OK, you’re a great critic. But it’s easy to identify problems. The tough part is fixing them. So, what do you suggest?
In 2002, 46.5 million Americans collected Social Security benefits. 3.6 million, or 10.4%, of Americans age 65 and over had income, including Social Security benefits, at or below the poverty level. Another 1.2 million had incomes just above the poverty level. Many people beyond working age rely on these benefits for basic necessities such as food, medicine, and shelter. Most didn’t make enough while they were working to provide for their retirement. They were honest, hard working people that simply didn’t make much money. Should they starve, or go without medicine? Can you at least admit that there is a problem, that millions of Americans would suffer were it not for their Social Security benefits? I don’t see how you could deny this.
If you can admit there is an issue, then it would be foolish to say it could be ignored. Who, then, other than the Government, is capable of tackling such an issue? And is it not the Government’s duty to protect the welfare of its citizens? How, in the richest nation ever to grace the planet, could the Government just turn a blind eye while its elderly starved? It couldn’t. Call it socialism if you want. It is. So what. You and I have to sacrifice a little income for the common good. Are you so greedy that you can’t part with a few hard earned dollars? You even get it back when you reach retirement (if all goes as planned…).
If we can agree that there is an issue we can’t simply ignore, then why can’t Social Security be the answer? Does it really matter what it’s called, or who created it? If you are really interested in the welfare of Americans, and not just in partisan bickering, then you’ll do your part to make things work, to help improve the system. It’s a lot closer to a solution than “nothing” is.
In 2002, 46.5 million Americans collected Social Security benefits. 3.6 million, or 10.4%, of Americans age 65 and over had income, including Social Security benefits, at or below the poverty level. Another 1.2 million had incomes just above the poverty level. Many people beyond working age rely on these benefits for basic necessities such as food, medicine, and shelter. Most didn’t make enough while they were working to provide for their retirement. They were honest, hard working people that simply didn’t make much money. Should they starve, or go without medicine? Can you at least admit that there is a problem, that millions of Americans would suffer were it not for their Social Security benefits? I don’t see how you could deny this.
I never said that it wasn’t an issue that people needed retirement. Of course every one does. My argument is that privatizing social security is the better solution the what it is today. And as your facts (I’m assuming) shows, privatizing will be the better solution for those whose income is below poverty level. Lets see, 2% interest for the current SS and 6% compounded interest for privatizing SS. Now, maybe these below income people can finally have a retirement above the average income level.
If you can admit there is an issue, then it would be foolish to say it could be ignored. Who, then, other than the Government, is capable of tackling such an issue? And is it not the Government’s duty to protect the welfare of its citizens? How, in the richest nation ever to grace the planet, could the Government just turn a blind eye while its elderly starved? It couldn’t. Call it socialism if you want. It is. So what. You and I have to sacrifice a little income for the common good. Are you so greedy that you can’t part with a few hard earned dollars? You even get it back when you reach retirement (if all goes as planned…).
Once again, you proved yourself that privatizing is the better solution. If the government requires people to put money into a private account and earn interest itself (as appose to tax payers paying the 2% interest), than my tax dollars do not have to be spent on someone else’s retirement.
I don’t have a WSJ subscription (can’t afford it with my welfare check). Can you point me to a ‘free’ link? Thanks!
Being a strong supporter of equal opportunity, I decided to cut and paste the articles here. Here is the first article….
It’s Irrational to Save
By EDWARD C. PRESCOTT
December 29, 2004; Page A8
There is an old maxim which states that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment. I think something similar can be said of government policy, to wit: Good policy comes from experience, and experience comes from poor policy.
This bit of homespun wisdom could easily apply to all sorts of government policies over time, but it has particular relevance to tax policy and, specifically, to the U.S. Social Security system. Created during the Great Depression to guarantee that no senior citizen should live in poverty, Social Security was a good idea meant to address the growing needs of elderly Americans. However, good ideas don’t always equal good policy.
Social Security was developed at a time when the number of workers paying into the system greatly outnumbered those who were receiving funds, and thus the promise made by government was easily kept. But times change while policies atrophy, and Social Security has evolved into a system that places an increasingly onerous burden on the young; the ratio of workers to elderly has shifted from 41-to-1 in the 1930s, to 3-to-1 today.
Young workers today are being told that their Social Security contributions — or taxes — may have to increase to support the burgeoning elderly population. Moreover, those young workers are being warned that the same benefits will not apply to them — that they will have to work longer and receive less than the folks they are now supporting. Such are government promises, especially those grounded on ill-founded policy.
Poor policies, though, need not persist. We really can learn from experience, and we should apply that experience and new knowledge to existing policies so those original good ideas — and government promises — can be made whole. Regarding tax policy, we have learned that labor supply is not inelastic and does indeed respond to changes in tax rates. This insight, so simple and yet so powerful, has implications for all sorts of tax policies, and one policy that would greatly benefit from an application of this insight would be our Social Security tax system.
Let’s return to those three young workers who have to support that one senior citizen and who may have their benefits cut back. Would such changes in tax rates and changes in government promises affect labor supply? Theory says “yes,” the statistical evidence agrees, and common sense concurs. These young workers are rational. They make labor/leisure choices on the margin, and these marginal choices add up.
So what to do? How to move from a pay-as-you-go welfare system to a self-funding retirement system that benefits from individual maximizing incentives? Again, the answer begins with the insight that labor supply is responsive to tax rates. We simply cannot keep cranking up Social Security taxes with impunity. What we need to do is turn the present tax-and-transfer system into a bona fide individual retirement system that is in line with individual incentives.
