finagling the future

From MaxSpeak, You Listen!

excerpt:

The 2005 Social Security trustees report is due out next Wednesday. It is important that people recognize that the projections in the report are made by the trustees, not the professional staff of the Social Security Administration (SSA). And four of the six trustees are political appointees of President Bush (e.g. Jack Snow and Elaine Chao). Among the two “independent” trustees is Thomas Savings, who has been vigorously pushing the case for Social Security privatization in recent weeks.

It would be a very simple matter for these political appointees to alter one of the assumptions slightly (e.g. raise life expectancies, increase projected disability rates, or project a shortening of the average work year) to make the program appear less solvent.

Even moving forward the date of the projected shortfall by a single year (from 2042 to 2041) is likely to produce a flood of headlines about Social Security’s finances being weaker than we thought.

If anyone doubts that the Bush administration might engage in this sort of political manipulation of projections, remember, they deliberately withheld from Congress new projections by Medicare’s chief actuary of the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. These new projections showed the cost to be roughly one-third higher than the projections the administration had given Congress at the time it voted on the bill.

FULL POST: BEWARE THE TRUSTEES OF MARCH