This is truly incredible, and yet totally unsurprising. The very serious folks have been telling us that we must take the advice of the Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission and solve the (nonexistent) social security problem. They pretty much consistently ignore the fact that the Commission never issued an official report, and that the only recommendations were those made by the chairmen, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. The latter is a self interested banker, while the former is, as it turns out, colossally stupid, uninformed and/or disingenuous.
It doesn’t take a lot of brains to understand the concept of life expectancy. Simpson has been going around saying that no one collected social security back in 1940 because life expectancy was only 65, so no one lived to collect benefits. Even putting aside the fact that life expectancy is a norm, anyone with half a brain can see that it is not life expectancy at birth that matters; it’s life expectancy at retirement. But Simpson can’t see that, and when it’s explained to him, he still can’t understand it, or pretends not to:
HuffPost suggested to Simpson during a telephone interview that his claim about life expectancy was misleading because his data include people who died in childhood of diseases that are now largely preventable. Incorporating such early deaths skews the average life expectancy number downward, making it appear as if people live dramatically longer today than they did half a century ago. According to the Social Security Administration’s actuaries, women who lived to 65 in 1940 had a life expectancy of 79.7 years and men were expected to live 77.7 years.
“If that is the case — and I don’t think it is — then that means they put in peanuts,” said Simpson.
Simpson speculated that the data presented to him by HuffPost had been furnished by “the Catfood Commission people” — a reference to progressive critics of the deficit commission who gave the president’s panel that label.
Told that the data came directly from the Social Security Administration, Simpson continued to insist it was inaccurate, while misstating the nature of a statistical average: “If you’re telling me that a guy who got to be 65 in 1940 — that all of them lived to be 77 — that is just not correct. Just because a guy gets to be 65, he’s gonna live to be 77? Hell, that’s my genre. That’s not true,” said Simpson, who will turn 80 in September.
Truly mind boggling. If Simpson’s characterization of life expectancy were accurate, then his statement that life expectancy in 1940 was 65 would imply that everyone born in 1940 lived to be 65, no greater and no less.
This is the guy to whom we are supposed to defer on Social Security, someone who couldn’t, by the looks of it, pass 6th grade math.
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