In short, the answer is to establish a system of mandatory investment accounts for retirement. Why mandatory accounts? Because without mandatory savings accounts we will not solve the time inconsistency problem of people under-saving and becoming a welfare burden.
Readers of this page will recall that I have made this proposal in a previous essay, but readers may also recall a letter that questioned an assumption I made about consumer behavior. In effect, the reader asked how, on the one hand, I consider people so irrational that they have to be forced to save, and, on the other hand, I consider people rational enough to manage their own retirement accounts.
But this question reveals a misunderstanding of the time inconsistency problem. The reason we need to have mandatory retirement accounts is not because people are irrational, but precisely because they are perfectly rational — they know exactly what they are doing. If, for example, somebody knows that they will be cared for in old age — even if they don’t save a nickel — then what is their incentive to save that nickel? Wouldn’t it be rational to spend that nickel instead?
So, indeed, people are acting rationally when they choose not to save. We have rational people making choices based on the rules. The trick is to get the rules right. A mandatory retirement system, properly designed, would establish effective rules. I have given additional thought to those rules, and won’t take the time here to describe a new program, but suffice to say that such a proposal might involve graduated input to a retirement program that would offer investment choices. The reason for graduated input is because young workers often need their limited resources to “get started” in their adult lives; that is, they may need to make investments in human capital, like education or families, or to finance a home or a car.
Shouldn’t we be worried, though, about people making bad choices with these retirement accounts and gambling all their savings on risky stocks, thereby making them wards of the state anyway? We should be no more worried about this happening then we are worried about federal workers gambling away their Thrift Plans. The reason we don’t worry about federal workers playing roulette with their retirement accounts is that we don’t let them — we have designed a system that allows individuals to make reasoned choices based on relatively conservative indexed options. The notion that people will be gambling away their retirement accounts on risky individual stocks is a red herring. People could make riskier choices with other investment resources; such “gambling” would simply not be an option under a rebuilt Social Security program.
The same holds true for that other red herring — that individual retirement accounts will simply line the pockets of Wall Street financial firms eager to charge exorbitant transaction fees to unsuspecting rubes. Again, we need look no further than the federal government’s own Thrift Plan to see a low-fee retirement plan with conservative indexed options. And by the way, another benefit of these plans is that they allow people to manage their accounts online.
These examples illustrate another problem: No sooner did talk get serious about fixing Social Security in recent weeks than the political boo-birds went to work scaring people away from new ideas. It’s rare to open a newspaper editorial page these days and not find some Cassandra screeching about evil policy-makers and cranky politicians who are trying to destroy Social Security. Why a politician from any party would want to intentionally destroy a retirement program meant to benefit the elderly is beyond me. Such political claptrap makes me glad I’m an economist. Granted, politics is a game with its own rules and incentives, and people will rationally play by those rules for political gain, but such political role-playing certainly complicates matters, at best, and makes for bad policy, at worst.
Maybe one way to help avoid ad hominem attacks and political labeling would be to recast the Social Security question from one of reform to one of reconstruction. Let’s stop talking about reforming Social Security — let’s rebuild it. In other words, if we could wipe the slate clean, what kind of government retirement program would we build from scratch today? It’s one thing to snipe at new proposals, but it takes a plan to beat a plan, and I’m willing to bet that the best minds of both political parties, given such a charge, would not come up with a government retirement program as it currently exists.
We have had a lot of experience with our current Social Security system, and we have had a lot of experience with other tax programs. We also have new insights into the effect of tax rates on labor supply. As that old maxim suggests, it’s time we put that experience and insight to use and make good policy.
Mr. Prescott is co-winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics, senior monetary adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and professor of economics at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
Radicalism: The conservatism of tomorrow injected into the affairs of today.
–Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary.”
Of all the economic issues facing Washington these days, one looms larger and larger as more time passes without a solution — how to fund our Social Security obligations. We often hear that the main problem is our aging demographics or the political games that are played with Social Security funds. While these may be problematic issues, they are only symptomatic of the fundamental predicament: Government has made promises that it can’t keep.
Heretofore, the government’s solution has always been to make more promises: “Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out. You’ll get your Social Security payments. Trust us.” But to savvy citizens these are starting to sound like pie-crust promises: Easy to make and easy to break. Indeed, Social Security benefit payments are projected to exceed payroll tax revenue in the year 2018, with Social Security trust fund depletion to occur in 2042. I would hate to be a politician in office when that pie crust breaks.
The time is right to act, and we don’t need a special commission to analyze the problem and recommend solutions because we already had one, and it submitted its report three years ago next month — The President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. The trouble is that little has happened since. It’s time to dust off that report, sharpen our policy pencils and get to work on reforming our Social Security system before it’s too late.
The main contribution of that 2001 bipartisan commission was to propose the establishment of a system of voluntary personal accounts, which would increase national savings as well as increase labor-force participation — more on that later. But this contribution is also the commission’s main flaw, for the proposal does not go far enough. We need to establish a system of mandatory savings accounts for retirement, not voluntary. Without mandatory savings accounts we will not solve the time-inconsistency problem of people under-saving and becoming a welfare burden on their families and on the taxpayers. That’s exactly where we are now.
