The 2020 Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry took a new turn this week as Joe Biden came under fire from the Bernie Sanders cam­paign over his record on propos­ing cuts to Social Secu­ri­ty. The two cam­paigns now have each released com­pet­ing ads over the issue, with the Biden camp accus­ing Sanders of an unfair attack, and Sanders respond­ing with a 30-sec­ond spot that quotes Biden say­ing, ​“When I argued if we should freeze fed­er­al spend­ing, I meant Social Secu­ri­ty as well.”

The Krugman charge (and Biden’s defense) is patently false.

Right on cue, the main­stream media has wad­ed into the issue, with the ten­u­ous­ly lib­er­al Paul Krug­man con­tin­u­ing his anti-Sanders jere­mi­ads from the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al page.

The lat­est Sanders atroc­i­ty alleged by Pro­fes­sor Krug­man is that Sanders spread false­hoods about Joe Biden’s record in sup­port of cuts to Social Secu­ri­ty benefits.

It does not pay to get too worked up about polit­i­cal back­bit­ing in a pri­ma­ry. In Novem­ber, we will need every­body to defeat Don­ald Trump, so remarks that could have the effect of dri­ving oth­ers to deny the even­tu­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee their vote should be avoided.

Sanders him­self has cau­tioned his sup­port­ers, ​“We don’t need to demo­nize those who may dis­agree with us.” A sim­ple test for a gen­uine Sanders cam­paign sup­port­er is whether they are march­ing in this direction.

Still, the Krug­man charge (and Biden’s defense) is patent­ly false.

The first shot in this brouha­ha was an email released by the Sanders cam­paign that includ­ed clips of Biden on the floor of the U.S. Sen­ate in 1995 tout­ing his polit­i­cal courage by embrac­ing cuts in Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits, osten­si­bly to save the pro­gram. Sanders argues that such cuts would be bad pol­i­cy, and that Biden’s past advo­ca­cy would make him vul­ner­a­ble to Trump in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Sanders, for his part, has long advo­cat­ed expand­ing Social Secu­ri­ty and intro­duced a bill in Con­gress to do so last year.

Biden’s remarks placed him in good com­pa­ny. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty estab­lish­ment, includ­ing Pres­i­dents Bill Clin­ton and Barack Oba­ma, as well as House Speak­er Nan­cy Pelosi, have tra­di­tion­al­ly embraced the main­stream view of Social Secu­ri­ty: name­ly that because it is out of bal­ance, if viewed in iso­la­tion over the next 75 years, some com­bi­na­tion of pay­roll tax increas­es and ben­e­fit cuts will be required to ​“pro­tect” or ​“mod­ern­ize” the pro­gram. A relat­ed objec­tive is to reduce the fed­er­al bud­get deficit over the long term. The con­nec­tion is that if Social Secu­ri­ty rev­enues are not suf­fi­cient to finance ben­e­fits, the mon­ey must come from some­where else.

This argu­ment has been hashed out many times. There is a good polit­i­cal rea­son to view Social Security’s finances in iso­la­tion: it pro­vides sup­port if you accept that intakes from the wide­ly accept­ed pay­roll tax must match out­puts for pro­gram ben­e­fits. Such a view requires a belief that the rev­enues, large­ly from pay­roll tax­es, must mea­sure up to ben­e­fit oblig­a­tions in real-time (annu­al­ly, in oth­er words). Such a restric­tion on Social Security’s finances is not applied sim­i­lar­ly to oth­er gov­ern­ment spend­ing. We don’t demand that the Depart­ment of Defense, for instance, be self-financing.

The advo­ca­cy of trim­ming ben­e­fits for the sake of pro­tect­ing Social Secu­ri­ty, or to reduce the bud­get deficit, is a respectable posi­tion, though I and many oth­er pro­gres­sive econ­o­mists hap­pen to believe it is com­plete­ly wrong. Econ­o­mists Dean Bak­er and Mark Weis­brot offer an exten­sive ver­sion of this case in their clas­sic book Social Secu­ri­ty: The Pho­ny Cri­sis in which they argue, ​“there is no eco­nom­ic, demo­graph­ic, or actu­ar­i­al basis for the wide­spread belief that the pro­gram needs to be fixed.”

