Tag Archives : social security
France Increases Retirement Age to 62, Solves 1.94 Percent of Its Fiscal Problem
I’m just making up the 1.94 percent number, but the International Herald Tribune reported last year that unfunded liabilities in France are nearly 550 percent of GDP. The news reports don’t include any estimates of what Sarkozy’s reform will mean, but I would be surprised if it had a big impact on France’s long-run fiscal […]
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More than Two-to-One Support for Personal Retirement Accounts
I am pleasantly shocked to see that a healthy majority of respondents favor partial privatization of Social Security. I knew support was reasonably strong several years ago, but I feared that the financial crisis would have made Americans more leery of financial markets. I also wondered whether the idea was discredited by its association with […]
read more...French Workers Protest against Reality
I sometimes joke that the French are the world’s most statist people. I have no idea if that is actually true, but the latest protests in France certainly are a good piece of evidence. French workers (especially government bureaucrats) are protesting a plan to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62. They apparently think […]
read more...A Basic – but Critical – Economics Lesson from Walter Williams
Just because something is free, that doesn’t mean there is no cost. This is the core message of Walter Williams’ column, which uses the example of “employer-paid” Social Security taxes to explain how politicians specialize in giving us very expensive things for “free.” Scarcity means there’s no free lunch. Having more of one thing requires […]
read more...Chile’s Private Social Security System a Big Success
Unlike the United States and most European nations, Chile does not face a long-term Social Security crisis. This is because lawmakers shifted to a system of personal accounts almost 30 years ago. As a result, Chile’s economy is much stronger, the financial system is healthy, workers are better off, and taxpayers are protected. It also […]
read more...“I Wish Republicans Had a Secret Plan for Personal Accounts”
Here’s my debate on Larry Kudlow’s show about Social Security personal retirement accounts.
read more...Personal Accounts Are Better than Empty Promises from Social Security
My Cato colleague Jose Pinera makes a powerful argument for “privatizing” Social Security, which is something that has happened in about 30 nations. My Ph.D. dissertation was on Australia’s private system, so I’ve always had a soft spot for this issue. Sadly, Washington is busy creating new entitlements instead of fixing the ones we already […]
read more...Senator Obama’s Social Security Tax Plan
In addition to several other tax increases, Senator Barack Obama wants to increase the Social Security payroll tax burden by imposing the tax on income above $250,000. This would be a sharp departure from current law, which only requires that the tax be imposed on the amount of income needed to “pay for” promised benefits. But more important, at least from an economic perspective, the Senator’s initiative would increase the top tax rate on productive behavior by as much as 12 percentage points – and this would be in addition to his proposal to kill the 2003 tax rate reductions and further boost the top rate by 4.6 percentage points.
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