elegant reasoning

Paul Henry Rosenberg rad at gte.net
Mon Jan 25 19:04:18 PST 1999


Doug Henwood wrote:


> >From the Cato Institute's Social Security Project
> <http://www.socialsecurity.org>:
>
> "Since blacks and the poor have shorter life spans than whites and
> high-income earners, Social Security transfers money from blacks to whites
> and from the poor to the rich, a reverse Robin Hood program. Since the
> median life expectancy for a black male born today is only 65.8 years, half
> of all black men will never collect a single retirement check from Social
> Security. Only a personalized Social Security system can end this
> discrimination."
> -- Joel Mowbray
> CURE


>From "Social Security and People of Color" by Kilolo Kijakazi, Senior
analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, http://www.cbpp.org/10-5-98socsec.htm :

"The Heritage methodology assumes that white men who work until 65 will receive 9.3 years of retirement benefits (from age 65 to 74.3), while African-American men who work until 65 will receive just 2.2 years of retirement benefits (from 65 to 67.2 years of age). This is flatly wrong. The age that an individual is expected to attain changes over his or her lifetime. If a man reaches age 65, he is expected to live 15.5 additional years if he is white and 13.5 more years if he is African-American. Heritage thus heavily underestimated the number of years that these men, and especially African-American men, will draw Social Security retirement benefits."

The document includes this comparative chart:

Expected Work and Retirement Years for

20-Year-Old Males in 1997

Work Years Retirement

Years

White Black White Black

Men Men Men Men Heritage Erroneous 45 45 9.3 2.2 Method

TRUE 42.2 39.1 12.1 8.1 Expectation

and a thorough debunking of the Heritage Foundation's fraud. It also contains, as an appendix, the February 4, 1998 Memorandum from Steve Goss, Deputy Chief Actuaryof the Social Security Administration, which provides the basic foundations for the analysis presented.

A very good case study in the Heritage Foundation's basic methodology of deceit.

-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net

"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"



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