Someone named Jim Clark (associate director of the Center for Economic Education and is the associate dean of the Barton School of Business at Wichita State University) wrote a "My View" piece in the Wichita Eagle today [Feb. 4], called "Get Facts Straight on Social Security Reform." I fired off a letter:

The big problem with the Social Security reform facts that Jim Clark wants to get straight is that they aren't facts yet: all he's done is speculate about the future. For instance, he assumes that Americans in the future won't have the moral backbone to increase taxes if necessary in order to fund the Social Security needs of the old and infirm, even though ever since the founding of Social Security they have done whatever needed to be done. Moreover, he asserts that the federal government of the future will default on its borrowing of the excess taxes that workers have paid into Social Security since the last time the politicians "fixed" it. If this is true we have much more serious things to worry about than pensions in the latter half of the 21st century. The only way Social Security can go bankrupt is if the U.S. government goes bankrupt first. Given Bush's tax cuts and exorbitant spending on war and corporate welfare, the trade imbalance and the sinking dollar -- that's the real threat we need to take seriously.

Clark also argued that Bush's privatization scheme wouldn't lead to telemarketing scams trying to fleece the new private accounts. He asserted that all of the proposed schemes involve a small number of options of conservatively managed funds. This gets into one of the intrinsic contradictions of the anti-Social Security movement. On the one hand they promise higher returns than the current fund gets from federal government securities. On the other hand they need to minimize the appearance of risk, since most people realize that the stock market can go down as well as up. But increased management fees will take a cut out of the returns, so where does that leave us? More importantly, why should we care? If the point behind greater returns is to justify benefit cuts, the bottom line is at best a wash, at worst a disaster.