Did We Commit Treason Yesterday? Trump Thinks So.

< war|200||>

Yesterday’s article faced up to the realization that the inconclusive war against Iran made our allies and adversaries view the U.S. as a nation in decline. It showed an Iran that had done serious damage to neighboring Arab states and has taken control of the Hormuz strait.

On Air Force One returning from China, David Sanger, a seasoned analyst for The New York Times, sent Mr. Trump into a tirade when he asked:

“What would the use be in repeating the bombing? You did it for 38 days and you did not get the political changes in Iran.”

Trump shot back,

“I got a total military victory. But the fake news, guys like you, write incorrectly. You’re a fake guy. We had a total military victory.”

He listed the military’s accomplishments — destroying Iran’s navy, air force, air defenses, radar, leadership.

“We’ve had a total victory, except by people like you that don’t write the truth…I actually think it’s sort of treasonous what you write, but you and The New York Times and CNN, I would say, are the worst. You should be ashamed. I actually think it is treason when you write, like, ‘They’re doing well militarily,’ [when] they have no navy, no air force, no anti-anything.”

That would seem to be us as well.

Trump had earlier said in a social media post that it was “virtual treason” when “fake news” reports “that the Iranian enemy is doing well, militarily, against us.” At a Florida event he said,

“We get the radical Left to say, we’re not winning , we’re not winning. They don’t have any military left. It’s unbel..it’s actually, it’s actually, I believe, it’s treasonous.”

Two weeks ago he said,

“If you see CNN, you’d think they’re winning the war. If you read The New York Times, it’s actually seditious, in my opinion.”

The military has done its damnedest against a so far implacable foe, but the media is expected only to accentuate the positive, to quote an old lyric.

At a March briefing three weeks into the war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was steamed at reporters in attendance:

“A dishonest and anti-Trump press will stop at nothing to downplay progress, amplify every cost, and call into question every step,”

He declared at a Pentagon news conference on April 8th that Operation Epic Fury had “decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come.” Hegseth laments the lack of a truly “patriotic press” in America.

Four days ago White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales stated that Iran’s military had been “crushed” and anyone who “thinks Iran has reconstituted its military is either delusional or a mouthpiece” for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Another spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, pronounced that,

“The Iranian regime knows full well their current reality is not sustainable, and President Trump holds all the cards as negotiators work to make a deal.”

we won

On March 9th, the war only 10 days old, Mr. Trump told CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much.” He has said we’ve already won the war, that Iran had accepted all his terms, and “frankly, maybe we’re better off not making a deal at all.” On April 12th in an interview by Maria Bartiromo on Fox News, Trump said about the war,

“I think this won’t be that much longer. They’re wiped out, Iran. They’re wiped out.”

Mr. Trump’s greater regret should be that the media has reported all of the positive things he has said, living in his own movie.

The Iran War Reveals an America in Decline

< war|283||>

America may be discovering that the disastrous war with Iran has reverberated far beyond Iran. After supposed “obliteration” of nuclear sites last June and, we are told, 13,000 strikes at Iranian targets this time, Iran shows no sign of yielding and has the upper hand with its control of the Hormuz Strait. Despite President Trump saying, “We’re the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world”, and about Operation Epic Fury, “It’s going to work very easily”, we have demonstrated that our military is less dominant than the world may have believed.

The article later discusses the four nation
axis out to supplant the U.S.as a world
superpower.

Early in the conflict, Defense Secretary Hegseth said Iran’s missile and drone programs are being “overwhelmingly destroyed”, that the joint U.S.-Israel attacks had “decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come”. The President described Iran’s arsenal as reduced to only about 18% or 19% of prewar level.

But it was soon reported that more than half of the country’s missile launchers are still intact as well as thousands of one-way attack drones. Just this week a worse report: A secret intelligence assessment told lawmakers that roughly 90% of Iran’s underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide are assessed to be “partially or fully operational”, and that Iran still has about 70% of its estimated 2,500 prewar missile stockpile. Worse of all, Iran has restored operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait.

inventory drawdown

The U.S. is looking at greatly diminished stockpiles of weapons. It has expended about 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles, over 40% of its original supply going into the war. It has sent off over 1,000 Tomahawk missiles – roughly “10 times the number the Pentagon procures in a year”, says a New York Times rundown. The 1,300 Patriot missiles we have fired to intercept incoming from Iran is two years of production. Add to that the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates of other interceptors depleted: half of high-altitude THAAD missiles, 25% of SM-6 and 50% of SM-3s interceptors, and around 25% of stealthy, armor-piercing air-to-surface JAASMs.

