half -- the last century. It has created a floor under which seniors cannot fall, and so many of them depend on it for their basic living, for their livelihood. It's critically important to protect it. That's why Al and I have committed to putting that Social Security surplus in a lockbox, not touching it. That's what allows us to keep Social Security solvent to 2054. Our opponents have an idea for privatizing Social Security that will jeopardize Social Security payments to recipients. And I looked at this idea. If I may use an oil industry analogy, which is to say that sometimes as you know, Dick, better than I, you have to dig deep whether there's oil in a well. For a while I was drilling into this idea of privatization of Social Security. It requires taking as much as a trillion dollars out of the Social Security fund. The independent analysts have said that would put the fund out of money in 2023, or if it's not out of money, benefits will have to be cut by over 50%. That's just not worth doing. Al Gore and I are going to guarantee Social Security and add to it the retirement savings plan that I mentioned earlier which will help middle-class families looking forward. They will have not only Social Security, but a superb extra retirement account as well. Social Security plus with us. With all due respect, Social Security minus from the Bush-Cheney ticket.

CHENEY: You won't be surprised if I disagree. The Social Security system is in trouble. It's been a fantastic program and been there for 65 years that has provided benefits for senior citizens over that period of time. For my parents. It means a great deal to millions of Americans. And Governor Bush and I want to make absolutely certain that the first thing we do is guarantee the continuation of those payments, those benefits and keep those promises that were made. But if you look down the road, you say you're 30 years old today, and I have two daughters about that age. They seriously question whether or not there will be any system left for them. That's because the demographics that work out there, it's almost an iron law. They know how many people there are, we know when the baby boom generation is coming along it will drive the system into bankruptcy unless we reform and deal with it. The reform we would like to offer is to allow our young people to begin to take a portion of the payroll tax, 2% of it, and invest it in a personal retirement account. That does several things. First of all, it gives them a stake in the Social Security system. That becomes their property. They own it. They can pass it on to their kids if they want. They don't have that kind of equity in Social Security today. Secondly, we can generate a higher return off that investment than you get in the existing system. You get about a 2% return of what you pay into Social Security. We can generate at least 6%. At least three times what we're able to get now. And long-term by generating a bigger return, we'll put additional funds into the system that will help to survive that crunch that is otherwise going to hit in the future. Bottom line is there's a choice here. With respect to Al Gore and Joe's plan, they don't reform Social Security. They add another huge obligation on top of it that future generations will have to pay. They don't reform it and don't save it. We have a plan to do that and a plan to give our young people a choice and more control over their own lives.

December 2000
SOCIAL SECURITY AND RETIREMENT RESEARCH:FROM RESEARCH TO POLICY
Alicia H. Munnell.
12/27
Privatize Social Security - bad idea?
Paul Farrell on John Bogle's critique of mutual-fund operated privatized/private/personal/individual accounts.

The campaign finance imperative

Josh Marshall:

As I've said before, this is for a new TPM blog dedicated to wall-to-wall coverage of the various threads of public corruption, self-dealing and sundry shenanigans afflicting Washington today -- Abramoff, Safavian, Reed, Norquist, the Duke, DeLay, Pombo, Ney, Burns. Ahh, the list goes on and on.

Hopefully this will pave the way for an even greater effort to push for more sweeping election finance reform.

Iraq Archive

Online Resources

Iraqanalysis.org
Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children from 1990 Through 1998: Assessing the Impact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanctions
Brookings Institution:Iraq
C-SPAN Iraq Coverage

Blogs that Discuss Iraq

Back to Iraq 2.0
Daily Howler
Brad DeLong
Political Animal/Kevin Drum
Talking Points Memo/Joshua Micah Marshall
Nouriel Roubini's Global Economics Weblog
MaxSpeak,You Listen!
TAPPED

Debate Chronology/Meta-Narrative

2002

9/7
White House: Bush Misstated Report on Iraq
An MSNBC article mysteriously taken down recovered by The Memory Hole.
10/22
For Bush, Facts Are Malleable
Dana Milbank enumerates several Bush falsehoods in the Washington Post.
10/25
Dead Parrot Society
Paul Krugman expands on Milbank’s emphasis on Iraq to recapsulate mendacity going back to the election of 2000.
11/6
Malleable Facts
The Dubya Report goes so far as to chart the Bush falsehoods from the Milbank article.

2003

4/17
Where Are Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Brad Delong asks.

