I put Middle Earth Journal in hiatus in May of 2008 and moved to Newshoggers.
I temporarily reopened Middle Earth Journal when Newshoggers shut it's doors but I was invited to Participate at The Moderate Voice so Middle Earth Journal is once again in hiatus.

Monday, February 14, 2005

The Best Social Security Policy...Do Nothing?

David R. Francis in the Christian Science Monitor has the best solution I have heard on fixing Social Security, wait, do nothing right now. As we have seen Bush uses on set of economic projections to show that "private accounts" are a good deal and another set to predict that Social Security will go bust. In reality if the first set of projections is correct Social security will be OK for at least 50 years and if the second is correct the stock market will tank. Both are just projections and are unreliable.
Why? Because economists have great difficulty making accurate long-term projections. And 75-year economic forecasts - upon which all the current alarm is based - are about as reliable as the Farmers' Almanac.
[......]
Trying to predict that far out is like the Eisenhower administration imagining 2005 - without a clue about the Vietnam War, '70s-era inflation, the rise of Silicon Valley, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the Internet.
Of course the real problem is paying off those treasury bonds starting in 2018. That's the crisis and has nothing to do with Social Security and everything to do with irresponsible fiscal policy like huge tax cuts during a war. The Bush administration does not want to have to redeem those treasury bonds. They say they are just "IOU's". I guess all of the foreign investors must be asking themselves is the treasury bonds they hold are just IOU's as well. Doing nothing about Social Security will force the government to look at more fiscal responsibility. The Bush administration considers the tax cuts sacred and will have to be forced by members of both parties to act responsibly.

Index of Social Security Posts

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