Marching With The Straw Men

Joe Biden gave his State of the Union speech this past Tuesday.

During that palaverous 7216 word pontification, Joe lied.

This is my shocked face...

No, this is...

He's a politician, after all.

He didn't kiss any babies, though there was an awkward buss, nor did he steal any lollipops.

He did however, cough up a hairball more brazen than most of his previous dismissals of truth.

Since his words were prepared, vetted, and teleprompted, it was carefully couched. This made it no less blatant, however.

Joe told America that Republicans wanted to end Social Security and Medicare.

Libertarians across the country are sighing, 'Oh, were this actually so.'

Alas, it is not. The GOP has proven as utterly feckless as the Democrats in addressing the 43 trillion pound gorilla in the room (yes, SS is underfunded by $43T), and even more worthless with regard to Medicare/aid (GWB at least made a few mewling noises about SS during his tenure).

It is a fact as certain as gravity that SS and Medicare are underfunded, that without reform they will cease being able to fully pay their obligations in a few years' time.

Curtis Houck @CurtisHouck

BOOM: Joy Reid explodes and just shouts "not true" over and over when Byron Donalds explains that Social Security is on a path to insolvency in 2035: "Joy, I'm a financial profession. I do more than just Congress...I'm telling you. [It] will go insolvent."

No matter how many times (I counted twelve) Joy Reid asserts otherwise.

It is also as factual that no one of sober mind is advocating the programs be ended. Reid is correct in saying that some would privatize SS, but then suggests that's a Bad Thing because it'd subject that money to "the whims of the market."

As opposed to... what? Government spending it all?

Because, despite Biden's assertion that "[t]hose benefits belong to the American people. They earned them," that is exactly what has happened. There's no trust fund, there's nothing but scrap paper in the Social Security "lockbox," as Al Gore dubbed it. Bad enough that the program is a Ponzi scheme, relying on current workers to make good on promises to retirees. Worse, the government spent all the excess collections across the past 88 years. Now that longer life expectancies and a shrinking ratio of workers to retirees have made excess collections a thing of the past, the piper must be paid. Any private pension manager who did this would, by the way, have been jailed - assuming he wasn't tarred and feathered first.

Cheats and liars.

Even apart from this fleecing of taxpayers, SS underperforms private investing, and the disparity is getting worse (i.e. if you're a young person, you're even more screwed). So, Reid's concern about market variances is unabashed straw-manning.

Which is what almost everyone does when it comes to entitlement reforms.

Point out that the system is unsustainable and you're accused of wanting to throw Granny off a cliff.

Argue that reforms are necessary and you want to "end the system." And throw Granny off a cliff.

Assert that it's reckless not to fix SS and Medicare now before it becomes even more difficult and expensive to do so, and you're a heartless monster who wants to throw Granny off a cliff.

All these people are liars. Liars in what they say about you, and liars in their assertions that SS and Medicare can continue as they are currently structured.

Joining them are the millions who carry on about how it's "their money" and that they're entitled to it. The money is gone, it's been spent, and given that SS was a pay-as-you-go scheme from the outset, it was never theirs in the first place. It is and always has been a tax, plain and simple, no different in principle than an income tax or a sales tax or any of the other forms of goose-plucking the government engages in. The benefits that are promised are not like a deposit account or CD or even a brokerage account, where your money actually exists in some form. They are nothing more than a revocable promise to give you Other People's Money at some point in the future - just like any other welfare program. Even many conservative fiscal hawks cling to the fiction that Social Security is somehow "special," theirs, and to remain untouched. I recall many hard core Tea Party types, at its peak of power, saying "hands off" their Social Security.

This is why SS won't get fixed in any responsible fashion. Instead, when the hard wave of reality hits, I expect the government to print a solution. To create money with which to pay the obligations. To (further) debauch the dollar as the coward's way out of the mess they've known about for decades.

Nevertheless, the responsible thing to do is to try anyway. As Mike Pompeo recently told John Stossel, “there is nothing that should be off the table.”

• Raise the benefits age.

• Means-test.

• Increase the payroll tax.

• Remove the income cap.

• Better manage the money.

• Aggressively pursue fraud, waste, duplication and the like.

• Migrate the system, across decades if need be, to individual accounts and privatization.

The system needs to be made permanently sustainable, and the only way that can happen is to wall politicians off from the money. Otherwise, all we’re doing is kicking an increasingly heavy and expensive can down the road.

Many, truth be told, are OK with that, as long as they get theirs. After all, why should they feel pain that their predecessors didn’t, if that pain can be foisted onto later generations?

Behold, the core of the problem, and why politicians who propose fixing it, no matter how responsible or modest their suggestions, get run over by an army of straw men.