Social Security, Long May It Wave

Dancing on the Third Rail . . .

Used to be, our principal social insurance programs — Social Security and Medicare — were thought be politically untouchable, a “third rail” of politics. Well, they’re being touched now, not to say molested. Budget rules binding the Congress make overt benefit cuts difficult to enact, merely as a matter of procedure. The way around this is proving to be reductions in administrative personnel that do not enjoy the same protections.

We are getting a dress rehearsal in another field as well — the proposed evisceration of the Medicaid program embodied in the MAGA House of Representatives’ pending budget resolution. I hit on one angle of this myself — the use of a block grant in disguising future benefit reductions. Medicaid is big in red states, including in myriad rural districts that went big for Trump. Will they swallow a big cut that gores their own ox?

In all these cases we are getting a reprise of economic nonsense about the national debt that I have been fighting for my entire career. Two other texts are Robert Eisner’s Social Security, More Not Less and Dean Baker’s and Mark Weisbrot’s Social Security, the Phony Crisis.

Trump wants to free up money without jumping up the deficit to pay for tax cuts and his jihad against immigrants. The latter already entails deportation to isolated camps in nations led by dictators bending the knee to the U.S.

Something similar is in prospect for the Internal Revenue Service. The upshot is that if you have any reason to ask a question about your benefits or taxes, any kind of non-standard issue, say by calling up the IRS or SSA, or by visiting a field office, you will encounter more serious obstacles than in the past, which were bad enough. Anyone visiting an SSA field office knows you have to get up early, bring a book, and be ready to sit for hours before you can speak to someone.

I had this experience years ago with respect to my wife’s Medicare. Medicare still owes me money, but I long ago gave up any hope of getting it back. The technology, whether it’s the infernal, automated phone answering systems, dysfunctional “FAQ” sections, or dumb chatbots on websites, is a way to hold clients at bay, not to serve them — very much like in private industry. “Your call is very important to us.” Yeah, right. It’s outsourcing, thanks in no small part to a campaign launched under the Clinton Administration and Al Gore’s farkakte “reinventing government” rubbish.

As Senator Daniel Moynihan pointed out decades ago, insofar as people accept the claim that Social Security “will not be there” for them, it will be easier to start hacking away at it.

The projected workforce reductions are a prelude. The imminent victims of Medicaid benefit and eligibility cuts are the moral test posed by Rabbi Hillel.