Ezra Klein On The “Pain Caucus”
As I am also a member of that magical demographic, “the young,” I’m just going to reprint the bulk of his post. It’s a point which deserves to be shouted from the rooftops again and again until we’re all hoarse.
These are the benefit cutters and means testers and age raisers — folks who loudly champion a set of painfully austere entitlement reforms despite the fact that the government’s fiscal worries are a) not about Social Security and b) driven by health care spending, not Medicare promises. It is, in other words, an aesthetic posture more than a policy argument, but it’s utterly pervasive in Washington.
Take Robert Samuelson’s column today, exhorting the young — and hey, kemosabe, I am the young — to “get mad” over the unsustainable course of government spending and start picketing outside AARP (I’m not kidding, that’s actually one of Samuelson’s suggestions). “You face a heavily mortgaged future,” says Samuelson. “You’ll pay Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers. The needed federal tax increase might total 50 percent over the next 25 years…There are three basic ways of reducing the costs of Social Security and Medicare: increase eligibility ages; trim benefits; and require recipients to pay more for their Medicare benefits (higher premiums, co-payments or deductibles).”
Number one: There is no such program as SocialSecurityandMedicare. It doesn’t exist. There is Social Security, which is a pension program predicted to endure manageable cost growth in the foreseeable future. It poses no threat to the federal budget. Claims that it is in crisis are a lie. Claims that it requires sharp cuts in benefits or hikes in the retirement age are a lie.
Then there is Medicare. Medicare is a trickier problem. Because it’s not the problem: The American health care system is. As Henry Aaron, the centrist Brookings health care expert has testified, our fiscal threats “derive entirely from projected increases in national health care spending, not from problems peculiar to government health care or entitlement spending.” As such, “materially slowing the growth of Medicare and Medicaid apart from general health system reform is impossible.” In other words: Raising the eligibility age or cutting benefits does not solve the problem. It does not solve the problem for the private sector, of course, but it does not solve the problem for the public sector, either. The problem is driven by rapid growth in health care costs. If you do not arrest that growth — in both the public and private sectors — and you instead raise the eligibility age for Medicare, you will just have to do it again. And again. And again. When wise men like Samuelson write columns arguing that the government must cut benefits or raise eligibility, they are arguing for doing nothing about the central fiscal problem facing the government. And frankly, on behalf of my generation, I resent that.
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