By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Donald Trump has some big ideas about Social Security.
Happily, he is almost certainly lying about them.
Trump is, politically speaking, a weathervane, prone to
telling every audience what he believes it wants to hear, irrespective of what
he said an hour ago or plans to say an hour hence.
Our friends at the National Rifle Association, which
foolishly endorsed Trump, learned this the hard way when barely a fortnight
after putting their imprimatur on the Trump campaign he turned around endorsed
the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton position on stripping Americans of their
Second Amendment rights without any sort of due process through executive fiat.
He’ll tell the NRA what they want to hear, and he’ll tell the gun-loathing
soccer moms in suburbia what they want to hear, too.
He’ll make whatever vow he thinks will get him what he
wants. And if you want to know how serious he is about vows, ask the NRA, or
Mrs. Trump, or Mrs. Trump, or Mrs. Trump.
On the question of entitlement reform, that’s the good
news: You can’t believe a word that comes out of Trump’s mouth.
What’s Trump’s position on entitlement reform? Depends on
who is asking.
In an interview with Fox
and Friends on Tuesday, Trump suggested that we should pay Social Security
dependents more than we currently do.
“The people are not making it on Social Security,” he said. “It’s a very big
problem. We’ll take care of it.”
Oh, will we?
Under current policy, the unfunded liabilities of Social
Security right now are about $25 trillion. (Conservatively; different assumptions
will of course produce different results.) Say “$25 trillion” to most people
and you may as well be saying “$25 billion” or “$25 gazillion” or “$25 googol”
(that’s $25.00 x 10 to the hundredth power for you English majors out there) —
most people have trouble mentally processing such large numbers. So, here’s a
handy comparison: If you took all of the money deposited in all of the banks in
the United States and then doubled
it, that’s how short we are on Social Security alone. That’s one program.
One program.
A group of economists including 15 Nobel laureates
estimated our total long-term unfunded liabilities a few years back at $222
trillion. How big is that number? It’s about three times the total net worth of
all U.S. households combined, which includes all of the directly and indirectly
held shares they have in U.S. corporations. It is just shy of the
entire stock of wealth held by the human race, not just money and financial
instruments and real estate, houses, cars, vintage sneaker collections, etc.
Sometimes, progressives confronted with those numbers
will retort: “Well, that’s over a 75-year timeline!” or “That’s over an
infinite time horizon!” And that is true. But those unfunded liabilities are
not the difference between our future obligations and current assets but rather are the difference between our future
obligations and our projected future
assets. Economic growth will not get us out of this mess, because economic
growth already is incorporated into the calculations.
With that in mind, ask yourself this question: Given that
the shortfall of our total future government obligations — not the obligations
themselves, just how short we are of
paying them — almost equals the entire stock of wealth accumulated by the
entire human race over the course of its history, what do you imagine the
chances are that those obligations will be paid out in the future at their
present value?
Don’t ask me to show my work here, but I’m going to go
with something in the neighborhood of 0.0000000 percent.
Social Security isn’t the biggest chunk of our unfunded
entitlement liabilities: It’s the second-biggest chunk, behind Medicare.
Medicare won’t be easy to cut, either. To sum up: There’s no way in hell we’re
going to pay out what we’ve already promised, and Trump wants to promise even
more.
The real debate going forward isn’t how we’re going to go
about making good on all those promises — it’s how we’re going to go about not making good on those promises.
But console yourselves with this: Donald Trump is a
habitual, incorrigible liar. He lies about almost every subject he mentions: He
lies about his real-estate holdings, lies about his bankruptcies, lies to his
business partners, lies to his family, and he lies constantly to the rubes who
have bought into his snake-oil presidential campaign.
According to a Bloomberg
report, Trump told Paul Ryan he fundamentally agrees with his
entitlement-reform ideas — which is to say, with cutting benefits — but doesn’t
want to say so in public. From Bloomberg:
“From a moral standpoint, I believe
in it,” Trump told Ryan. “But you also have to get elected. And there’s no way
a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, ‘We’re
going to cut your Social Security’ and the Democrat is saying, ‘We’re going to keep
it and give you more.’”
That approach isn’t new, of course. Jude Wanninski
famously described the partisan dynamic in the United States with his “Two
Santa Claus Theory,” meaning that the Democrats promise goodies in the form of
public benefits, and the Republicans promise goodies in the form of cutting the
taxes that pay for those benefits. The result is enormous public indebtedness
and unfunded liabilities. The Republicans had a pretty good run of it but
eventually became victims of their own success. As Mitt Romney once had the bad
taste to point out, promising cuts in the federal income tax is not a winning
strategy when half the population doesn’t pay it.
Trump has decided to run on both sides of Wanninski’s
jolly old political divide: Want tax cuts? He’ll promise you enormous, huge,
fiscally irresponsible tax cuts. Want tax hikes on venture capitalists and
private-equity investors? He’ll promise you tax hikes, too. Hillary Rodham
Clinton promises a new stimulus bill with $275 billion in pork? Trump promises
to double it.
He’s a five-point drop in the polls away from promising
us all unicorns that egest rainbow sherbet.
Strangely, this is the best you can really say of Trump:
Thank goodness he’s a compulsive liar, because otherwise he’d just be nuts.
No comments:
Post a Comment