McCain has been in Congress for about three decades. You would think in all that time he would have learned a little something about Social Security. Apparently not.
According to McCain it’s a disgrace that Social Security is a pay as you go system. Here he is talking about it:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugN8Rn5baqM[/youtube]
Now, you would think from listening to him that somehow the fact that current beneficiaries are paid from current receipts is a development of recent vintage. In fact, it’s a basic principle of the system. It was designed to function that way. So McCain is saying one of two things. The first is that he wants to put an end to Social Security. The alternative is that he is so uninformed that he doesn’t even have a basic understanding of how the system works. Personally, I vote for the latter. His reference to the Reagan era overhaul tends to prove that, since that legislation, of which he apparently improves, did nothing to change the basic system, and it remains the basic legislation by which the system is funded.
The reality is that McCain’s ignorance about this issue is of a piece with his basic ignorance about just about everything else. This is the guy who can’t tell a Sunni from a Shiite, though he is supposed to be an expert on security issues.
McCain’s fact free approach to his “straight talk” will, of course, be ignored by the media.
It is worth remembering, however, that McCain’s statement is not entirely correct. Today’s workers are not only paying the benefits for today’s retirees. They are also buying government bonds to pay a portion of their own benefits when demographic realities will make it too difficult for working people to carry the full load (this is the Reagan compromise that McCain lauds). Bush and Congress have taken that borrowed money and squandered it, and the Republicans, apparently including McCain, don’t want to pay it back. One way to achieve that purpose is to get young people to ask planted questions like that posed by the lady in the video. The idea is to drive a wedge between the generations.
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