October 19, 2010
Eric Schurenberg is upset about Social Security and Medicare benefits because the federal government spends 7 times as much on each senior as it does on each child. This is taken from a paper that came out from the Brookings Institution.
Let’s use the Schurenberg-Brookings methodology to see the ratio of average federal spending on the country’s 400 billionaires to spending per child. For convenience let’s say that federal spending averages $5,000 per child.
How much does the federal government spend on each billionaire? Most wealthy people hold some amount of their wealth in government bonds. Let’s conservatively assume that our 400 billionaires hold an average of $1 billion worth of government bonds. Let’s assume that these bonds pay an average interest rate of 4 percent. This means that the government is paying our billionaires an average of $40 million a year in interest. This is about 8,000 times what we spend on children on average. How’s that for fairness?
Okay, everyone is jumping up and down saying that our billionaires paid for these bonds and this interest is just a return on that payment. This is true, but guess what? Our seniors paid Social Security and Medicare taxes to cover their benefits. In other words, they paid for these benefits much like the billionaires paid for their bonds, except of course that the seniors had no choice in the matter.
Ignoring the fact that Social Security and Medicare were paid for with designated taxes is dishonest, just as it would be dishonest to comment on the interest payments going to the billionaires without noting that they had paid for their bonds. But hey, this is the state of public debate in Washington.
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