Before I describe the benefits of such accounts, let’s begin by dismissing the notion that individual savings plans are somehow dangerous to U.S. citizens. Some politicians have vilified the idea of giving investment freedom to citizens, arguing that those citizens will be exposed to risks inherent in the market. But this is political scaremongering. U.S. citizens already utilize IRAs, 401Ks, PCOs, Keoghs, SEPs and other investment options just fine, thank you. If some people are conservative investors or managing for the short term, they direct their funds accordingly; if others are more inclined to take risks or looking at the long run, they make appropriate decisions. Consumers already know how to invest their money — why does the government feel the need to patronize them when it comes to Social Security?
It would be one thing if the government’s Social Security system paid a decent return, but as the President’s Commission reported, for a single male worker born in 2000 with average earnings, the real annual return on his currently-scheduled contributions to Social Security will be just 0.86%. And for a worker who earns the maximum amount taxed (then $80,400), the real annual return is a negative 0.72%. A bank would have to offer a pretty fancy toaster to get depositors at those rates of return.
Further, about two dozen countries have reformed their state-run retirement programs, including Chile, Sweden, Australia, Peru, the U.K., Kazakhstan, China, Croatia and Poland. If citizens in these countries can handle individual savings accounts, especially citizens in countries without a history of financial freedom, then U.S. citizens should be equally adept. At a time when the rest of the world is dropping the vestiges of state control, the United States should be leading the way and not lagging behind.
An important benefit of individual savings accounts is that they are transparent, and transparency solves many problems. For example, naysayers may point to the pension funds of such cities as San Diego and Minneapolis, which are currently struggling with underfunded pension plans. But these are pensions where individuals have no control over their contributions and where politicians, with the aid of accountants, can hide inadequate funding for a long period. The beauty of individual savings accounts is that each person decides how his money will be invested and, with the advent of the Internet, he can then monitor those investments at any time and easily make changes to react to changing investment news. Individual savings accounts are transparency in practice.
The benefits of such reform extend beyond the individual retirement accounts of U.S. citizens (although that would be reason enough for reform) — they also accrue to the economy. As noted above, national savings will increase, as will participation in the labor force, both to the benefit of society. On the first point, more private assets means there will be more capital, which will have a positive impact on wages, which benefits the working people, especially the young. More capital also means that the economy will have more productive assets, which also contributes to more production.
Regarding labor supply, any system that taxes people when they are young and gives it back when they are old will have a negative impact on labor supply. People will simply work less. Put another way: If people are in control of their own savings, and if their retirement is funded by savings rather than transfers, they will work more. And everyone is better off. These are the type of win-win situations that politicians and policy makers should be falling over themselves to accomplish.
And those policy makers need to get beyond the idea of creating only voluntary savings accounts. Voluntary accounts are not the full answer. There is nothing wrong with making a reasonable level of savings mandatory. Remember that our current Social Security system is mandatory, but as it stands it is a mandatory tax that perpetuates a welfare system. It doesn’t have to be this way. We should separate retirement savings from a system of welfare, and the most efficient way to do that is to turn our mandatory transfer system into a mandatory savings system.
Some analysts have suggested that we can’t move from a transfer system to a saving system because current retirees will be left in the lurch. Who will pay for them if workers’ money is suddenly shifted to individual savings accounts? There will indeed be a period of time, likely no more than 10 years, when narrowly defined government debt relative to gross national income would increase before decreasing. But government debt is small relative to the present value of the Social Security promises that currently exist. Further, the sum of the value of government debt and the value of these promises will start declining immediately.
Under a reformed system there will always be some individuals who, owing to disabilities or other reasons that prevent them from working, will not have sufficient savings in their old age. The solution is to include a means-tested supplement to ensure that those citizens receive a required payment — just like they receive today. Nobody gets left behind under this new system, and most will move ahead. U.S. citizens deserve more than a minimum payment, and the U.S. economy deserves more than to have its savings, capital and labor weighed down by an increasingly costly tax-and-transfer system.
So how would such a reformed system work? Here’s a proposal: Have three-quarters of employer and employee Social Security contributions (currently 12.4% of wages, salaries and proprietors’ income up to $87,900) put into an individual savings account. This would be deferred income with taxes paid when people receive their retirement benefits. The other one-quarter of Social Security contributions would finance welfare and increase the labor supply, resulting in higher output and an increase in tax revenues.
Reforming Social Security into a system of mandatory individual savings accounts is not as radical as it sounds. The world is moving in this direction, and here in the U.S. our citizens have been dealing with individual accounts for many years through their employers — and some of these are mandatory. As Ambrose Bierce’s definition of radicalism suggests, someday we will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.
Mr. Prescott is co-winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics, senior monetary adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and professor of economics at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
In addition to the benefits mentioned above, there are also political benefits to privatizing social security…
Arnold Kling, Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes this in his WSJ debate with Max Sawicky:
The way I would put it is that politicians have three credit cards — three ways of buying votes today and paying later. This involves making promises that will have to be redeemed by taxes collected in the future. Those three credit cards are the general budget, Social Security and Medicare.
Changing Social Security from a transfer scheme to one with personal accounts serves to take away the politicians’ Social Security Credit Card. They no longer would have the authority to promise benefits out of future Social Security taxes. Incidentally, the tab that they already have run up would be moved over to the General Budget Credit Card, so that current benefits would wind up paid out of general revenues, which is something you said that you favor.
Amusing… I’ll take the word of your Nobel Prize Winner on the issue of social security if and when you trust the wisdom of all the science Nobel Prize winners on the issue of global warming.
