Angry Bear is runs the go-to series on Social Security -- you know, the "entitlement reform" that Versailles, including the administration, is so enthusiastic about. Bruce Webb, who covers Social Security, responds to the latest round of tendentious pearl-clutching from the usual suspects:

Now there are some valid questions about whether the U.S. can sustain a Public Debt load that is as of last Friday $11,920,519,164,319.42 and projected to grow at $1 trillion a year for the next 10 years. On the other hand people who are using legalisms to tell you that somehow the $2.5 trillion of that $11.9 trillion that is owed to current workers and retirees is in a junior debt position to the $800.5 billion owed to China are blowing smoke. Legally, morally and even more important electorally the claims of American workers and retirees are if anything better than those of the Chinese Central Bank.

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The Rose Garden: Obama Backed Off Social Security Push

The White House quietly sought to get the ball rolling on overhauling Social Security earlier this year, but it either abandoned or significantly downgraded the process under pressure from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and outside liberal interest groups, according to sources familiar with the stalled effort.

but Steny Hoyer says that social security deform is on the table.

Welcome to 2017

You know how the sky is supposed to open up and rain fire on us in 2017, when Social Security payroll tax receipts are less than what it costs to provide Social Security? Well get out your asbestos umbrellas folks, because according to the Obama budget (page 123), its happening this year.

According to the "outlays" section, Social Security will cost 662 billion in FY 2009 (which started October 1, 2008...we're five months into it.) And under "receipts", we see that "Social Security Payroll Taxes" come to only 654 billion.

Leah gave me a copy of James Galbraith's The Predator State, which contains the best description of the Social Security "debate" that I've seen. Pages 138 -139. It's long, but it's good, good, good:

The financial crisis argument rests on the large numbers of baby boomers set to start retiring -- on the fact that eventually payroll tax receipts will start to fall short of benefits due and that at some point in the middle distance, the bonds accumulated in the trust fund will have to be retired. Yet the reality is that this was the bargain established by the 1983 Greenspan Commmission. The baby boom was old news when this commission convened; it understood the demographics perfectly well, and nothing that has happened since has made the situation worse. On the contrary, the labor force has grown more rapidly in the years since 1983, thanks to higher levels of immigration than were foreseen and the recovery of productivity growth in the late 1990s, generating a larger economy from which projected benefits could be paid. If the Greenspan Commission, notwithstanding the reactionary deal it made, dealt effectively with the need to match tax receipts to the stream of benefits due, then the finances of the system are actually better today than they were expected to be back then. And therefore if the Greenspan Commission resolved the crisis, there can be no crisis now. And there is not.

Seen this way, efforts to cut benefits to the impending baby boom retirees are a way, simply put, of taking back the 1983 bargain. If they were enacted, the very same people who overpaid their payroll taxes to "prefinance" their Social Security benefits would find that they had been given a dishonest bargain. Having paid a lifetime of higher payroll taxes, subsidizing the income tax cuts enjoyed by the investor classes of the 1980s and 1990s, they would come to the end of the rainbow and find the pot of gold empty.

Except for their 410(k)s, of course. Not.

Yes, Obama's going to nominate Gregg this morning. So let's look at Gregg. From the Heritage Foundation, Gregg and a Blue Dog introduced legislation for Social Security "carveouts"* back in 2000:

Carve-out Accounts
The other alternative is to fund an individual Social Security account by diverting, or "carving out," some portion of the 10.6 percent of income (including the part that an employer pays on behalf of the employee) that Americans now pay for Social Security retirement benefits. In the legislation introduced by Representatives Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) and Charles Stenholm (D-TX), 16 and that introduced by Senators Judd Gregg (R-NH) and John Breaux (D-LA), 17 8.6 percent of income continues to go to Social Security, while an amount equal to 2 percent of income funds a personal retirement account.

I guess, back in 2000, that might have looked pretty good to somebody who wasn't paying attention. See Dean Baker in 1998 on Gregg's problems with the numbers:

Andrew Sullivan

We need to take a machete to social security and Medicare and a very sharp scalpel to all domestic discretionary spending.

See any reference to the Bush tax cuts? No?

Social security and medicare are not the cause of our budget problems.

2008-01-18:

How Obama lost my trust on Social Security
This issue was been framed by many as Obama calling Social Security in "crisis." It was Atrios who blew the whistle on Obama on this point, and his argument, developed over several posts, was more subtle. His point was that Obama had put Social Security "in play" -- after the "angry left" with a great deal of toil, had succeeded in getting our craven Democratic leadership to take it out of play -- and that when Social Security is in play, it's in play by Beltway (Village) rules -- and everyone in the Beltway who is "serious" believes that privatization is on the table. So, Atrios sums up, Obama undid a lot of hard work by a lot of good people. And for why?

