February 12, 2008
Let's talk about the Social Security problem
No, really. I mean it. Let's talk about it. With some real concrete and honest assessment and no polarizing, politicizing, inflaming rhetoric, and skip the whole crazy idea of privatization, and really get to the heart of the issue.
Game?
Okay, here goes. In the February 3 edition of the New York Times, one article and one advertisement stood out, in part for their proximity to each other, and in part for the contradiction they posed but could not address. The (full page, back of a section) advertisement was from Allstate. The question it asked? "How long a retirement should you plan for?" The subtitle, if you will, was this point:
Consider this: Hallmark sold 85,000 "Happy 100th Birthday!" cards last year.
Within the text of the message was this statement: "So, it's easy to understand why workers today should plan for a 30-year retirement" (my emphasis).
Got that part? Okay, let's go on to the article, written by N. Gregory Mankiw and titled: "My Birthday Wish: Not Burdening Our Children."
This economics professor from Harvard, on celebrating his half-century birthday, wished that his generation would not become their grandchildren's most pressing economic problem. And he lays out the problem very succinctly in a series of linkages between events of his life growing up and the incremental increases in the payroll taxes that support the various programs of the Social Security/Medicare systems. He observes the three-part problem: 1) Americans are living longer than ever before (see advertisement above); 2) The workforce supporting the retired force is shrinking; and 3) the cost of healthcare for those elder years is ever-increasing with no end in sight.
(In another interesting article on the same day, Wal-mart is given praise for advocating things the government doesn't want to take on, like universal health care. How about if Wal-Mart just gives all their employees, full or part time, free health care out of their astronomical profits and stops lobbying for the government to rescue them? Oh, sorry. That's another post.)
Professor Mankiw is hardly the first person to observe the statistics. Back in 1994, UNUM's Chief Economist, Keith Forrest, toured the West Coast giving presentations on current federal economic policy, including GDP growth rates, labor issues, the beginnings of what we now call global warming, and risk shifting - specifically the federal government shifting risk to future generations by toying with Social Security and Medicare rather than actually fixing them. Even back then the problem was clear and simple and took only one graph to demonstrate.
In 1935, when social security came into being, the average life expectancy for a person reaching the normal social security retirement age was less than 5 years. In fact, the average life expectancy at birth didn't even reach 65 until the early 1940s. But once it did, it never went down again. That means every person born after about 1945 had, at birth, an average life expectancy of at least 65. For persons born now, the average life expectancy is over 75 and increasing toward 80. So while the worker-to-beneficiary ratio continues to decline (originally 42-1, then 16-1, now less than 3-1), the payout period gets longer and longer. And this part is not in debate. As Mr. Forrest said even back then: these people have been born. They are here. And barring a global cataclysm, they will live a long long time.
Last time I checked the statistics on it, and it's been a few years, the fastest growing age group in America was the post-85ers. Again, see the advertisement above.
And yet, and here's the big important point that no one wants to talk about, the normal social security retirement age is still 65 for most people, 67 for some and may be as high as 70 for some people. That's not enough!
Look again at the ad above. Plan for a 30 year retirement. What is the assumption underlying that notion? The assumption that regardless of the gains in life expectancy we should still expect that everyone can and will retire, with government support, between ages 62 and 70. That assumption needs to be challenged. Without all the rhetoric about "entitlement" and "promises" and so forth. I don't know anyone my age who has grown up believing, really believing, that social security will be there for them, regardless of the number of payroll tax increases we've been asked to absorb. So it's not that big a stretch to imagine that we could seriously talk about raising the social security threshold to 75 or 80 or even more and still keep the original promise of social security. And if we could do that, then we could seriously talk about upping the saving quotient in this country, and curbing excessive consumerism and so on and so forth. If everyone working now believed their only retirement would be self-provided, many would know they could not retire at all, ever, and others would begin working seriously to provide for themselves.
As a first step, I suggest we start challenging this idea of retirement at 65 as a standard or a given. If you can save enough over your working life to be able to stop working and support yourself, great! By all means, retire. But if you depend on others to do it, then it's time for a different expectation, and a different conversation.
Professor Mankiw has re-opened this conversation. Let's take it up seriously, with some rhetorical astuteness. Let's talk about it, and see if we can do what the politics of party driven government don't seem to be able to. Let's talk about real solutions instead of accounting. Let's talk about it in ordinary conversations, and larger discussions, and seminars about retirement planning and in critiquing the advertisements and the politicians who won't offer alternatives to the 30-year retirement on their own.
