What Liberal Pushback Should Look Like

Thomas Geoghegan, has just written an OP/ED suggesting that Social Security and taxation should be increased, not decreases:

As a labor lawyer I cringe when Democrats talk of “saving” Social Security. We should not “save” it but raise it. Right now Social Security pays out 39 percent of the average worker’s preretirement earnings. While jaws may drop inside the Beltway, we could raise that to 50 percent. We’d still be near the bottom of the league of the world’s richest countries — but at least it would be a basement with some food and air. We have elderly people living on less than $10,000 a year. Is that what Democrats want to “save”?

“But we can’t afford it!” Oh, come on: We have a federal tax rate equal to nearly 15 percent of our G.D.P. — far below the take in most wealthy countries. Let’s wake up: the biggest crisis we face is that most of us have nothing meaningful saved for retirement. I know. I started my career wanting to be a pension lawyer. In the 1970s, lawyers like me expected there to be big pots of private pensions for hourly workers. By the 1980s, as factories closed, I was filing hopeless lawsuits to claw back bits and pieces of benefits. Now there are even fewer bits and pieces to get.

A recent Harris poll found that 34 percent of Americans have nothing saved for retirement — not even a hundred bucks. In this lost decade, that percentage is sure to go up. At retirement the lucky few with a 401(k) typically have $98,000. As an annuity that’s about $600 a month — not exactly an upper-middle-class lifestyle. It’s too late for Congress to come up with some new savings plan — a new I.R.A. that grows hair, or something. There’s no time. We have to improve the one public pension program in place. Should we means-test it? No. I don’t care if they go out and buy bottles of Jim Beam: let our elderly have an occasional night out at a restaurant.

The most paralyzing half-truth in this country is that people hate taxes. People are willing to pay taxes that they spend on themselves. Two-thirds of those surveyed in a CBS/New York Times poll in January were willing to pay more taxes to save Social Security at its modest level. To “save” it, most of us don’t need to pay. We could lift the cap on high earners, the 6 percent of workers who make over $106,800 a year. If earnings above the cap were subject to the payroll tax with no increase in benefits to high earners, there would be no deficit in the Social Security trust fund in 2037, as projected.

If people are willing to pay more just to “save” Social Security, they should be glad to pay more to raise it.

I cannot imagine a such a full throated defense of basic human decency as government policy from any Democrat on the national stage, and that is a large part of the tragedy that is the Democratic party.

7 comments

  1. Elder Brother says:

    A more real problem is presenting government policy as being the product of human decency. 

    Why not argue it from economic sense — we have a consumer driven economy, we need money in people' pockets…

  2. Anonymous says:

    > A more real problem is presenting government policy as being the product of human decency.

    As long as we cede the "decency" grounds (really, this should be "justice" grounds) we are fighting a losing battle, by promoting the selfishness in public policy attitude.

    I would also comment, Matthew, that this defense has nothing to do liberalism – it is a lefty defense. I am not sure if there is a self-image problem here for you, but you are a lefty.

  3. Yoram Gat says:

    (Guest above was me.)

    I will not argue about where liberalism is positioned. I think many self-described liberals would not describe themselves as lefties, but that is beside the point.

    The point is that the arguments offered by Geoghegan – and your own summary comment – have nothing to do with liberal positions. This is what Elder Brother was referring to. Liberalism is not about decency, it is about abstractions like "liberty" or "meritocracy".

  4. Yoram Gat says:

    I don't think I offered that thesis. "Right to liberty" is a moral position, I guess (although a pretty vague one). But it is a very different moral position from "right to three square meals a day" or "right to a comfortable retirement", etc. The latter positions are not liberal.

Leave a Reply