George Rebane
Progressives and their ambiguous cousins, the liberals, cannot be this ignorant. Tonight on Fox News Neil Cavuto interviewed James Roosevelt Jr, FDR’s grandson and former associate commissioner of Social Security. Junior, sober as a judge, claimed in front of a national audience that SS was completely solvent due to the Treasury bonds worth trillions squirreled away in its vaunted “lock box” – the one shown on PBS as a stack of computer printouts in a file cabinet.
It is remarkable that this individual is still walking the streets on his own recognizance. Cavuto was careful in showing him deference while successfully fighting back giggles that tend to loosen and explosively expel all the phlegm accumulated in the back cavities of your nose. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary interview that maintained all previously established dignities. But the ignorance displayed does require a bit more consideration – maybe we can look under the hood and see what is there.
Almost all people well read on the national fisc know that the SS “lock box” is full of unfunded liabilities in the form of national debt denominated in Treasury bills. There is currently no known way to pay off this debt short of monetizing it (print new money). In fact, now with trillion plus dollar deficits stretching beyond the foreseeable future, there is less known today about paying off this debt with newly created wealth than we knew yesterday. Everyone, including the Chinese, is betting that they can find a chair before the music stops playing. SS is among those guaranteed to remain standing with the bag.
Daniel B. Klein, professor of economics at George Mason, recently wrote a piece ('Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader', 8jun10 WSJ) that summarized a Zogby International survey on which he had participated with Zelijka Buturovic. From this the indelible conclusion was that “self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.” In more succinct and “unequivocal” terms – “The left flunks Econ 101.”
No one has made a name accusing FDR of being stupid. The best we can attribute his abysmally bad economic policies to is, perhaps, an unexamined love affair with Stalin’s programs inflicted on the USSR during the 20s and 30s, which for our progressives became the beloved templates hyped by what then passed for journalism, and, of course, Hollywood (see a reprise in ‘Reds’). No matter how the final attribution of that may settle, James Jr was the inheritor and bears the full burden of his double helix.
More illumination comes from Klein reporting the results of the eight question survey for the six self-identified ideological groups. The average number of incorrect responses for each group were –
Very conservative 1.30
Libertarian 1.38
Conservative 1.67
Moderate 3.67
Liberal 4.69
Progressive/very liberal 5.26
And according to party affiliation the results were –
Republicans 1.61
Democrats 4.59
It is hard to elaborate on such robust and self-explanatory results other than to give those of the left the benefit of doubt on the ignorant-to-evil spectrum. Evil requires a more determined and studied background. And we let the reader judge the merits of the double helix that in such cases must be brought to bear.
[17aug2010] As if we needed more proof to underline the above results. Please take a look at the 9aug10 Nevada County Democratic Central Committee newsletter that can be downloaded here. The last segment contains a piece on the 'five myths of Social Security' that makes clear the kind of parallel (and insane) universe these socialists live in. They actually believe that the Treasuries in the "lock box" that "fully fund" SS are 1) not part of the national debt, 2) their interest payments to SS recipients are not contributing to ongoing deficits, and 3) because the US has never defaulted on a Treasury issue before, SS recipients will, into the far future, continue receiving the full value of their promised retirement payments from these Treasuries. Beyond amazing! but it does explain why they talk and vote the way they do.
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