Jacobin Confusion on Social Security

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Friday, April 10, 2026

 

Debate over Social Security, scant though it is, usually and understandably focuses on its insolvency. I recently tried to call attention to some of the program’s other flaws, such as its negative impact on U.S. savings rates and its failure, notwithstanding its enormous cost, to eliminate poverty among senior citizens. I argued that we should think not just about how to save the existing program but about what kind of program would make sense as part of a modern American retirement system. I suggested that a better system would include a flatter benefit structure, one that gave people with the lowest lifetime earnings larger checks but asked people with the highest lifetime earnings to plan to rely more on retirement savings outside the program.

 

These changes would, by the standard definitions of the term in fiscal contexts, make Social Security more progressive. But self-proclaimed progressives who work in this area generally hate it — because, I suspect, they place great value on the political power of the program roughly as it is.

 

So it would not have surprised me if Josh Mound, writing in the left-wing magazine Jacobin, had disagreed with me. What surprises me is how little resemblance there is between his characterization of what I said and what I actually said. His criticism somehow manages to be even more irrelevant to my argument than Dean Baker’s was.

 

Mound writes:

 

As with earlier attempts to persuade younger generations to support cuts to old-age benefits, proponents of the [Total Boomer Luxury Communism] narrative hope to create the impression that cutting Social Security would allow younger Americans to stick it to supposedly “greedy geezers.”

 

Last month, conservative Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru declared, “Don’t Save Social Security.” Echoing the TBLC discourse, Ponnuru argued that the program simply funnels money to already-well-off retirees — citing the common conservative talking point that a rich retired couple could receive $100,000 in benefits each year.

 

I never suggested that senior citizens are greedy, nor did I claim that the program “simply” sends money to well-off retirees, nor did I advocate any change affecting current retirees.

 

Mound continues: “His solution? Raise the retirement age and replace the current benefit formula with a flat payment of roughly $1,350 per month.” I have no idea where Mound got that $1,350 per month figure, or the idea that I came out for a flat payment. I didn’t endorse either idea in the column.

 

Some more from Mound:

 

The CBO’s benefit-to-tax ratio is also the source for claims like Ponnuru’s that workers receive “more than the sum of what the person paid in taxes and the interest on that money.”

 

Yet this raises an obvious question: If Social Security returns more than workers contribute, how can conservatives simultaneously claim that the program is a “very bad deal” and that, as President George W. Bush put it during his privatization push, workers’ “money will grow, over time, [in private accounts] at a greater rate than anything the current system can deliver”?

 

By “conservatives simultaneously claim,” Mound means, based on his links, that different right-of-center people made these claims 14 years ago, 26 years ago, and 21 years ago. As I have written before, I think the time in which personal accounts made sense as a partial replacement for Social Security has passed.

 

I’ll end with a confession: There is no way, based on the inaccuracy of the passages I know most about, that I am ever going to read the entirety of the more than 15,000 words Jacobin gave Mound for this article. I cannot recommend that you do so either.