4/29
Matters of Emphasis
Paul Krugman on the Bush Administration’s hype of the Iraqi threat.
5/1
All the President’s Lies
Contrasts Bush’s rhetoric with the actual content of his policies.
5/13
The Say-Anything School
EJ Dionne updates Bush Administration misinformation.
5/14
Intelligence Designed
Harold Meyerson details Bush Administration end-runs around bureaucratic channels to derive the desired intelligence product.
5/15
WMD? MIA
David Corn of the Nation decries what he sees as the Bush Administration’s dangerously lackadaisical search for WMD.
6/1
Bush Remarks Confirm Shift in Justifying War
Dana Milbank on Bush’s downshifting claims on Iraq. From the Washington Post.
6/3
The Truth About Bush’s “Lies”
Byron York of the National Review defends Bush.
6/10
Who's Accountable?
Paul Krugman on the failure of the Bush Administration to account for previous claims.
6/19
The Selling of the Iraq War. The First Casualty.
A cumulative accounting of the Bush Administration’s ministrations of intelligence regarding Iraq by Spencer Ackerman and John Judis in The New Republic.
6/24
Denial and Deception
Paul Krugman on the response – or lack thereof – to the Bush Administration’s spin on its case for war.
6/26
Pants on fire...
The Likely Story compiles Bush lies about Iraq.
6/27
Was Bush Lying About WMD?
Fred Kaplan makes a case for misreading of the evidence.
6/29
Is Bush Lying About Iraq?
Orcinus makes a case.
6/30
The War Against Bush
Stephen Hayes of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard responds to the Ackerman/Judis piece.
10/1
Unilateralism Disgraced
In the American Prospect, Ivo H. Daalder of Brookings and James M. Lindsey of the Council on Foreign Relations on Bush's wrong unilateral assumptions on Iraq.
11/17
WAR AFTER THE WAR
George Packer in The New Yorker on the chaos which led to the chaos.

2004

2/8
Vial Mendacity [originally posted at Suite101.com]
8/7
Who Parses the Parsers?
Paul Krugman writes in to Matthew Yglesias.
10/26
Security in Iraq
Ivo Daalder, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Max Boot on The Diane Rehm Show.
10/29
Lancet Report 'Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq'
The Lancet study and related links at Iraqanalysis.org

2005

5/1
Blair hit by new leak of secret war plan
London Times reporting on how the war decision preceded justification.

The secret Downing Street memo:

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY


DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.


The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.


(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)


MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

5/6
British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy
A Knight Ridder report of Bush administration tailoring of intelligence to fit policy.
11/7
Who Is Lying About Iraq?
Norman Podhoretz writing in Commentary.
11/9
MARKETING THE WAR....
Kevin Drum responds....
11/10
The Case For War
Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics responds.
11/11
President Commemorates Veterans Day, Discusses War on Terror
White House transcript:

While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. (Applause.) Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. And many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security." That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate -- who had access to the same intelligence -- voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power. (Applause.)

The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. (Applause.) These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. (Applause.) Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. (Applause.) And our troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less than victory.(Applause.)

Instapundit:

The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way -- and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base, that it's deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad.

And yes, he should question their patriotism. Because they're acting unpatriotically.

Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Liars?
Brad DeLong:

History Is Written By the Mission Accomplishers - Wonkette:

In a Veteran's Day speech today, Bush came out with the administration's official policy on criticizing the war in Iraq: "While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began."

Yes. It is. Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.

11/12
Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument
Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus provide Washington Post coverage.
Talking Points Memo
Josh Marshall enumerates talking points of the Bush administration's bad faith on Iraq:

1. Longstanding effort to convince the American people that Iraq maintained ties to al Qaida and may have played a role in 9/11. This was always just a plain old lie. (And if you want to see where the real fights with the Intelligence Community came up, it was always on the terror tie angle and much less on WMD.) The president and his chief advisors tried to leverage Americans' horror over 9/11 to gain support for attacking Iraq. Simple: lying to the public the president was sworn to protect.

2. Repeated efforts to jam purported evidence about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program (the Niger canard) into major presidential speeches despite the fact the CIA believed the claim was not credible and tried to prevent the president from doing so. What's the explanation for that? At best a reckless disregard for the truth in making the case for war to the American public.

3. Consistent and longstanding effort to elide the distinction between chem-bio-weapons (which are terrible but no immediate threat to American security) and nuclear weapons (which are). For better or worse, there was a strong consensus within the foreign policy establishment that Iraq continued to stockpile WMDs. Nor was it an improbable assumption since Saddam had stockpiled and used such weapons before and, by 2002, had been free of on-site weapons inspections for almost four years. But what most observers meant by this was chemical and possibly biological weapons, not nuclear weapons. Big difference! The White House knew that this wasn't enough to get the country into war, so they pushed the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam for which there was much, much less evidence.

