In his weekly Business World column today, the Wall Street Journal’s ($) Holman Jenkins, Jr. lays out the case that a second Bush Administration may be the one time that realistic reform of Social Security could actually take place:
People become inordinate risktakers to protect something they have. Once voters figure out the true extent of the entitlement morass, even those summering Nantucket editors might be expected to rush to the barricades and, whatever their cultural affinity, cast their vote for Mr. Bush for the simple reason that entitlement reform is inescapably a second-term activity.
. . . President John Kerry would be sure to lay back too while re-election sugarplums still danced in his head, and who’d want to bet on him to beat the Democratic curse and win a second term? If not, nine years would be the soonest reform could start, by which time another $18 trillion in unfunded retirement obligations would have piled up.
Nope, it’s Mr. Bush or bust. Congress is no help. Wonder why, in the dog days of August, GOP House Speaker Denny Hastert became a sudden convert to a flat tax? He was hoping to divert the Bush White House’s attention from Social Security reform. His members, facing re-election every two years, still believe that Social Security is an untouchable “third rail,” notwithstanding a few GOP thrillseekers who’ve lately done handsprings on the third rail and lived to tell the tale.
Democrats, of course, can be expected to resist ferociously, and for reasons going beyond mere sentimental attachment to the FDR/LBJ welfare state. Anything that turns the adult population into wealth holders would change voting behavior forever, and not to Terry McAuliffe’s advantage.
All this makes Mr. Bush’s apparent willingness to tackle entitlements a once-in-a-generation planetary alignment, not to be passed up by a society that cares about its future.
Mr. Jenkins goes on to explain the “creative” accounting that the federal government engages in to mask the true cost of its Social Security obligations:
[A]dvocates need to get busy helping the public master a peculiarity of federal accounting. To wit, promises made to bondholders show up in the national debt. Promises made to future retirees don’t.
Thus the officially recognized national debt is about $3.9 trillion, while the unfunded Social Security obligation alone represents an IOU of $10 trillion in present value. Throw Medicare onto the bonfire and that’s another $62 trillion.
Keep in mind these figures represent only the “unfunded” portion, not the part covered by monies already credited to notional federal trust funds or to be collected in payroll taxes from now till eternity. It would take $3.9 trillion today to retire the visible national debt, and $72 trillion today to pay off unfunded promises to retirees. Yet only the first debt is reported to voters. That’s the kind of accounting “oversight” that, in the private sector, leads straight to a cellblock.
That makes Enron’s shifting of a mere $40 billion of debt into off balance sheet transactions look rather trivial, doesn’t it? And why are these huge hidden costs important to understand? Mr. Jenkins answers:
Because suddenly the $1 trillion in “transition costs” to finance the creation of the Bush-touted private retirement accounts for younger workers doesn’t seem so outlandish compared to the real federal debt, visible and invisible.
Interestingly, Mr. Jenkins then focuses on the main impediment to true Social Security reform — risk aversion:
Unreasoning risk aversion is a hallmark of the human mind, and Democrats and their pet economists are already doing all they can to encourage the stand-pattism of certain voting blocs, especially single women and oldsters. John Kerry never tires of frightening these voters with the Satans of Wall Street and Ken Lay. He says instead a “tweak here, tweak there” will tide Social Security over without any “risky” reforms.
Here we must summon the heavy guns of “behavioral economics,” whose adherents have been winning Nobel Prizes lately. Their most firmly established insight is that real people, as opposed to the rational maximizers of the economic texts, suffer from an excess of caution. “Prospect theory,” pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, shows that people overvalue their fear of loss and undervalue the prospect of gain, leaving themselves worse off than they would be if they were willing to entertain reasonable risks.
I agree with Mr. Jenkins that real Social Security reform is more likely in a second Bush Administration than in a Kerry Administration. But given the Bush Administration’s aversion to balanced policy analysis, I question whether there is really much of a prospect for reform even in a second Bush Administration. I guess we can dream, can’t we?
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