I read another one of those wonderful Heritage Foundation editorial yesterday. The Social Security Crisis Gets Personal by Stuart Butler.

I noticed a couple of things.

I noticed he would like to distract you with scary-sounding statistics.

As the Social Security system itself has aged, payroll taxes have grown relentlessly and the return on those taxes has fallen dramatically. When Social Security began, the payroll tax was just 2% of income. Now it's 12.4%. Today, the average male worker about to retire will typically get just a 1.27% return on his lifetime of taxes — less than he'd get from a savings account. That's bad enough, but the younger you are, the worse it will get. A 25-year-old worker can expect a return of minus-0.64% — he loses money.

I think this is a good time to remind you all—the goal is a stable social safety net. I think the reminder necessary because Stuart feels he's going to present a justification for private accounts that is more important than keeping the system solvent.

Yes, because of a bigger crisis that has nothing to do with the program's solvency. It's a personal crisis affecting millions of American working families:

But the scary statistical stuff...the constantly reducing yields on the money in the Social Security trust fund that Greenspan convinced us was necessary. Do you know why the yield keeps falling? It's because the pre-funding was phased-in…the proportion of funds collected to funds paid out was lower when pre-funding began.

…most of our current problem is really attributable to a problem of design. The low returns offered to today's younger workers are largely a necessary by-product of a pay-as-you-go system (while not exactly a pay-as-you-go system, the current system is very similar). But why were earlier generations spared such a poor return? The answer is that the pay-as-you-go system was phased in over time by gradually increasing both taxes and benefits to provide higher returns to the early contributors. While not sustainable, such high returns are always possible in the early stages of a pay-as-you-go system.

…The low return paid in the pay-as-you-go system results entirely from the excess paid to the early contributors to the system. So long as this debt and all obligations to older workers are honored when switching to the private system, privatization provides no gain.

In other words, the system is behaving exactly as it was designed to…we, in our past, gave ourselves this inflated bill.

That's kind of basic, but it's not the level the discussion is being held on. The discussion is being held on a level wherein the vice president of economic and policy studies of a major foundation can, I assume with a straight face make statements like this:

It's not surprising that savings have plummeted in lower-income neighborhoods while credit card debt has soared. The Social Security system is sucking money out of every paycheck, which reduces savings, and it eventually returns too little back to the community.

Nevermind the lack of jobs that are accessible to these lower-income workers, jobs one can actually live on. Nevermind the usurious interest rates on credit cards…especially on secured credit cards which are actually risk-free to the credit card issuer. The medical costs that lie at the root of up to half of all personal bankruptcies in this nation have nothing to do with the low savings and high credit usage rate (and incidentally, Type Two Tim wrote a paper for The Heritage Foundation on the bankruptcy blight just passed… it's title, The Bankruptcy Bill and Debt Obesity, gives you a clue about the Foundation's opinion). And you can't assume the forces that have pretty much eliminated savings and increased credit usage in the rest of the population are the same forces that do so among lower-income citizens.

Nope. Stuart says it's Social Security.

With a straight face.

And though I hate it when people assume only stupid people read these editorials, this isn't what annoyed me the most.

No, Stuart had to invoke the Negroes.

Because Social Security is only an annuity system, paying monthly checks, those with the lowest life expectancy receive the least back. That's particularly bad news for African American men, who typically die younger than whites and so get shortchanged. Indeed, many African American males now in the their 30s or younger will never recoup the money they put into Social Security.

I thought Black folks collectively had made it known we don't appreciate it when you only note our mortality rate in order to support something that does nothing to improve our mortality rate. It kind of makes us feel you don't ACTUALLY care about it, you know?

And the hypocritical bastard, after trying to establish a better rate of return as the Holy Grail, decides that's not the standard by which Black folks should gauge the program, oh no...

They point out that because African Americans are more likely to be poor and more likely to become disabled they tend to get a better return from Social Security. That's because the rate of return on contributions is higher for low-income earners and because the disabled can collect once they are injured, which is often well before retirement age.

Of course, their argument is a bit like saying that because African Americans are more likely than other average Americans to be on welfare or unemployed, they shouldn't care about taxes on the middle class.

And we've never written a single paper about the life expectancy differential, oh no. But we know about it well enough that we can wield the fact as a cudgel.

And we're not surprised the Heritage Foundation is so disrespectful of Black people. We're just making the point: there's your Conservatives, your Republicans.