HULK SMASH!!!
screw the rapists trying to rape social security!
Both sides of their mouths?
I'm shocked.
That 1.6% growth rate thing just drives me nuts.
What do they think would happen to their precious private accounts if we had a 1.6% growth rate over the next 70 years!?
A squirrel some-times finds a nut.
Why am I suprised. Freaking Jackals.
frist, heh no third.
Nearly melted down reading the San Diego Union yesterday about SS trustee report. Lazy SOBs. I knew more from reading DeLong then the AP reporter on the story. Wife said I was upsetting the kids. Christ.
whoa, atrios, what happened to the open threads? It's so disappointing to read thoughtful, reasoned commentary about Social Security, a topic you understand far far better than I.
Just kidding.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fact is there is no such thing as a free lunch and you cannot milk a dry cow.
If the econ is not growing over the long term, then the stock market is not gonna have, on average over the long term, any growth.
OTOH - if the econ is growing, well, then, as the Rethugs like to say "a rising tide lifts all boats" including the way Soc. Sec. funds are currently invested.
People view the stock market as some magical money making machine - it isn't (just as too many people overestimate the ability of private enterprise to get things done efficiently).
Unfortunately, numbers confuse people (and when you point it out to them, they'll vote Rethug out of spite ... they would rather be bamboozled than to be patronized) ... but people do understand old bromides.
So whenever privatization comes up or any other such scheme comes up -- we should just repeat "there is no such thing as a free lunch" and "a cow can only produce so much milk" and the like.
That's one of the quirky inconsistencies that nobody in the state-run media has felt like pointing out.
If the economy sucks badly enough (Thanks, Nero!) to do that kind of damage to the Social Security fund, by what reasoning do they presume that pirate accounts would do any better? It makes no sense. It's worse than Chewbacca living on Endor...
It's more than senseless, it's doublethink.
How about the fact that they assume such a low rate while Bush assumes one so much higher when talking about "cutting the budget deficit in half"???? ridiculousssssss
Good point. Krugman nailed this trying-to-have-it-both-ways logic while most of the world had just started reeling from the affrontery of the scam.
Hey, Atrios - a suggestion: I remember when you did a primer on insurance, back before people knew you were and economist. That was some really good material.
The left side of the political spectrum has traditionally been less knowledgable and hostile towards the topic of capital, so I think that's why people like you, Krugman, and DeLong have been so popular.
It would be real nice to see some basic primers on concepts like productivity, how equities are valued, the time value of money, and so forth, explained in terms that laypeople can understand and with examples that lefties can identify with.
Thanks for considering the idea.
It's more than senseless, it's doublethink.
Hey! They just raised the choco ration! Doubleplusgood!
These assholes are the ones that Orwell was warning us about.
Hey, it's FRIDAY!
Time for the latest Moron Mail from the MBF Brigade!
John Raby takes off on the libruls for pointing out the Armstrong Williams scandal.
New Moron Mail from John next Friday!
Yeah, so the trustees got pressured to come up with something, anything, that provides support to Bush's contentions. Unfortunately for them (and Bush), Bush's case is utterly insupportable by anything approximating reality. They did the best they could, twisting and squirming for all they were worth--and still could only shave one year off the "insolvency" date.
Too bad nobody has publicly called Bush on his statement that SS will be "bankrupt" after 2042. In order for that to be true, America would have to have 100% unemployment. No jobs. None. Not a single person on a payroll anywhere.
But then, maybe 100% unemployment is the Republican economic goal over the longer term.
That 1.6% growth rate thing just drives me nuts.
What do they think would happen to their precious private accounts if we had a 1.6% growth rate over the next 70 years!?
DastardlyDan | Email | Homepage | 03.25.05 - 3:55 pm | #
That's exactly it.
On the one hand, the SS Trustees (who include John Snow) are predicting a 75-year-long Great Depression, with growth rates averaging LESS THAN HALF the actual historical trend of 3.6%.
On the other hand, their friends over at Privatization Central use stock growth rates of 7% per year to entice their victims. These growth rates are only possible with an economic growth average of at least 5% per year -- nearly FOUR TIMES what the Trustees predict.
By the way, if the economy really did grow at 5% per year for the next 75 years, not only would Social Security be solvent, it'd be able to pay for the rest of the Federal Government's operating costs without breaking a sweat!
