Saturday, May 28, 2005
Excellent analysis on Social Security.
To get past all the superficial sound-bite positioning that's inundated us all, read C. Eugene Steuerle's testimony on Social Security before the House Ways and Means Committee.
Steuerle is an economist who served in the Treasury for both Republican and Democratic administrations, and played a significant role in putting together the Tax Reform of 1986, which bi-partisanly lowered tax rates and broadened the tax base -- the best tax law this country has seen in generations, and one that Congress has been hacking away at ever since.
He acutely skips past the red herring arguments about "solvency" and private accounts to get right to the core issue ... with analysis that isn't from either party's camp.
I was going to quote excerpts but can't do it justice that way, so read the whole thing.
When you're done, if you like it, there's more.
Steuerle, in my opinion, has been the best economics-and-government columnist around for a long time. But most of his columns have been locked within the expensive "pay" section at Tax Analysts.
But now the public now has free access to his archives there. They are well worth scanning through. A lot of his older material reads today as prescient rather than dated -- and a lot better than the archive collections of many of the more famous I could name.
