Worms, Pond Scum and Economists

Dean Baker writes

Worms, Pond Scum and Economists

The effort to blame the awful plight of the young on Social Security and Medicare is picking up steam.
In the last week, there were several pieces in The Washington Post and The New York Times that either implicitly or explicitly blamed older workers and retirees for the bad economic plight facing young people today. There is now a full-court press to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, ostensibly out of a desire to help young workers today and in the future.

Just to be clear, there is no doubt that young workers face dismal economic prospects at the moment.

This means that young people today can expect many more years of dire labor market conditions, because the remedies that could turn around their job situations have been blocked by nonsense spewing from economists. Incidentally, this situation works out very nicely for those on top, who are enjoying the benefits of record-high profit shares, which have also helped to fuel a soaring stock market.
The failure to see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world, coupled with the failure to prescribe an effective remedy to deal with the damage, should be sufficient to earn the economics profession the contempt of right-thinking people everywhere. But there is nothing too low for this group of professionals.

We are now seeing economists joining the crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare by implicitly or explicitly claiming that these programs are somehow responsible for the dismal economic plight of the young. The argument is that we can only free up money for helping our young if we take money from the old, a group with a median income of $20,000 a year.

By contrast, the upward redistribution of income to the richest 1 percent is equal to 10 percentage points of national income, or more than $1.3 trillion a year. To put this in the ten-year-budget-window context that dominates Washington debate, the amount that has been redistributed upward will be more than $16 trillion over the next decade. And that is based on the heroic assumption that the upward redistribution does not continue.