Social Security is not the problem; it's the model

Paula N. Singer, Christian Science Monitor -Every day in the United States, 10,000 baby boomers reach retirement age. That, in a nutshell, is the demographic challenge facing Social Security.

Critics want to blame the system itself. They point out how it will run through its surplus funds by 2033 – and how, after that, it will only have enough to provide 75 percent of promised benefits. They depict Social Security as one more failed government program or, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry once put it, a Ponzi scheme.

But compared with Washington’s budget processes, Social Security is a model of fiscal rectitude. While Congress has failed to rein in spending and engaged in expensive off-budget wars at the same time that it was cutting taxes for the rich, Social Security has operated under a 30-year bipartisan agreement that not only fully funded existing benefits but also built up a $2.6 trillion surplus in anticipation of today's retiree bulge.

How has Washington rewarded that fiscal prudence? Congress and various administrations have raided these surplus monies in order to make their overspending appear less egregious in the budget books.

So next time someone suggests radically downsizing Social Security or scrapping it altogether, ask yourself who should take the bigger financial hit: baby boomers and younger workers who paid into the system to build up the surplus – or the top 1 percent of Americans who benefited the most from all those tax cuts?

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