There is nothing new to report on the nation’s retirement and disability programs, not substantively anyway, but don’t expect that to be the focus of upcoming debate. Rather, we can expect the ratcheting up of the emergency meme and calls for drastic changes to what have always been the nation’s most successful social programs.
As reported by the AP, today’s report was expected to tell us that our “aging population and an economy that has been slow to rebound are straining the long-term finances of Social Security and Medicare, the government’s two largest benefit programs.”
Annual check up reports show that Medicare is in worse shape than Social Security because of rising health care costs. But both programs are on a path to become insolvent in the coming decades, unless Congress acts.
The two programs “are on a path to become insolvent in the coming decades, unless Congress acts, according to the trustees.”
You read that right: We are talking about an emergency that remains decades away. For Medicare, that means 2024; for Social Security, 2038. But don’t expect those who have been looking to gut the retirement system to play today’s release as anything less than fiscal armageddon.
I am not arguing against change. Medicare is burdened fiscally by the problems with the larger health care system and by the exclusion of a younger cohort to help spread the costs more efficiently. Addressing the failures of the national health care system — preferably by imposing a single-payer, Medicare-for-All system — would go a long way toward dealing with its problems.
As for Social Security, we have 26 years to fortify the retirement system, which should include the removal of the tax cap and must not impose market solutions on a program that has prevented millions of seniors from falling into poverty since its inception.
We need to be systematic and rational, and avoid the kind of rhetorical excess that we have witnessed in the past when retirement reform is placed on the table. The programs are too successful and too important to too many to allow discussion of their future to be hijacked by the anti-government crowd.
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Hank Kalet 