So far as I can tell, there was no reason whatever for Obama to put Social Security in play, except to score some meaningless points against Hillary in Iowa. I've seen the YouTube, and it's breathtaking in its "audacity": One sentence he's saying Hillary doesn't have a plan to deal with the "problem," and in the very next sentence he's saying he doesn't want to make it a political football. Dude, you just MADE my dignity in old age a political football, and all to pick up a tenth of a point in Iowa.

(See here, for a classic OFB reaction.)

New York Times, 2009-01-08:

Milwaukee Business Journal

U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) is introducing a proposal Wednesday that he says would establish universal health care, shore up Social Security and Medicare, and provide a simpler alternative to the current tax code.

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Atrios on the subject of Social Security

One camp includes people like me who think the system is financially sound and it isn't a pressing problem. More than that, no matter how fiscally sound it's made to be long run, conservatives and the Right won't stop trying to destroy it. Then there are the group of people who believe the system is something to worry about, at least a bit, and that the way to end the Social Security debate forever and destroy prevailing "IT'S DOOOMED" Beltway conventional wisdom is to put enough more money into the system so that's 100% sound 4evah.

Let's look at one of Obama's main advisers...the one who supports Social Security "reform" that destroys the current system...

"Obama's Economic Brain Trust Breaks With `Status Quo' (Update1)

By Rich Miller and Matthew Benjamin
Bloomberg.com
May 10, 2007

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=2...

...Three academics -- Austan Goolsbee, 37, a University of Chicago professor and columnist for The New York Times, Jeffrey Liebman, 39, a pension and poverty expert at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and David Cutler, 41, a Harvard health economist -- form the core of Obama's economic team....

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Stroll Home, Barack Obama
(sung to Lynyrd Skynryd's "Sweet Home Alabama"*)

Big ideals keep him burning
Social Security Republican
Bringing hope throughout the nation
With his style and his grin
Where the heck have you been, huh?

Well I heard Krugman’s a doubter
Well, I heard he wears a frown
Well, I hope that New York Jew remembers
Obama’s fans don’t need him anyhow

Stroll home, Barack Obama
Goodbye Florida/Michigan
Stroll home, Barack Obama
Lord, I’m on my knees for you

But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him and his a proper security, a reasonable leisure, and a decent living throughout life, is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power. - Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1935 State of the Union Address.

Unfortunately, during the ensuing 72 years since that speech and the enactment of FDR's New Deal, Social Security has become a "Third Rail" in presidential politics. Candidates for the presidency from both parties continuously avoid stating specifics on the issue. Everyone has ideas but no one is willing to commit. While the candidates are eager to say what they are against (i.e. tax increases, decreasing benefits, increasing the retirement age), most fail or are afraid to state an affirmative plan. Thus the favorite phrase candidates use to avoid the Third Rail of Social Security has become: "everything is on the table."

Everything may be on the table, but it seems that few are willing to take a seat.   Read more…

This is what the Gray Lord has been trying to get across: there is no "crisis" in Social Security, and trying to fix what ain't broke does not often go well. As it happens this comes from a commenter:

Just say: it's not a Social Security problem, it's an income tax problem. It's a tax-cuts-for-the-rich problem.

The problem is not, and has never been, with Social Security. The problem is that Social Security has been used to pay for a generation of tax cuts for the rich. And rather than pay that money back by setting the income tax rate for the rich back where it should have been, Americans are being asked to keep those tax cuts for the rich in place forever and ever.

It's not a Social Security problem. It's a problem of the rich who used the Social Security surplus as a way to lower their taxes. Now that the surplus is going to be used for the baby boomers, the focus should be on the artificially low top bracket tax rates, not on the payroll tax or Social Security benefits. It's the great shell game, now going strong since 1983.

Some of the loons are not loons, of course, just nervous and ill-informed people

The next attack on the Social Security Trust fund is far more likely than the last one to succeed.

Via the essential Avedon, this buried item from WaPo:

Leaders of the Senate Budget Committee want to assemble a Bipartisan panel of lawmakers and administration officials to deal with the skyrocketing costs of Social Security and other entitlement programs, with the goal of bringing a reform proposal to a vote in Congress later this year.

Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said he and his predecessor, Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), have asked House and Senate leaders to consider appointing the panel, which would be composed of an equal number of Republican and Democratic lawmakers. They said they have also asked the White House to participate.

Conrad declined to provide many details of the panel, saying too much information could "kill this baby in the crib."

Please, strangle this baby now! And way to connect with the base, Kent!

Say it with me:

What a surprise. Via The Amazing Froomkin, this:

Nominations Sent to the Senate
Andrew G. Biggs, of New York, to be Deputy Commissioner of Social Security for the remainder of the term expiring January 19, 2007, vice James B. Lockhart III.

Andrew G. Biggs, of New York, to be Deputy Commissioner of Social Security for a term expiring January 19, 2013.
(Reappointment)

Andrew Biggs is from the Cato Institute, and is a Social Security privatizer: