"Stop talking so crazy"

Jared Bernstein's appeal to reason:

I’d like to impose a new fiscal measure.  Whenever you say either “America is Greece!” re our fiscal debt—or anything like that—or “Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme!” you have to send $10 to the US Treasury.

Today’s bond markets have the yield on the 10-year Greek bond at 23.54 and on the US ten-year note at 1.95.  So enough about that…OK?

Social Security is pay-as-you-go. 

Ponzi’s scheme was not as it depended on continuous doubling the ratio of contributors to investors (read this wonderful treatment by Social Security’s historian).

As the above link concludes: “The first modern social insurance program began in Germany in 1889 and has been in continuous operation for more than 100 years. The American Social Security system has been in continuous successful operation since 1935. Charles Ponzi’s scheme lasted barely 200 days.”...


Now, forgive me if I get a little bit spiritual: as I’ve written before, Social Security was designed to “create a strong link between the aged and the working-age population–today’s workers create the capital, the technology, and the wealth that will support tomorrow’s generation. Embedded in its…formulas is the notion that those of us who came before, whether they were teachers, accountants, homemakers, mail carriers, barbers, cashiers, or lawyers, have built up the productive capacity of our nation.

When the children of these workers come of age (along with new immigrants), they will earn their living from this infrastructure while also making their own contributions. As they do so, we will peel off some portion of their earnings to provide pensions for their forebears, just as those forebears did for their own predecessors…Social Security is thus an elegant collaborative solution to a universal challenge.”

Maybe some people don’t want to accept the fact that we’re all in this together, but…we are.