Funny, Bushco is caught in a double bind of his own making.
Facts and reality never mattered to him in the budget wars and Iraq war because everybody believed him.
But no one believes him anymore, especially on Social Securty. He says reform, they hear "cuts."
And since facts don't matter, no facts he presents, no matter how much he cooks the books in his favor, nothing will change any beautiful 'murican minds.
Folks just proving Abe's adage, cain't fool 'em all the time.
Well, they're sinking fast, although not fast enough. The SCLM is waking up, too late, of course, but now they see that they've lost a large percentage of American readers, and they know that the collapse of the industry is right aroung the corner if they don't start reporting news. For all of the Fox BS, their audience is very small comparatively, and they can't keep this garbage scow afloat by themselves, or even with the help of MSGOP or CNN. There is a hell of a mess to clean up, though.
I don't know if the SCLM is waking up at all:
They are still reporting that "Social Security is going to go broke even sooner than we previously thought" and "because of court rulings, Terri Schiavo's options are running out".
The reporting is still as biased as ever.
According to Secretary Snow (idiot, dumbass and moron) a 1.6% growth rate will give a portfilio a 6% annual return. He stated this in a Bloomberg interview.
Of course, now the market sucks and we have a 3.8% growth rate.
Surprised that Bushco cooks the books?
fuzzy math
quantum provatization- bush should nominated for the nobel prize in policital science...
How about the fact that they assume such a low rate while Bush assumes one so much higher when talking about "cutting the budget deficit in half"????
Low growth rates really make a mess of the Laffer curve.
That does not mean that a projected growth rate of 1.6 percent is inaccurate. That might be a realistic guess given the demographic and resource realities that we face.
The way that to reduce the deficit in a low growth economy is inflation. The recent declines the capital markets have been blamed on short-term inflation fears. Will long-term inflation fears appear?
Um, this post isn't about Terry Schiavo. I'm pretty sure that's not permitted, Atrios. Get with the program please.
What I'm annoyed with is how anyone can believe that a single person who works for the white house in any of these organizations such as the SS trustees is anything other than a purely partisan hack whose sole purpose is to withold information until it can be censored and then manipulate others into lying about it followed by threatening others into not revealing it?
Everytime one of these people walks aout to talk about something everyone would be well within their rights to laugh at them from the very start until they run off the podium in tears.
MYOB'
.
Uh, doesn't the SS issue give us an opportunity to propose, discuss and advocate for some 21st century approaches to re-creating community and the middle class.
cinsidering our retarded health system, how do they get our life expectancy to 150?
It is VERY important to realize that undercounting the productivity number in the short term has a very BIG impact on the long term forecast. Basically, by shortchanging growth and tax revenue they are assuming the trust fund won't grow as fast during the next few critical years, which means the long term compounding is significantly less.
The Social Security Trustees just gave up. They didn't even try to put in a quasi-realistic number for 2005. They kept Low Cost where it as always been: fully funded Trust Fund with flat trust fund ratio (reserve expressed as a function of time - in this case five years) What is the Low Cost alternative? What does it mean . As a result they by definition had to keep Intermediate Cost (the numbers always cited) below that, which resulted in the truly absurd 2.0% 2005 productivity figure, down from the reported 3.3% for 2004. They provide no mechanism for this sharp slowdown between now and Christmas in the face of a strong first quarter, they simply abandoned any idea of actually arguing economics in favor of a political power play that is showing no sign of working.
Link to the whole report here: 2005 Social Security Report Link to the Economic Assumptions table here: 2005 Report: Economic Assumptions
Exactly who is predicting a slowdown in growth to 60% of 2004's rate? Make privatizers defend Intermediate Cost numbers. Trust me they can't do it. The mainstream media may not be reporting it but academic privatizers know they have just taken a knockout punch, the Trustees simply ran up the white flag.
"the long run rate of productivity growth would be 1.9%, substantially lengthening the solvency of the trust fund"
In this case that means meeting the numbers of Low Cost (outcome I) , which not only means a Trust Fund fully funded through the traditional 75 year window, but a Trust Fund ratio that is actually trending up as we go through that window.
2005 Report: Trust Fund Ratios under the Three Alternatives
Extrapolate that over the "infinite future" that privatizers are happy to use when they think the shoe is on the other foot.
No, no,. no...I BELIEVE in the stock market. I have FAITH.
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