Posted on 09/12/2011 3:14:24 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Until a half a minute ago, liberals called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, too.
Is Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry a courageous and welcome truth teller for calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme, or is he being needlessly provocative instead? Or maybe you think Perry’s Ponzi comparison is just plain wrong. I favor the truth-teller option, but the debate will surely go on.
In any case, it’s certain that Perry’s Ponzi-scheme claim is in no way original. Not only have a raft of conservatives called Social Security a Ponzi scheme over the years, quite a few very respectable liberals have done so as well. It is clearly wrong either to treat the Ponzi-scheme analogy as unprecedented or to rule it altogether out of legitimate public debate. A historical tour of the use of the Ponzi-scheme metaphor will make the point.
Jonathan Last has already identified a 1967 Newsweek column by liberal economist and Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson as perhaps the earliest use of the Social Security/Ponzi-scheme comparison in public argument. Samuelson was actually drawing on the Ponzi analogy to defend Social Security. His claim was that the perpetual succession of human generations establishes the conditions for a sustainable Ponzi scheme. Regardless of whether Samuelson was the first commentator to use the Ponzi analogy, he has clearly been the most influential. Policy briefs and books churned out by conservative think tanks such as Heritage and Cato have cited Samuelson’s Ponzi column for years. This is likely how the comparison made its way into public debate.
Samuelson’s idea that Social Security could best be understood as an enduring and rational Ponzi scheme grew out of his “overlapping-generations model,” introduced in a seminal 1958 paper. Samuelson’s model implied that public debt in general, and Social Security in particular, could be financed over successive generations without major tax increases. In the 1980s, Samuelson’s overlapping-generations model was seized upon by Keynesian economists to serve as a microeconomic foundation for their favored theories and plans.
The unfortunate weakness of Samuelson’s model is its assumption that a growing economy will produce continual population increase. In an April 1978 follow-up in Newsweek to his original 1967 column, Samuelson acknowledged that demographic reality was disproving this assumption. Samuelson repeated his use of the Ponzi analogy and continued to defend his hopes for Social Security as best he could. While Samuelson hung onto some slim indications in 1977 that U.S. fertility might be on the upswing, it grew increasingly clear to critics that the post–Baby Boom decline in births was not going to be reversed. Increasingly, Samuelson’s Ponzi-scheme analogy was seized upon by those who doubted Social Security’s long-term soundness. Continued
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True enough but the “Gentle Man” has become courser — not like the man who spoke to the nation after the Challenger accident — who comforted the nation, celebrated the astronauts and their endeavors (mentioned God) and encouraged children to excel, to follow their example and live their dreams.
It’s different now and we need to wake up those who have forgotten (or were never taught), and explain what losing that “Gentle Man” means to them and the world.
So, in other words, the leftist 'Save the Earth by killing off it's Human infection' crowd has now doomed Social Security.
Liberals are truly the cause of every disaster in the world.
Rick Perry: I am going to be honest with the American people
Bachmann needs to turn in her Tea Pary membership card.
I want blunt talk and people that will face issues head on.
Instead, it looks like Bachmann has decided to go the “scare the grannys” route and demigogue the issue, which is the formula for never fixing the problem. Sorry, I’ve had enough of that from Democrats and RINOs.
CNN’s just released poll has Bachmann at 4% (down from 10% two weeks ago).
Thank You!
BTTT!
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