Interesting you say that Jab, when that is in fact what I do. For example, what do you say about this report on global warming,
“A review of more than 200 climate studies led by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has determined that the 20th century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1000 years. The review also confirmed that the Medieval Warm Period of 800 to 1300 A.D. and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1900 A.D. were worldwide phenomena not limited to the European and North American continents. While 20th century temperatures are much higher than in the Little Ice Age period, many parts of the world show the medieval warmth to be greater than that of the 20th century. ”
What?!?! How can that be? How could there be times in history that were hotter than now? I thought it was human beings, and all their industrialization that caused global warming? Yet we see hotter times before the industrial revolution.
Oh wait, I see now, you really didn’t mean all scientists, you just meant the ones that agree with you.
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Big Dicks Says:
May 25th, 2006 at 10:11 amBig Dicks
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Silverstein Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:34 pmSilverstein
Wer Fuller selbst gerne einmal reden hören und sehen will, kann sich Aufnahmen seines legendären 42-stündigen Vortrags Everything I know streamen lassen (die Seite ist allerdings recht häufig nicht zu erreichen).
Richard Jenkins Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:37 pmRichard Jenkins
For instance, I typed “cat” in my Terminal, and dragged three files from my iTunes Music folder in to the Terminal window, and followed with the > pipe and specified ~/Desktop (”~/” is Unix shorthand for your “Home folder”) and the file went to t…
Candy Clark Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:37 pmCandy Clark
might do the job. Its for Linux (and Windows) but I would expect to be able to compile it under OS X.
John Cooper, Jr. Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:37 pmJohn Cooper, Jr.
Oops, in the “cat /Users/tangent/music/iTunes…” paste it took away the back slashes, so disregard the paste.
Richard Burton Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:42 pmRichard Burton
Are there any mp3 sources for these lectures? It’d be great to be able to listen to them off-line.
Mary Ann Evans Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:52 pmMary Ann Evans
the best way to turn the rm into mp3 is a piece of software called RM to mp3 converter, look for it on bit torrent.
Nicholas Coppola Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:53 pmNicholas Coppola
The price goes to Restiffbard. The iTunes Applescript does the job exactly the way I wanted it. Thanks a lot for your suggestions though, they will undoubtedly come in handy at some later point in time.
Harlean Carpentier Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:55 pmHarlean Carpentier
You can definitely do this in GarageBand. Simply drag the songs you want from iTunes to GarageBand and it automatically converts them. Then use the Export to iTunes feature. Works like a charm!
Jesus Gonzales Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:57 pmJesus Gonzales
MP3’s to PCM Wave and then encode them back into MP3 is never a good idea, you’d loose too much quality (compression x 2).
Frank James Cooper Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 9:57 pmFrank James Cooper
You need the files in the order you want them joined on a CD and on import there is an option to join.Works like a dream.
Margarita Cansino Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:00 pmMargarita Cansino
have spent some time converting and tagging all thee 42 hours into mp3. i was wondering if poeple here are interested in it, as I have already spent a lot of time making it IPOD compactable.
Rocco Barbella Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:00 pmRocco Barbella
might do the job. Its for Linux (and Windows) but I would expect to be able to compile it under OS X.
Pat Harrington Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:08 pmPat Harrington
used to use a program called Cool Edit to do this kind of work as well as other audio editing things. I’m not even sure if it’s around anymore. This was a long time ago.
Leonard Hacker Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:10 pmLeonard Hacker
Have you tried TotalRecorder? I believe it can record pretty much anything you want and output it as MP3.
Chubby Checker Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:10 pmChubby Checker
You can definitely do this in GarageBand. Simply drag the songs you want from iTunes to GarageBand and it automatically converts them. Then use the Export to iTunes feature. Works like a charm!
Elliott Goldstein Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:16 pmElliott Goldstein
The price goes to Restiffbard. The iTunes Applescript does the job exactly the way I wanted it. Thanks a lot for your suggestions though, they will undoubtedly come in handy at some later point in time.
Alicia Christian Foster Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:20 pmAlicia Christian Foster
The instructions in the article are really easy to follow - in fact, they deserve to be inscribed in stone for the benefit of humankind (and the puzzlement of future archaeologists).
Eric Clapton Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:26 pmEric Clapton
If you’re not afraid of the Unix command line, you could do this with the Cat command. Just type cat mp3-1-name.mp3 mp3-2-name.mp3 mp3-3-name.mp3 > joined-songs.mp3.
Frank James Cooper Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:26 pmFrank James Cooper
had a similar problem a while back where i wanted to split large mp3s (live sets) into parts, while there are quite a number of apps out there that can do it, i found most of them to be bloated or they required you to buy it, so i ended up writing my o…
Dr. Joyce Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:28 pmDr. Joyce
To join songs, try the old DOS command COPY, like this: copy /b song1.mp3 + song2.mp3 + song3.mpg mysongs.mp3. That should work great.
Melvin Kaminsky Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:32 pmMelvin Kaminsky
know garageband can do essentially what you’re asking, maybe sound studio too. That old school classic app SoundApp was amazing and would probably work as well. I know it does work under classic.
Connie Haines Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:32 pmConnie Haines
The price goes to Restiffbard. The iTunes Applescript does the job exactly the way I wanted it. Thanks a lot for your suggestions though, they will undoubtedly come in handy at some later point in time.
Suzanne Cupito Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:33 pmSuzanne Cupito
Oops, in the “cat /Users/tangent/music/iTunes…” paste it took away the back slashes, so disregard the paste.
Eric Clapp Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:40 pmEric Clapp
Are there any mp3 sources for these lectures? It’d be great to be able to listen to them off-line.
John Cooper, Jr. Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 10:42 pmJohn Cooper, Jr.
If you’re not afraid of the Unix command line, you could do this with the Cat command. Just type cat mp3-1-name.mp3 mp3-2-name.mp3 mp3-3-name.mp3 > joined-songs.mp3.
