Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Confuse the kids first then raise taxes

Pity the AARP. The senior organization has worked tirelessly to prop up Social Security, no matter what the long term realities demand. But now they risk alienating a whole new generation of retirees who are destined to pay more and receive less because the AARP blocks necessary reform. The short term answer, apparently, is to temporize, confuse, conflate, and obfuscate until Americans can be fooled into another tax increase.

The liberal entitlement lobby has asked candidates around the country to fill out a questionnaire asking, "Will you support a balanced Social Security plan to continue the program's guaranteed benefits for future generations?" That may sound innocuous, but here's how AARP defines its balanced plan on its Web site near the above question: "AARP believes that a bipartisan plan that balances additional contributions from high income workers with modest adjustments in future benefits can maintain guaranteed Social Security benefits for future generations."
What this means for younger workers is even higher payroll taxes for a revenue-transfer program that will, at best, produce a return on investment of 2%. Social Security is the deal so good, they had to make it mandatory.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What gets me, is that the AARP's constituency wasn't even effected by the proposed reforms -- you had to be less than age 55 (if I recall correctly) in order to avail yourself of the private retirement accounts. Above that age, there was no change.