Random Walk

THANKS to OMB Director Alice Rivlin’s controversial budget memo, Social Security is back in the news. She proposes to slash benefits, then raise taxes on them, then raise the payroll taxes that employers and employees pay into the system. Republicans, however, simply refuse to talk openly about the problem of Social Security overspending and underfunding, even though a cash deficit is expected by 2013, if not sooner.

Third Millennium, an organization of baby-boomers, recently commissioned a poll of 18-to-34-year-old high-school graduates that found more respondents believe in UFOs (46 per cent) than believe they will receive Social Security benefits (28 per cent). Even worse, Peter Ferrara of the National Center for Policy Analysis estimates that most workers entering the work force in the mid 1980s will get a paltry 1 per cent or less annual real rate of retirement return from all the tax money they pay into the Social Security system.

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THANKS to OMB Director Alice Rivlin’s controversial budget memo, Social Security is back in the news. She proposes to slash benefits, then raise taxes on them, then raise the payroll taxes that employers and employees pay into the system. Republicans, however, simply refuse to talk openly about the problem of Social Security overspending and underfunding, even though a cash deficit is expected by 2013, if not sooner.

Third Millennium, an organization of baby-boomers, recently commissioned a poll of 18-to-34-year-old high-school graduates that found more respondents believe in UFOs (46 per cent) than believe they will receive Social Security benefits (28 per cent). Even worse, Peter Ferrara of the National Center for Policy Analysis estimates that most workers entering the work force in the mid 1980s will get a paltry 1 per cent or less annual real rate of retirement return from all the tax money they pay into the Social Security system.