At 11:00 AM 1/12/99 -0800, you wrote:
>While you are at it, any rebutal to Milton Friedman's Social Security
>Chimeras on the WSJ op-ed page (11/11/99)?
>
>Henry C.K. Liu
>
Friedman's editorial (in yesterday's NYT, by the way), points out,
correctly, that the SS trust funds and projected shortfalls and all the
sturm and drang surrounding them are, in fact, mere accounting issues. He
points out that, in real economic terms, it doesn't matter whether we save
or not, whether there's a shortfall or not -- points that many of us on
this list have made. He argues that gradual, partial privatization of SS
is unnecessary, since gradualist solutions are premised on attempts to
"preserve" what amount to fictional balances anyway. Why not, he
concludes, go all the way? Full, complete privatization right now. What
about today's SS recipients? Give them a check representing the present
value of their promised benefits and wash our hands of them!
My (obvious) rebuttal is that, if the shortfall and trust fund and all that
jazz are mere accounting problems (which they are) then SS has no problem
in the first place. Why not drop the whole argument and affirm our
committment to a decent public pension system for all Americans?
Ellen Frank