4. The fact that the administration's push for war wasn't even about WMD in the first place. Scarcely a week goes by when I don't get an email from a reader who writes, "I always knew that Saddam didn't have WMDs. How is that you, with all your access and reporting, didn't know that too?" Good question. They were right. And I was wrong. But like many things in this reality-based universe of ours, this was a question subject to empirical inquiry. No one really knew what Saddam was doing between 1998 and 2002. And US intelligence made a lot of very poor assumptions based on sketchy hints and clues. But the solution, at least the first part of it, was to get inspectors in on the ground and actually find out. That is what President Bush's very credible threat of force had done by the Fall of 2002. But once there the inspectors began making pretty steady progress in showing that many of our suspicions about reconstituted WMD programs didn't bear out, the White House response was to begin trying to discredit the inspectors themselves. By early 2003, inspections had shown that there was no serious nuclear weapons effort underway -- the only sort of operation which could have represented a serious or imminent threat. From January of 2003 the administration went to work trying to insure that the war could be started before the rationale for war was entirely discredited. They wanted to create fait accomplis, facts on the ground that no subsequent information or developments could alter. The whole thing was a con. It wasn't about WMD.

11/15
Another Set of Scare Tactics
EJ Dionne:

There is a great missing element in the argument over whether the administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to talk about the context in which Bush won a blank check from Congress to invade Iraq. He doesn't want us to remember that he injected the war debate into the 2002 midterm election campaign for partisan purposes, and he doesn't want to acknowledge that he used the post-Sept. 11 mood to do all he could to intimidate Democrats from raising questions more of them should have raised.

The big difference between our current president and his father is that the first President Bush put off the debate over the Persian Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one of most substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress has ever seen, and a unified nation. The first President Bush was scrupulous about keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion.

The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress for a vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October.

More:

The bad faith of Bush's current argument is staggering. He wants to say that the "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate" who "voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power" thereby gave up their right to question his use of intelligence forever after. But he does not want to acknowledge that he forced the war vote to take place under circumstances that guaranteed the minimum amount of reflection and debate, and that opened anyone who dared question his policies to charges, right before an election, that they were soft on Hussein.

By linking the war on terrorism to a partisan war against Democrats, Bush undercut his capacity to lead the nation in this fight. And by resorting to partisan attacks again last week, Bush only reminded us of the shameful circumstances in which the whole thing started.

Veterans Day

Brief Wikipedia write-up.

Falling through the cracks?

In the aftermath of Hurricane Stan...

BBC: Guatemala faces hunger 'timebomb':

Parts of Guatemala are facing a starvation "timebomb" in the aftermath of Hurricane Stan, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.

Hundreds of people were buried by landslides after a week of intense rains in early October.

But Trevor Rowe of the WFP says there are fears even more may die from malnutrition unless they get help soon.

"We suspect that by the end of the year most people's food will have run out," he says.

"We're talking about subsistence farmers, who live a hand-to-mouth existence."

[Via Donlan News Wire]

Kerry On, My Wayward Son?

Dallas Morning News Washington, D.C. mainstay Carl Leubsdorf discusses the rise of outgoing Virginia Governor Mark Warner and his presumed fellow presidential "dark horse" aspirants:

He would be one of many dark-horse candidates in a field likely to be dominated by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, assuming she runs. But one of them – Govs. Bill Richardson of New Mexico or Tom Vilsack of Iowa; Sens. Joe Biden of Delaware, John Kerry of Massachusetts, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin or Evan Bayh of Indiana; former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina; or Mr. Warner – is likely to emerge as Mrs. Clinton's main rival

Ouch.

Social Security Meta-Archive: March 2005

[Part of the Social Security Meta-Archive: 2005]

Social Security Meta-Archive: February 2005

Basic Facts on Social Security and Proposed
Benefit Cuts/Privatization[PDF]
Dean Baker and David Rosnick.

Social Security, revisited
Doug Henwood in the Left Business Observer.

Be Not Afraid: Personal Accounts Are No Radical Idea
Stephen Moore and AEI friends...

3/2
The Importance of Raising National Saving
"Speech by [Federal Reserve] Governor Edward M. Gramlich At the Benjamin Rush Lecture, Dickinson College, Pennsylvania"

While there are as yet not a great number of feasible ideas for significantly reducing the cost of Medicare, there are a number of proposals to reform Social Security. The President is touting a proposal, and ten years ago as chair of another Presidential advisory council on Social Security, I devised a proposal of my own.6 This is not the place to get into a full discussion of Social Security reform proposals, but one aspect of Social Security reform is important. Given the low national saving rates, and the fact that many American households do not save enough to avoid a big cut in their standard of living in retirement, it would seem desirable to have Social Security reforms that also raise national saving. One obvious and immediate way to do that would be to raise payroll taxes; another obvious, and perhaps less painful, way to do that would be to have individual accounts on top of Social Security. If these "add-on" individual accounts were to be mandated, as I proposed, those households who already save amply could reduce their other individual accounts while those who do no private saving for retirement would be forced to do more. Hence national saving would be increased, and increased for just those households who presently do little saving.

