Robert Reich: The Seven Biggest Economic Lies

No suprises hear.

Him and Paul Crugman always speak STRAIGHT TRUTH.

xactly... the huffington post is never involved with anything but black and white truth. Power to the people ... and give the people what they need and they will give back what they can according to their ability to do so.

1. I love you.

2. the check is in the mail.

3. ...

I'll call you tomorrow

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I'm sick of .sig files

who's Paul Crugman the new left wing icon du jour?

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I'm sick of .sig files

I don't know about the rest, but he never really addressed the criticism that SS is a ponzi scheme. He just said that it was solvent.

1) SS can be solvent until the year 4019 if you keep adjusting the benefit.

2) SS relies on the next two generations to fund current retirees until they die. If the we stopped having 2.5 babies per family SS would become insolvent pretty quick.

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman

That means it's not a ponzi scheme. I'm not sure I follow your point. A ponzi scheme is insolvent from the beginning. That's how it's designed. No matter what happens, we know for sure that the ponzi scheme will not have sufficient funds to meet its future obligations. The same cannot be said about with social security.Social security has been solvent for about 75 years, thanks to a few modest adjustments from time to time. With a few more modest adjustments it can go for another 75 years without missing a beat and with administrative costs that are a small fraction of the overhead incurred in private sector retirement vehicles. Pretty good deal if you ask me.

Ponzi schemes can adjust and adjust and adjust. They will continue working despite a fundamental design flaw for as long as people have faith in them.

But there is no adjustment that will ever make a ponzi scheme solvent.

EDIT: Actually, I guess that's not true. Mr. Ponzi can meet his current payment obligations as long as he brings in more "investors." He has no intent, though, and no real possibility, of continuing to meet his obligations for generations to come. If someone can show that the same is true of social security, then maybe it will be almost like a ponzi scheme, except without the fraud component.

Reich and Truth. Impossible.

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- Brian


1989 500SEL Euro
1966 250SE Cabriolet
1958 BMW Isetta 600

There wasn't a shred of fact in any of those seven claims , but then, the Huffington Post is well known as being a left wing political hack rag. Being "objective" is a dirty word in their press rooms that will get you fired.

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"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

You struck my curiosity this morning Kuan, so I did a little digging in the US Govt.'s financial statements.

For the Fy ended Sept 30, 2009, the OASDI fund had revenues in excess of expenditures of 19 billion. When combined with Medicare, the expenditures exceeded current revenues by 202 billiion. That 202 billion deficit is part of the 1.4 trillion total US deficit for the year.
Table 1. page 141 in the 2009 Financial Report of the US Government
http://www.gao.gov/financial/fy2009/09frusg.pdf.

The Govt. currently uses 2.08 as the fertility rate, and the projections do lower it to 2.00 in the future - 2040. Just when the projected male life expectancy climbs to 79.9.
See the assumptions on p 128.


Social Security and Medicare–Demographic and Economic Assumptions

The Boards of Trustees2 of the OASDI and Medicare Trust Funds provide in their annual reports to Congress
short-range (10-year) and long-range (75-year) actuarial estimates of each trust fund. Because of the inherent
uncertainty in estimates for 75 years into the future, the Boards use three alternative sets of economic and demographic
assumptions to show a range of possibilities. Assumptions are made about many economic and demographic factors,
including gross domestic product (GDP), earnings, the CPI, the unemployment rate, the fertility rate, immigration,
mortality, disability incidence and terminations and, for the Medicare projections, health care cost growth. The
assumptions used for the most recent set of projections shown in Tables 1A (Social Security) and Table 1B (Medicare)
are generally referred to as the “intermediate assumptions,” and reflect the trustees’ best estimate of expected future
experience. For further information on Social Security and Medicare demographic and economic assumptions, refer to
SSA’s Performance and Accountability Report and HHS’ Agency Financial Report.



Scary thought: I have read that 5,000 boomers will reach retirement age (65) every day for the next 10 years. I have also heard the number as being 10,000. Take your pick. Either way, if the car ever gets out of the ditch, it's heading for the cliff without major changes in entitlements and revenues.
Tic..tic..tic..tic..tic....

That's quite a report. It will take a while for my pea brain to try to digest it. Off the top of my head, though, I think it is a mistake to lump social security and medicare in the same basket. AFAIK, the projected growth in medicare dwarfs the projected growth in social security. Without major changes, medicare will explode our debt/deficit problems. Unlike medicare, social security actually decreases our deficits each year and its growth curve is much, much flatter than medicare's growth curve.

As a general matter, any politician who uses the phrase "social security and medicare" when discussing the debt/deficit does so because he or she hates the concept of social security and wants people to think that social security is in big trouble.

Maybe if enough of us agree with comrade EDy, and her continuous posting of links to left wing websites, she will be promoted to Minister of Propaganda. For now I guess she will have to wallow in her insignificant role of "head of posting on obscure car forums". Do you even own a Mercedes, Citizen EDy, or is that too "bourgeois" for you?

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