Impeach George W. Bush Message Board

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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush

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To: Neocon who wrote (17188)	11/25/2002 2:41:27 PM
From: Steve Dietrich	Read Replies (1) of 93284

<< The first numbers I quoted in this discussion, talking about the trust fund running out in 2041 and so on, were from Social Security, not the Presidential Commission. Perhaps they are pessimistic. The only thing is that that is the prudent way to budget, so I doubt the crisis is a lie....... >> I think if you compare what the SS Trustees say compared to what the Commission is saying, you'll see that the crisis is a lie. According to SS itself the system is absolutely fine until 2041 and then things get a little rocky, but hardly a crisis, and that's in 2041. They are also using pessimistic assumptions about economic growth which, while prudent, make the term crisis even more inappropriate. The Commission on the other hand is political and has an agenda: to further the cause of privatization (partial or otherwise) of SS. Surely you can see the difference in the quality and purpose of the two entities. SS uses a conservative estimate of 2% gdp growth in its report. There's not an economist in the world who thinks the stock market will perform well in a 2% gdp growth economy. If growth is over 3% on average as most predict, SS never has a problem. I agree with you (in another thread) that we ought to give up the fiction of the trust fund and just agree that we have certain obligations that we will meet with our revenues. This idea of collecting money in the 80's that will pay for benefits in 2010 is extremely silly. It can't possibly be efficient economic policy to take money out of the economy and then just sit on it for a few decades. That's why borrowing it from ourselves is actually smart: assuming we were going to borrow that money somewhere else anyway. And we've got a pretty huge debt which makes that a pretty fair assumption. Steve

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