Other types of Social Security reform seem less promising from a national saving point of view. If, for example, the individual accounts were to be "carved out" of present payroll tax payments, as President Bush has recently proposed, household saving would go up but government saving, in the first instance, would go down by the same amount, meaning that the initial impact on overall national saving would be nil. But carve-out individual accounts might eventually reduce saving because households getting individual accounts who are already saving for retirement might cut back on their pre-existing saving. Hence carve-out individual accounts seem more likely to reduce than increase national saving. This is not the only criterion for judging between add-on and carve-out individual accounts, but I think it is an important one.

There may also be some way to compromise between mandatory add-on individual accounts that raise national saving but could be a tough sell politically, and carve-out individual accounts that are not likely to raise national saving. Some have suggested raising employee pension contribution rates by automatic default options for employer defined-contribution account. Under such a plan employees would be automatically enrolled in the employer's plan and would have to "opt out" to reject participation. Moreover, firms could be forced to carry employer defined-contribution accounts, as is done in Ireland.

The Hassle Factor
Thomas Geoghegan in Slate on the aversion to personal management of private accounts.
3/3
Social Security, Generational Justice, and Long-Term Deficits[PDF]
Faculty paper by Neil H. Buchanan of the Rutgers School of Law
*Sigh* Greg Mankiw
DeLong on Mankiw and privatization's possible effects on national savings.
3/4
Bruce Webb in comment:

Obviously we are getting to these guys. But time to hold their feet to the fire. It is one thing to claim that stocks can return historic rates even given flat productivity, it is quite another to simply accept that flat productivity. The real point of the "No economist left behind" challenge, at least in my eyes, is that no one is actually predicting that the economy will slow down at the drastic rate implied by Intermediate Cost or making the case that growth at 3 and 4 percent a year won't have the clear results suggested by Low Cost. Mankiw and others are trying to win this battle on points. It won't work.

Because their fundamental battle is not with some theoretical model of the economy, it is with the actual economic results reported in the business pages. The real question is not the spread of economic models that can produce 6.5% returns, but the specific economic outcome you invisage over the next two to five years and its impact on Social Security solvency.

The "No economist left behind" challenge is proving useful in flushing out intellectual dishonesty and willingness to sell integrity for political gain, but ultimately it is a sideshow. In the end this battle is not going to be won by economists, it is going to be won by accountants and honest spreadsheets.

Economic Debate
Arnold Kling at EconLog joins in, triggering extended comment.
Savings and Social Security
The blog Dead Parrot Society tries to track the argument and assess "liberal" and "conservative" positions on privatization's impact on national savings.
Copied ‘kissing’ photo ignites furor
The Portland Tribune finds one of its pictures swiped to make an ad attacking the AARP as pro-gay and anti-family as a result of its anti-privatization stance.
3/5
National Savings and Social Security
DeLong responds to Dead Parrot, discussing Greenspan's latest intervention.
The Crisis Last Time: Social Security Reform
Paul C. Light of Brookings on the 1983 reform.
Is the Social Security System in need of reform?
University of Oregon economist Mark Thoma commenting in his blog, Economist's View.
3/6
Robert's Stochastic thoughts
Robert Waldmann responds on the comparative effects of different types of forced savings.
Robert Waldmann's Thoughts on Social Security and National Saving
DeLong responds on assumptions of political behavior with regard to deficits.
3/7
Looks Like Bafflegab To Me
JustOneMinute weighs in on asset returns.
National Savings and Social Security, Part Deux
The Dead Parrot continues...
When Congress Killed Private Accounts
The 1930s proposal of voluntary annuities killed by the insurance industry.
3/9
WH admits it has no idea what W is talking about
A Daily Kos diary on the White House's flip-flops on add-ons and carve-outs.
3/10
George W. Bush: Liar or Fool?
Brad DeLong links to an AP story on Bush's bogus "75-year fix" talking point, Mark Thoma discusses the poverty annuity.
President's social security plan will worsen situation
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.
3/11
The Perfect World >> Politics >> The Battle over Social Security
"pseudoerasmus" in an online forum:

An ideal social security reform would leave current benefits unchanged without raising payroll taxes. This would require, amongst other things, that individuals receive zero net gains from private accounts, because what ever returns are realised in private accounts (whether 5% or 7% or 15%), the government would reduce traditional benefits proportionately. In other words, there is an improvement in social security's cost basis (because payroll taxes are invested under privatisation), but no one's retirement finances are improved (except insofar as they won't be paying higher taxes to fund an unreformed social security). There can still be other benefits from privatisation, if the economy grows faster as a result of it.

The above is another way of saying that the government is lowering the costs of social security by transferring the risks associated with retirement saving from society as a whole to individuals.

