Obama's Soothing - And Toxic - Opiate About Entitlements

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07/14/2015 06:43 PM ET

 

Delusions: President Obama assured an audience of seniors Monday that there is "no crisis" in Social Security and Medicare, and that the cash will always be there. Call it the opiate of the Democrats. Just don't call it reality.

Speaking at the annual White House Conference on Aging, the president had nothing but spoonfuls of sugar for the attendees on the fiscal condition of Social Security and Medicare.

"Now, we're often told that Medicare and Social Security are in crisis. We hear that all the time. And usually, that's used as an excuse to try to cut spending on those bedrock programs. But here's the truth. Medicare and Social Security are not in crisis, nor have they kept us from cutting our deficits by two-thirds since I took office," the president said.

He didn't go into details, and probably for good reason: The numbers don't support his claim.

Social Security is going broke faster than anyone expects, with the so-called trust fund of IOUs that finances the entitlement forecast to run out in 2033. That's not from some right-wing think tank, it's from the Social Security Administration itself. Social Security's disability fund goes bust in 2016. Medicare, according to the SSA, runs out of other people's money by 2030.

Adding to the unsettling picture is that the SSA missed its April deadline for reporting the 2015 condition of its trust funds again as it has in recent years, now that the news is all bad. It still hasn't reported anything.

Researchers at Harvard and Dartmouth report that the SSA's actuarial forecasts have consistently overstated the funds' solvency since 2000 — which means that as bad as the SSA numbers look, the reality is worse.

"These biases are getting bigger, and they are substantial," Gary King, co-author of the studies and director of Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, told USA Today last May. Social Security "is going to be insolvent before everyone thinks."

Yet as the problem gets bigger and closer every year, there's a strange effort to deny a problem at all and lull us into a sense of complacency. All's well, they tell us.

The Republicans aren't much better. This year's presidential candidates have said little about the coming train wreck, with none offering any breakthrough proposals. In 2012's election, by contrast, both Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich suggested a Chile-style private savings plan, something that pollster researcher Kristen Soltis Anderson, in her new book "The Selfie Vote," found to be a potent issue for presidential contenders to advocate to win over younger voters.

But neither party is discussing it. The only thing that's certain is that attempting to sweep it under the rug, as President Obama just did, will only ensure a bigger, more painful problem when the crisis arrives.

Who does that serve?

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