Op Ed On The SSI Marriage Penalty But It's More Complicated Than Presented

    There's an op ed in the New York Times on the marriage penalty in the SSI program which is preventing a couple who each have Down Syndrome from marrying. 

    The author completely misses or at least doesn't write about the strong possibility that the couple will soon be eligible for Disabled Adult Child (DAC) benefits, if they're not already. Marriage won't be a problem for DAC as long as both are eligible for DAC, which is itself crazy! DAC pays benefits on the Social Security account of a parent but the parent must be deceased or on benefits on their own account. Since the man with Down Syndrome is 44 and the woman is 40, their parents are at or near retirement age. Usually marriage ends DAC but not if you marry someone who is also eligible for DAC.

    I hate, hate, hate counseling someone newly entitled to DAC that they probably don't want to get married because it will probably end their DAC but it's my job. This may be the worst provision in the Social Security Act.

O'Malley Trashed

     Mark Warshawsky, of the right wing American Enterprise Institute, has written an op ed for the Baltimore Sun trashing Social Security's Commissioner, Martin O'Malley. Warshawsky blames O'Malley for asking for greater operating funds for Social Security. He says that the increasing number of people drawing Social Security benefits is large irrelevant to the agency's workload since it is mostly retirees who put little burden on the system. He says that the agency's real problem with getting its workload done is employees working from home and Social Security adding a new step in the process of disability review in 2019 and 2020. I don't know what new step he's talking about here. Of course, there's also the problem that in 2019 and 2020 O'Malley wasn't the Commissioner and Biden wasn't the President. Warshawsky goes on criticize what O'Malley is doing about overpayments and O'Malley's failure to adopt new regulations drafted while Republicans were in office to deny far more disability claimants. By the way, Republicans could have adopted those regulations but were no more eager than O'Malley to do so and for good reason. They're not justified by the data not to mention that all hell would break loose if they were adopted.

    By the way, not to knock the Baltimore Sun, which is a fine newspaper, but I'm betting that the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal passed on this piece before the Sun finally agreed to publish it.

Reactions To NYT Editorial On Raising Retirement Age

      Readers react to the recent New York Times editorial calling raising the Social Security retirement age.

     By the way, my response is: That’s so not happening!

It Never Stops

     There's an op ed in the New York  Times pushing for increasing Social Security's full retirement age. I think the authors never encounter anyone working at a job requiring standing all day other than employees at Starbucks. The people who clean their offices, repair their cars, care for their elderly relatives and mow their yards are invisible to them. They're under the illusion that everyone is like them and works in an office, which is not true. They don't realize that most people don't make it to full retirement age now and the major reason isn't laziness, but illness. People live longer but bad knees, bad backs, diabetes and many other health conditions still reduce people's ability to work at any job as they age. To say they can just apply for disability benefits is a "let them eat cake" solution. Do they have any idea how brutal Social Security's disability programs are?

    Politically, any further raise in full retirement age isn't going to fly, now or later. You can't win on this. Give it up.

Nice Idea, But ...

     From an article by Jack Smalligan and Chantel Boyens of the Urban Institute in The Hill concerning Social Security overpayments and how to reduce them:

... [W]e proposed that the Social Security Administration adopt a prospective eligibility and certification process. Under this approach, the agency would review a beneficiary’s eligibility and benefit level periodically and certify the beneficiary’s benefit level for a fixed period of time. If a beneficiary’s income changed, their benefits would be revised when they were due for recertification — but the agency would not be able to claw back past payments. ...

This is not a radical proposal: It is how other safety net programs, such as SNAP, already work. This approach also aligns with the Social Security Administration’s own practice for redetermining benefits for disability beneficiaries when they experience a medical improvement that might decrease their need for benefits. ...

    I suppose this would be nice but I don't know where the manpower for doing all those Title II redeterminations would come from. Well-meaning people such the authors of this piece cannot grasp the depth of the staffing crisis at Social Security.

