CATO To Social Security Recipients: Drop Dead

      Jeffrey Mirin of the right wing Cato Institute looks at the possibility of the Social Security trust funds running dry and benefits being cut by more than 20% and yawns. His view is any increase in taxes is quite out of the question so let's do nothing and let nature take its course. As he says, "the ideal Social Security system would have much lower benefits, if any."

Americans Have Ideas On “Saving" Social Security

      From a press release issued by Nationwide Insurance:

Despite widespread political divisions, Americans across political party lines largely agree that Social Security needs reform. According to the Nationwide Retirement Institute's 2026 Social Security Survey, 80% of U.S. adults who receive or expect to receive Social Security say the system needs to change, including 82% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans.

The agreement extends to potential solutions. The same three proposals were ranked as the most popular approaches to strengthening Social Security among both Democrats and Republicans:

1. Increase taxes on higher earners to increase funding: 51% overall, including 56% of Democrats and 43% of Republicans
2. Increase funding through taxes paid by employers: 42% overall, including 44% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans
3. Reduce or eliminate benefits for individuals with incomes above a certain threshold: 38% overall, including 38% of Democrats and 37% of Republicans. 

Miss Pearl

      Since this is a slow news day I thought I would write about something of interest to me,  regional differences in English usage.

    I started hearing a few clients refer to me as Mr. Charles when I was in my 40s. This usage was not unfamiliar to me. I particularly remember a woman in my neighborhood growing up in Winston-Salem who was always referred to as Miss Pearl but she was not the only one who received this honorific, and, yes, it was intended as an honorific. I always understood this usage as one denoting increasing age, respect and affection. Miss Pearl qualified in every way. I was not completely happy being referred to as Mr. Charles since it indicated I was getting older but I knew I was being referred to with affection and respect so I couldn’t complain. I have no problem with it now.

     I’ve always thought of this as a Southern thing and particularly common among African Americans but I’ve never known for sure. I do know it’s less common than it used to be but that may be because I now live in Raleigh, a community that has received a huge influx of people from other parts of the country and the world. As an example, Raleigh’s largest suburb is Cary. The joke locally is that Cary is an acronym standing for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees! The last person who called me Mr. Charles was a young woman wearing a hijab.

     Anyway, I’d be interested in knowing if this is a usage you’re familiar with. Who uses it? How is it used? Is it as common as it used to be?

Hiltzik On Larson’s Defeat

      Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, himself a big friend of Social Security, has a column out bemoaning John Larson’s defeat in the primary race to continue representing his Connecticut district in the House of Representatives. Larson has been the Chairman and now Ranking Member of the House Social Security Subcommittee. There is much to admire in Larson’s career. He has certainly been a huge friend to Social Security. However, while there are strong explanations, Larson has been quite ineffective in passing Social Security legislation.

SSA Seeks Information On AI

      The Social Security Administration is seeking information to examine “how to better leverage AI and agentic AI capabilities across SSA programs, workforce, and infrastructure.” There’s no additional detail about what they’re seeking so I have to think they’re at a very early stage. 

     This is consistent with past Republican, and sometimes Democratic, behavior — an eagerness to spend billions of dollars on contractors accompanied by a great unwillingness to spend money on personnel to make the system work.

A Poll

 

The Judge Lottery

      From  The Judge Lottery: Within-Office Disparities in Social Security Disability Adjudication, Fiscal Year 2025 by Drew Patterson:

Description

A claimant who appeals a denied Social Security disability claim is assigned, essentially at random, to an administrative law judge (ALJ) within a hearing office. Using the Social Security Administration's public ALJ disposition files for fiscal year 2025, this paper measures how much that assignment matters. Among 1,023 judges who issued at least 100 decisions in a single office (317,462 decisions in total), allowance rates ranged from 8.8 percent to 92.8 percent. The disparity is not primarily geographic: 73 percent of the variance in judge allowance rates lies within hearing offices rather than between them, and in the median office the gap between the most and least generous judge is 32.6 percentage points. A simulation in which every judge in an office decides identical case pools shows that sampling noise can account for only about 5 percent of the observed within-office variance. Judge allowance rates are also highly stable across years (r = 0.93 between FY2025 and FY2026 year-to-date), which rules out one-off docket composition as an explanation. Office-level workload measures explain little of either the level or the spread of allowance rates, and a state-month panel of initial-level determinations from 2015 to 2026 shows only a small association between backlog pressure and allowance rates. The judge draw remains one of the largest observable determinants of whether a disability appeal succeeds, a decade after the agency's quality-review reforms. Includes full analysis code and the exact SSA public data snapshots used. …

I’m Back

      I’m sorry that I was unable to approve comments on this blog for the last day. Blogger is quite reliable until it isn’t. For about 24 hours it professed not to know me. I’ll have something substantive to post tomorrow.