Social Security is in a dire financial state in part because it is entirely possible to get elected to the Congress without saying anything about the program.
Even in a good economy, the program’s prospects are not great. Given the latest forecasts from the Social Security Administration, people as old as 76 expect on average to outlive the system’s ability to keep its promises. At that time, seniors across Georgia can expect reductions to benefits approaching 25 percent.
That is not a worse case scenario. That stern warning actually assumes a robust economy with modest inflation, dropping throughout 2022. So things may be much worse.
These concerns should wake up our elected officials, but they don’t. The political calculus of Social Security hasn’t budged in nearly 20 years. Candidates will tell you what their opponent will do, what they will not do, while leaving no trace of what they would actually do to stabilize the program.
While candidates will spend tens of millions of dollars to fight for votes on the margin, they can’t find a dime to explain to us what they would do about the program on which the rest of us depend. Instead, politicians vaguely promise to protect the program while hoping that no one is so impolite as to ask how.
The current Senate race in Georgia is no different from others in the nation as a whole. Voters across this state are at risk of a crisis that is approaching to a degree of mathematical certainty. Yet, neither candidate lists Social Security as an issue on their website– and neither campaign returns calls for positions.
Current Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., does not list Social Security as an issue on his senate website. In speeches, he has committed to fight the privatization of the program. That promise is not difficult to keep given that the Social Security Administration has not seen a proposal to add personal accounts to the program in more than a decade.
Republican opponent Herschel Walker has so successfully avoided the topic that even American Bridge 21st Century, “a rapid response” arm of the Democratic Party, has been unable to connect him even loosely to the ubiquitous narrative that the GOP plans to “end” Social Security.
The vapid state of the issue in the current campaign reveals an inherent contradiction between the importance of the program and where it fits in the priority of those who want to represent us in Congress.
The only fact on which all experts agree is that the longer we wait the harder the problem will be to fix. For the average person on the street that means the more we elect people who have no commitment to the program the more pain we will experience in our retirement years.
At this point, Congress isn’t working on solving the problem. Lawmakers are talking about what the problem is. Democrats are roughly $20 trillion dollars apart on how much the program needs to be expanded. Republicans haven’t put forward a proposal in nearly a decade.
Until voters make Social Security a priority in those precious minutes that they spend standing in the voting booth, politicians will stand to the side watching the program drift into crisis, one which will dictate the terms of the solution on the public.
Voters need to reframe the question of Social Security for those who seeking office. Currently, politicians worry that Social Security is the “3rd Rail” of politics. Touch it, and die. They need to understand: Ignore it and lose.
Brenton Smith of Atlanta has written on the Social Security issue for publications ranging from Forbes to Market Watch.