All manufacturers plan to ramp up production. This need has been foreseen for years, but met with inaction. It will take some three years to arrive at minimally needed production levels. That assumes Congress will appropriate the funds – the Defense Department is asking for $1.45 trillion in its budget request, and that does not include extra billions needed to cover the cost of the Iran war.

The U.S. has been the hegemon of the Gulf, turning back Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, feeding money and weaponry to Israel, taming Iran with the JCPOA agreement until Trump in his manifest ignorance tossed it in the trash. As Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh write at The Wall Street Journal:

”The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony. Take that away — and the freedom of navigation that goes with it — and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.”

The nature of warfare has become low cost missiles and drones that finds the U.S. still fighting with its hugely expensive aircraft carriers and fighter-bomber jets. The U.S. underestimated Iran’s, having no satellites of its own, ability to strike with pinpoint accuracy, which said that China and Russia are backing Iran with surveillance satellites and intelligence. In unprecedented strikes against fellow Muslim nations, Iran targeted the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and destroyed 17% of the world’s largest liquid natural gas export plant in Qatar that will take five years to bring back on line.

stalemate

Another wave of attacks by the U.S. against an unyielding Iran would leave America’s magazines nearly empty – stockpiles that were meant for a possible war with principal adversary China when it attempts a takeover of Taiwan, stockpiles that were already inadequate before the Iran depletion.

A desperate measure would be the destruction of Iran’s oil export hub at Kharg Island. The fear is that Iran would retaliate by destroying the counterpart facilities of all its neighbors, causing a worldwide energy catastrophe.

Other than diplomacy, that leaves the blockade, which ties up some 30 U.S. warships indefintely, and which Iran could withstand for another three to four months before facing economic collapse, in the CIA’s estimation. A U.S. official who spoke to The Washington Post thought Iran’s capacity to endure prolonged economic hardship is far greater than even the CIA estimate:

“The leadership has gotten more radical, determined and increasingly confident they can outlast U.S. political will and sustain domestic repression to check any resistance.”

Besides, a regime that killed a possible 30,000 protesters would not be concerned with subjecting the Iranian people with economic hardship. One possible breakthrough is that Iran is running out of storage capacity for the oil it is prevented from exporting. Tehran might relent faced with shutting in wells which can render them inoperable.

If the Strait is ever returned to normal, Iran knows it can hold the world energy markets hostage — resume tolls, choose which ships of which countries may pass through, impose demands at will, with those missile launchers along the shoreline poised to demand obedience.

less is less

The outcome is that Israel and the Arab nations see the U.S. as a diminished superpower tied by Iran in a Gordian knot it knows not how to unravel. The nations of the region have always counted on the U.S. to come to their aid and thwart any aggressor, but now they are dismayed to find their protector has come up short of its ability to do so, and will probably be disinclined to continue.

The U.S. military can do a lot of damage, but doesn’t look ahead how to finish. Think of Iraq. Think of Afghanistan. Now, another quagmire. Conservative journalist Christopher Caldwell in a New York Times opinion piece thinks Netanyahu got it right: He saw that prospects for enlisting U.S. firepower were dwindling, that “Mr. Trump’s gullibility provided Mr. Netanyahu with a last chance”. And now the Arab countries realize they must finally learn how to fight for themselves.

adversaries are watching

The axis of China-Russia-North Korea-Iran has undoubtedly become more emboldened by the U.S. inability to force Iran to capitulate while squandering so much of its ordnance in the process. China now questions whether the U.S. is capable of defending Taiwan. The Iran war has exposed that America cannot produce weaponry at a rate sufficient to wage a sustained conflict. Our aura of supremacy has faded.

China President Xi Jinping pressed Trump this week not to go through with the planned arms sale to Taiwan. Trump, in the first time for an American president, appears to have equivocated support for the beleaguered island nation. To not become a combatant in the defense of Taiwan is an argument for futility, but to abandon assistance altogether would be yet another America betrayal, casting adrift in the bargain our allies in the region: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia. China’s conquering of Taiwan would add the straits between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland to China’s control of the South China Sea. It would effectively dislodge the U.S. from the western Pacific.

