Concerned Villagers
by David Atkins
Now that the Occupy movement has taken deficit hysteria out of the news, the Washington Post is wondering what happened to getting back to the business of feeding catfood to Grandma to please our Galtian overlords:
Last year, as a debate over the runaway national debt gathered steam in Washington, Social Security passed a treacherous milestone. It went “cash negative.”
For most of its 75-year history, the program had paid its own way through a dedicated stream of payroll taxes, even generating huge surpluses for the past two decades. But in 2010, under the strain of a recession that caused tax revenue to plummet, the cost of benefits outstripped tax collections for the first time since the early 1980s.
Now, Social Security is sucking money out of the Treasury. This year, it will add a projected $46 billion to the nation’s budget problems, according to projections by system trustees. Replacing cash lost to a one-year payroll tax holiday will require an additional $105 billion. If the payroll tax break is expanded next year, as President Obama has proposed, Social Security will need an extra $267 billion to pay promised benefits.
But while talk about fixing the nation’s finances has grown more urgent, fixing Social Security has largely vanished from the conversation.
You know what else is a drain on the treasury and doesn’t pay for itself? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also, Bush’s deeply unpopular tax cuts for the wealthy. Those don’t pay for themselves either, and yet they seem oddly absent in the national conversation, too.
There’s also the inconvenient fact that the Social Security trust fund is still more than able to cover the costs of letting seniors retire with some dignity for the next several decades, in spite of the fact that the government has borrowed against the fund to pay for tax cuts for billionaires ever since Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
But don’t look to the Washington Post to tell you that. They’re clearly eager to turn the conversation back from inequality to cutting the safety net. I wonder why that is?
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