Privatizing Social Security? (re-printed)

Michael Hiltzik has a column in the LA Times entitled Proposal to Privatize Social Security Rears its Ugly Head Again - basically an election-season partisan piece attacking Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for referencing privatization in their campaign rhetoric and pandering to their base.

 I am moderately skeptical about privatizing Social Security, mostly because I am skeptical about any proposal to "solve" once and for all the inherent, unavoidable problems with government-provided (or even government-facilitated) retirement benefits - future costs and revenues are simply too unpredictable in a country as large and complex as the United States. I also worry about how a regime of mandatory savings/investment could distort the stock market itself and undermine normal free market competition among firms soliciting investors.

But I'm even more skeptical about how seriously we should take any Presidential candidate's campaign speech points about how to fix Social Security; this is a feature of every election cycle that seems to come to nothing after the election. Reforming Social Security will be almost entirely a Congressional task, with the President involved only on the sidelines, as a cheerleader for his party's legislators. Social Security reform would be even more controversial than health care reform; Republicans would probably need a supermajority in each house in order to make drastic changes. So I am always a little mystified when people are either alarmed or enthused about a Chief Executive candidate - from either party - promising to fix Social Security unilaterally. It's not really within the President's powers, and it's probably not possible in any case. It seems more worthwhile to pay attention when candidates talk about things the President can do - Supreme Court nominations, appointing the Fed Chairman, ordering military interventions overseas, or prioritizing certain types of immigration enforcement. The President does not directly raise or lower taxes, create or destroy jobs (apart from White House staff), or reduce poverty - on these issues, he is mostly confined to exercising his veto power after Congress enacts its own political compromise.

There's another source of my skepticism about most of the privatization rhetoric - retirement benefits are only a portion (albeit the largest portion) of the SSA's disbursements. According to the SSA's latest statistics, more than one-third of the benefits paid out in a month are under the disability and survivorship programs, which would be entirely unaffected by privatized retirement plans (almost $20 million per month goes to these non-retiree beneficiaries - disbursements outside the reach of any privatization plans). Assuming we did privatizing retirement benefits, and that it reduced the SSA's spending on the program significantly, the proportion of disbursements going to disabled workers and survivors would become that much greater of the total pie, creating a new host of policy issues and political debates. In addition, SSA has claimed in the past that 85% of its own agency overhead is spent on the disability program, which requires more than one million formal adjudicative hearings per year for determining eligibility. If this is true, then any savings in administrative costs brought by privatizing retirement benefits would affect only a small portion (15%) of SSA's overhead, not a very significant difference.