The four countries support each other in their common animus toward the U.S. Iran has supplied Russia with its top-of-line drones for its war against Ukraine. China is bankrolling 60% of that war and has even “discreetly built supply lines going to drone factories in Russia”, according to British military. All of the four are fitted out for war with nuclear weapons and millions of men in arms. They pose an indomitable threat to a U.S. buried in debt exceeding $39 trillion and a president who has destroyed our alliances around the world, telling Europe it is on its own with NATO, leaving the U.S. isolated. Their overarching objective is to supplant America as the world’s leading country, to leave it isolated in this hemisphere. China intends to be the world’s only superpower hegemon and America no longer has the strength to stop it.

It’s Too Late to Fix Social Security

< entitlements|340||>

Ten years ago subscribers would have read on this page “What’s Going to Happen to Your Social Security?”. It told you that, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), starting in 2033 Social Security will be short of funds — unable then to pay full benefits should Congress fail to fix the shortfall.

In the ten years since, Congress has done nothing. This looming catastrophe — 40% of seniors depend on Social Security as their only source of income — yet Congress does nothing.

And so, just six years from now, the Social Security trust fund will run out of money by 2032, “resulting in benefit cuts of 22.5% in 2033”, says the CBO.

the mechanics

For many decades, the Social Security Administration (SSA) took in more from payroll taxes than it paid out as benefits to seniors and persons with disabilities. The difference was loaned in a constant stream to the government in exchange for IOUs with the growing deposits referred to as a trust fund.

As the bulge of the post-World War II baby boomer generation began to retire, by 2021 benefit outlays began to exceed tax receipts, and the SSA had to start calling in the IOUs from the government trust fund to cover the gap. The trust fund will be completely drained at some point in 2032 leaving, beginning the following year, only the income of payroll taxes, and that income will be 22.5% shy of what will be needed as benefits to be paid out to retirees. What to do?

fixes

There is no end to the ideas for adjustments that would put Social Security’s finances back on firm footing. Trouble is, it is now so late that none of them have enough time to pull in funding sufficient to fill the void. There’s a reason to know what fixes there are, nevertheless, to answer the question of whether Social Security can be saved in the long run, or whether it has become unworkable in its current form. A run through:

increase the payroll tax dollar limit.

Payroll is taxed at 12.4% (half paid by one’s employer) on the first $184,500 of income, a “cap” that is adjusted upwards every year for inflation. The most frequently suggested fix is to raise that limit to various proposed amounts — $300,000 perhaps, or $500,000. Some, such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, ask why any limit — why not tax all income, as we do for Medicare?

Because the Medicare tax is 2.9% versus 12.4% for Social Security is a reason for why not. Changes to Social Security should be equitable, and taking from an individual that high a percentage for every dollar earned is not. As it stands, someone making $184,500 or more is paying almost $23,000 in Social Security tax. Getting rid of the limit would be penalizing someone for doing well, charging $124,000 for every million dollars of income. Should that someone be required to pay this much to the benefit of someone else?

What could be done is to charge a much smaller percent — like Medicare’s 2.9% — on all income above this year’s $184,500. We’ve seen no consideration of that nor of increasing the cap; indeed the subject of Social Security never seems to come up in Congress at all.

increase the payroll tax percentage

One study says that if the 12.4% payroll tax rate were increased by 3.5 points, that would eliminate the income-to-outlay deficit. But it would be taking a sixth of an individual’s income when 12.4% is already a rough go, especially for those with low income and for those starting out who, even with a college education, are now having difficulty finding a job, are burdened by student loan payback, face outsize housing costs, unaffordable work hours childcare, etc. It would be asking that they pay still more when Gallup polling shows that only 37% of Americans aged 30 to 49 expect to receive any Social Security benefits at all when they retire. They’re mistaken, but it certainly shows the distrust in “the system”.

cut back benefits

For the Social Security system to be self-sustaining, trimming the benefits of well-off seniors must be on the table. The more one has, the less one needs from the government. Benefits must be reduced relative to beneficiaries’ other income and liquid assets. The young and middle-aged cannot go on being taxed to give money to those who have more than enough.

That would of course be greeted with howls from all but the most generous. “That money is owed to us! It’s time we got it back!”

But for this so-called means testing to be a solution, how would it be done? Would not the Social Security Administration need to gather income and asset data from every benefit recipient every year? Despairing of doing so, would it not lead to the SSA requiring every senior to submit a statement every year tallying income and liquid assets — on severe penalty for omissions or fraud — for the SSA to compute that year’s benefits? This is a huge administrative overhaul and ongoing burden.

