A correspondent passes along the latest Internet rant, with approval. It purports to be a letter from an irate American to former Sen. Alan Simpson of the deficit-reduction commission. The relevant part goes like this:

Hey Alan, let’s get a few things straight…

1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole for FIFTY YEARS.

2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).

3. My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero ambition losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme...

5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from Day One, and now you morons propose to change the rules of the game. Why? Because you idiots mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal money from Medicare to pay the bills.

It goes on from here, but you get the idea. I wrote the following reply:

This screed is fun to read, and yeah, the politicians have voted themselves some rich beneifts and I smile to see them kicked in the pants for it. I smile at the guy's attitude. But he doesn't have all his facts right. For example, he says:

My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades.

Mostly not. Social Security is mostly pay-as-you-go. Most of this guy's money was paid out immediately to his parents' generation. The rest of it went into Treasury bonds, which I guess is what he means by "interest bearing account." But the interest on T-bonds is paid by the taxpayer. It's not a benefit to the taxpayer. The principal is spent by Congress.

This guy says he's paid into Social Security all his life. That's nice, but it does not mean he's fully paid his way in an economic sense. In a contractual sense, he did; he paid what they told him to pay. But the first few generations in Social Security got a really good deal. My dad paid in at the 2% rate in the 1940s and the fairly low rates in the 1960s, retired in 1969 and got inflation adjustments for the rest of his life. It was a great deal for him. It will be an OK deal for me (I'm 59), and it will be a poor deal for my son, who is 20. This is not becase the politicians spent the money, but because of a change in the ratio of people at work to people retired. People are having fewer kids, and old people are living longer. That's the problem.

The same problem affects Medicare. It's not that politicians spent the money from the Medicare tax. It's the birthrate problem plus the cost-of-medical-care problem. The cost of medical care is a whole subject by itself, but consider this. We have an industry in Seattle--biotech--to come up with new drugs and treatments. It's a wonderful industry; it employs lots of educated people at high salaries; it fills up the buildings in South Lake Union, near where I work, and it extends life. It's latest success is a new treatment for advanced stage prostate cancer. The treatment increases life by an average of 4 months and costs several thousand dollars a month. It has to cost that much, otherwise investors won't put up the money for the companies and the people and the buildings; but the cost of this and similar new treatments is raises the cost of medical care, and Medicare has a problem.

It's fun to kick Alan Simpson, but I think he's mostly right.

Bruce Ramsey