Does The Government Excel At Retirement?

An extreme liberal economist Paul Krugman recently wrote an article published in The New York Times telling all of us that government does excel at something.

What?  Let us read on.

Mr. Krugman started with the usual liberal talking points that Republicans love cutting taxes on the rich and being stingy on welfare to poor people.  Once he gets past that dribble, he moves on to inform us that democrats want to actually expand Social Security, a program that started running deficits in 2009.

He is all excited that Democrats are “standing up to anti-government propaganda” and professes that government can do some things better than the private sector, other than what he calls “public goods,” i.e. national defense and air traffic control.

One example he gives is health insurance. Really, health insurance?  He points to Medicare and Medicaid.  Does he not realize that the patients go to private doctors and hospitals, not government ones?  He states that Medicare and Medicaid are “substantially cheaper and more efficient that private insurance.”

Does he not know that Medicare and Medicaid pay less than the cost of service and is subsidized by private insurance, and could never stand on their own in their present forms?

Is he really that uninformed?  We are told by the left that he is brilliant; this is what they call brilliant?

Mr. Krugman also believes that government excels at providing retirement security, i.e. Social Security.

Social Security, which Mr. Krugman believes the government excels at, ran a deficit of 71 billion dollars in 2013, the fourth year in a row running a deficit.

Social Security, which Mr. Krugman believes the government excels at, according to the 2014 annual report from the programs’ trustees, the combined 75-year unfunded obligation of the Social Security and Disability Insurance Trust Funds is $13.4 trillion, a $1.1 trillion increase from last year’s unfunded obligation of $12.3 trillion.

Why does he want to expand Social Security?

Well, because he believes “the decline of private pensions, and their replacement with inadequate 401(k)­type plans, has left a gap that Social Security isn’t currently big enough to fill. So why not make it bigger?"

Do you believe government excels at providing retirement benefits via social security?

Should we expand social security and increase the unfunded liabilities?

Or are you like me? I would love for the government to give me the principal I and my employer gave them, they can keep the interest, and I will do much better than they could.

I will be interviewing Gary Wolfram, the William E. Simon Professor in Economics and Public Policy at Hillsdale College, tomorrow (Tuesday) at 10:06 am on the Live with Renk Show to find out his thoughts on this issue.