PRESERVED AS IF IN AMBER. Harold Meyerson reaches back forty years to offer a defense of Social Security.

Above all, what changed the lives of America's senior citizens were the significant increases in Social Security benefits enacted in the 1960s and '70s, and the indexing of those benefits to average wage growth. But since the Bush administration is reportedly soon to propose ending that indexing, and replacing it with a different formula that would greatly reduce benefits, it's worth taking a moment to look back at senior poverty as it existed in the year of John F. Kennedy's election as president.

Mr Meyerson perpetuates a logical error: there is less poverty among pensioners today than there was forty years ago, and Social Security is the cause.

Today, however, the United States is governed by a president who is affronted by the very idea of a successful government program. According to a story in yesterday's Post, President Bush wants to change the Social Security indexing formula in a way that will reduce monthly payments by 32.5 percent by 2052 and 45.9 percent by 2075. Today a retiree receives a Social Security check that equals 42 percent of the average worker's wage; if Bush's plan is enacted, that check will shrink to just 20 percent of that wage.

Better watch the political spouting, Mr Meyerson. In the absence of any action, that check will disappear, or perhaps be paid off in inflated currency. And that "successful government program" might have achieved some of those results by stealing the future from younger workers.

Perhaps there is yet another answer: there is more childhood poverty today because Social Security and Medicare have reduced economic growth compared to what it would have been with a different tax regime. Martin Feldstein has worked on this topic for years. There is also a paper by Alan J. Auerbach, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff called "Generational Accounting: A Meaningful Way to Evaluate Fiscal Policy" (requires J-STOR privileges) in the Winter 1994 Journal of Economic Perspectives that illustrates the extent to which the current crop of elders are stealing from future generations.

Mr Meyerson would rather score more polemical points.

In 1980, 39 percent of American workers had defined-benefit pension plans; today just 21 percent do, as employers have shunted their employees into 401(k) investment plans. If Bush gets his way, both the government's retirement plan and employers' will be supplanted by plans based on stock performance. If Bush gets his way, his chief domestic achievement will be to have turned "secure retirement" into an oxymoron.

No. A "secure retirement" is only as secure as the productivity of the current crop of workers. The Social Security tax drives a wedge between productivity and reward, which reduces economic growth. Because the bonds currently representing the Trust Fund's "surplus" will be refinanced out of expected tax revenues, the status quo means reliance on that lower rate of economic growth -- or on refinancing the bonds at the Fed, which means your defined benefit of $1 is an inflated $1.

Arnold Kling has some useful observations.

If benefit growth is not slowed, then the taxes required to both pay for Social Security and provide subsidies to low-wage workers's savings plans will be too onerous. Regardless of how private accounts are implemented, we need a "plan B" policy to slow the growth of benefits, using either price indexing or adjustments to the retirement age.That would be true even in the absence of private accounts.

How "defined" is a benefit if Congress can at any time redefine the retirement age?

Mr Kling also offers useful advice to policy wonks. Stop lecturing us about your good intentions.

[The transition to private accounts] would cut the regressive Social Security tax, shifting the burden of paying current benefits to other taxes that are more likely to fall on the wealthy. Thus, the consequence of privatization would be quite progressive, even though [Professor Paul] Krugman assumes that the motives of the Bush Administration do not favor the working class. In my view, this demonstrates the importance for economists of focusing on consequences rather than on motives.

Hear! Hear!

Villainous Company has also spent some time over the weekend following the Social Security debates and has a collection of gems worth your perusal.