I don’t read his blog very much because he’s so gratuitously nasty and so obviously convinced of his own brilliance–and while he does seem to be a genuinely intelligent person, there’s just not enough good stuff there to outweigh the mindless snottiness. I know this style of writing has won him some fans, but I think it has also detracted from his reputation among people who would otherwise be inclined to listen to him.

Anyway, DeLong says that my latest article is “idiocy” and that I have a “strange economic mind.” He makes three claims to back up this charge. First, he claims that I deny that higher growth will solve Social Security’s fiscal problem whereas, in truth, higher growth has pushed back the exhaustion date for the program’s trust fund. My point was, however, precisely that higher growth cannot solve the problem even if the day of reckoning can be pushed back. DeLong can’t really be arguing that Stelzer was right to ignore the way that higher growth increases Social Security benefits? I also don’t think that the trust fund exhaustion date is the day of reckoning, which gets us to point two: DeLong ridicules me for saying that the Social Security trust fund contains only IOUs, when stocks are IOUs too. There’s a lot that could be said on this point, but I think the key point here is that the IOUs in question are promises from the government, to the government. Let’s assume that maintaining the trust funds over the years has been a good policy: that it has kept the government from going deeper into debt and thus made it easier for the government to confront the looming problems with Social Security. It is still true that the government has to raise taxes, cut spending, or borrow money as soon as Social Security’s benefits start to exceed its revenues. The date that happens is when there’s a problem, not the date the trust fund is exhausted. Third, I say, responding to Stelzer’s claim that personal accounts would be too regulated to give people any real control over their money, that people would probably have real investment choices. DeLong objects to this comment because with real choices comes the possibility of large losses for some people.

This third point is where DeLong’s commentary really goes off the rails. Note that he isn’t claiming that Stelzer is right or that I am wrong. On his account, I am an idiot simply because, in the course of answering one specific objection to personal accounts, I have not answered all possible objections to personal accounts. I think I will find a way to live with DeLong’s disdain.