Truth - Al Franken [80]
It shocked us both,
My wife and me,
That I’ve been dead
Since ’93.
This assumption did a lot of heavy lifting for the Heritage Foundation. It meant that every black man paid into Social Security for forty-six years and only drew benefits for two years. But Heritage ignored the fact that black males, like white males, die at every age, from 0 to, according to Treasury Secretary John Snow, 150. Black men who reach sixty-seven have a life expectancy of seventy-nine. That doesn’t mean that they all die at seventy-nine. It’s just an average. It means that, on average, black male retirees will receive Social Security benefits for twelve years—not two.
And here’s another thing that Heritage fudged. Social Security doesn’t just pay retirement benefits. It also pays disability and survivor benefits. And because of the enormous racial inequality in this country, African-Americans are much more likely than whites to receive both. Of all African-Americans who receive Social Security benefits of any kind, 47 percent receive either disability or survivor benefits. The number for whites is 28 percent. So, leaving out disability and survivor benefits would skew things a bit, don’t ya think? Well, guess what? Somehow the Einsteins over at Heritage forgot to include them. By accident? On purpose? Who knows?
And that’s not all. African-American men earn, on average, about $25,000 a year. That’s a lot less than the average white guy. I think it has something to do with the legacy of slavery. Anyway, Social Security’s benefits are progressive, which means that the less you earn, the bigger your benefits are, relative to your income.
That’s why, in 2003, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that “in the aggregate, blacks and Hispanics have higher disability rates and lower lifetime earnings, and thus receive greater benefits relative to taxes than whites.”
Which is quite a contradiction to the Heritage Foundation’s finding that “low-income African-American males realize particularly dismal rates of return from Social Security.” And that’s why I described the Heritage Foundation as “extremely untrustworthy.”
So it’s not just that Bush’s argument that Social Security needed to be changed because “the system is inherently unfair” to blacks was demonstrably false. No, it’s worse than that. Blacks do better than whites under Social Security because they get the short end of the stick in so many other ways. But Bush wasn’t addressing any of those problems. He was just looking for another excuse to privatize Social Security. But it was nice of him to inject race into the debate.
None of the reasons Bush gave for taking on Social Security could survive critical scrutiny, or even comedic scrutiny. But if none of those reasons were the reason, what was the reason? Why, in God’s name, was Bush so intent on using his hard-earned capital to introduce private accounts to Social Security? And why were Republicans lining up to support him?
I was hoping to avoid this. But it looks like we are now forced to turn to the aforementioned hidden reasons.
I think the basic reason Bush and company tried to privatize Social Security is simple. Conservative Republicans hate government. They hate the idea that the people can join together to use the government to solve their problems. Social Security is the biggest and most successful example of how public policy can provide a safety net where everyone shares the risk and everyone shares the reward. If they could unravel that, then anything was possible. Everyone could be left to fend for themselves. That’s their vision of the “Ownership Society.” Which is code for the “On-Your-Own Society.”
At least, that’s my gut. But one thing I’ve learned in this life is you gotta give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, as they kept saying, they really did want to “strengthen” Social Security, and even though their