Social Security a no-show in the midterms

While Social Security serves as a lifeline for millions in Missouri and beyond, it was nearly invisible in the 2018 midterm elections. Even in battleground states, where millions of dollars were available to chase voters at the margins, candidates couldn’t find 20 cents to explain their thoughts on the program’s long-term stability.

At this point, the program’s prospects are troubling at best. The trustees of the program’s trust funds expect the program to pay benefits in full into 2034, provided that the economy cooperates. That isn’t a long time considering that the Social Security Administration believes that roughly half of those people turning 71 today will be alive and turning 87 at a time when benefits reductions would exceed 20 percent.

The program’s issues are not entirely long-term either. The experts in Washington believe that the program in 2018 will need to use some of the reserves held in the various trust funds for the first time in nearly 40 years. This is a structural change from the past, when the payroll taxes provided almost all of the money needed to pay the bills. For the first time in the lives of most Americans, the interest costs on the program’s $2.9 trillion reserves will be paid with cash drawn from the broader economy.

Voters deserve answers. Instead, the voters are getting dosed with the politics of delay — a strategy in which candidates tell you everything that they will not do, but nothing about what they will do. They attack the flaws, both real and imaginary, in the opponent’s plan, while meticulously avoiding leaving even a trace of a position of their own.

This isn’t a problem limited by political party. Virtually all of the candidates in the states where control of the Senate will be determined either “support” or “defend” the beloved program without providing any detail of what that support might mean.

To illustrate, the winner in the Senate race in Missouri, Republican Josh Hawley, said that he opposes any changes to the program for those in or approaching retirement. Yet, he didn’t provide a single tax increase that he would support in order to pay for that commitment.

In Florida, neither candidate provided any details about what he believes that the nation should do to stabilize the program. Even AARP, a leading senior’s advocacy group, was unable to find any details on the future of Social Security from either candidate, even in private emails.

During the campaign, Jacky Rosen, a Democrat and the new senator from Nevada, promised to “fight back against efforts to privatize or weaken Social Security.” That commitment should not be difficult to fulfill, given that the SSA’s actuarial team has not scored a proposal that included a privatization component for Social Security in nearly 10 years.

The idea of personal accounts within Social Security is financially implausible. Under such a system, the government would have to raise other taxes to offset any revenue diverted from Social Security on a dollar-for-dollar basis in order to pay existing retirees. In short, younger workers would be allowed to keep $1 of payroll taxes in their right pocket provided that they paid $1 in other taxes from their left.

Why do politicians employ these tactics when millions of voters today are at risk? The reason is because they work. In 2016, we nominated for president the two people who said the least about the program, and subsequently elected the one who promised to do nothing. Since the time that Donald Trump arrived in the White House, the program has added roughly $2 trillion in unfunded liabilities, despite the economy driving economic growth and record wages.

This political strategy presents a material risk for those who depend upon these checks; the passage of time is a programmatic cancer to Social Security. According to the SSA, shifting the passage of time accounts for nearly three-fourths of the system’s unfunded liabilities. In 2017 alone, that cost was roughly $500 billion. In another way to look at this dynamic, in the minute that you spend with this article, the program will create roughly $1 million in broken promises to future seniors.

It is completely understandable why politicians employ the politics of delay. It is less clear why the voters tolerate it.

Brenton Smith lives in Marietta, Ga., and writes on the issue of Social Security reform with work appearing in Forbes, MarketWatch, TheHill.Com and other nationally branded media.