And how would it not discourage people from working years longer if continued earnings were offset by reduced Social Security benefits? But moralistic suggestions like those that started this “cut back benefits” segment are tossed about without any follow through analysis of what they entail.

later eligibility age

When Roosevelt enacted Social Security in 1935, he established 65 as the retirement age when the average life expectancy in the United States was 63 years. Today, the average life expectancy in the U.S. is close to 79. Retirees who exceed that age are clearly receiving far more in benefits than the Social Security taxes they paid in — and that’s after adjusting all those payments for inflation and ascribing reasonable interest earnings to the money loaned to the government for decades.

It should be obvious that we cannot work for 40 to 45 years, paying an eighth of our income into the system, and then expect to receive a substantial payout for possibly 20 or 25 years thereafter. Funding what Elon Musk called a Ponzi scheme are our fellow citizens toiling away for those 40 to 45 years. With today’s greater longevity, this has gotten way out of balance.

Moreover, when Congress passed the 1935 Act, 42 people worked for each post 65-year-old retiree. By the start of the Covid pandemic, each retiree was being funded on the backs of only 2.7 workers.

If people weren’t eligible for Social Security until a later age, fewer years of benefits would save the government a vast amount. The Reagan administration came to the same conclusion when it faced the same problem we do now. In a law passed in 1983, the age of eligibility to receive full benefits based on work and payment history was raised from 65 to 67 — but ever so slowly in tiny increments across 44 years. Next year therefore is the first year when one must be 67 to sign up for full benefits. (One can begin drawing benefits at age 62 but at a reduced rate.)

The better health of people now living longer lives says they could work longer to support themselves, so shouldn’t the eligibility age be raised again, to 70 say? That assumes we can change a culture where employers discriminate against age, where younger workers are thought to be more productive, more willing to adapt to new ways, new technologies, and are cheaper.

You can see how sensitive an issue it was in 1983, such that the yearly age increase was made almost imperceptible. To prevent uproar would require a similarly attenuated age increase schedule, which, even if enacted right this minute, would have little effect on the problem looming six years out.

One retirement age doesn’t fit all

Pushing the retirement age later only worsens a serious inequity that must be fixed.

Those who worked physical jobs all their lives — sanitation workers doing heavy lifting, roofers nailing shingles, commercial fishermen hauling traps and nets — would be unable to go on working to the age of 70 to support themselves. They need Social Security relief sooner.

Moreover, those in the bottom income rungs for one or another reason — those physical jobs did physical damage, they weren’t able to afford proper healthcare, and so forth — have not seen their life expectancy rise as much as the more affluent with their physically undemanding jobs and money enough to pay for better healthcare. That says that with full benefit eligibility at 67, those at the bottom with shorter life expectancy will receive fewer years of Social Security benefits whereas those at the top income brackets could receive benefits for a couple of decades or more. It should be clear that the current arrangement is dramatically unfair. Those who worked physically demanding jobs should qualify for benefits sooner.

How would this work? Six years ago when this subject came up, a Let’s Fix This Country article invented the following scheme: Employers submitting payroll withholdings to the SSA would tag them with a 3-level rating — just three to keep it simple — characterizing the employee’s job — physically demanding to moderate (such as on one’s feet all day) to undemanding (desk jobs). Alongside one’s income history would be this life evolving point score, with those who spent most of their working years in physical work scoring highest and thus earning earliest full benefit eligibility, along a scale to those who scored lower for having done less or no physical work earning latest eligibility.

Or rather, we thought we had come up with an invention only to find that France had been concurrently developing just such a scheme, although elaborate, of job characteristics, awarding points for night work, variable shifts, repetitive tasks, exposure to extreme temperatures and noise, etc., that entitles workers to full pensions earlier. And not just France. Many countries have adopted and others are considering such schemes, classifying jobs according to what the French call pénibilité or arduousness. But not the U.S.

no easy fixes

As said, no one of these remedies nor all of them combined would fill the deficit coming in six years. We will probably see Congress vote to fill the 22.5% difference from general government revenue – and they’ll leave it at that, discovering, as we lay out here, that reform is too complicated for our dysfunctional, polarized Congress to deal with.