Astute readers of this blog will recognize that Professor Mankiw's generation includes me. And I don't want my generation to be anybody's biggest economic problem either. But we will be.
Unless we change our minds and work to change other's minds too.
Posted by cageyer at 12:08 PM | Comments (1)
January 29, 2008
speaking of eloquence
This in this morning, courtesy of rickydoc over at rootwork the rootsblog.
Posted by cageyer at 08:46 AM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2008
the watchman on the wall
Yesterday, Caroline Kennedy, only surviving member of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's marital family, endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama for the office her father died while holding. Today, Senator Edward Kennedy, only surviving brother in that Kennedy generation, was expected to do the same.
In an eloquent and somewhat poignant opinion column, Ms. Kennedy said that people were telling her that this candidate inspired in them the hope, the optimism, the potential, that her father had once inspired. That of all the available field, this man stood out, carried that same sort of sense that the world could be different, that we could make it different, that individual people with a concern could do something that had meaning in the larger scheme of things. So she endorsed him--anointing him in a way with the spirit of Camelot.
Barack Obama, a United States Senator from Illinois of mixed race heritage, won the Democratic primary in South Carolina.
Say that slowly. A black man won the Democratic party primary in the very Southern state of South Carolina, the home of Strom Thurmond, the home of a state defense of Confederate flag displays, the home of the Clarendon County School District, where an auto mechanic named Harry Briggs forfeited his livelihood and that of most of his family members to become the lead plaintiff in one of the cases that would make up the Brown decision. The Clarendon County that is probably today still segregated, though not officially, in a state that is still a harbinger of the deepest racial divides of America history.
Say it again, slowly.
A few months back, a reporter for the New York Times was interviewing black women in a hair salon in South Carolina. The question had to do with whether they would support Mr. Obama, the black man, or Hillary Clinton, the woman candidate. For those responding it was a dilemma. Both factions, and the party is dividing along these factions, unfortunately, were important to them. But you know what comment stood out for me the most?
The concern that if Barack Obama were elected president of this country, he would be assassinated.
Like Jack. Like Bobby. Like Martin.
These women are smart, even if they are not college educated, and even if they don't tote around many theories about leadership and identity and presence. They understand the gritty fact that if you stand up and say those of us who are Americans are not just white, we are many colors and many faiths and the true meaning of being American is to embrace all of that in the context of the liberty proclaimed in our founding documents, that your life may be the price.
I'm told that next week, New York is part of that media circus that is variously know as Super Tuesday or Tsunami Tuesday, or whatever, when most of the delegates to the very outdated electoral college will be decided. And my problem with that day is that I can't support the candidate I want to. Why? Because when I moved to the great State of New York, I registered, as I have always done, as a Republican.
My choices? Let's not even go there.
My party has let me down for so many years on so many levels that it is impossible to justify my allegiance. So I won't. I will only attempt to by saying that I consider myself a Lincoln Republican. More on that another time.
I ran across a quote by President Kennedy in my research today, about how the words we proclaim about democracy don't override the discrimination diplomats experience when they come to this country. 1963. Yes, it was a long time ago. But it was also nearly 10 years after Brown. He felt the need to say it. and in the same speech, the speech he never got to give in Dallas that November day, he would have concluded:
We in this country, in this generation, are--by destiny rather than choice--the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of "peace on earth, good will toward men." That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: "except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."
He also promised in that speech that our nation's power would never be used aggressively, but always for peace. My party has failed in that promise. The "Audacity of Hope" that Barak Obama brings makes me wish, like never before, that party politics were not what they are, and that I could go out a week from now and vote for the best shining light I've seen since I was a toddler.
Thank you, Caroline.
Update: There's a great discussion on Obama's victory over on
Posted by cageyer at 08:55 PM | Comments (2)
January 10, 2008
A Kennedy Reflection
Madeleine Albright has a new book out, called Memo to the President-elect. In the short excerpt from Chapter 1, she quotes from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address:
we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty
I wonder about this now. In the same excerpt, Albright recalls the words of Colin Powell as he spoke to Congress as the new secretary of state:
It is a challenge of leadership. For it is not a dark and dangerous idological foe we confront, but the overwhelming power of millions of people who have tasted freedom. It is our own incredible success that we face.