3/12
Talking Points Memo
Josh Marshall responds to Mankiw on the Democrats approach to Social Security.
Mankiw 0, Liberals 3
DeLong.
Mankiw on Privatization
Matthew Yglesias.
I'll Stop Calling This Crew "Orwellian" When They Stop Using 1984 as an Operations Manual
Delong follows up Yglesias, focusing on James Glassman and Kevin Hassett
3/13
Whichever Way We Go, Some Get Left Behind
Eugene Steuerle, writing in the Washington Post.
3/14
Brad DeLong comment thread
Joe "Let Me Endorse Some Phony Republican Numbers" Lieberman
DeLong on Krugman's attack of Joe Lieberman's use of Republican numbers; Sam Williamson questions another Bush talking point.
3/15
The Conservative Welfare State
Social Security decried as right-wing socialism at libertarian LewRockwell.com
'Above All, Try Something'
John Fund of OpinionJournal.com contrasts his take on the 1930s debate over "private accounts" with that of "supporters of Social Security."
Blocking Move
Jonathon Chait, writing in The New Republic, on political and principled reasons for Democrats to oppose Bush's privatization.
3/16
Collision course:The Bush budget and Social Security
Analysis by Max Sawicky.
Public Finance and Public Policy
Alex Tabarrok at the blog Marginal Revolution discusses a textbook by Jonathan Gruber:

Gruber is especially good at discussing empirical research. What is the effect, for example, of social security on private savings, on the living standards of the elderly, on the incentive to retire? What do we learn from the international evidence?

(Quick answers: Social security crowds out about 35 cents of private savings for every social security dollar. As a result, social security has reduced the eldery poverty rate although not quite as much as naive trends would suggest. Social security does reduce the labor force participation rates of the elderly but less so in the United States than in most European countries where there are huge disincentives for working beyond the normal retirement age. (Get the book or this powerpoint presentation for more details - note you need to view the PP in SlideShow mode to get the full effect.)

3/17
Social Security - Obstruction's Defender
A conservative response to Chait from the blog Logical Meme.
A Positive Program for Social Security
A draft of a plan by DeLong, with extended discussion.
Heads in the Sand or a Winning Hand?
Economist Mark Thoma at Economist's View:

There are, perhaps, small to moderate issues to address as time passes and we should take corrective action if needed, but I do not see the evidence needed to support radical reform. If people have an ideological reason for wanting privatization they should be honest about that and not hide behind concocted evidence of potential system catastrophe.

3/18
Social Security - Obstructionism’s Opponent
Logically, the blog Logical Meme follows up its attack on Chait with a defense of Mankiw.
3/19
The Life-Cycle Personal Accounts Proposal for Social Security: An Evaluation
Robert Shiller's paper on asset returns.
Retirement Accounts Questioned
Jonathan Weisman's Washington Post coverage of Shiller's paper:

A new paper by Yale University economist Robert J. Shiller found that under Bush's default "life-cycle accounts," which shift assets from stocks to bonds over a worker's lifetime, nearly a third of workers would bring in less in benefits than if they remained in the traditional system. That analysis is based on historical rates of return in the United States. Using global rates of return, which Shiller says more closely track future conditions, life-cycle portfolios could be expected to fall short of the traditional system's returns 71 percent of the time.

Both the White House and the Social Security Administration have relied on historical returns in estimating the earnings of proposed personal investment accounts. Shiller used 91 computer simulations to analyze the past performance of stocks and bonds in a variety of portfolios. He measured the returns in 44-year increments, beginning in 1871, to approximate a worker's lifetime contributions to personal accounts.

The results "showed a disappointing outlook for investors in the personal accounts relative to the rhetoric of their promoters," concluded Shiller, a leading researcher in stock market volatility who gained fame in the late 1990s for his warnings of a stock market bubble.

Yes, Bush Private Accounts Are a Bad Deal
DeLong:

The 3% real interest rate on the clawback of contributions to private accounts is too high to make them a good deal. Shiller's right.

Shiller: Private Accounts a Bad Deal
DeLong samples from Shiller's paper:

Key Findings:

Using historical returns, the life-cycle portfolio loses money 32% of the time (i.e., 32% of the time the internal rate of return is less than the 3% real return required to break even in the proposal). The median rate of return is 3.4% annually.

Using more realistic adjusted returns, the life-cycle portfolio loses money 71% of the time and has a median rate of return of 2.6%.

Discussion: These rates of return are considerably below the 4.6% that the Social Security actuaries have assumed for. In addition there is considerably more risk than one would generally associate with previous discussions of “lifecycle portfolios.” The most important reason this happens is that the life-cycle portfolio is invested in higher-yielding assets in early years and lower-yielding assets in later years. Because contributions are made annually, the returns in later years matter much more (i.e., the return in the first year only affects the first contribution but the return in the last year affects all 44 years of contributions). This effect is heightened because the typical worker reaches peak earnings in his or her fifties.

