Expand Social Security: Column

Duncan Black | USATODAY

According to the Pew Research Center, the median household wealth for those aged 65+ is about $170,000. While that sounds like a significant amount of money, as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research pointed out, this is actually a trivial amount of wealth for people with little or no income other than Social Security benefits. Remember that this figure includes housing wealth. Even if it was a bunch of cash in a bank account, it wouldn't actually provide for a significant supplement to other retirement income, but the reality is that many people have a house and not much else.

The point is that people with this vast wealth of $170,000, mostly tied up in the house in which they live, face bleak retirement years. As politicians in both parties discuss cutting promised Social Security retirement benefits as a misguided tribute to the austerity gods, the reality is that we desperately need to increase these benefits right now.

Some people who have objected to my proposal for increasing Social Security retirement benefits have done so on the basis that this is something people should be personally responsible for. Essentially, life's a big test, and one element of that test is a lifelong commitment to amassing significant personal wealth that can be drawn down in your twilight years. If you fail, well, better luck next time. Except ...

But there's no need for retirement income to be in this special category of things we must be personally responsible for. We are not personally responsible for many things in our lives. I didn't build the roads I drive on, or purchase the buses that stop regularly on my corner. I have little to do with the hiring and management of police and fire personnel or air traffic controllers.

Our hopefully somewhat democratically accountable governments provide many things for us. There are economic arguments about the areas where government should be more or less involved generally and ideological disagreements about the appropriate role for government. There will probably always be disagreement about just who should pay, and how. But there also practical arguments. If there's broad political agreement on a particular outcome, such as that most people should expect to have a reasonably comfortable retirement, then the question is how best to achieve that. I don't think 75-year-olds should face economic ruin and homelessness for any reason. I am not alone in that opinion. How do we ensure that?

Social Security was envisioned as one leg of a three-legged stool of retirement, along with employer pensions and private savings or insurance (though the metaphor itself was devised after its creation). The problem is that two of those legs have shrunk significantly. This is not a stool one can comfortably sit on. This is not a stool most people will be able to sit on at all. The system, as envisioned, is failing.

We can goad and cajole people into saving. We can provide incentives for people to save for their retirement, and penalize them for raiding those funds before they retire. We can subsidize employer contributions to retirement funds.

But we have been doing all of these things for decades, and they haven't worked. The majority of people nearing retirement will not have sufficient funds to retire with anything resembling economic security and comfort.

Maybe we can tweak this basic system for future generations. I'm not optimistic that people who are entering the labor force today, with high student loan debt and meager job prospects, will have any more luck with the current system, even a somewhat improved version of it, than their parents did. But right now there's an immediate problem to be addressed. Large numbers of people are going to be too old to work, but too poor to maintain their lifestyles.

Many of these people actually have been very responsible, if not perfectly so, like most of us. They worked as health and opportunity allowed, they obtained education, they bought homes, and they raised their children. They paid their medical and other bills when necessary, and contributed to the education costs of their children. They lived up to, roughly speaking at least, a typical vision of the American Dream. They just do not have enough money in personal savings, retirement plans, and expected Social Security benefits. It is unlikely that their children and grandchildren will, either, absent changes to our approach to funding retirement.

There isn't a lot of support for this in Washington right now. Austerity is the rage, and the old and the poor must suffer right along with the rich. One member of Congress, Alan Grayson, D-Fla., did tweet, "We should not be talking about cutting programs like Social Security; we should be talking about expanding them." He is correct, but sadly the leftmost position generally in Congress is to demand no cuts to the program. There isn't yet a movement to expand them. Try calling your member of Congress. You never know, they might listen.

Duncan Black writes the blog Eschatonunder the pseudonym of Atrios and is a fellow at Media Matters for America.

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