{"id":133,"date":"2005-02-01T23:39:41","date_gmt":"2005-02-02T03:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/02\/01\/krugman-on-social-security\/"},"modified":"2005-02-01T23:42:34","modified_gmt":"2005-02-02T03:42:34","slug":"krugman-on-social-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2005\/02\/01\/krugman-on-social-security\/","title":{"rendered":"Krugman on Social Security"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Once again, in his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/02\/01\/opinion\/01krugman.html?oref=login\">NY Times op-ed piece<\/a>, our hero of the dismal science, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pkarchive.org\/\">Paul<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/krugman\/www\/\">Krugman<\/a>, brings a little sanity to an economic issue. This time it&#8217;s the Bush administration &#8216;Social Security Crisis&#8217; talking point.<\/p>\n<p>With a tiny bit of math, and a lot of reasoning, Krugman takes apart the projections on which the Bush plan is based, reaching an elegantly crushing conclusion:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>They can rescue their happy vision for stock returns by claiming that the Social Security actuaries are vastly underestimating future economic growth. But in that case, we don&#8217;t need to worry about Social Security&#8217;s future: if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come.<\/p>\n<p>Alternatively, privatizers can unhappily admit that future stock returns will be much lower than they have been claiming. But without those high returns, the arithmetic of their schemes collapses.<\/p>\n<p>It really is that stark: any growth projection that would permit the stock returns the privatizers need to make their schemes work would put Social Security solidly in the black.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">Once again, in his NY Times op-ed piece, our hero of the dismal science, Paul Krugman, brings a little sanity to an economic issue. This time it&#8217;s the Bush administration &#8216;Social Security Crisis&#8217; talking point. With a tiny bit of math, and a lot of reasoning, Krugman takes apart the projections on which the Bush plan is based, reaching an&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2005\/02\/01\/krugman-on-social-security\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-29","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}