What ​“fix­ing the pro­gram” gen­er­al­ly means is rais­ing rev­enues (by reduc­ing ben­e­fit costs) that won’t be need­ed for more than 15 years. Instead, they would be deposit­ed into the Social Secu­ri­ty Trust Fund, which in 2018 had reserves equiv­a­lent to 289% of annu­al pro­gram costs. By mid-range esti­mates, the fund is not pro­ject­ed to run out of mon­ey until 2036. By more opti­mistic assump­tions, it would nev­er run out. Even if it did, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment would still have pay­roll tax rev­enue and could eas­i­ly sup­ple­ment it to meet ben­e­fit obligations.

Ene­mies of the pro­gram like to say the Trust Fund is ​“going broke” — or isn’t real. In fact, the Trust Fund is quite real. It holds U.S. gov­ern­ment secu­ri­ties, the safest finan­cial asset in the world, backed up by the pow­er to tax the rich­est coun­try in the world.

The real agen­da here is to use deficit pan­ic to arrest any growth in the pub­lic sec­tor. And it’s worked pret­ty well. For Fis­cal Year 2019, fed­er­al out­lays were 21.3% of GDP. Under Repub­li­can Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan, they were as high as 22.9%.

The game here is that Democ­rats do the hard work of cut­ting spend­ing, out­rag­ing their con­stituents and los­ing elec­tions, and then Repub­li­cans come in and set about blow­ing up the deficit all over again, with tax cuts for their rich donors. Bill Clin­ton and Barack Oba­ma both fell into this trap — and Joe Biden was a stead­fast ally. Krug­man has writ­ten about all this elo­quent­ly, so he had to real­ly stretch to gin up his attack on Sanders.

At the end of the Sanders cam­paign email, there is a brief ref­er­ence to a speech Biden made at the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion in 2018. Krug­man seizes on this ref­er­ence to claim that it does not sub­stan­ti­ate Sanders’ crit­i­cisms, con­clud­ing that Sanders ​“flat-out lied.” In fact, while Biden’s lan­guage is less than forth­right, he does push a posi­tion, pop­u­lar among cen­trist Democ­rats, that has long been used to jus­ti­fy cuts to Social Security.

In his Brook­ings speech, Biden claimed that ​“Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare can stay — it still needs adjust­ments — but it can stay.” This is per­fect­ly in line with the estab­lish­ment deficit nag­ging dis­cussed above, these days often crit­i­cized by Krug­man him­self. Even if you doubt that infer­ence, the video clips, described by Biden as ​“doc­tored” (itself an…untruth, accord­ing to the New York Times), are unambiguous.

Here is Biden speak­ing to Meet the Press​’s Tim Russert in 2007:

Tim Russert: Sen­a­tor, we have a deficit. We have Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare loom­ing. The num­ber of peo­ple on Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare is now 40 mil­lion peo­ple. It’s going to be 80 mil­lion in 15 years. Would you con­sid­er look­ing at those pro­grams, age of eligibility… Biden: Absolute­ly.

And Biden’s advo­ca­cy of Social Secu­ri­ty cuts hasn’t just been the­o­ret­i­cal. As David Dayen lays out, it’s had real con­se­quences by pop­u­lar­iz­ing the regres­sive ​“chained CPI” approach to cal­cu­lat­ing benefits.

To sup­port his argu­ment, Krug­man links to a piece from Poli­ti­Fact, which has its own his­to­ry of man­gled eco­nom­ic analy­sis, accord­ing to no less than Paul Krug­man!

PolitiFact’s argu­ment is that Biden was aim­ing to ​“pro­tect the pro­gram,” which, as not­ed above, is the time-hon­ored excuse for aus­ter­i­ty of all types. So, Krug­man is wrong to affirm that Sanders lied about Biden’s sup­port for ben­e­fit cuts, and dis­hon­est to imply that the Brook­ings speech is a deci­sive refu­ta­tion of that charge.

In sum­ma­ry, there should be no doubt that Joe Biden has long advo­cat­ed cuts to Social Secu­ri­ty. So have many oth­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty lead­ers, but, as they say, the times they are a‑changin’. Biden is now sup­port­ing ben­e­fit increas­es. Again, in a spir­it of comi­ty, we should wel­come all converts.

Krug­man mis­led his read­ers by call­ing Sanders a liar on this issue. Going for­ward, the appli­ca­tion of the lib­er­al commentator’s for­mi­da­ble pow­ers of eco­nom­ic analy­sis upon Sanders’ pro­pos­als should be received with circumspection.

Thank­ful­ly, Social Secu­ri­ty appears to cur­rent­ly be out of the dan­ger zone. But it will always be vul­ner­a­ble due to delu­sions about the long-run dan­gers of bud­get deficits, and politi­cians will­ing to describe ben­e­fit cuts as mea­sures to save the pro­gram. We shouldn’t buy it.