The way he said it was meant to scare people into thinking that the IOUs are worthless.
This "trust fund" thing has been an obfuscating contrivance from the very beginning and has been fodder for jokes and hyperbole from the onset. Its fuzziness allowed folks to spin it different ways. Remember the fun that was made of Gore and the "lockbox"? I say "obfuscating contrivance;" Krauthammer says "hoax." Is "hoax" scarier? Maybe. What we have, in fact, is a promise. What we don't have is money. Those folks who have insisted that SS is "fully funded" until 205X are perpetrating a hoax given that it's a promise with no money. Krauthammer is calling them on it. That can be disconcerting to those who had bought the notion.
If that is what he meant, he would have said it in some way that more reflected that.
Krauthammer is, indeed, a talented writer. Maybe he should not have used the shortcut of later in his piece referring to the Trust Fund as the hoax rather than restating his more complete point that the notion that it's fully funded is the hoax. I think he set the stage adequately to use shortcuts, but reasonable people may differ.
In the course of his piece he said: "The Social Security surplus, which Congress happily spends every year, peaks in 2008. Which means that starting in four years (and for every year thereafter) a budgetary squeeze begins, requiring new taxation or new borrowing." I think what he means is eminently clear.
As for scariness, I think the fact that we will have to tax or borrow starting that soon if we are to keep our promise is rather scary. What is scarier, but not specified, is the notion that we may choose not to keep that promise. A promise is just a promise. We can break our promises to SS and we can break our promises to the Japanese Bank. Do you remember during the days of huge deficits (the old ones, not Bush's <g>) when serious people were suggested that we just default on our debt? It's not unheard of. I don't thing there's a snowball's chance in hell that we will default on our loans from the Japanese. But defaulting on our promise to SS? We might. Had Krauthammer suggested that, then I think you would have cause to claim that he was trying to scare people. As it was, he was just laying out the facts in a way that was perhaps a bit abrupt for those who had not yet internalized them.
We run out of money in just a few years. We run out of promise in about fifty years. Both dates are important. Those who ignore one in favor of the other are doing us a disservice. |