With general government funds used increasingly as the income/outlay gap widens, which it will if no fixes are enacted, there’s fear that a powerful, monied class with no stake in Social Security might be inclined to work for its destruction. Like an Albanian blood feud, there is the Republican element that, from one generation to the next, has never given up the goal of avenging FDR’s “socialist” scheme. Stephen Moore, most recently the chief economist of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has said that Social Security is “the soft underbelly of the welfare state”; “jab your spear through that” and you can undermine the whole thing.

It’s Too Late to Fix Social Security

< entitlements|305||>

Ten years ago subscribers would have read on this page “What’s Going to Happen to Your Social Security?”. It told you that, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), starting in 2033 Social Security will be short of funds — unable then to pay full benefits should Congress fail to fix the shortfall.

In the ten years since, Congress has done nothing. This looming catastrophe — 40% of seniors depend on Social Security as their only source of income — yet Congress does nothing.

And so, just six years from now, the Social Security trust fund will run out of money by 2032, “resulting in benefit cuts of 22.5% in 2033”, says the CBO.

the mechanics

For many decades, the Social Security Administration (SSA) took in more from payroll taxes than it paid out as benefits to seniors and persons with disabilities. The difference was loaned in a constant stream to the government in exchange for IOUs with the growing deposits referred to as a trust fund.

As the bulge of the post-World War II baby boomer generation began to retire, by 2021 benefit outlays began to exceed tax receipts, and the SSA had to start calling in the IOUs from the government trust fund to cover the gap. The trust fund will be completely drained at some point in 2032 leaving, beginning the following year, only the income of payroll taxes, and that income will be 22.5% shy of what will be needed as benefits to be paid out to retirees. What to do?

fixes

There is no end to the ideas for adjustments that would put Social Security’s finances back on firm footing. Trouble is, it is now so late that none of them have enough time to pull in funding sufficient to fill the void. There’s a reason to know what fixes there are, nevertheless, to answer the question of whether Social Security can be saved in the long run, or whether it has become unworkable in its current form. A run through:

increase the payroll tax dollar limit.

Payroll is taxed at 12.4% (half paid by one’s employer) on the first $184,500 of income, a “cap” that is adjusted upwards every year for inflation. The most frequently suggested fix is to raise that limit to various proposed amounts — $300,000 perhaps, or $500,000. Some, such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, ask why any limit — why not tax all income, as we do for Medicare?

Because the Medicare tax is 2.9% versus 12.4% for Social Security is a reason for why not. Changes to Social Security should be equitable, and taking from an individual that high a percentage for every dollar earned is not. As it stands, someone making $184,500 or more is paying almost $23,000 in Social Security tax. Getting rid of the limit would be penalizing someone for doing well, charging $124,000 for every million dollars of income. Should that someone be required to pay this much to the benefit of someone else?

What could be done is to charge a much smaller percent — like Medicare’s 2.9% — on all income above this year’s $184,500. We’ve seen no consideration of that nor of increasing the cap; indeed the subject of Social Security never seems to come up in Congress at all.

increase the payroll tax percentage

One study says that if the 12.4% payroll tax rate were increased by 3.5 points, that would eliminate the income-to-outlay deficit. But it would be taking a sixth of an individual’s income when 12.4% is already a rough go, especially for those with low income and for those starting out who, even with a college education, are now having difficulty finding a job, are burdened by student loan payback, face outsize housing costs, unaffordable work hours childcare, etc. It would be asking that they pay still more when Gallup polling shows that only 37% of Americans aged 30 to 49 expect to receive any Social Security benefits at all when they retire. They’re mistaken, but it certainly shows the distrust in “the system”.

cut back benefits

For the Social Security system to be self-sustaining, trimming the benefits of well-off seniors must be on the table. The more one has, the less one needs from the government. Benefits must be reduced relative to beneficiaries’ other income and liquid assets. The young and middle-aged cannot go on being taxed to give money to those who have more than enough.

That would of course be greeted with howls from all but the most generous. “That money is owed to us! It’s time we got it back!”

But for this so-called means testing to be a solution, how would it be done? Would not the Social Security Administration need to gather income and asset data from every benefit recipient every year? Despairing of doing so, would it not lead to the SSA requiring every senior to submit a statement every year tallying income and liquid assets — on severe penalty for omissions or fraud — for the SSA to compute that year’s benefits? This is a huge administrative overhaul and ongoing burden.

