A leftist attack on bipartisanship

Don Luskin

Angry Leftist blogger "Atrios" nominates Joe Lieberman as "Wanker of the Day," because of his letter to the New York Times in which Lieberman asserts, totally correctly, that "every year we do nothing about Social Security's coming insolvency we add $600 billion in unfunded liabilities... Experts we've consulted at the Social Security Administration have confirmed this estimate." Atrios reproduces a section from the 2004 Annual Report of the Trustees of the Social Security Trust Funds in which the Trustee's state that "the effects of changes in data and methods more than offset this increase." So Atrios, the pseudonym for Duncan Black, an economics professor on the payroll of the Soros-backed "Media Matters" site, crows that "Between 2003 and 2004 it actually became less expensive to save social security until infinity time!" An economics professor should know better. Lieberman is no wanker -- he's absolutely right when he says that the unfunded liability rises by $600 billion a year by virtue of the sheer passage of time. As I said yesterday about this,

Of course, other factors can crop up over a year that will change the value of the unfunded liability, too. Changing assumptions about birth rates, life expectancy, inflation, and economic growth can also make a difference. But all else equal, the unfunded liability rises each year by the interest rate.

As we've seen over many decades of actuarial forecasts for Social Security, these other factors change a great deal from year to year. Sometimes those factors will make things worse, sometimes better (over history, they've tended on net to strongly make things worse). But that's just noise masking a fundamental truth: the unfunded liability rises each year by the interest rate. My question for Atrios, if he is indeed an economics professor, is: How can you whore yourself like this? How can you use statistical noise in order to provide polemical cover for those who want to evade fundamental economic truth? Who knows how Atrios answers that question in the privacy of his own heart. The fact is, it works -- naive wannabes on the Left pick up garbage like this from Atrios and repeat it as gospel.
Posted by Don Luskin on March 18, 2005 11:47 AM to Social Security Choice