Edithe Marrener Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 11:06 pmEdithe Marrener
The instructions in the article are really easy to follow - in fact, they deserve to be inscribed in stone for the benefit of humankind (and the puzzlement of future archaeologists).
Rocky Graziano Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 11:13 pmRocky Graziano
The instructions in the article are really easy to follow - in fact, they deserve to be inscribed in stone for the benefit of humankind (and the puzzlement of future archaeologists).
Eric Clapton Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 11:27 pmEric Clapton
If you’re not afraid of the Unix command line, you could do this with the Cat command. Just type cat mp3-1-name.mp3 mp3-2-name.mp3 mp3-3-name.mp3 > joined-songs.mp3.
Henry Hall Says:
June 1st, 2006 at 12:21 amHenry Hall
Sounds like a shell script should be able to do it… I’d mpg123 them to .wav, concatenate the wavs (I bet there’s some neat little app that does that), and convert them back.
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February 28th, 2005 at 1:25 am
OK, you’re a great critic. But it’s easy to identify problems. The tough part is fixing them. So, what do you suggest?
In 2002, 46.5 million Americans collected Social Security benefits. 3.6 million, or 10.4%, of Americans age 65 and over had income, including Social Security benefits, at or below the poverty level. Another 1.2 million had incomes just above the poverty level. Many people beyond working age rely on these benefits for basic necessities such as food, medicine, and shelter. Most didn’t make enough while they were working to provide for their retirement. They were honest, hard working people that simply didn’t make much money. Should they starve, or go without medicine? Can you at least admit that there is a problem, that millions of Americans would suffer were it not for their Social Security benefits? I don’t see how you could deny this.
If you can admit there is an issue, then it would be foolish to say it could be ignored. Who, then, other than the Government, is capable of tackling such an issue? And is it not the Government’s duty to protect the welfare of its citizens? How, in the richest nation ever to grace the planet, could the Government just turn a blind eye while its elderly starved? It couldn’t. Call it socialism if you want. It is. So what. You and I have to sacrifice a little income for the common good. Are you so greedy that you can’t part with a few hard earned dollars? You even get it back when you reach retirement (if all goes as planned…).
If we can agree that there is an issue we can’t simply ignore, then why can’t Social Security be the answer? Does it really matter what it’s called, or who created it? If you are really interested in the welfare of Americans, and not just in partisan bickering, then you’ll do your part to make things work, to help improve the system. It’s a lot closer to a solution than “nothing” is.
March 9th, 2005 at 3:11 pm
UnknownPundit, I’d like to hear your thoughts on Prescotts, the co-winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics, solution to the social security problem.
March 21st, 2005 at 8:45 pm
I don’t have a WSJ subscription (can’t afford it with my welfare check). Can you point me to a ‘free’ link? Thanks!
March 24th, 2005 at 8:09 pm
In 2002, 46.5 million Americans collected Social Security benefits. 3.6 million, or 10.4%, of Americans age 65 and over had income, including Social Security benefits, at or below the poverty level. Another 1.2 million had incomes just above the poverty level. Many people beyond working age rely on these benefits for basic necessities such as food, medicine, and shelter. Most didn’t make enough while they were working to provide for their retirement. They were honest, hard working people that simply didn’t make much money. Should they starve, or go without medicine? Can you at least admit that there is a problem, that millions of Americans would suffer were it not for their Social Security benefits? I don’t see how you could deny this.
I never said that it wasn’t an issue that people needed retirement. Of course every one does. My argument is that privatizing social security is the better solution the what it is today. And as your facts (I’m assuming) shows, privatizing will be the better solution for those whose income is below poverty level. Lets see, 2% interest for the current SS and 6% compounded interest for privatizing SS. Now, maybe these below income people can finally have a retirement above the average income level.
If you can admit there is an issue, then it would be foolish to say it could be ignored. Who, then, other than the Government, is capable of tackling such an issue? And is it not the Government’s duty to protect the welfare of its citizens? How, in the richest nation ever to grace the planet, could the Government just turn a blind eye while its elderly starved? It couldn’t. Call it socialism if you want. It is. So what. You and I have to sacrifice a little income for the common good. Are you so greedy that you can’t part with a few hard earned dollars? You even get it back when you reach retirement (if all goes as planned…).
Once again, you proved yourself that privatizing is the better solution. If the government requires people to put money into a private account and earn interest itself (as appose to tax payers paying the 2% interest), than my tax dollars do not have to be spent on someone else’s retirement.
March 26th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
I don’t have a WSJ subscription (can’t afford it with my welfare check). Can you point me to a ‘free’ link? Thanks!
Being a strong supporter of equal opportunity, I decided to cut and paste the articles here. Here is the first article….
It’s Irrational to Save
By EDWARD C. PRESCOTT
December 29, 2004; Page A8
There is an old maxim which states that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment. I think something similar can be said of government policy, to wit: Good policy comes from experience, and experience comes from poor policy.
This bit of homespun wisdom could easily apply to all sorts of government policies over time, but it has particular relevance to tax policy and, specifically, to the U.S. Social Security system. Created during the Great Depression to guarantee that no senior citizen should live in poverty, Social Security was a good idea meant to address the growing needs of elderly Americans. However, good ideas don’t always equal good policy.
Social Security was developed at a time when the number of workers paying into the system greatly outnumbered those who were receiving funds, and thus the promise made by government was easily kept. But times change while policies atrophy, and Social Security has evolved into a system that places an increasingly onerous burden on the young; the ratio of workers to elderly has shifted from 41-to-1 in the 1930s, to 3-to-1 today.
