SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM MADE CLEAR
by CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
Issue of 2005-05-02 New Yorker
Posted 2005-04-25
. . Combined with a partial improvement in the CPI (the BLS implementing its vastly superior chained-CPI, which would eliminate 30-40 basis points of the bias), these reforms will easily deal with the long-run solvency issues.
—The Republican economist Michael Boskin, writing in the Wall Street Journal.
Q: Is President Bush’s proposal to reform Social Security a good thing for older people?
A: Utterly. Deferred benefit indexation, when viewed through an actuarial matrix subliminator, shows a benefit-to-deficit ratio of .003, which is entirely within normal parameters.
Q: What about younger folks?
A: Assetized over a B.L.S.-modified thermo-demographic time-horizon, no problemo.
Q: Then why is the President’s proposal encountering such resistance?
A: The Democrats are just trying to make it sound more complicated than it is.
Q: Will it be necessary to raise the retirement age?
A: Looking at the out-year projections on a nonlinear, bi-sequential theta curve, no. Of course, you won’t hear the Democrats making that argument.
Q: What about these private accounts? Will people really have access to their own money?
A: There are two—well, three . . . no, four—ways of looking at it. Five, actually. But let’s focus on the first, fourth, and fifth. As recently as 1977, a B.L.T.—
Q: B.L.S., you mean? Bureau of Labor Statistics?
A: No, bacon, lettuce, and tomato. . . . Look, you have to view it through a monetarized Feldman prism. The old matrices are, let’s face it, out the window. If you go back to the nineteen-thirties, or even to the reign of Vercingetorix, the only way of proximizing was to extrapolate an entire ex-ante carve-out into an ex-post add-on. Hardly an elegant solution.
Q: The President’s opponents say that the private accounts are going to cost something like two trillion dollars. Is that true?
A: It depends on how you view “two trillion dollars.” If you look at it as a concept, it’s just a number on paper. But if you look at two trillion as a stack of one-dollar bills that would reach to Pluto and back, sure, it’s a lot of money. So is three trillion. So is four trillion. So is a googol-zillion katrillion umptillion. And why stop there? It’s a spurious argument on its face. I spit on it.
Q: The President’s plan is predicated on the stock market’s returning 6.5 per cent. Isn’t that, historically speaking, unrealistic?
A: Only if you’re still calculating with a slide rule. The out-year S. & P. projectivization is acceptably maximizable to within a six-to-eight-per-cent range, as long as you keep changing the oil and occasionally sacrifice a few peacocks and white bullocks to the god Amen-Ra. There’s simply no reason not to assume that the
Q: Is Social Security reform affected by the fact that the national debt is skyrocketing, or that the dollar is plunging, or that the President’s Medicare drug-entitlement program will be nearly twice as costly as he said?
A: As a percentage of G.D.P., the deficit is actually lower than it was in 1066 A.D. As for the dollar, it’ll still buy you a cheeseburger. And if the Bank of Korea doesn’t want to go on subsidizing our life style, to hell with them. Lay a two-hundred-per-cent tariff on Samsung products, pull our troops out, and let them deal with that nut-case hair ball across the border. Medicare-wise, O.K., it’s going to cost $720 billion instead of $400 billion. So someone screwed up. Do you ever screw up? What are you, perfect? I’m telling you, Social Security reform is a slam dunk. Why is everyone suddenly so, like, obtuse?
