Ezra Klein Has Joined the Collective!

Welcome, Ezra! You have been successfully assimilated!

However, he is really horrified:

Ezra Klein: Social Security Trustees Report: By the way, two years ago, when I was starting at UC Santa Cruz and spending a great deal of my time intoxicated, I really didn't think I'd ever be disappointed because I couldn't read the latest Social Security Trustees Report in a timely fashion. I mean, Jesus, what's happened to me? I can't even drink yet (well, legally), and yet I'm genuinely fascinated by actuarial assumptions regarding the long-term fiscal health of the state-run pension program? You must be kidding me.

Of course, he cannot hold a candle to Mark Schmitt's daughter:

The Decembrist: You know you've been in Washington too long...: when your 3-year-old interrupts at the dinner table and complains, 'I don't know anything about PAYGO!' The sad thing is, we've only been here for six months!

Resistance to assimilation is futile.

Comments

[Ralph]

Question for Prof Brad DeLong: I have been wondering for some time about the effect of transition costs from partial privatization on the social security trust fund. As you know, the trust fund has about $1.5 trillion of Treasury bonds as assets. By 2018, when social security benefits begom to exceed payroll tax revenues, the trust fund will have somewhere between $3 to $5 trillion of assets. But under partial privatization, though details are still not released, estimates suggest about $1 trillion of debt will have to be borrowed over the next decade and $4.5 trillion over the next two decades. My question is how is the accounting for the trust fund affected by these enormous transition costs. Does this not imply a serious deterioration of the balance sheet of the trust fund compared to the case if partial privatization fails to carry Congress?

[ChasHeath]

Ralph, the President's apparent plan is to basicly dissolve the trust fund and shift responsibility for the fact that the trust fund would run out of assets sometime in the 2020s and go seriously negative in the 2030s over to the general fund.

It's a convenient position for a politician who won't be in office 20 or so years from now to take, to assert that future Presidents and Congresses will think as highly of this arrangement as the current occupants do.

[peBird]

I'm relieved we didn't have to learn too much about bend points.

[Unstable Isotope]

I think assimilation is occurring. I've never even taken an economics class, yet I find myself fascinated with all the ins and outs of budget projections.

[JR]

I've lived in DC for 18 years and I don't know anything about PAYGO.