We’re Not This Easily Fooled

      Yuval Levy of the right wing American Enterprise Institute has written a op ed piece for the New York Times that starts out with a beautifully phrased defense of Social Security and Medicare as “an act of intergenerational gratitude and generosity” that he regards as laudable and necessary but then ends by endorsing a plan to end Social Security as we have known it and substituting a universal benefit set just above the poverty line. He doesn’t even suggest the possibility of survivor and disability benefits. The right wing never discusses survivor and disability benefits. They don’t fit into their Social Security “reform” schemes. Levy goes on about how a universal benefit set just above the poverty line plan lifts a few seniors out of poverty. He doesn’t mention that this plan would mean a dramatic cut in benefits for most. His idea for a voluntary defined contribution plan on top of his version of “Social Security” hardly changes things. At best, that’s a retirement crap shoot compared with the actual “security” in Social Security not to mention that a vast number, probably most, workers wouldn’t make the voluntary contributions. 

     In its own way this may be the most disgusting piece of right wing anti-Social Security propaganda I’ve ever seen. He must think that we’re all fools. This idiotic plan would destroy Social Security and lead to riots in the streets. Levy can dress up his rhetoric with paeans about intergenerational obligations all he wants but his hostility to the very concept of Social Security is obvious. The plan is simple. Transform “Social Security” into something that is widely despised, then end it. That’s the aim of every right wing plan for Social Security “reform.”

Don't Panic!

     Paul Krugman has an excellent piece in the New York Times about why we should not panic about Social Security. You really should read the whole thing. Here are a few excerpts:

...  The thing about Social Security is that from the beginning it was designed to encourage misconceptions. It looks, on casual inspection, like a giant version of a private pension plan. ...

I’m pretty sure that it was set up to look like an ordinary pension fund because that made it politically easier to sell. But in reality, Social Security has never been run like a private pension plan. ...

For one thing, for the first half-century of the program’s existence it had almost no assets; in 1985, the trust fund was only large enough to pay around two months’ worth of benefits. So it has always operated mainly on a pay-as-you-go basis, with today’s payroll taxes paying for today’s retiree benefits, not tomorrow’s.

I often get mail from people claiming that this makes Social Security a Ponzi scheme. But it isn’t. It’s just a government program supported by a dedicated tax ...

I get a lot of mail from people saying that we should simply eliminate the upper limit on the payroll tax. That would certainly raise a lot of money. But bear in mind that there’s no fundamental reason Social Security has to be financed with payroll taxes — we only do it that way because back in 1935, F.D.R.’s advisers thought it would be a good idea to dress Social Security up to look like a private pension fund. ...

The other idea I hear a lot is that we should raise the retirement age — which has already been increased, from 65 to 67. After all, people are living longer, so they can work longer, right?

Well, some people are living longer. But one key point in thinking about Social Security is that the number of years you can expect to spend collecting benefits has become increasingly linked to the income you earned earlier in your life. ...

[C]alling for an increase in the retirement age is, in effect, saying that janitors can’t be allowed to retire because lawyers are living longer. Not a very nice position to take. ...

 

We Don't Talk About Social Security

    Ramesh Ponnuru, a fellow at the right wing American Enterprise Institute, has written an opinion piece for Bloomberg, giving advice to Republicans on how to handle Social Security issues during this election season. He makes it clear that he believes that Social Security must be cut. That's the first thing he talks about. However, he acknowledges that this is wildly unpopular and extremely unlikely to happen. Thus, he basically advises Republicans to shut up about Social Security.

    That's not completely reassuring. Republicans would be better advised to permanently forget about cutting Social Security. That will never, ever be anything other than political suicide for the Republican party. Never, ever. People like Ponnuru are part of the problem for Republicans. They keep up a slow, pointless drumbeat for cutting Social Security that makes some in the GOP think it is actually something that can and should happen and which gives many Americans good reason to believe that they can't trust Republicans on Social Security.

A Tale Of Two Newspapers

    From Rudy Boschwitz writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Social Security is a perennial crisis. Eighty-three percent of Generation X and 77% of millennials say they worry that the program will run out of money in their lifetimes, according to a June 2021 Harris poll for the Nationwide Retirement Institute. The latest report of the Social Security Trustees backs them up, finding that the Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund “will be able to pay scheduled benefits on a timely basis until 2034, one year later than reported last year.” That’s only 12 years from now. ...

I’ve updated my reform proposals:

• Raise the full retirement age further. ...

• Raise the early eligibility age. ...

• Change the way benefits are calculated for new recipients. [To cut benefits] ...

• Slow the growth of benefits for new and existing beneficiaries alike by changing the basis on which they’re indexed for inflation.  ...

• Withhold some Social Security COLAs from higher-income retirees. ...

• Give the COLA not annually but every 14 or 15 months using the 12 months of lowest inflation.

