“YEAH, HE’S THE ONE…HE’S THE ONE WE OUGHT TO GET!!!”

3/3/11

Today’s (i.e., Thursday, 3/3’s) Wall Street Journal reports on the results of a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll that displays the typical schizophrenia, bordering on hypocrisy, that characterizes discussion of reducing the federal deficit through spending reductions and/or tax increases.

In this case, we are not only dealing with the normal flight from reality that surrounds such discussion, i.e., everyone wants to reduce the deficit but no one wants his program cut. While such know-nothingness was clearly on display in this poll (Less than a quarter of Americans think cutting Social Security or Medicare is necessary to “significantly reduce the deficit. Even tea partiers, by a 2 to 1 margin, oppose cutting Social Security.), in this case it is just another manifestation of the normal willingness to gore everyone else’s ox to achieve whatever goal one finds desirable in the abstract.

No, what I found interesting and a touch unique about the results of this poll is another instance of respondents’ apparently not understanding the nature of the question. While, apparently, few want social security reduced, more than half favored increasing the retirement age to 69 by 2075 and 60% favored means testing social security and Medicare. Yes, this is yet another instance of an unyielding willingness to cut the other guy’s program (Few people consider themselves wealthy enough to fail any means test to which they would agree and no one sufficiently sentient to respond to much of anything will be under 69 by 2075.), but such measures will in fact “cut social security” to the point at which 60% of Social Security’s underfunding would be eliminated but, again, do so by going after the always evil “other guy,” who may, in fact, be one’s own grandchildren in this instance, but I digress. So people are unwilling to cut Social Security and Medicare but they are willing to cut Social Security and Medicare. This paradox becomes understandable, and compatible with what has come to be understood as human nature, when we see that the respondents are unwilling to cut their own Social Security and Medicare but they are willing to cut someone else’s Social Security and Medicare.

While the poll results are both intriguing and utterly predictable, what make them worthy of a post are their revelations of the willingness of people to means test Social Security. Am I in favor of means testing Social Security? Maybe. Am I in favor of means testing most government programs? Certainly. But my accession is dependent on the nature of the means test. AS LONG AS THE “MEANS” BEING TESTED ARE WHAT A PERSON MADE DURING HIS OR HER LIFE TIME, I’M ALL FOR IT. IF THE “MEANS” BEING TESTED ARE THE WEALTH SOMEONE HAS ACCUMULATED BY THE AGE S/HE IS ELIGIBLE FOR A GIVEN PROGRAM, I AM DEAD-SET, AMDAMANTLY AGAINST SUCH “MEANS” TESTING, for obvious reasons: Such “means testing” will result in the subsidization of people who made a lot of money during their lives and urinated it all away by people who may or may not have made much money in their lives but who, by living a measured and perhaps frugal lifestyle, have managed to enter retirement with a considerable nest egg. Such an arrangement would be nothing less than a surefire prescription for further exacerbating our savings problem, a giant step toward the inevitable ruination of the Republic, an injustice of historic proportions, and an abomination before God and man.

A means test to which the sober among us would agree (i.e., based on what you made, not on what you had) will never be implemented because the spendthrifts, whose towering majority among the American populace will only grow over the years, will work strenuously to see that the frugal among us are forced to subsidize the lifestyles the “high income broke,” felt compelled to pursue when younger, primarily to give them a point from which to look down their noses on those they are demanding take care of them in their old age. And, aided by the utterly predictable continued and intensified mindless and witless orgies to bacchanal, the Republic will hurtle toward its inevitable doom.