And how would it not discourage people from working years longer if continued earnings were offset by reduced Social Security benefits? But moralistic suggestions like those that started this “cut back benefits” segment are tossed about without any follow through analysis of what they entail.

later eligibility age

When Roosevelt enacted Social Security in 1935, he established 65 as the retirement age when the average life expectancy in the United States was 63 years. Today, the average life expectancy in the U.S. is close to 79. Retirees who exceed that age are clearly receiving far more in benefits than the Social Security taxes they paid in — and that’s after adjusting all those payments for inflation and ascribing reasonable interest earnings to the money loaned to the government for decades.

It should be obvious that we cannot work for 40 to 45 years, paying an eighth of our income into the system, and then expect to receive a substantial payout for possibly 20 or 25 years thereafter. Funding what Elon Musk called a Ponzi scheme are our fellow citizens toiling away for those 40 to 45 years. With today’s greater longevity, this has gotten way out of balance.

Moreover, when Congress passed the 1935 Act, 42 people worked for each post 65-year-old retiree. By the start of the Covid pandemic, each retiree was being funded on the backs of only 2.7 workers.

If people weren’t eligible for Social Security until a later age, fewer years of benefits would save the government a vast amount. The Reagan administration came to the same conclusion when it faced the same problem we do now. In a law passed in 1983, the age of eligibility to receive full benefits based on work and payment history was raised from 65 to 67 — but ever so slowly in tiny increments across 44 years. Next year therefore is the first year when one must be 67 to sign up for full benefits. (One can begin drawing benefits at age 62 but at a reduced rate.)

The better health of people now living longer lives says they could work longer to support themselves, so shouldn’t the eligibility age be raised again, to 70 say? That assumes we can change a culture where employers discriminate against age, where younger workers are thought to be more productive, more willing to adapt to new ways, new technologies, and are cheaper.

You can see how sensitive an issue it was in 1983, such that the yearly age increase was made almost imperceptible. To prevent uproar would require a similarly attenuated age increase schedule, which, even if enacted right this minute, would have little effect on the problem looming six years out.

One retirement age doesn’t fit all

Pushing the retirement age later only worsens a serious inequity that must be fixed.

Those who worked physical jobs all their lives — sanitation workers doing heavy lifting, roofers nailing shingles, commercial fishermen hauling traps and nets — would be unable to go on working to the age of 70 to support themselves. They need Social Security relief sooner.

Moreover, those in the bottom income rungs for one or another reason — those physical jobs did physical damage, they weren’t able to afford proper healthcare, and so forth — have not seen their life expectancy rise as much as the more affluent with their physically undemanding jobs and money enough to pay for better healthcare. That says that with full benefit eligibility at 67, those at the bottom with shorter life expectancy will receive fewer years of Social Security benefits whereas those at the top income brackets could receive benefits for a couple of decades or more. It should be clear that the current arrangement is dramatically unfair. Those who worked physically demanding jobs should qualify for benefits sooner.

How would this work? Six years ago when this subject came up, a Let’s Fix This Country article invented the following scheme: Employers submitting payroll withholdings to the SSA would tag them with a 3-level rating — just three to keep it simple — characterizing the employee’s job — physically demanding to moderate (such as on one’s feet all day) to undemanding (desk jobs). Alongside one’s income history would be this life evolving point score, with those who spent most of their working years in physical work scoring highest and thus earning earliest full benefit eligibility, along a scale to those who scored lower for having done less or no physical work earning latest eligibility.

Or rather, we thought we had come up with an invention only to find that France had been concurrently developing just such a scheme, although elaborate, of job characteristics, awarding points for night work, variable shifts, repetitive tasks, exposure to extreme temperatures and noise, etc., that entitles workers to full pensions earlier. And not just France. Many countries have adopted and others are considering such schemes, classifying jobs according to what the French call pénibilité or arduousness. But not the U.S.

no easy fixes

As said, no one of these remedies nor all of them combined would fill the deficit coming in six years. We will probably see Congress vote to fill the 22.5% difference from general government revenue – and they’ll leave it at that, discovering, as we lay out here, that reform is too complicated for our dysfunctional, polarized Congress to deal with.

With general government funds used increasingly as the income/outlay gap widens, which it will if no fixes are enacted, there’s fear that a powerful, monied class with no stake in Social Security might be inclined to work for its destruction. Like an Albanian blood feud, there is the Republican element that, from one generation to the next, has never given up the goal of avenging FDR’s “socialist” scheme. Stephen Moore, most recently the chief economist of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has said that Social Security is “the soft underbelly of the welfare state”; “jab your spear through that” and you can undermine the whole thing.