Other Findings:

The optimal portfolio for a worker choosing the personal account as a replacement for much of the guaranteed Social Security benefit is considerably different from the optimal portfolio for a worker investing a 401(k) in addition to Social Security. If you have a Social Security benefit that is not subject to market risk, then you can invest your additional savings in a higher return/risk portfolio. But in the President’s proposal, the investments are replacing a large fraction of the existing Social Security benefit. Thus you would not want to invest them in as risky a portfolio.

A worker that has the correct balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds should not even participate in the accounts. Conditional on participating, he or she should invest entirely in bonds in order to avoid changing their current portfolio. Other psychologically constrained workers might benefit from shifting their portfolios more into equities. Social Security design has to take seriously psychological barriers to enlightened saving and investing; workers not subject to these barriers are very different from workers who already do things right. Overall, any proposals to encourage savings and investment should be designed with a variety of different types of workers clearly in mind.

3/20
Paul Krugman on the "$600 Billion a Year" Number
DeLong links to an argument on the opportunity cost of not changing Social Security at a particular point in time.
3/22
April Fool's Day Comes Early This Year!
DeLong:

My scheduled once-every-three-months surf over to Donald Luskin's website was supposed to happen on April 1...

3/23
DOING THE MATH
Matthew Yglesias, in TAPPED, on the Trustees' assumptions over recent years and the implications for productivity and immigration.
The 2005 OASDI Trustees Report
...Or, the 2005 Annual Report.
HOW FUNDED ARE THY OBLIGATIONS
Yglesias, in TAPPED, after the release of the report:

...Now the 2005 report is out and once again past projections were too low. The actual 2004 number was 3.3 percent, and the '05 projection has been boosted to 2.0 percent.

Nevertheless, the long-term projection is unchanged. Why? Because the method used to generate the long-term projection deliberately excludes all this new data. Instead, they come up with 1.6 percent because "The annual increase in total productivity averaged 1.6 percent over the last four complete economic cycles (measured from peak to peak), covering the 34-year period from 1966 to 2000. The annual increase in total productivity averaged 2.2, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.6 percent over the business cycles 1966-73, 1973-78, 1978-89, 1989-2000, respectively." So far, productivity growth in the current cycle has been much higher than 1.6 percent. As a result, there's every reason to believe that, as long as the methodology is held constant, the long-term number will shoot up once we reach the next economic peak. The productivity figure, meanwhile, is absolutely crucial to the entire enterprise, which means that the program's fiscal health will look far better once the current expansion comes to an end.

Social Security Trustees Report
Blogger Ezra Klein:

What's really amazing here is that, even with the tweaked assumptions and the "see no, hear no, speak no" approach to productivity gains, the long-term balance of the program has actually improved from last year to this year. Despite fiddling with some numbers so the president can yell "Crisis!", Social Security is actually healthier down the road than it was last year. Go look at the graph Brad's got, it's all there.

Despite all this, the LA Times' headline blares "Social Security going broke in 2041". Sigh. The article, interestingly, shows that Social Security is not the problem, it's Medicare that matters. Medicare, after all, started paying out more than it's taking in last year (as opposed to Social Security's date of 2017), and total bankruptcy for the program is projected for 2020. Spending so much time worrying about Social Security is like a doctor worrying about early signs of Parkinson's while his patient has a heart attack on the table. Not so bright. Weird note -- the article calls 2041 the date Social Security goes "broke", but 2020 is when Medicare faces "insolvency". Same meaning, but the sense of urgency is drastically different.

So bottom line, things aren't too bad. Politically, the report helps Bush, but the slight changes should blunt its effectiveness. Moreover, Bush himself has begun admitting that private accounts don't do anything for the program's solvency, and since the report is dealing with Social Security's fiscal condition, it shouldn't give any momentum to privatization. Oh, and Medicare is going to kill us all.

The 2005 Social Security Trustees Report
DeLong on the improvement on the outlook despite Bush administration assumptions:

...That's six thumbs on the scales, and still the long-run deficit shrinks.

The Social Security Trustees Explain Their Productivity Assumptions
DeLong:

One would think that the fact that productivity growth has averaged 3.0% per year in the four years since 2000 would be worth a mention. One would expect some reason for completely throwing away the last four years' worth of data on productivity.

But it isn't there.

With subsequent commentary by Paul Krugman.
Social Security fund may run out sooner
CNNMoney coverage.
3/24
Asset Returns and Economic Growth: Full Draft
Delong on his paper with Baker and Krugman.
Four Reporters, Four Different Stories
Columbia Journalism Review coverage of the coverage.
The White House Thinks About the Clawback
DeLong links to WSJ coverage and comments:

It really does look as if they chose 3%, and then never ran the numbers--never ran the numbers at all to see what the distribution of private account returns would be.