Young workers today are being told that their Social Security contributions — or taxes — may have to increase to support the burgeoning elderly population. Moreover, those young workers are being warned that the same benefits will not apply to them — that they will have to work longer and receive less than the folks they are now supporting. Such are government promises, especially those grounded on ill-founded policy.
Poor policies, though, need not persist. We really can learn from experience, and we should apply that experience and new knowledge to existing policies so those original good ideas — and government promises — can be made whole. Regarding tax policy, we have learned that labor supply is not inelastic and does indeed respond to changes in tax rates. This insight, so simple and yet so powerful, has implications for all sorts of tax policies, and one policy that would greatly benefit from an application of this insight would be our Social Security tax system.
Let’s return to those three young workers who have to support that one senior citizen and who may have their benefits cut back. Would such changes in tax rates and changes in government promises affect labor supply? Theory says “yes,” the statistical evidence agrees, and common sense concurs. These young workers are rational. They make labor/leisure choices on the margin, and these marginal choices add up.
So what to do? How to move from a pay-as-you-go welfare system to a self-funding retirement system that benefits from individual maximizing incentives? Again, the answer begins with the insight that labor supply is responsive to tax rates. We simply cannot keep cranking up Social Security taxes with impunity. What we need to do is turn the present tax-and-transfer system into a bona fide individual retirement system that is in line with individual incentives.
In short, the answer is to establish a system of mandatory investment accounts for retirement. Why mandatory accounts? Because without mandatory savings accounts we will not solve the time inconsistency problem of people under-saving and becoming a welfare burden.
Readers of this page will recall that I have made this proposal in a previous essay, but readers may also recall a letter that questioned an assumption I made about consumer behavior. In effect, the reader asked how, on the one hand, I consider people so irrational that they have to be forced to save, and, on the other hand, I consider people rational enough to manage their own retirement accounts.
But this question reveals a misunderstanding of the time inconsistency problem. The reason we need to have mandatory retirement accounts is not because people are irrational, but precisely because they are perfectly rational — they know exactly what they are doing. If, for example, somebody knows that they will be cared for in old age — even if they don’t save a nickel — then what is their incentive to save that nickel? Wouldn’t it be rational to spend that nickel instead?
So, indeed, people are acting rationally when they choose not to save. We have rational people making choices based on the rules. The trick is to get the rules right. A mandatory retirement system, properly designed, would establish effective rules. I have given additional thought to those rules, and won’t take the time here to describe a new program, but suffice to say that such a proposal might involve graduated input to a retirement program that would offer investment choices. The reason for graduated input is because young workers often need their limited resources to “get started” in their adult lives; that is, they may need to make investments in human capital, like education or families, or to finance a home or a car.
Shouldn’t we be worried, though, about people making bad choices with these retirement accounts and gambling all their savings on risky stocks, thereby making them wards of the state anyway? We should be no more worried about this happening then we are worried about federal workers gambling away their Thrift Plans. The reason we don’t worry about federal workers playing roulette with their retirement accounts is that we don’t let them — we have designed a system that allows individuals to make reasoned choices based on relatively conservative indexed options. The notion that people will be gambling away their retirement accounts on risky individual stocks is a red herring. People could make riskier choices with other investment resources; such “gambling” would simply not be an option under a rebuilt Social Security program.
The same holds true for that other red herring — that individual retirement accounts will simply line the pockets of Wall Street financial firms eager to charge exorbitant transaction fees to unsuspecting rubes. Again, we need look no further than the federal government’s own Thrift Plan to see a low-fee retirement plan with conservative indexed options. And by the way, another benefit of these plans is that they allow people to manage their accounts online.
These examples illustrate another problem: No sooner did talk get serious about fixing Social Security in recent weeks than the political boo-birds went to work scaring people away from new ideas. It’s rare to open a newspaper editorial page these days and not find some Cassandra screeching about evil policy-makers and cranky politicians who are trying to destroy Social Security. Why a politician from any party would want to intentionally destroy a retirement program meant to benefit the elderly is beyond me. Such political claptrap makes me glad I’m an economist. Granted, politics is a game with its own rules and incentives, and people will rationally play by those rules for political gain, but such political role-playing certainly complicates matters, at best, and makes for bad policy, at worst.
Maybe one way to help avoid ad hominem attacks and political labeling would be to recast the Social Security question from one of reform to one of reconstruction. Let’s stop talking about reforming Social Security — let’s rebuild it. In other words, if we could wipe the slate clean, what kind of government retirement program would we build from scratch today? It’s one thing to snipe at new proposals, but it takes a plan to beat a plan, and I’m willing to bet that the best minds of both political parties, given such a charge, would not come up with a government retirement program as it currently exists.
We have had a lot of experience with our current Social Security system, and we have had a lot of experience with other tax programs. We also have new insights into the effect of tax rates on labor supply. As that old maxim suggests, it’s time we put that experience and insight to use and make good policy.
Mr. Prescott is co-winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics, senior monetary adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and professor of economics at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
March 26th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Here is the (somewhat) related second article…
Why Does the Government Patronize Us?
By EDWARD C. PRESCOTT
November 11, 2004; Page A16
Radicalism: The conservatism of tomorrow injected into the affairs of today.
–Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary.”
Of all the economic issues facing Washington these days, one looms larger and larger as more time passes without a solution — how to fund our Social Security obligations. We often hear that the main problem is our aging demographics or the political games that are played with Social Security funds. While these may be problematic issues, they are only symptomatic of the fundamental predicament: Government has made promises that it can’t keep.