• Tax Social Security income for higher-bracket taxpayers, and give them the option to forgo all or part of their monthly payment. ...

• Raise the payroll tax by 0.1% of wages every other year—half from withholding, half for the employer’s contribution—for 20 years, a total tax increase of 1%. ...

    Social Security benefits are already taxed for high income recipients -- at least 85% of the benefits are taxed so that would be only a modest tax increase which would raise only a small amount of money. A rise in the FICA tax by 0.05%? That's hardly a token tax rise. No increase in the wage base. And all these cuts in benefits! That's what passes for a reasonable dialogue at Rupert Murdock's Wall Street Journal.

    From Michael Hiltzik writing for the Los Angeles Times: 

The army of perennial doomsayers about the financial condition of Social Security had to be a little crestfallen after the release of the program trustees’ annual report last week.

That’s because the report documented that the program’s condition had actually improved in the last year, if modestly.

More to the point, the trustees’ data underscored that the cost of maintaining Social Security benefits at current levels, or even expanding and improving them, is well within the capacity of the American economy at least to the end of this century, which is as far as the trustees looked. ...

This year, the trustees reckon, Social Security’s combined costs for retirees, those with disabilities and their dependents will come to about 4.98% of an economy valued at $25 trillion. Through the turn of the century, that percentage will peak at 6.18% in 2075, when GDP is estimated to be more than $208 trillion, then will fall to about 5.87% in 2100, when GDP is projected to be $574.5 trillion.

Is this “unaffordable”? Not by international standards. Some of our closest allies in the developed world spend much more than we do on public retirement and disability programs — Japan spends 10.5% of its GDP, France 15.3% and Germany 12.5%. ...

That’s the point of efforts in Congress to expand and increase Social Security benefits, as would be done by a bill dubbed Social Security 2100, introduced by Rep. John B. Larson and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, both Democrats from Connecticut.

The measure would increase benefits across the board by an average 2%, set a minimum retirement benefit at 25% above the federal poverty line and extend dependent benefits for students up to age 26 (the current cutoff is 19), among other improvements.

 On the revenue side, the bill would eliminate, over time, the existing cap on wages subject to tax, which is $147,000 this year — a level that in effect gives the 1% a pass on their obligation to support this universal system. (The payroll tax is 12.4% up to that wage cap, shared equally by employer and employee.) ...

More could be done to provide additional revenue for Social Security. One option would be to make all income, not just wages, subject to the Social Security tax, thus bringing the capital gains and dividends that make up a disproportionate share of income for the wealthiest Americans into the revenue stream.

That option doesn’t get talked about much, perhaps because politicians know that the wealthy would go to the mat to protect their capital gains from higher taxes. ...

    I'm with Hiltzik. The idea that we can't afford an increase in Social Security benefits is nuts. There is no justification for even talking about benefit cuts, especially a plan that talks of huge benefits cuts coupled with the tiniest increase in taxes for the wealthy.

 

 

Just The First Step

     Jonathan Stein and Katherine Vengraitis have written an op ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer to explain why "Reopening Social Security offices is just the first step to serving those in need."

The Case For Updating SSI

      Jonathan M. Stein and Chi-Ser Tran have written a piece for Common Dreams giving a strong argument for updating Supplemental Security Income. 

     I think there's good reason for hope that the budget reconciliation bill the Senate will consider later this year will contain positive SSI provisions, although probably not all that's really needed.

Saul Pens Op Ed For WSJ

      There is an op ed by ousted Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul in today's Wall Street Journal. Saul claims to have administered Social Security in a nonpartisan way. He believes he's a victim of employee unions who want to reopen contract negotiations.

     Saul is certainly correct that the labor unions are most responsible for his firing. However, they were only out to get him because of his highly partisan effort to destroy the unions. I don't know why he expected them to turn the other cheek or for a Democratic administration to ignore their complaints.

     The absurd thing about this op ed is that Saul's claim to have administered Social Security in a nonpartisan fashion is being published in what must be the most highly partisan Republican editorial page in the country. That's hardly a good way to prove your non-partisanship. Perhaps he offered it to other newspapers first but they weren't interested.

     The most important thing about this op ed may be the fact that it sounds as if Saul accepts that he's been fired. There's no talk about litigation. The litigation would have gone nowhere but it would still have been an annoyance.

Independent Agency?

