Social Security is drifting toward a cliff, and Congress keeps pretending the shortfall will fix itself. It won’t.
Absent reform, benefits will be cut across the board by roughly 23 percent within six years. That outcome would harm retirees who depend on Social Security the most — while barely affecting the living standards of those who do not need financial support in old age.
This should not be a radical idea. Government income transfers should be targeted to those who need financial support — not used to subsidize consumption among well-off seniors at the expense of younger working Americans. This approach is grounded in what Social Security was meant to do in the first place: “give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against…poverty-ridden old age,” in the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
You know who this is aimed at? The guy I see in the mirror brushing his teeth every morning.
But (seriously) I have a problem: Romina aims proposed benefit
cuts at the "wealthy", which is fine in theory, but I'm pretty sure
Uncle Stupid has no infrastructure that would allow it to accurately determine the "wealth" of millions of
geezers. It does some snooping on those it suspects of financial shenanigans, but taking snapshots on the
(volatile) assets of everyone at retirement age? Ye gods, I think that's problematic!
(The IRS currently claws back some Social Security benefits, but that's based on recipients having
a high income from other sources, not "wealth".)
Your representatives may finally grab the feared "third rail" of U.S. politics. When the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out in the early 2030s, the law is clear: Benefits must be slashed. That would mean a roughly 24% cut to Social Security checks and an 11% cut to Medicare benefits. But Congress almost certainly won't let that happen.
The easy, though irresponsible, political path may seem obvious: Change the law, keep benefits whole, and pay by borrowing the money. This way legislators won't have to cast unpopular votes for spending cuts or tax hikes. This makes sense only if the consequences won't become clear until much later, after voters have forgotten all about it.
What most people are missing is that this time, the consequences may show up quickly. Inflation may not wait for debt to pile up. It can arrive the moment Congress commits to that debt-ridden path.
Interestingly, a runaway inflation also makes the problem worse, very quickly, since Social Security benefits
go up automatically. Aieee!
Increased spending on old-age entitlements and the cost of financing the national debt will push annual budget deficits from $1.9 trillion this year to over $3 trillion by 2036.
That's according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) latest 10-year budget estimate, released Wednesday morning. Over the next decade, the CBO expects the national debt to hit a record high of more than 120 percent of America's gross domestic product, exceeding the previous high of 106 percent near the end of World War II.
Much of that new borrowing will occur despite an anticipated increase in federal revenue, which the CBO expects will increase from about $5.6 trillion this year to $8.3 trillion by 2036. That increase in revenue is completely swamped by a projected rise in government spending, which will surge from about $7 trillion this year to over $11.4 trillion by the end of the 10-year budget window.
Hey, but what about that $18 trillion that
Trump promised
was in the pipeline?
It’s hard to recall a regulator who has done as much damage to medical innovation in as little time as Vinay Prasad. In his latest drive-by shooting, the leader of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine without even a cursory review. This is arbitrary government at its worst.
The FDA rarely refuses to review a drug or vaccine application. Our sources say the FDA has rejected only about 4% of applications without a review, typically when they are missing important information. That wasn’t the case with Moderna.
Dr. Prasad spiked Moderna’s flu vaccine because its Phase 3 trial was putatively not “adequate and well-controlled.” He quibbled that the control group in Moderna’s late-stage trial didn’t receive the “best-available standard of care.” He decides what is “best.”
I assume Vinay is following Junior's orders here. I'm pretty sure that pharmaceutical companies have
yet to develop a vaccine that would regrow his spine.
I had high hopes and low expectations that the FDA under the new administration would be less paternalistic and more open to medical freedom. Instead, what we are getting is paternalism with different preferences. In particular, the FDA now appears to have a bizarre anti-vaccine fixation, particularly of the mRNA variety (disappointing but not surprising given the leadership of RFK Jr.).
The latest is that the FDA has issued a Refusal-to-File (RTF) letter to Moderna for their mRNA influenza vaccine, mRNA-1010. An RTF means the FDA has determined that the application is so deficient it doesn’t even warrant a review. RTF letters are not unheard of, but they’re rare—especially given that Moderna spent hundreds of millions of dollars running Phase 3 trials enrolling over 43,000 participants based on FDA guidance, and is now being told the (apparently) agreed-upon design was inadequate.
Alex's bottom line:
An administration that promised medical freedom is delivering medical nationalism: fewer options, less innovation, and a clear signal to every company considering pharmaceutical investment that the rules can change after the game is played. And this isn’t a one-product story. mRNA is a general-purpose platform with spillovers across infectious disease and vaccines for cancer; if the U.S. turns mRNA into a political third rail, the investment, talent, and manufacturing will migrate elsewhere. America built this capability, and we’re now choosing to export it—along with the health benefits.
I've said this before, but: It's Calvinball, except with lives in the balance.
(paid link)If the flu don't get ya, the singularity will.
I'm currently reading a dire prediction of AI doom predicting … well, you can read the title for yourself
over there on your right. Nate Silver is not as apocalyptic, but
he's pretty gloomy:
The singularity won't be gentle.
So here’s a take I consider relatively straightforward, but I don’t think has really sunk into the conventional wisdom. If AI has even a fraction of the impact that many people in Silicon Valley now expect on the fabric of work and daily life, it’s going to have profound and unpredictable political impacts.
Last June, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, published a blog post entitled “The Gentle Singularity”. If you’re not familiar with the jargon, the Singularity (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) is a hypothesized extremely rapid takeoff in technological progress — so technologies that would once have taken years or decades to come to fruition might be realized in months, days, hours, minutes, microseconds. I’m not sure that I want to weigh in right now on my “priors” about the Singularity. It’s probably safe to say they’re more skeptical than your average Berkeley-based machine-learning researcher but more credulous than your typical political takes artist.
These guys have put some thought into likely scenarios, and I haven't. (I have a good excuse: I went to bed
on November 7, 2016, glumly resigned to the fact that Hillary Clinton was going to be our next President.
Since then, I've avoided making predictions, "especially about the future".)
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