Heretofore, the government’s solution has always been to make more promises: “Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out. You’ll get your Social Security payments. Trust us.” But to savvy citizens these are starting to sound like pie-crust promises: Easy to make and easy to break. Indeed, Social Security benefit payments are projected to exceed payroll tax revenue in the year 2018, with Social Security trust fund depletion to occur in 2042. I would hate to be a politician in office when that pie crust breaks.
The time is right to act, and we don’t need a special commission to analyze the problem and recommend solutions because we already had one, and it submitted its report three years ago next month — The President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. The trouble is that little has happened since. It’s time to dust off that report, sharpen our policy pencils and get to work on reforming our Social Security system before it’s too late.
The main contribution of that 2001 bipartisan commission was to propose the establishment of a system of voluntary personal accounts, which would increase national savings as well as increase labor-force participation — more on that later. But this contribution is also the commission’s main flaw, for the proposal does not go far enough. We need to establish a system of mandatory savings accounts for retirement, not voluntary. Without mandatory savings accounts we will not solve the time-inconsistency problem of people under-saving and becoming a welfare burden on their families and on the taxpayers. That’s exactly where we are now.
Before I describe the benefits of such accounts, let’s begin by dismissing the notion that individual savings plans are somehow dangerous to U.S. citizens. Some politicians have vilified the idea of giving investment freedom to citizens, arguing that those citizens will be exposed to risks inherent in the market. But this is political scaremongering. U.S. citizens already utilize IRAs, 401Ks, PCOs, Keoghs, SEPs and other investment options just fine, thank you. If some people are conservative investors or managing for the short term, they direct their funds accordingly; if others are more inclined to take risks or looking at the long run, they make appropriate decisions. Consumers already know how to invest their money — why does the government feel the need to patronize them when it comes to Social Security?
It would be one thing if the government’s Social Security system paid a decent return, but as the President’s Commission reported, for a single male worker born in 2000 with average earnings, the real annual return on his currently-scheduled contributions to Social Security will be just 0.86%. And for a worker who earns the maximum amount taxed (then $80,400), the real annual return is a negative 0.72%. A bank would have to offer a pretty fancy toaster to get depositors at those rates of return.
Further, about two dozen countries have reformed their state-run retirement programs, including Chile, Sweden, Australia, Peru, the U.K., Kazakhstan, China, Croatia and Poland. If citizens in these countries can handle individual savings accounts, especially citizens in countries without a history of financial freedom, then U.S. citizens should be equally adept. At a time when the rest of the world is dropping the vestiges of state control, the United States should be leading the way and not lagging behind.
An important benefit of individual savings accounts is that they are transparent, and transparency solves many problems. For example, naysayers may point to the pension funds of such cities as San Diego and Minneapolis, which are currently struggling with underfunded pension plans. But these are pensions where individuals have no control over their contributions and where politicians, with the aid of accountants, can hide inadequate funding for a long period. The beauty of individual savings accounts is that each person decides how his money will be invested and, with the advent of the Internet, he can then monitor those investments at any time and easily make changes to react to changing investment news. Individual savings accounts are transparency in practice.
The benefits of such reform extend beyond the individual retirement accounts of U.S. citizens (although that would be reason enough for reform) — they also accrue to the economy. As noted above, national savings will increase, as will participation in the labor force, both to the benefit of society. On the first point, more private assets means there will be more capital, which will have a positive impact on wages, which benefits the working people, especially the young. More capital also means that the economy will have more productive assets, which also contributes to more production.
Regarding labor supply, any system that taxes people when they are young and gives it back when they are old will have a negative impact on labor supply. People will simply work less. Put another way: If people are in control of their own savings, and if their retirement is funded by savings rather than transfers, they will work more. And everyone is better off. These are the type of win-win situations that politicians and policy makers should be falling over themselves to accomplish.
And those policy makers need to get beyond the idea of creating only voluntary savings accounts. Voluntary accounts are not the full answer. There is nothing wrong with making a reasonable level of savings mandatory. Remember that our current Social Security system is mandatory, but as it stands it is a mandatory tax that perpetuates a welfare system. It doesn’t have to be this way. We should separate retirement savings from a system of welfare, and the most efficient way to do that is to turn our mandatory transfer system into a mandatory savings system.
Some analysts have suggested that we can’t move from a transfer system to a saving system because current retirees will be left in the lurch. Who will pay for them if workers’ money is suddenly shifted to individual savings accounts? There will indeed be a period of time, likely no more than 10 years, when narrowly defined government debt relative to gross national income would increase before decreasing. But government debt is small relative to the present value of the Social Security promises that currently exist. Further, the sum of the value of government debt and the value of these promises will start declining immediately.
Under a reformed system there will always be some individuals who, owing to disabilities or other reasons that prevent them from working, will not have sufficient savings in their old age. The solution is to include a means-tested supplement to ensure that those citizens receive a required payment — just like they receive today. Nobody gets left behind under this new system, and most will move ahead. U.S. citizens deserve more than a minimum payment, and the U.S. economy deserves more than to have its savings, capital and labor weighed down by an increasingly costly tax-and-transfer system.
So how would such a reformed system work? Here’s a proposal: Have three-quarters of employer and employee Social Security contributions (currently 12.4% of wages, salaries and proprietors’ income up to $87,900) put into an individual savings account. This would be deferred income with taxes paid when people receive their retirement benefits. The other one-quarter of Social Security contributions would finance welfare and increase the labor supply, resulting in higher output and an increase in tax revenues.
