>Excerpt from:
>
>http://www.progressive.org/conniff9903.htm
>Here, before he was quickly cut off by Chairman Archer, Kemp let
>the cat out of the bag: If we continue having even modest
>economic growth, there is no reason to believe the Social
>Security system will reach a crisis. . . .
Max, you truncated your excerpt before this wonderful passage:
<quote> The projected shortfall in Social Security, around the year 2032, according to the system's trustees, is based on the astonishingly pessimistic assumption that the U.S. economy will all but grind to a halt.
The real news, writes economist Doug Henwood in his book Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom, is not that Social Security is going belly-up, but that "either the trustees are using deliberately bearish growth assumptions to promote public doubt of the system . . . or are foreseeing seventy-five years of depression ahead of us."
Progressive economists like Henwood oppose drastic efforts to "save" Social Security, because, like Kemp, they note that the system is not in any real financial trouble.
If it seems odd that a left-winger like Henwood and an exuberant free marketeer like Jack Kemp would agree[...] </quote>
Doug