A Demographic Tsunami
By Ralph Reiland

"Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy. Social Security. It's Time for E*Trade." That's the message on a San Francisco billboard. It's saying that stock trading on the Internet provides a better shot at a secure retirement than depending on the government.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., less enthusiastic about the market, warns that President Bush's plan to allow workers to privatize and invest a portion of their Social Security taxes "turns a guaranteed benefit into a guaranteed gamble."

She's right about the "guaranteed gamble" part. Most things are a gamble. Picking a major in college is a surefire gamble. So is getting married or switching jobs or jumping out of a perfectly good airplane and hoping the parachute isn't on the blink.

One might even say that not gambling in life is the equivalent of death. And even then we're betting on whether we're going up, down or nowhere. Or as Edmund Burke put it, "Gambling is a principle inherent
in nature."

Conversely, Pelosi is wrong about the "guaranteed benefit" in Social Security. In Flemming v. Nestor, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that we don't have a legal right to a dime in Social Security benefits. Payroll taxes, said the court, are just that--taxes, not "contributions" to an assured or fail-safe program of defined benefits.

In the eyes of the law, Social Security retirement checks are no different than the subsidy checks that farmers get for not growing wheat. Either set of payouts can be reduced or eliminated by a vote in Congress. Simply stated, Social Security is a legislated and changeable entitlement, like food stamps, and not a contract.

What is guaranteed about Social Security is that it's facing a demographic tsunami. In 1940, there were 42 workers per retiree. The ratio today is down to 3-to-1 and it'll be 2-to-1 before today's
20-year-olds are eligible for Early Birds.

More young immigrants would help, but a recent report by Stuart Anderson, a senior official at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in President Bush's first term, concludes that a hefty 33 percent jump in immigration over the next 75 years would only trim Social Security's impending multitrillion-dollar deficit by 10 percent. More domestic babies would also help, but there aren't even
enough evangelicals to turn the demographic picture around.

The first well-publicized crunch comes when today's 20-year-olds are 33 and the amount of money collected per year in payroll taxes begins to fall short of what's needed for annual benefit outlays.

The second moment of truth, according to the 2004 Annual Report of the Social Security and Medicare boards of trustees, comes when today's 20-year-olds are 57 and there's nothing left of the "trust fund"
reserves.

The problem is that tomorrow's workers might well not be able or willing to erase the red ink in a system where the number of retirees is projected to increase by 100 percent by 2030, to 70 million, while
the number of workers is expected to rise by only 20 percent.

As it already stands, a median-income American family is paying more in taxes than it spends on food, clothing and medical care combined. In 1955, for instance, the typical one-earner family paid 17 percent of
its income in taxes. Today, that's more than doubled to 38 percent.

Things were cheap when Franklin Roosevelt succeeded in pushing the Social Security plan through Congress in 1935. The maximum tax was 2 percent on a worker's first $3,000, or $5 per month. Benefits didn't commence until age 65, and life expectancy at birth was 58 for men and 62 for women. Among men who survived to age 21, only about half managed to make it to 65.

Today, it's not so easy to keep the system in the black. With just the Medicare program, for example, TAE editor in chief Karl Zinsmeister pointed recently to how the program's liability costs have mushroomed: "Do you realize that taxpayers will pay $9,000 per senior citizen next year for Medicare, a figure rising every year at double-digit rates? As a result, Medicare's unfunded liabilities over the next lifetime come to a staggering $62 trillion. That's the equivalent of a hidden half-million-dollar mortgage piled on the back of every household in the United States."

All told, we're way past the point where doing nothing is the best answer.

Ralph Reiland in an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.