April 06, 2005

White Cabinets!

Obviously I'm not going to endorse everything the Heritage Foundation writes about the Social Security Trust Fund. All the same, they've got an actual picture of the thing that's worth checking out. It's just a couple of white, locked filing cabinets stored in someone's office. Kind of funny.

By the by, I still wish some economist would release a study showing what a "default" on the Trust Fund would mean in terms of cold hard benefit cuts. By which I mean, how much would Congress need to slash benefits in 2021 or whenever so as not to have to pay back the Trust Fund bonds. Dean Baker has showed (pdf) what it would all mean in terms of transferring wealth from poor to rich, but class warfare isn't going to do liberals much good here. Basically, no one cares. So I want charts and graphs revealing the raw, brutal pain of it all. What age groups get burned? How big would the reductions need to be? Who gets left out on the street? Who eats garbage? Who moves in to the top bunk in little Timmy's room? That sort of thing.
-- Brad Plumer 7:58 PM || ||