I am not usually a fan of libertarians, but this piece on Social Security at Reason caught my eye. Julian Sanchez gets the politics of the "progressive" Bush plan just about right:
What worries liberals about progressive indexing, and about the shift to a more overtly welfare-like Social Security system, is that welfare benefits tend to be politically unpopular—and much easier to cut than benefits perceived as universal. Social Security, in other words, is a massive Rube Goldberg device, an ornate and utterly superfluous system of transfers from the middle and upper classes to themselves, the sole purpose of which is to construct—and conceal—a much smaller welfare machine for elderly retirees nestled deep in the guts of the meta-contraption. Some defenders of the status quo are now attempting—though they scarcely seem to believe it themselves—to argue that Social Security is no less vital for the middle class. But corner a progressive over a quiet drink and he'll probably admit that, in fact, the only defensible purpose of Social Security is to ensure that nobody retires in poverty. There may be political reasons for cutting a monthly check to Bill Gates when he turns 65, but there are no sane policy reasons.
Sanchez continues by suggesting, in so many words, that if today we were coming up with a program to make sure that people had some means of support in their old age, nobody would come up with the massively expensive and massively statist Social Security system. He concludes:
This is the sad irony of the current debate: Most wonks on both the left and the right would probably agree that a modest, means-tested program designed to prevent the elderly from retiring in poverty would be superior to our current Rube Goldberg system. But liberals will block such an improvement, because there's no way for conservatives to credibly promise that, once Social Security is explicitly restructured as welfare, they won't gut it. All of which keeps in place another trademark Rube Goldberg feature of the system: The boot on a lever, kicking us all in the ass.
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