Chris Rock and Social Security

By now, we've probably heard the Chris Rock routine about Social Security:

The average black man dies at 54. Black people should get Social Security at 29. Black people don't live that long -hypertension, high blood pressure, NYPD.

But now we're seeing a bunch of Republicans latch onto this to muddy things up.

I first heard about this a few weeks ago on Meet the Press, when Bill Thomas managed to talk for about 20 minutes and really not say much of anything. However, the recurrent themes were that "everything is on the table" and "we ought to change the program to make allowances for benefits based on race and sex." I thought, what the hell. Why don't we just throw out all of the civil rights stuff. But then I remembered that everyone to the right of Orrin Hatch is out starfucking Abe Lincoln at the moment, so I decided to see what developed.

King sized grain of salt here, but I think that African-Americans are a little bit skittish whenever the right wing tries to correct an injustice. Last time, they got separate but equal facilities. Remember, these are people who fight every affirmative action initiative that comes down the pipe.

So when Luskin jumped in with his comments, the radar immediately went on.

Krugman quotes Bush saying that “African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people.” Krugman says Bush made this statement “[t]his week, in a closed meeting with African-Americans.” Krugman is wrong: Bush made this statement on January 11 in an open meeting with Americans of all races. And Bush is right — according to the National Center for Health Statistics, at age 65 the median African American male lives 14.6 more years, compared with 16.6 more years for whites. That means African Americans have 2 fewer years to collect their Social Security benefits than whites do, even though they pay the same amount of taxes during their working lives.

OK, so we have people dying sooner, probably primarily because of differing quality of health insurance, right? So we just put in single payer health insurance, have people put on a few PSAs and the situation solves itself because everyone's health care is equal, right?

Needless to say, this wasn't where Luskin was going. It's about personal accounts.

But let’s set all the statistics aside and get back to the real issue here — the issue that Rep. Ford focused on: “The key to retirement security and upward social mobility is wealth creation.” That, indeed, is the core philosophy underlying President Bush’s initiative to reform Social Security with personal accounts — it’s the heart of his vision of an “ownership society.” To Krugman, however, that vision is nothing. As he wrote in a Times column last year, “I thought all Americans have a vital stake in the nation’s future, regardless of how much property they own.”

Right now, the plans are to do about $1,000 per year in personal savings accounts. Suction off the loads that financial advisors will pull on that amount of money, and you'll be right at the amount that the trust fund gets from investing in savings bonds. So it's just something to obscure the issue.

All Luskin sets up with his evidence is that African-Americans live shorter lives. And the only thing he should pull from that is that we should either work to raise African-American life expectancies or increase the benefits to African-Americans. But he chose to obscure the issue by throwing in a red herring about private accounts.

Jesse at Pandagon explores this issue and makes a lot of sense with the following.

Quick question: regardless of the "gotcha" here - one that I don't really accept, but that's a different story, isn't the problem that there's something after age 40 (say, access to medical care and job opportunities) which is causing black males to to die at a higher rate than whites?

Even if what Luskin is quoting is true, it still proves Krugman's point - Republicans are more concerned with pushing a political agenda than the impact of the statistics they cite.

"Black people's life expectancy is shorter because they die between 40 and 65! Ha! Why do they die? Who gives a shit? End Social Security!"

The most interesting thing about the Social Security proposal to me is that the government is still limiting the amount of money you can put into the funds (and the number of funds you can put money into), meaning that the exact same "inequalities" in the current Social Security will continue - only through private rather than public investment. The only way the system works to benefit black people is if you continue depending on their early deaths to create unclaimed private accounts to be passed on to their spouses and children. The amount of money in those accounts after administrative fees and lower incomes is arguable, as is the net benefit of a nation of children and spouses with prematurely dead parents/partners and a little bit more money in their pockets (presuming they wouldn't have gotten Social Security survivor benefits to begin with).

So, again, we wind up with the initial promise of privatization - the best way this system can work for you is if you die early. Particularly black people.