Some deficit hawks are after other prey

By Ted Marmor

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform appointed by President Obama is preoccupied with the federal government's growing fiscal deficit. So is America Speaks, a nonprofit group that held the first of a series of town-hall meetings on the subject in Philadelphia last weekend.

The general assumption is that reducing the deficit should be a top national objective, and that Social Security should be considered a major source of deficit relief. That much is simple enough. But little else about the campaign against deficits is so simple.

Two issues must be sharply separated. The first is the fiscal policy question of how long increased deficits can be prudently tolerated in the interests of stimulating the economy. The second issue, Social Security, is different - though one wouldn't know it from listening to most deficit hawks.

Government budget deficits are a serious problem, but Social Security is not a serious part of it. To say otherwise is to engage in mythmaking, and the deficit hawks are doing a lot of that. Those who warn that Social Security's revenues will fall short of outlays in the 2040s are really pointing to a need for small adjustments, not a problem with the program's solvency.

In recent years, deficits have grown sharply in other parts of the federal budget. But American workers have "saved" enough (through their Social Security taxes) to finance their retirement benefits as far as the eye can see clearly. Workers did their part, and the political consequences of not honoring those obligations are so staggering that it is unrealistic to discuss such a prospect.

Attacks on Social Security have been launched in various forms for decades, but many conservative commentators have not been prepared to directly question the desirability of social insurance programs. Instead, they have charged that such programs are ungovernable and, increasingly, unaffordable.

It is crucial to understand how devious such arguments are. They are ideological stances searching for plausible occasions to celebrate what they presume. This ploy is obvious in the case of Social Security pensions, which are not suffering worrisome fiscal imbalances now or later.