     Mark J. Warshawsky, who was a Trump policy appointee at Social Security but who got forced out when the Biden Administration came in, writes for the Baltimore Sun about SSA's odd "independent agency" status. Surprisingly, I don’t fully disagree with him. The Social Security Administration can never be truly independent. It's too restrained by the budget process and the Office of Management and Budget's veto power over regulations. I think that cabinet status is long overdue for the agency. By a wide measure it's the largest and most consequential of the independent agencies. However, unlike Mr. Warshawsky I believe the Commissioner should serve at the pleasure of the President. A highly partisan figure like Andrew Saul (or Mark Warshawsky) should never be serving at Social Security, much less during an Administration he's at odds with.  Let's end this "independent agency" farce. It hasn't worked.

Devastating Effects From Field Office Closures

      From an op ed by Jonathan Stein and David Weaver in the New York Times:

At a time when the pandemic has hit the disabled and elderly the hardest, they also face the erosion of a critical income lifeline, Supplemental Security Income (S.S.I.). The program has collapsed during the pandemic: From July to November 2020, the Social Security Administration awarded benefits to about 100,000 fewer individuals compared with the same period last year. In July 2020 the agency distributed just 38,318 new awards — the fewest in 20 years of available data.

At this rate, more than 230,000 low-income disabled and elderly Americans will miss out on vital cash benefits and access to health care (via Medicaid, which S.S.I. recipients generally qualify for) in one year. ...

The immediate cause of this ongoing crisis is the closure of Social Security’s network of 1,200 field offices during the Covid-19 pandemic. Generally, the agency does not take online applications for S.S.I. benefits, leaving these disabled and elderly people with one primary service option: calling its overburdened general phone line. Further, the field offices were a source of information and assistance for millions of Americans, many challenged by cognitive, learning, language and poverty-related issues. ...

Even before this crisis, two-thirds of those who completed the initial 23-page application for the program failed to qualify under the current burdensome disability and means tests. ...

Social Security executives are aware of the existing and pandemic-era challenges and are making good-faith efforts to address them, including a rare and laudatory engagement with claimants’ advocates. But these important steps by the agency are undermined by an effort to close the doors to hundreds of thousands of claimants during a time of economic collapse and labor market contraction. ...

The S.S.I. elderly and disabled await Jan. 20, and a Biden White House that understands their plight.

Union Argues For Increased Telework But Is The Argument Founded In Reality?

     Ralph de Juliis, the head of the union that represents most Social Security employees, has penned an op ed in the Baltimore Sun calling for Social Security to continue extensive telework even after the end of the Covid-19 emergency. He says:

... Social Security employees have found that not only are they able to efficiently work from home, they can provide an even better public service in a time of increased uncertainty. Before the implementation of telework, our field office employees had a 70% response rate to claimants, a rate that has increased to 95% in our remote work world. ...

     What does a 95% response rate mean? Field office service during this emergency has been better than I expected but I certainly haven't seen improvement over the baseline.

     He also says:

.....We also propose allowing employees in our telecommunication centers to work 100% remotely. The work of our telecommunications professionals already takes place over the phone, and we saw an increase in productivity among these employees during our 2013-2019 telework program. ...

     Yet, Social Security is reporting that the wait time for its 800 number went up to 90 minutes after telework was resumed! That does not sound like an increase in productivity.

"We Don’t Need Fewer Entitlements For The American Middle Class. We Need More."

     From Lawrence Summers, former President of Harvard, former Treasury Secretary and former economic advisor to President Obama, writing for the Washington Post:

Few economic virtues are more universally applauded than thrift.

Going back at least to Ben Franklin, Americans have equated greater thriftiness with greater worthiness. Progressives decry the limited saving and wealth accumulation of middle-income families ... Conservatives applaud thrift as an aspect of self-reliance and propose ideas such as health-savings accounts to help families prepare for emergencies. Moderates believe universal social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which they label as entitlements, should be modest or even curtailed out of fiscal prudence.

In the current economic context of extremely low interest rates, however, these views are more wrong than right. The federal government should provide more, not less, social insurance. If it did, the result would be reduced inequality, a more secure middle class and a stronger economy.

The real challenges that keep middle-class families up at night are retirement, economic dislocation and supporting their children as they go to college and then buy a first home. These ... are not best met by personal saving. Rather, a generous and well-functioning society in which Social Security meets retirement needs, appropriate unemployment and wage insurance programs cushion economic shocks, adequate public funding holds down college costs, and health insurance has generous coverage would greatly reduce the need for most households to save.

