Duncan Black’s neighbors probably can’t hear him tapping away on his laptop in his Philadelphia row house, but he has been doing his best to become Townsend’s modern heir. An economist and former college professor, Black—who goes by the pseudonym “Atrios” online—is one of America’s most popular political bloggers; his typical output consists of short, snarky quips on the news from a liberal perspective. But in late 2012 he embarked on a sustained crusade, on his blog and in a series of columns for USA Today, to inject a single idea into America’s policy discourse: “We need an across-the-board increase in Social Security retirement benefits of 20 percent or more,” he declared in the opening of a column for USA Today. “We need it to happen right now.”
The proposal was not exactly attuned to the political winds in Washington. Indeed, for anyone inclined to think in terms of counting potential votes in Congress—especially this Congress—the idea of expanding Social Security is the epitome of a political non-starter. Black’s proposal was attuned, however, to a mounting pile of research and demographic data that describes a gathering disaster. The famously large baby boom generation is heading into retirement. Thanks to decades of stagnant wages and the asset collapse of the Great Recession, more than half of American working-class households are at risk of being unable to sustain their standard of living past retirement. To put it even more starkly, according to research by the economists Joelle Saad-Lessler and Teresa Ghilarducci, 49 percent of middle-class workers are on track to be “poor or near poor” after they retire.
There is very little safety net left to break this fall. The labor market for older workers is bleak. Private pensions are largely a thing of the past. Private savings are so far gone that some 25 percent of households with 401(k) and other retirement plans have raided them early to cover expenses, and a growing number of Americans over age 50 find themselves accumulating, not settling, debt. On the whole, 401(k)s have proved a “disaster,” as Black puts it, one that has enriched the financial sector but lashed the country’s retirement security to a volatile stock market—and left 75 percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 with less than $30,000 in their accounts.
What’s left? Social Security. Though it was never meant to be a national retirement system all by itself, that’s increasingly what it has become. For Americans over age 65 in the bottom half of the income distribution, Social Security makes up at least 80 percent of retirement income.
And yet, when Social Security has been in the news in recent years, it has usually been because someone wants to cut it. With Republicans in Congress ever more devoted to dismantling government, and the Congressional left doing everything it can just to fight the erosion of social programs, the center in American politics has increasingly come to be defined by deficit scolds preaching the “hard choices” of austerity. And the deficit reduction industry, a network of people in both parties who tend to enjoy favorable media attention for being “serious minded,” has long painted Social Security cuts as responsible fiscal policy—never mind that the program is funded outside the budget and does not add to the deficit.
All of this is especially surreal when you consider one additional fact: About 75 percent of Americans say we should consider increasing Social Security benefits, according to a survey by the National Academy of Social Insurance. Increasing Social Security is an idea that’s popular, concrete, and arguably necessary to forestall mass poverty among the elderly. But because it’s not “serious,” it hasn’t even been on the table in Washington. In a fit of quixotic energy, Black set out to change this. What’s remarkable is that his fool’s errand seems to be working.
Duncan Black didn't exactly plan to become one of America’s most aggressive advocates of retirement security. He first conceived of his crusade as a formal experiment in trying to change the conversation—using, of all things, a page from the playbook of the American right wing.
For years, bloggers and activists like Black in the online progressive movement have been fascinated with something called the Overton Window, a theory of how ideas enter the political mainstream and eventually become policy. The theory was coined by the libertarian thinker Joseph Overton, who argued that the public can only countenance a fairly narrow “window” of acceptable views on a given subject at a given time. Politicians, in order to be seen as viable, generally have to endorse views within that narrow range. However, savvy members of a political movement can work to move the Overton Window. By endorsing proposals that split the distance between views that are inside the window and the movement’s ultimate goal, activists can gradually drag the window toward their desired end position. To change policy, the idea goes, you change the political environment. (...)
