Hilzoy catches a wee bit of obtuseness, or ignorance, dropping from John McCain’s mouth. McCain wants to gut Social Security, and doesn’t care too much about details, or facts.
McCain said:
“I’d like to start out by giving you a little straight talk. Under the present set-up, because we’ve mortgaged our children’s futures, you will not have Social Security benefits that present-day retirees have unless we fix it. And Americans have got to understand that.
Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it’s got to be fixed.
(From CQTranscriptions, “SEN. JOHN MCCAIN HOLDS A QUESTION-AND-ANSWER AT A TOWNHALL MEETING”, July 7, 2008. Accessed via Lexis/Nexis.)
Hilzoy responds:
The fact that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by workers, young or otherwise, is not a disgrace, or a scandal, or a new development. Social Security has been funded this way since its inception. The first person to receive monthly benefits, one Ida Mae Fuller, had worked for three years, and contributed all of $24.75 to the Social Security Trust Fund. She lived to be 100, and collected $22,888.92 in benefits. Did the Social Security Trust Fund found that money under its pillow? Somehow, I don’t think so.
Younger workers paid Ida Mae Fuller’s pension. Workers who were younger still paid those workers when they retired. And even younger workers, like me, are paying for their Social Security benefits. This is not a disgrace; it’s the way the system operates. And it’s certainly not a sign that we’ve mortgaged our children’s futures, or that something has to be fixed.
One interpretation of this statement would be that McCain is being deceptive: trying to make a straightforward feature of Social Security seem like a scary new problem, in order to gin up support for his nonexistent plans to fix it. I tend to think that he just doesn’t know how Social Security works. (This would explain why he doesn’t see the problem with privatizing the system: the need to pay a generation’s worth of transition costs.) However, it doesn’t really matter which explanation is right: either one ought to be close to disqualifying.
John McCain: deceptive or stone cold ignorant? We report; you decide.
All John McCain knows is that some of his long-term lobbyist buddies want to privative Social Security so they can plunder the government coffers. He’ll do anything he can to help them, because without his lobbyist buddies (and his media buddies), McCain wouldn’t be where he is in politics now (losing a presidential election).