It is highly inefficient to rely on individual saving rather than universal public programs to deal with life’s contingencies. Social Security, for example, pays out close to 99 percent of the revenue it collects in benefits. In contrast, individuals saving for retirement or the proverbial rainy day can over a lifetime dissipate as much as 20 percent of their savings in commission payments to financial institutions. Similar, and probably greater, efficiencies are associated with government provision of other forms of insurance.

There is the further point that self-reliance is an especially implausible way to deal with catastrophes such as disability or the loss of a good-paying job without the availability of an alternative. Genuinely preparing for such contingencies would involve building up a large nest egg at a substantial cost in terms of current consumption. Meanwhile, the feared contingencies never arise for most people. That’s why pooling risk through insurance is the best strategy. ...

We don’t need fewer entitlements for the American middle class. We need more.

Union Leader Castigates Saul

     From an op ed in the Baltimore Sun by Ralph de Juliis, head of the union local that represents most Social Security employees:

... While the president has blustered and obfuscated through his first term, Trump-appointed Cabinet officials have waged a war on the federal workforce that has undermined our productivity, driven down morale and villainized the very employees who show up every day to serve the American people. ...  

Now under threat is the Social Security Administration thanks to administration decisions that will ultimately harm employees and drive up wait times for Social Security recipients under the guise of good public relations. Social Security Administrator Commissioner Andrew Saul announced that the agency would extend office hours to the public on Wednesday afternoons in more than 1,100 field offices around the country. He followed this announcement with a promise to hire 1,100 new employees, claiming that the new hires would directly impact the efficacy of our field offices. ...

But this fallacy falls apart when one takes a closer look. Only a fraction of those new hires will go toward telecommunications centers, and none to the field offices, which are already severely understaffed. On top of that, the Social Security Administration has experienced a yearly attrition rate of nearly 4,000 employees over the past four years, meaning the hiring numbers that are promised aren’t exactly what they seem. The most insidious part of Commissioner Saul’s announcement is the fact that he has placed a hiring freeze on the agency, which is still in effect, preventing the agency from replacing the workforce we’ve lost to the private sector, retirement or other opportunities.

Our field offices had coped with this staff shortage by setting aside time on Wednesday afternoons for employees to address and finish open claims. By opening up these hours to the public, employees will be inundated by new cases, increasing the backlog and elongating wait times for the American public. While Commissioner Saul takes a victory lap, public servants around the country only see their workload increasing. The result is worker morale plummeting by the day. ...

Social Security employees deserve a leadership that understands the issues we face and is dedicated to our mission to provide the best possible service to the American people. That leadership doesn’t exist in Commissioner Saul. That’s why we call on Congress to hold hearings on the agency under Commissioner Saul’s tenure, reopen our contract, and bring the Social Security Administration back to the bargaining table.

     It's not just me asking why the House Social Security Subcommittee hasn't held even one oversight hearing in this Congress.

They Never Give Up

     The right wing hasn't given up on privatizing Social Security. Here's a recent Wall Street Journal op ed calling for giving people the right to divert their FICA taxes into a private account, which would, of course, quickly destroy funding for Social Security benefits. At least, I think that's what this incoherent proposal amounts to. These proposals never go into details because their authors never bother to understand how Social Security works. They hate Social Security and want the government to funnel money to them.

Good Luck With That Plan

     From an op ed in the Washington Examiner, a right wing newspaper:

... It's time for Washington to cut millennials a deal and give us a chance to get off the ship before it sinks, saving our wallets and the nation's ballooning deficit. Congress ought to pass a Social Security buyout to anyone who wants it.

The government has promised Social Security payments to Americans who have spent a lifetime paying into the system. Given the structure of the program, that requires taxes from Americans working today. A buyout that required Americans to pay double or triple the amount of Social Security taxes for a finite amount of time in exchange for being released from the program for the rest of their lives could circle the square. Current retirees would be funded by increased Social Security taxes on Americans taking the buyout, and millennials could be saved from a lifetime of paying into a broken system....

When Members Of The Ways And Means Committee Speak, Social Security Needs To Pay Attention

    There's an op ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer from an attorney with Community Legal Services, which has a distinguished history of Social Security advocacy, and two members of the House Ways and Means Committee, denouncing the long appeal backlogs at Social Security and the reimposition of the reconsideration step in Pennsylvania.