Saturday, February 26, 2005
The "Seven Years" Lie: The GOP Privatizers' Newest Weapon
Josh Marshall debunks the GOP privatizers' latest bullshit, the "Seven Years" scam. As he says, be prepared to see this crap being flung about on all of the Sabbath Gasbags' shows tomorrow -- so get your letters and comments out to the media now. And remember, this assumes the numbers Josh cites from SSA and the extremely pessimistic projections being used by the Social Security trustees are correct. As Roger Lowenstein noted in a recent New York Times magazine:
... David Langer, an independent actuary who made a study of Social Security's previous projections compared with the actual results in 2003, thinks the ''optimistic'' case is its most accurate. Over a recent 10-year span, the trustees' intermediate guesses turned out to be quite pessimistic. Its optimistic guesses were dead on, and its pessimistic case -- sort of a doomsday situation -- was wildly inaccurate. And, contrary to widespread belief, recent demographic trends have been modestly better (from an actuary's gloomy standpoint) than anticipated. For instance, longevity hasn't increased as much as expected. Partly as a result, since 1997 the agency has pushed back, by 13 years, the date at which it projects its reserves will be exhausted. In other words, as the cries of impending doom started to crescendo, the guardians of the system have grown more optimistic.And as Dr. Irwin Kellner of MarketWatch notes, the trustees' projections predict growth rates over the next seventy-five years to average out to only 1.9% per year -- barely half what they've actually been (3.6%) over the past seventy-five years. (Years that include the Great Depression.) Dr. Kellner goes on to mention that a slightly higher growth rate of 2.7% per year -- still lower than the 3.6% of the last seventy-five years, but far more likely than the trustees' 1.9% -- would guarantee that Social Security would never run out of money, ever. But, as we already know, the privatizers and their legislative allies are allergic to facts, and not above stretching, if not outright breaking, the truth.
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