Thanks, Cato, But Let’s Not “Re-Imagine” Social Security (It’s Been Working for 90 Years)
What do you get when a libertarian think tank publishes a book proposing to radically change Social Security in collaboration mostly with other right-leaning organizations? You get something like “Re-imagining Social Security,” authored by the CATO Institute’s Ivane Nachkebia and Romina Boccia (who more than once has called the program a ‘legal Ponzi scheme’). Not surprisingly, to these authors, “re-imagining” the program that some 70 million Americans depend on for financial security essentially means altering the program beyond recognition and cutting benefits for future retirees. To which we say: better not to let their imaginations run away with our earned benefits.
The libertarian Cato Institute (which never met a federal program it liked) appears to be on a crusade to undermine the existing Social Security program. Just this week, Boccia published a post in Cato’s ‘Debt Dispatch’ blog, claiming that Social Security “operates on the Robin Hood principle in reverse.” This is, pardon the expression, quite rich coming from a think tank whose funders include the Koch network and mega-corporations like Google, Facebook, Philip Morris, the American Petroleum Institute and Chevron.