Senator Bernie Moreno attempts to convert his perverse decision into an inarguable moral obligation.
Defending her boss’s proposal to make Social Security solvent entirely through tax increases — a proposal I criticized — Senator Bernie Moreno’s communications director tells the Washington Post, “Sen. Moreno promised Ohioans he would fight for them in DC and make sure they get the benefits they were promised and that’s exactly why he’s leading this effort.”
You hear this a lot in the Social Security debate, but what does it mean to say that Congress is obligated to keep the program’s promises? There is, of course, no legally enforceable promise: The Supreme Court long ago ruled that the program conferred no property right to its beneficiaries and that Congress could alter it at any time. And while it seems fair to say that the federal government has led generations of Americans to believe that they would receive benefits from the program in old age and that it would be wrong to make those benefits paltry or cut them entirely, what level of benefits has been promised?
People who talk this way about the program’s solemn promises don’t mean that beneficiaries should get what the program took from them during their working lives: Even with adjustments for inflation and imputing interest, seniors and soon-to-be seniors are mostly getting back more than they paid in.
They don’t mean seniors should receive what the program can pay based on the taxes that go into it, obviously: If that’s all they meant, there would be no solvency problem to fix.
They don’t mean that seniors are promised a retirement income that keeps them out of poverty: The program makes no such guarantee but pays many seniors much more than it would take to ensure that outcome.
They don’t mean that the program should make sure that tomorrow’s senior citizens get the same benefits, adjusted for inflation, as today’s seniors: They want to make sure benefits keep rising, even in inflation-adjusted terms.
And they certainly don’t mean that future beneficiaries should get what the law as it currently stands says they will get: The law as it stands says that benefits will be cut by more than a fifth starting in a few years. That doesn’t count as a promise for Moreno and company.
What the promise-keepers have in mind appears to be a selective reading of the laws: The benefit levels set into law in the late 1970s are sacrosanct, but they’re happy to scrap both the tax levels written into the law and the law’s limiting language about what happens to benefits when the trust fund runs out.
Moreno has made a choice: The federal government should impose the largest increase in the top tax rate since Herbert Hoover’s presidency in order to keep benefits rising for the highest-earning seniors of the future. The misleading (albeit commonly used) language about “promises” attempts to convert that perverse decision into an inarguable moral obligation.