by James A. Bacon
Calling politics in Washington, D.C., “dysfunctional” severely understates the incompetence, hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty and cavalier disregard for the national well being that predominates in the nation’s capital. A better term would be “psychotic,” as in divorced from reality. Or even “schizophrenic,” characterized by a disintegration of the thought process and emotional control. How else can one describe a group of people seemingly bent upon the nation’s destruction?
A case in point is the conflicting message regarding Social Security. As the Washington Post noted in a recent article, Social Security cash flow went “cash negative” last year. Instead of running a surplus that gets applied to reducing the national deficit, the program ran in the red in 2o1o, augmenting the deficit by $46 billion.
According to the most recent calculations of the Social Security and Medicare boards of trustees, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) fund wasn’t supposed to slip into a chronic deficit until 2025, and it wasn’t supposed to drain its trust fund until 2038. But with slow economic growth and prolonged high unemployment, Social Security is bringing in tens of billions of dollars less in revenue than forecast, meaning that the trust fund will run dry earlier than anticipated. Meanwhile, the Disability Insurance fund began running a deficit in 2009 and is projected to exhaust its trust fund in 2018.
And the reaction in Washington?
“Let’s worry about Social Security when it’s a problem. Today, it is not a problem,” said Sen. Harry Reid in a March rally. Later, in an MSNBC interview, he added, “Social Security does not add a single penny, not a dime, a nickel, a dollar to the budget problems we have. Never has and, for the next 30 years, it won’t do that.”
Wow! This guy is the Senate Majority Leader, the second most powerful politician in the country? Reid may not be swatting at imaginary flies and gibbering nonsense on the street corner, but he has constructed an alternate reality that exists nowhere but inside his head.
Meanwhile, President Obama ignored the blueprint for Social Security reform advanced by his own deficit-cutting commission and decided last year instead to implement — with Republican connivance — a $105 billion payroll tax holiday. And he now proposes another tax break that would add another $267 billion to the Social Security deficit, an action so irresponsible and reckless that even Republicans have backed away from it.
The Disability Insurance fund, an indispensable safety net for more than 10 million Americans, is scheduled to run out of money in seven years and the impending disaster is not a topic of conversation for neither the political class that purports to represent the people, nor the mainstream media, which purports to hold accountable those in power. The program currently costs $92.5 billion a year to administer. When its trust fund spends the last dollar, where will the money come from to cover the operating deficit?
The Bowles-Simpson deficit-cutting plan would have restored Social Security to solvency by gradually phasing in payroll tax increases and trimming scheduled benefit increases so the burden didn’t fall on anyone too suddenly or severely. But the powerful AARP discouraged serious discussion of the ideas behind the plan, reports the Post, by “airing television ads in which an older man warns viewers that ‘some in Washington want to make a deal cutting the Social Security and Medicare benefits we worked for,’ instead of cutting “waste and loopholes.’”
The phrase “pathological liar” comes to mind.
When the reality of the Disability Insurance fund’s looming meltdown has finally penetrated Congress’ collective consciousness, I am betting that it will address the problem by merging the DI fund with the much larger OASI fund, paying for disability benefits with revenues previously reserved for retirees. That would solve a smaller problem, saving the DI fund, which covers 10 million Americans, by accelerating the larger problem, the impending implosion of the OASI fund, which covers 47.5 million Americans.
The very people who pose as champions of the social safety net are driving it to utter ruination.
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