It was only later that Black realized the urgency of his case. In late January, he attended a conference put on by the National Academy of Social Insurance, a non-partisan policy group of experts. He found that many there agreed on the nature and scope of the retirement crisis. Yet nobody felt like they could step out and state what seemed obvious: that the best solution would be to take the existing delivery system of Social Security and just add to it. “They had all these Rube Goldberg-type ideas to help at the margins,” Black said. Not only were such technocratic devices inadequate in the face of the crisis, Black realized, they had far less political mobilizing power than a simple solution based on what people already know. Proposing a dramatic expansion of Social Security might seem fanciful, but at least it could serve as a kind of political North Star.
by David Dayen, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image: Chris Sembrot
The proposal was not exactly attuned to the political winds in Washington. Indeed, for anyone inclined to think in terms of counting potential votes in Congress—especially this Congress—the idea of expanding Social Security is the epitome of a political non-starter. Black’s proposal was attuned, however, to a mounting pile of research and demographic data that describes a gathering disaster. The famously large baby boom generation is heading into retirement. Thanks to decades of stagnant wages and the asset collapse of the Great Recession, more than half of American working-class households are at risk of being unable to sustain their standard of living past retirement. To put it even more starkly, according to research by the economists Joelle Saad-Lessler and Teresa Ghilarducci, 49 percent of middle-class workers are on track to be “poor or near poor” after they retire.There is very little safety net left to break this fall. The labor market for older workers is bleak. Private pensions are largely a thing of the past. Private savings are so far gone that some 25 percent of households with 401(k) and other retirement plans have raided them early to cover expenses, and a growing number of Americans over age 50 find themselves accumulating, not settling, debt. On the whole, 401(k)s have proved a “disaster,” as Black puts it, one that has enriched the financial sector but lashed the country’s retirement security to a volatile stock market—and left 75 percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 with less than $30,000 in their accounts.
What’s left? Social Security. Though it was never meant to be a national retirement system all by itself, that’s increasingly what it has become. For Americans over age 65 in the bottom half of the income distribution, Social Security makes up at least 80 percent of retirement income.
And yet, when Social Security has been in the news in recent years, it has usually been because someone wants to cut it. With Republicans in Congress ever more devoted to dismantling government, and the Congressional left doing everything it can just to fight the erosion of social programs, the center in American politics has increasingly come to be defined by deficit scolds preaching the “hard choices” of austerity. And the deficit reduction industry, a network of people in both parties who tend to enjoy favorable media attention for being “serious minded,” has long painted Social Security cuts as responsible fiscal policy—never mind that the program is funded outside the budget and does not add to the deficit.
All of this is especially surreal when you consider one additional fact: About 75 percent of Americans say we should consider increasing Social Security benefits, according to a survey by the National Academy of Social Insurance. Increasing Social Security is an idea that’s popular, concrete, and arguably necessary to forestall mass poverty among the elderly. But because it’s not “serious,” it hasn’t even been on the table in Washington. In a fit of quixotic energy, Black set out to change this. What’s remarkable is that his fool’s errand seems to be working.
Duncan Black didn't exactly plan to become one of America’s most aggressive advocates of retirement security. He first conceived of his crusade as a formal experiment in trying to change the conversation—using, of all things, a page from the playbook of the American right wing.
For years, bloggers and activists like Black in the online progressive movement have been fascinated with something called the Overton Window, a theory of how ideas enter the political mainstream and eventually become policy. The theory was coined by the libertarian thinker Joseph Overton, who argued that the public can only countenance a fairly narrow “window” of acceptable views on a given subject at a given time. Politicians, in order to be seen as viable, generally have to endorse views within that narrow range. However, savvy members of a political movement can work to move the Overton Window. By endorsing proposals that split the distance between views that are inside the window and the movement’s ultimate goal, activists can gradually drag the window toward their desired end position. To change policy, the idea goes, you change the political environment. (...)
It was only later that Black realized the urgency of his case. In late January, he attended a conference put on by the National Academy of Social Insurance, a non-partisan policy group of experts. He found that many there agreed on the nature and scope of the retirement crisis. Yet nobody felt like they could step out and state what seemed obvious: that the best solution would be to take the existing delivery system of Social Security and just add to it. “They had all these Rube Goldberg-type ideas to help at the margins,” Black said. Not only were such technocratic devices inadequate in the face of the crisis, Black realized, they had far less political mobilizing power than a simple solution based on what people already know. Proposing a dramatic expansion of Social Security might seem fanciful, but at least it could serve as a kind of political North Star.
by David Dayen, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image: Chris Sembrot
