O Tempores, O Mores – for Tully Part the First: Neither Apple, Nor OrangeWe went over to
Centerfield on Saturday to chat about il Ducetto’s latest Social Security hint – it surely would be too generous to call it a plan. Our position is that this President is fundamentally opposed to Social Security, itself, which is his privilege. Those who fundamentally support Social Security, however, cannot, therefore, expect a good faith negotiation. We would, Pudentilla thinks, be better off waiting for a Republican leadership that does not challenge the program itself, before negotiating about the steps necessary to correct potential its potential solvency problems. We also objected to il Ducetto’s approach on fiscal grounds and noted that we felt that his fiscal record was pretty bad. Well, to be fair, we did compare il Ducetto’s fiscal approach to Nero’s – which may have been unfair to a few medieval and early modern European monarchs who drained their nation’s treasury as recklessly, if not more so than il Ducetto and Nero.
Tully, the author of the post that prompted my comments took me task for my partisan, “bush-hating” approach and challenged me to back up my arguments with facts. Now, we don’t mind being called partisan – although we’ve crossed party lines on more than four occasions to vote for the better candidate, and we really don’t care whether people call us a “bush-hater,” – the man’s in our prayers and we can distinguish between our criticism of his policy and record and our attitude towards him as an individual (which is irrelevant, since we never have met the guy, and probably never will). It is, however, quite reasonable for Tully to challenge us to lay out a reasoned argument supported by facts. Since we try to reserve Sundays for church and family, we didn’t have time to reply to Tully yesterday, but would like to try here, rather than clutter up his comments sections with multiple posts.
First – how do we define Social Security? Is it an “entitlement” program or a social insurance program. We think the definitional question matters, because we think the answer to the definitional question shapes the analysis of the program and its problems. In fact, Social Security doesn’t neatly fall into either one of the definitional categories political analysts use.
It isn’t fair to call it an “entitlement program” when individuals actually pay into the system every paycheck. Our Dad, it’s true, thought of the funds withheld from his check as the tax he currently paid for the privilege for not seeing elderly and blind people selling apples and pencils on the street – and since he grew up during the Depression, he thought it was a tax worth paying.
One might even argue under our Dad’s “current tax” theory that Social Security is a program Christians should insist their government implement (see, Matt. 5:1-48). Indeed most religious traditions command their followers to comfort the poor, the widowed, orphaned and the weak. While this rationale works for Pudentilla, it nevertheless seem to her, that as long as the First Amendment survives, the argument for a Social Security program must be made in secular terms. Many people who call themselves Christians, moreover, have taken offense over the years when tax dollars have been spent to secure the lives and dignity of the poor and disabled, so even were it constitutionally permissable to consider Social Security a program mandated by Christian teachings, it is not obvious that this rationale would enjoy support from that vast and and not easily characterized group of citizens who call themselves Christian.
So we are left to conclude that Social Security isn’t exactly an entitlement program, because people pay their own money into it, kind of like an insurance program. A lot of folks, however, get more out of the system than they pay in. Some, like our cousin, who is blind and whose father died when he was young, never paid a dime into the system, and he got checks anyway. Now, as a working adult, he pays in, but as an adolescent and when dealing with the rather daunting challenges blindness poses to the question of employment, he got other people’s money. And, unlike most insurance programs, it’s mandatory. Because it’s mandatory, the risk of economic harm that one might suffer because of old age, widow or orphanhood, or disability is spread among a huge population and a minimum level of economic security is guaranteed for all to whom these ills might bafall.
We think one might even make an economic argument in supporting payments to ensure an economic floor for all Americans. The negative productivity effects of personal tragedy, for example, are not limited to the elderly poor, widowed, orphaned and disabled. Were they not able to support themselves at the economic floor Social Security provides, they would either be selling apples and pencils till they died in the street, or draining time and energy away from friends and family who would, for a host of reasons, support them. The time and energy that the young and able devote to their poor, elderly, widowed, orphaned and disabled friends and relations cannot be devoted to economy expanding activities. In an age where both parties to a longterm relationship work, this is not a trivial benefit to the general social and economic good. In other words, it is simply more economically efficient to spread the cost of insuring against poverty caused by age, widowhood, orphanhood and disabilty rather than deal with the economic and social disruptions it causes as they arise.
So, Social Security is a mandatory, social insurance program. Some might quibble about the mandatory nature of the program. It is true, the government frequently requires us to obtain insurance (e.g., cars), but Social Security does not let us choose our insurer. We pay our payroll taxes to the Social Security Administration, not to Personal Disaster Insurance, Inc. There’s a good reason for this – insurance companies limit their costs by driving out of the pool of the insured those who need the insurance most. They make their money by taking premiums from folks who sincerely hope they’ll never actually use the insurance. The whole point of an insurance scheme to protect all citizens from the ravages of poverty induced by age, widowhood, orphanhood or disability, is not to cherry pick the insured. The Social Security insurance scheme, moreover, is progressive. Poor people will take more out of it than they put in, the very wealthy, less.
We wonder what a 60 year old, mid-level executive at Enron or A.I.G. or any of the host of companies whose fraudulent collapse devastated the personal savings of their employees, would say about this aspect of Soc Sec. If Pudentilla had worked for Enron when it was flying high, she might well have grumbled about the Social Security payroll tax, saying “darn, it’s our money – we’d make more putting it in the company stock!”
The day after Enron filed for bankruptcy, however, all she would have left in the world to retire on, would have been her Social Security. And then she might well have said, “darn, we’re glad we have this floor of economic security so that we don’t have to sell apples on the street corner in order to pay for our coffee at the shelter.” And she might also have noted that Social Security provided her with her benefits with great efficiency and effectiveness.
But in fairness to the “entitlement” definition rubric, we have to admit, “progressive, mandatory, and directed” are not a trio of adjectives we typically think about when we think about insurance. Which, we think, is the genius of the program and an instance of “American pragmatism” trumping partisan or ideological definition. Social Security works. It has worked for 70 some years. By offering the middle class an “economic floor,” it has also provided great economic and political stability to the country.
The arguments about which definitional label one deploys when discussing Social Security mask, we think, partisan or ideological predispositions. If one believes “entitlements” are bad or good things for governments to manage, then one will be predisposed to assess Social Security in a certain way. In this confusion those who think the government has no business managing entitlements benefit at the expense of those who don’t mind or actively support the ideal of “entitlement programs.” Because the historical and political reality of Social Security, which is neither an entitlement program nor a straight insurance program, is that it works and the population overwhelmingly supports it. If we start from that premise, then our next question must be, “what do we do to ensure that it keeps working?” If we start with the definition, “entitlement,” we leave open the argument that the program can and should be abolished.
A centrist, pragmatist like Pudentilla, accordingly, refuses to engage this definitional debate. Tully can call Social Security a widget and it matters not one whit to us. What matters is that the program has worked and does work; it’s highly efficient and highly effective. Calling Social Security an “entitlement” simply allows those who are opposed to the program to rhetorically evade the rather large burden history places against their premises. Our question then should be, what problems does Social Security face, and what are the best steps we can take to meet and beat those problems.
To be continued.