The strength of commitment promised to the world by the young president of 1961 had achieved the survival and success he envisioned. Communism as practiced by the former Soviet Union and its iron curtain devotees was gone, capitalism had taken on global proportions and the world was at peace when Powell warned of the challenge that success brought us. We failed. We - all of us in this democratic nation - failed because we retained political leaders who had already proven they were not up to the challenge. So far distant is Powell's challenge from this moment, from that cold January day when Kennedy's words rang out, the Albright warns the new president "you will enter office with respect for American leadership lower than it has been in the memory of any living person."
Jack Kennedy became president a little over two months before I was born. My young childhood was shaped by his vision of what America could be. I liked Kennedy. The older I got, and the more I learned about him, the more I liked him. And I'm not blind to his shortcomings. They were legion. But as a president of this country, as a national leader, he was the right man at the right time. I have wondered many times how our country might have been different if he had lived.
But this week it's really been Jack's dedicated younger brother, Robert, who has been on my mind. Reading about the violence in the South during the Civil Rights Movements, the records of Bobby's efforts as head of the Justice Department to walk the fine line between states' rights and citizen's rights, to do what was right with an eye always focused on what would be best for his brother's presidency, and eventually catching the belief that he could be president himself. In an article I read over this past weekend, the writer was comparing 1968 to 2008, and for the similarities there are these are not nearly those days. He recalled that period of Kennedy's campaign as a wild 85-day adventure.
The article showed a picture of Robert Kennedy, that young idealist and presidential candidate standing in a moment of quiet sobriety, head bowed, in the moments before he told a crowd in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed in Memphis. His speech that night is nothing short of amazing. Impromptu, his own thought, his own encouragement to those who would be filled with hatred to choose unity and understanding instead, quoting Aeschylus from memory. Martin Kettle called it the "bravest speech of that campaign". In my lifetime, I have never seen another like it. Listen for yourself. It's currently the "Top 100 Speech of the Moment" at American Rhetoric.
Maybe it was because I had been so absorbed in this history, the awful times that followed the Brown decision, maybe it was the photograph, maybe it was the knowledge that 2008 isn't and can't be 1968, but as I sat with that article, I did something I almost never do with any seriousness. I looked at the man in the photograph and asked him, with tears threatening and the knowledge that this project I have engaged is changing me in ways I am only just glimpsing, "how might my life have been different if you had lived?"
Posted by cageyer at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)
May 21, 2006
Seen... and not believed
I would not have believed people believe such things, would not have believed people would write such things, and certainly not that they would put them in the public realm with names attached; would not , except that I read them in the local paper as letters to the editor. To wit:
I cannot even find the words to express my dismay at these sentiments. Not only are some of them just patently false (we do not have a national langugage, just in case you didn't already know that), some are both amazingly stupid and false. The first and third, for example. The folks who did live here for centuries before the Europeans arrived would certainly understand that all the people who came here changed this country to be what they wanted it to be, to the extent of herding up the peoples of the land and either killing them outright or limiting them to sterile environments that destroyed them all the more slowly. As for the fourth entry, I don't consider anyone lazy who risks their lives to get here when the "proper channels" deny them entry. The last one is just mean-spirited and selfish.
America has always been a place where people from other countries have run away to. It has always been changing and changed by those people. It was designed to be changed. That's what all those founding documents were designed to allow. And the fact that I have to share my citizenship with self-righteous, ignorant and arrogant morons who write the kind of trash quoted above makes me very sad, and a little bit sick. No one has ever said such things in my presence. I wish that meant no one actually thought such things.
On May 2, statistics assembled by the Pew Hispanic Center appeared in the same paper as these comments. They indicate that 90% of illegal immigrant men are part of the labor force. That hardly seems like a collection of "lazy bums" to me. Only 5% of the U.S. labor force is illegal aliens. 5%. That's it. To listen to these misguided folks, you'd think it was more like 70%.
I don't understand the concept of "illegal" immigrants in these globally modern times. But I'll bet the elders of the local Haudenosaunee tribe could explain it to me. And INS wouldn't be in the answer.
Note: excepts are taken from letters published in The Post-Standard on May 4, 2006, in response to the May 1 demonstrations by immigrants around the country.
Update:: Heard in a meeting earlier this week that somebody managed to tack on a little rider to an immigration bill passed last week by the U.S. Senate that creates English as the official language of these United States. Ugh. We just won't learn, will we? (By the way, any specific on said bill, like name, title, or date of passage would be most appreciated and save me search time...)
Posted by cageyer at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)
May 03, 2006
What he said...
Found over at Desparate Houseflies, from Ben Stein.
yeah - what he said.
Posted by cageyer at 09:16 AM | Comments (0)