Paul Krugman Says Social Security Is Sustainable. It’s Really Not – By Eric Boehm (Reason) / Feb 23, 2023
Krugman sees benefit cuts as “a choice” but believes that implementing a massive tax increase on American employers and workers would be “of course” no big deal.
For The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, the real crisis facing America’s entitlement programs is that the media isn’t working hard enough to ignore their impending collapse.
“I’ve seen numerous declarations from mainstream media that of course Medicare and Social Security can’t be sustained in their present form,” Krugman wrote in a Times op-ed this week. “And not just in the opinion pages.”
Perhaps that’s because the unsustainable trajectories of Social Security and Medicare aren’t a matter of opinion. They’re factual realities, supported by the most recent annual reports of the programs’ trustees and the independent analysis of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Social Security’s main trust fund will hit insolvency somewhere between 2033 and 2035, according to those projections, while one of the main trust funds in Medicare will be insolvent before the end of this decade. When insolvency hits, there will be mandatory across-the-board benefit cuts—for Social Security, that’s likely to translate into a roughly 20 percent reduction in promised benefits.
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