One underlying problem, of course, is that private accounts shift risk onto beneficiaries, and that beneficiaries are more averse to risk than the government. Thus it is genuinely hard to make private accounts both attractive to those non-rich beneficiaries who are most averse to risk and also fiscally neutral.

Fire Insurance is not Welfare and Neither is Social Security
Mark Thoma.
3/25
Justifications for the Long-Run Productivity Growth Forecasts in the Trustees' Reports
Memo from DeLong to Baker and Krugman.
Insuring Against the Inevitable
Will Wilkinson at CATO says Social Security should be thought of as an unfairly implemented retirement supplement.
Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Insurance-Ain't-Welfare Department)
DeLong links to a Mark Thoma rebuttal of Robert Samuelson, with subsequent comment by Lee A. Arnold:

Fire insurance is insurance in case of fire. Retirement insurance is insurance in case of retirement.

Some systematic thinking is in order:

Social Security gives a small payout to EVERYBODY, thereby helping-out the neediest in an incidental, and discreet, way.

By including everybody, we keep it simple, keep management and transactions costs low, and minimize gaming the system. The fact that you once paid into it, gives you a right and an expectation, like a social agreement. Since it is paid out late in the summer of life, moral hazard is at a minimum.

Indeed Social Security is enjoyed and relied-upon by many conservatives who obsess fetishistically about other welfare costs and psychologies.

Without Social Security, about 50% of retirees would be below the poverty line. They would not be in better shape if they'd gambled the money in the markets. Go ask them.

It's hard to think of a better system. If the President succeeds in ruining it, we will have to reinvent it.

And Bruce Webb:

The fundamental difference between Social Security and European Welfare State systems is funding. Social Security always has been, and given current numbers always will be, 100% funded by Workers. Welfare is paid through taxes levied across the whole society/nation, heirs to great wealth who know to a certainly that they will never be standing in line at the welfare office still have to pay in. Social Security is different, if you emerge from college with a big trust fund that allows you to leverage that inheritence into billions (the Trump model - he started with a substantial real estate stake from his father) then great. You never pay a penny in to Social Security, you never take a nickel out.

And that really is the issue here. Capital's only moral claim to control the outcome of Social Security was the almost universal belief that it would be called to bail out Social Security at some point in the future. Well as it turns out Workers don't need Capital on this one, the Trust Fund is not going to run out and privatizers can get the hell of our lawn.

It's not welfare and it isn't broke.

3/27
The 2005 Report
The Bruce Web on the implications of the report.
3/28
Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Richard Stevenson Takes Another Dive Edition)
DeLong expands upon the commentary of Matthew Yglesias, followed by an extended thread on clawback.
3/30
Why Oh Why Are We Ruled By These Liars? (Assistant Secretary Rob Nichols, This Is Your Life! Department)
DeLong links to Josh Marshall readers' reactions to a Bush official's talking points and reacts:

"They hadn't run the numbers" for what happens in the second decade of Bush private accounts? Do they really think the press corps and the people are dumb enough to believe that? And why do they think it's to their advantage to set out such transparent lies? Would anyone support a long-run plan proposed by people who haven't "run the numbers" beyond the first ten years?

Asset Returns and Economic Growth
DeLong ruminates over economic models.
John Snow Is Genuinely Embarrassing...
DeLong links to Pandagon's coverage of Snow's job of defending Bush's proposal and responds.
Another Snow Job on Privatization
A fisking by Mark Thoma.
3/31
Ed Andrews Writes About Asset Returns and Economic Growth
DeLong links to New York Times coverage and comments.
GUNFIGHT AT THE BROOKINGS CORRAL
Baker and Krugman present their paper, Mankiw responds, Sawicky witnesses.

Social Security Meta-Archive: April 2005

The Cutting Edge of Social Security

The papers of Peter Diamond, a leading economist dealing with social insurance, via Dynamist Blog.

[Added, along with Martin Feldstein's papers, to the Social Security Meta-Archive]

Tonight in Manhattan

Washington Post

It's like, a Portal.

Via Abu Aardvark, the Council on Foreign Relations has a new main website.

Don't worry, the Portal is user safe.

Response timelines

Kevin Drum has compiled a list of Hurricane response timelines from around the web, including his own relatively concise one.

Katrina

Via Mark Thoma, CNN's extensive relief and information links including to the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army.

Globalization Archive

Online Resources

"Globalization" and "Neoliberalism"[PDF]
Discussion by Berkley economist Brad DeLong of critiques of globalization.

Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive: Global
Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive: International Trade
Articles mostly from the 1990s.

Globalization FAQ.
Survey of issues surrounding global economic development, emphasizing challenges to emerging markets.

