Volume 43, Number 20 · December 19, 1996
Social Security and Its Discontents
By Jeff Madrick
Restoring Hope in America: The Social Security Solution
by Sam Beard
Institute for Contemporary Studies, San Francisco, 224 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Frightening America's Elderly: How the Age Lobby Holds Seniors Captive
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Capital Research Center, Washington, D.C, 98 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old? How the Coming Social Security Crisis Threatens You, Your Family, and Your Country
by Peter G. Peterson
Random House, 237 pp., $21.00
Social Security in the Twenty-First Century
edited by Eric R. Kingson, edited by James H. Schulz
Oxford University Press, 313 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Beard wants us to believe, of course, that it is government that is holding us all back. Forty-five years from now, Beard calculates, an average worker who has invested his Social Security contributions in a privately administered portfolio of stocks and other securities instead of handing it over to the government will become a millionaire twice over—if only in nominal rather than inflation-adjusted dollars. What Beard omits to say is that if Social Security maintains its currently mandated benefits, it will also make the typical recipient a millionaire in forty-five years, without the risk of investing in the volatile stock market. By the year 2040, a typical Social Security beneficiary will receive about $92,000 a year in the dollars of that year, on the basis of assumptions similar to Beard's. To buy an annuity in that year paying the same annual amount until death would cost nearly $1 million.[1] Even today, a package of Social Security and Medicare benefits is worth half a million dollars to the typical retired couple.
Review, 5125 words
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