> The president's concern about fiscal child abuse is well placed.
Now there's a nasty phrase -- "fiscal child abuse." Seems a bit callous toward those who endure actual abuse. Is it my imagination, or has the language of politics become much nastier of late? How might one measure that?
> So the trillion-dollar question is: Who will pay this gigantic and > growing bill? Will it be we adults or our kids, including kids not yet > born?
I'd like to suggest a navigational metaphor for why smaller changes, rather than drastic ones (of the sort implied by "fiscal child abuse" and similar hyperbole) are appropriate.
Imagine you're piloting an airplane and find that you are off-course. Your destination is directly east, 90 degrees and you find that you're on a course of 80 degrees. How much of a course correction is needed?
The answer is, "it depends." If you are 10 miles from your destination, you need to make a big correction, quickly. If you are 500 miles away, you need a small correction. In fact, if you make a big correction when you're far away, you're wasting fuel and time.
Hardly anybody is arguing that Social Security is headed in the right direction. There isn't even much disagreement about how far off-course it is. The arguments focus more "weather" forecasts -- how much further off-course might shifting economic winds put us?
If there is a crisis today, then a big correction is needed now. But if the crisis is many years away, as virtually every analysis says, then there is no need for major change.
Making any sort of big correction today will be mostly wasted effort (in terms of its benefit to Social Security). At the same time, failure to make a small correction today will mean that we'll either have to make a bigger one in the future or we'll completely miss our target. In an airplane, the latter can result in running out of fuel and making what pilots call an "unplanned arrival."
We could argue about the definitions of large and small course corrections, but the main point I'm trying to make is that those who choose to call this a crisis imply to me that they are arguing for a drastic course correction. I'm much more inclined toward those whose language implies that they understand that smaller changes today can have a dramatic impact on where we arrive decades from now.
And I'm going to ignore those who use guilt trips about child abuse, robbing from future generations, and the silly idea that if I don't agree that it's a crisis, I thereby favor doing nothing at all.
Nick
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