Reforming Social Security into a system of mandatory individual savings accounts is not as radical as it sounds. The world is moving in this direction, and here in the U.S. our citizens have been dealing with individual accounts for many years through their employers — and some of these are mandatory. As Ambrose Bierce’s definition of radicalism suggests, someday we will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.
Mr. Prescott is co-winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics, senior monetary adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and professor of economics at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
March 26th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
In addition to the benefits mentioned above, there are also political benefits to privatizing social security…
Arnold Kling, Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes this in his WSJ debate with Max Sawicky:
April 7th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
Amusing… I’ll take the word of your Nobel Prize Winner on the issue of social security if and when you trust the wisdom of all the science Nobel Prize winners on the issue of global warming.
April 13th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
Interesting you say that Jab, when that is in fact what I do. For example, what do you say about this report on global warming,
What?!?! How can that be? How could there be times in history that were hotter than now? I thought it was human beings, and all their industrialization that caused global warming? Yet we see hotter times before the industrial revolution.
Oh wait, I see now, you really didn’t mean all scientists, you just meant the ones that agree with you.
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For instance, I typed “cat” in my Terminal, and dragged three files from my iTunes Music folder in to the Terminal window, and followed with the > pipe and specified ~/Desktop (”~/” is Unix shorthand for your “Home folder”) and the file went to t…
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might do the job. Its for Linux (and Windows) but I would expect to be able to compile it under OS X.
May 31st, 2006 at 9:37 pm
Oops, in the “cat /Users/tangent/music/iTunes…” paste it took away the back slashes, so disregard the paste.
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The price goes to Restiffbard. The iTunes Applescript does the job exactly the way I wanted it. Thanks a lot for your suggestions though, they will undoubtedly come in handy at some later point in time.
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You can definitely do this in GarageBand. Simply drag the songs you want from iTunes to GarageBand and it automatically converts them. Then use the Export to iTunes feature. Works like a charm!
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MP3’s to PCM Wave and then encode them back into MP3 is never a good idea, you’d loose too much quality (compression x 2).
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You need the files in the order you want them joined on a CD and on import there is an option to join.Works like a dream.
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have spent some time converting and tagging all thee 42 hours into mp3. i was wondering if poeple here are interested in it, as I have already spent a lot of time making it IPOD compactable.
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might do the job. Its for Linux (and Windows) but I would expect to be able to compile it under OS X.
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If not, can anyone recommend a good tool for turning RealAudio streams into mp3?
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used to use a program called Cool Edit to do this kind of work as well as other audio editing things. I’m not even sure if it’s around anymore. This was a long time ago.
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If not, can anyone recommend a good tool for turning RealAudio streams into mp3?
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Have you tried TotalRecorder? I believe it can record pretty much anything you want and output it as MP3.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:10 pm
You can definitely do this in GarageBand. Simply drag the songs you want from iTunes to GarageBand and it automatically converts them. Then use the Export to iTunes feature. Works like a charm!
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If not, can anyone recommend a good tool for turning RealAudio streams into mp3?
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The price goes to Restiffbard. The iTunes Applescript does the job exactly the way I wanted it. Thanks a lot for your suggestions though, they will undoubtedly come in handy at some later point in time.
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If you’re not afraid of the Unix command line, you could do this with the Cat command. Just type cat mp3-1-name.mp3 mp3-2-name.mp3 mp3-3-name.mp3 > joined-songs.mp3.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:26 pm
had a similar problem a while back where i wanted to split large mp3s (live sets) into parts, while there are quite a number of apps out there that can do it, i found most of them to be bloated or they required you to buy it, so i ended up writing my o…
May 31st, 2006 at 10:28 pm
To join songs, try the old DOS command COPY, like this: copy /b song1.mp3 + song2.mp3 + song3.mpg mysongs.mp3. That should work great.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:28 pm
Hmm… Yeah I guess that might work. I’ll have to try it out.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:32 pm
know garageband can do essentially what you’re asking, maybe sound studio too. That old school classic app SoundApp was amazing and would probably work as well. I know it does work under classic.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:32 pm
The price goes to Restiffbard. The iTunes Applescript does the job exactly the way I wanted it. Thanks a lot for your suggestions though, they will undoubtedly come in handy at some later point in time.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Oops, in the “cat /Users/tangent/music/iTunes…” paste it took away the back slashes, so disregard the paste.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Are there any mp3 sources for these lectures? It’d be great to be able to listen to them off-line.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:42 pm
If you’re not afraid of the Unix command line, you could do this with the Cat command. Just type cat mp3-1-name.mp3 mp3-2-name.mp3 mp3-3-name.mp3 > joined-songs.mp3.
May 31st, 2006 at 11:06 pm
The instructions in the article are really easy to follow - in fact, they deserve to be inscribed in stone for the benefit of humankind (and the puzzlement of future archaeologists).
May 31st, 2006 at 11:13 pm
The instructions in the article are really easy to follow - in fact, they deserve to be inscribed in stone for the benefit of humankind (and the puzzlement of future archaeologists).
May 31st, 2006 at 11:27 pm
If you’re not afraid of the Unix command line, you could do this with the Cat command. Just type cat mp3-1-name.mp3 mp3-2-name.mp3 mp3-3-name.mp3 > joined-songs.mp3.
June 1st, 2006 at 12:21 am
Sounds like a shell script should be able to do it… I’d mpg123 them to .wav, concatenate the wavs (I bet there’s some neat little app that does that), and convert them back.
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