Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Students for Saving Social Security is a worthwhile organization. It favors real reforms to move the Social Security program in the direction of personal accounts, including the ongoing efforts of Senators DeMint and Santorum. You can sign this online petition if you agree.
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I’m afraid SS reform has fizzled for the near future.
Yeah, probably, but it’s a good cause.
I think Bush (or somebody) actually softened the ground–or else the twenty-somethings general desire to have a little more control arises from their fear there will be nothing. (And this may lead to various ruses to avoid paying it in the future.) Of course my students (open admissions junior college, Texas, 40-50% eventually graduating from an engineering and military school) are pretty much to the right of any demographics for their age, but no one appears to be making their primary argument against privatization and half a dozen are arguing for it. This seems to be the consensus of these classes. Their first papers tended to overstate the disaster looming and they haven’t seemed to register that privatization will not help that all that much. So they don’t always have the best arguments for it nor the best ones again. We’ll see.
I don’t think there’s any question but that it will be a problem from the standpoint of taxes and government spending. The arithmetic of longer lifespans and a higher proportion of retirement-aged people in the general population makes that a certainty. I therefore assume that the system will be changed fundamentally at some point, but how and when it will be changed are still unclear.
Whatever happens on a societal level, it always makes sense for individuals to save and invest on their own.