Rational Action

Tonight I attended a debate about social security with my friends Matt and Karen (I doubt the names matter, but they could come in handy one day.) It was held at the NY Society for Ethical Culture (”They remind me of the unitarians,” said Karen), and the panelists were the honourable Paul Krugman, Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo, and Michael Tanner, a proponent of Social Security Choice. The moderator was the toolish Vered Mallon, who has, I believe, appeared on some NYC broadcast network.

We all basically agreed that this debate failed to realize its potential, and we all blamed Mallon for this failure. As she introduced the issue of Social Security, it became clear that she didn’t intend to make herself a disinterested mediator — rather, as she stumbled through her lines, she pronounced the concept of privatization DOA, lacking any semblance of support from the public . What a great way to start off a debate on social security’s future: the other side’s position is politically impossible! So there!

Tanner was the first to present, and he did a pretty good job of parrying back against Mallon. He corrected her claim that he worked for the “Conservative CATO institute”: “Actually, it’s the Libertarian CATO institute.” That Mallon got the terms confused is telling.

Tanner had two primary arguments against Social Security. First that, as an investment, it got people a terrible rate of return. Putting the money in the stock market would increase the return, limiting the need to raise payroll taxes or cut effective benefits. His second point was that, as a social program, it made us all “supplicants” to the government. By taking away money from workers and redistributing it to the elderly, it pitted one generation against another, and dehumanized both. These are, respectively, the Republican and Libertarian positions (They are not mutually exclusive.)

Tanner advocated for a system where there were both a safety net and a forced savings program. Social Security, he said, attempts to do both but ends up doing neither well. This argument is intuitive and defensible. But there is a problem with it, specifically with Michael Tanner’s decision to argue it: Libertarians do not want the government providing a safety net nor a forced savings program! We felt like he was being a bit dishonest, betraying his beliefs in order to argue what was palatable in a public forum.

Krugman, in his delightful (yes, delightful) geeky-academic style, responded to Tanner comprehensively, and was extremely convincing in his tone and his message. I particularly liked his claim that saying that “social security gets a bad return” makes no sense: social security is designed to provide a safety net against misfortunate and old age, not to maximize returns for its participants. Once you show how privatization diminishes that safety net, he said, support for Bush’s vague restructuring diminishes greatly. And while the system has been in place for the past 70 years, Krugman explained that very few people have complained about feeling like they were “supplicants” to the almighty Federal Government.

Joshua Micah Marshall provided some interesting analysis at the beginning, but he really didn’t fit into the debate. His leftish stance also made the debate into a three-on-one, since Vered Mallon felt inclined to moderate by effectively telling the audience just how wrong Tanner was.

Marshall explained Bush’s problems in pushing privatization by distinguishing between the interests of the administration and those of the Congressional Republicans. On one hand, Bush has a legacy to pursue, and changing social security will put him in the history books as one of the “Great Presidents.” On the other hand, for the Senators and Representatives, fundamentally tinkering with Social Security probably won’t net them any gains in the electorate, but it has the potential to make them lose big. The mindset is, “we’ve got a good thing going, and this plan just might screw it up.”

It seemed to me that Marshall would have been an excellent moderator for the debate. While we know he’s not as econ-minded as Krugman or Tanner, he certainly understands the issues at hand and would know how to ask tough questions to both sides. At least it would have given him a role and taken away Vered Mallon, who felt the need to ask, every so often, “So Joshua, how is [current topic of discussion] playing out in the public’s eye?”

In an act which made me want Marshall as her replacement even more, Mallon decided to interrupt Tanner’s closing statement to ask the question (paraphrased), “What about Abraham Lincoln, who talked about letting the government do what the people cannot?!” Well, Mr. Tanner?! Don’t you see?! Your libertarian ethic doesn’t jibe with our great big-government President, Abraham Lincoln! So there!

The debate really should have been about ideology. Even Mallon wanted it to head in that direction, as she asked while introducing the panelists, “Do we want our children to live in a country based on FDR’s New Deal, or Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America?” Yet Krugman and Tanner were stuck responding to questions which danced around pesky ideological differences — I suspect Mallon didn’t prepare to ask anything remotely stimulating because doing so would have precluded her view of Democrat-style liberalism as a foregone conclusion. Only in his closing statement did Krugman begin to explain his ideology of strong worker rights and a stable safety net. Meanwhile, Tanner was always on the defensive, and probably a bit dishonest to beliefs to boot.

I should note that it was wonderful to finally see Paul Krugman in person, and I liked Joshua Micah Marshall’s presentation a bit more than I like his blog. The debate just had a lot of untapped potential. The experience was fun, but it lacked soul.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 5:32 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.