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May 01, 2005

Whither Trust Fund?

This is the main thing I don't yet understand about the Pozen plan:

What happens with the Trust Fund? My main objection to prior plan proposals is that there's always been this magic hand-waving where the Trust Fund just kind of disappears, which means that everyone who has paid payroll taxes for the last twenty years has been screwed, by an average amount of over $1000/year. However, I'm unclear on what happens with the Trust Fund this time. I think they declare it "gone", but they also mandate general fund transfers, which is how the Trust Fund would be paid back anyway. And over its lifetime, the general fund transfers would probably exceed the current sum of the Trust Fund.

So in that sense, the Trust Fund argument has less power than it had before. The reason is because it reduces us to arguing about and predicting the future motivations of Republicans. For example:

We're going to come to a time where those general fund transfers will be commonplace. Do you really expect Republicans to accept that? They're just going to argue that Social Security is too expensive. They'll either vote to raise payroll taxes, or, more likely, cut benefits further. This is certainly correct, but the Republicans can just easily feign indignation and claim it's ridiculous while they run for office. The argument is just less effective than it was before. Before, benefit cuts were steep enough that the general fund transfers would never have been enough to pay back the trust fund, which meant a robbery of the trust fund. Now it's not so clear.

Everything else still makes this a raw deal. It's marginally better than the one they were discussing before (progressive wage/inflation indexing is better than straight inflation indexing), but it shouldn't be converted away from wage indexing at all. And the personal accounts are just stupid - your return has to beat inflation just to break even, and in order to match what most of us would get under currently scheduled benefits, the additional return would have to be astronomical.

Posted by tunesmith at May 1, 2005 02:27 PM

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