IMF(International Monetary Fund)
OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
Penn World Tables
Country by country comparisons.
World Bank
BIS (Bank for International Settlements)
The "central bank of central banks."
Wikipedia:Globalization
Commanding Heights
Website of the PBS broadcast.
Far Eastern Economic Review
Institute for International Economics
Project Syndicate


Debate Chronology

1991

12/12
Summers Memo
Controversial World Bank memo allegedly encouraging polluters to relocate to less developed nations.

1998

11/2
The Global Fix
In The New Republic, economist Dani Rodrik formulates a plan to save the world.
12/18
Please DON"T Save Me Kathie Lee!
Suite101 discussion.

1999

4/26
Criticisms of the Index of Economic Freedom
Mike Huben compiles criticism of the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s propaganda initiative pertaining to the level of governmental intervention in emerging markets.

2000

5/1
The Meltzer Report
Brad DeLong on a major critique of the IMF.

2002

1/1

How to Judge Globalism.
In the American Prospect, Economist Amartya Sen deals with the promises and perils of globalism.
Globalism’s Discontents.
Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, writing in the American Prospect, critiques the IMF’s one-size-fits-all policies.
9/4
Globalization Will Continue
Brad DeLong links to Martin Wolf in the Financial Times.

2003

9/4
Brink Lindsey Is Very Good Indeed
Brad DeLong on Brink Lindsey's book, Against the Dead Hand.

2004

9/9
Paul Samuelson's outsourcing "bombshell"
Daniel Drezner links to New York Times coverage.
9/9
Globalization, slow down!
Christian Science Monitor reporting on the Samuelson paper.
9/27
On Point: Paul Samuelson: Rethinking Free Trade
Radio interview.
12/6
Shaking Up Trade Theory
BusinessWeek coverage of recent events.
12/7
Shaking Up Trade Theory
Aftermath on the blog Dvorak Uncensored.

2005

9/15
BUSH AND THE MILLENNIUM....
Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly decries Bush's description of his stewardship of "millenium" goals.
10/17
Paul Krugman: The Big Squeeze
Discussing a Paul Krugman column, economist Mark Thoma offers education as a main response to the pressures of outsourcing.
10/19
The Future of American Manufacturing
Mark Thoma discusses a column by Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post.
10/20
Dallas Fed President Fisher: Cost-Pull Disinflation from Globalization
Fisher's views presented by Mark Thoma.
New York Fed President Geithner on Global Imbalances
Mark Thoma continues his series of globalization posts at his blog, Economist's View.
11/9
Progressives should be for progress
Economist Alan Blinder at TPMCafe:

People sometimes forget that international trade is just one of many forces that are changing the world--and certainly not the most important one. No one doubts, for example, that technology is more powerful, more pervasive, and more disruptive than trade. The microchip has probably displaced more American workers than China ever will. But whether driven by trade, technology, or something else, economic change typically has casualties; and we ought to have robust policies and institutions to help people over the rough spots. I think both pro- and anti-trade progressives can agree on that.

What's the alternative? We could to stop economic change--or rather to try to stop it, for such efforts almost always fail. But that is surely not the route to progress. With sufficiently rigorous (and ridiculous) policies, the U.S. could have preserved the industrial structure of the 1950s, a time when super-America was super-dominant on the world stage and international trade was a vastly smaller share of our GDP, right to the present day. In this counterfactual experiment, GM and US Steel would be bigger companies today, while Microsoft and eBay would be based in some other countries. But at what cost to U.S. standards of living? And do we really think this would have saved the jobs of all those auto and steelworkers? It has long been a mystery to economists why so many people view creative destruction that stems from technology as okay, while similar creative destruction that stems from international trade is something to be opposed.

2016

5/11
Should the Middle Class Fear the World's Poor? 
Discussion of outcomes of developed world middle classes vs developing world lower classes in the wake of Branko Milanovic's new book on global inequality.
5/18
Worlds of Inequality
Miles Corak reviews Milanovic's new book in the American Prospect.

2017

6/9
What's Wrong With Our System of Global Trade And Finance
John Judis interviews Dani Rodrik at Talking Points Memo.

7/1
The New Class War
Michael Lind, in American Affairs, on neoliberal globalization as class war.

Social Security House Calls

Carl P. Leubsdorf: Bush's Social Security plan may hinge on the House
The Dallas Morning News on the continuing privatization offensive:

Mr. Rove, speaking to college students and lobbyists before Congress went on its current recess, said the House would act next month and the Senate soon after, according to the congressional newspaper The Hill .

And Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and one of his party's canniest operatives, said without giving details that his panel would introduce a retirement security bill in September.

[Added to the 2005 Social Security Meta-Narrative]

It's back...

The Official Blog of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill has resumed operation...