On the Guaranteed Benefit of Social Security

One day this week, I got home early and caught the end of The News Hour on PBS. They had two policy experts on, one on each side of the Social Security issue. The guy who was pushing the Bush plan was Dinesh D'Souza.

While watching, I had no idea who this guy was; I just knew I disagreed with most everything he said. So who is he? Despite the Portuguese family name, he is, as his given name suggests, Indian. He studied at Dartmouth College, where he was founder and editor of a controversial conservative rag called the Dartmouth Review. Later, he was picked up by the right wing think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He has authored numerous controversial books, most notably The End of Racism; in it, he defends black/white segregation in the US on the grounds it allowed blacks "to perform to the capacity of their arrested development." Between 1988 and 2001, he has received grants totaling $1.6 million from two right wing foundations: the John M. Olin Foundation and the Bradley Foundation, both of which fund the AEI. D'Souza, disparagingly called "Distort D'Newsa" by some, is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Judging from what I've read, I'd judge him to be a crackpot, but I guess certain moneyed interests like what he has to say. Anyway, the purpose of this entry is not to bash D'Souza. I was talking about Social Security... Now, where was I?

In his appearance on The News Hour, D'Souza made a howler of a claim in support of Social Security reform. He said that the whole idea of providing a guaranteed benefit was unfair because the older generation that receives the benefit possesses more aggregate wealth than the younger generation that pays the payroll tax. D'Souza's frame: Social Security is the poor subsidizing the rich.

Now, it is true that the average 65-year-old retiree possesses more wealth than the average 25-year-old worker. After all, that 25-year-old worker has not had much time to accumulate wealth.

But the word average is the key to uncovering D'Souza's deception (ooh, I like how that rolls off the tongue). Since there are many 65-year-olds who never earned enough income during their working years to accumulate wealth, it follows that disparities in wealth will be greatest among seniors. The poor elderly are no less poor because they are elderly; in fact, they are worse off than the young because they are generally less able to work for a living. So removing Social Security's guaranteed benefit would condemn them to destitution.