Atrios isn’t impressed with my support of a plan to bring Social Security into long-term balance:
I really don’t get why people think there’s some grand deal to be cut on Social Security which would take it off the table. A couple of years after the deal is cut, new projects with slightly different facts/assumptions will show it “going broke” in “only” 65 years or something and then they’ll be back to hack away at it again.
They don’t want the programs to survive, they want to kill them.
I know this is a fashionable view among battle-hardened liberal bloggers, but I just don’t think it’s true. The demographic basis of Social Security’s finances is extremely steady and generally changes by only hundredths of a percentage point each year — and with the retirement of the baby boom generation now finally upon us and better understood than ever, this is even truer than before. If Congress enacted a combination of 
small revenue increases and small benefit cuts (amounting to less than 1.5% of GDP, as shown in the chart on the right) that phased in slowly and brought the program into long-term balance, it’s almost a certainty that the financial projections would continue to show long-term balance for another 20-30 years. Granted, that’s not forever, but it’s as long as anything ever lasts in politics.
As for “slightly different facts/assumptions,” even during the heyday of Social Security privatization in 2005, virtually everyone accepted the midpoint assumptions of the Social Security trustees report as gospel. Obviously there will always be some fringe groups with their own doomsday scenarios who can’t be satisfied no matter what, but the trustees report will satisfy virtually everyone who matters. What’s more, unlike most subjects, this is one where Democrats could almost certainly pick off enough Republican votes to get something passed. It really would take Social Security largely off the table as a political football for a very long time.
And I’d rather take it off the table now, under some kind of reasonable terms, than have it taken off the table a decade from now when some shiny new Republican is back in power. It’s not something that’s a high priority right now, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make it a priority sometime in the near future.
