The Unknown Ideal

Pensions & Investments had a dopey editorial in their January 9th issue lamenting the failure of Bush's idiotic and costly PR campaign to trash Social Security. Actuary David Langer calls the editors on their crap in a February 20 letter::

The truth is [Bush] exercised poor judgement in attempting to substitute an iffy privatization program for the well-established Social Security program. By doing so, he arbitrarily dismissed the positive experience of over 150 million workers and 47 million beneficiaries . . .

You complain, "Most opponents proposed no solution to the looming funding problems of the system." The widely published conclusion of my private actuarial studies is that there are no such problems and therefore nothing needs to be solved. My findings noted the trustees' projections in their reports for each of the years for 1992 to 2001 grossly understated actual 2002 assets and in their 1983 to 2005 reports their asset projections to the same future year (such as 2030) were not as close as one would expect. These projection comparisons raise questions about the credibility of their estimates.

The trustees, who are largely hostile to Social Security (a strange posture for a trustee), control the actuarial output in their reports, and it appears they "cooked" the 2% deficits --- if done slowly, this is easily unobserved.

P&I's editorial page cud chewers, like the Wall Street Journal's Bushbotic pontificators, have a regrettable tendency to ignore their own rag's good reporting (for instance an April 4th report on Robert Shiller's dissection of the Bush privatization scheme as a federalized margin-loan ripoff that would ensure huge deficits in the program) in the service of their infantile, misguided, and predigested pro-Bush opinions.