Former cat-food commissioner proponent Paul Ryan hasn't changed his tune since he's been Speaker of the House.
Ryan made an appearance on this Thursday's Squawk Box on CNBC, and was once again ringing the alarm bell over our debt and deficit. Ryan, of course, like all Republicans, doesn't want to raise the income cap to keep Social Security solvent.
Instead, Ryan wants to raise the retirement age and means-test the program. He also repeated the lie that Social Security is somehow tied to the general fund, which it's not.
SORKIN: Where are you on Social Security? Are you in the Ken Langone school of means testing?
RYAN: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I helped write the Simpson-Bowles provision on Social Security with Kent Conrad, a Democrat, and we put in a price indexing means testing scheme called Pozen, named after guy named Bob Pozen at Fidelity.
It's a smart way of means-testing the benefit, so that the higher-wage-income earner has protection against inflation increase, but not wage inflation. The worker, the lower-income worker, gets protection against wage inflation.
So there are various different schemes on means testing. That doesn't get you all the way there. That gets you about halfway there.
I think you have to raise the retirement age. But don't just do it once and then, and then and then. I would just put the retirement age on longevity tables.
And according to SSA, it goes up one month every other year. So you just basically say, longevity is increasing. It's definitely with healthcare technology, so raise the retirement age with longevity tables so that it, that carries you a long ways with Social Security.
Social security is pretty easy to fix, technically speaking.
QUICK: Except for that, look, I will say it's one thing if you have an office job and you can work later in your life. If you are somebody who is doing heavy duty work...
RYAN: I agree with that.
QUICK: ... construction or other... somewhere where you're on your feet all day or you're lifting and doing things...
RYAN: There are ways of addressing that. Right, so based on the kind of work that you do, the category of work you do, you can have a different retirement age for that as well.
But remember, Social Security, when they wrote the law, the retirement age was 65, and the life expectancy for men was like 62. (crosstalk) There's no way this law was ever designed to last as long in benefits as it is today. It's not working.
It goes bankrupt in 2032. And when that happens, you have an across the board benefit cut. So this is right around the corner.
QUICK: Well, look, if there's no appetite politically, for any sort of solution now, you don't think that there's going to be, if populism is running both parties right now, what president is going to say, okay, you're getting a (inaudible) percent drop. You're gonna find the money somewhere else.
RYAN: That's right, they're gonna find them, and they'll just go to the general fund and then they'll hasten the debt crisis. Then the bond market will say, oh, you're just gonna borrow more money for this? It's a lot of money.
So that would in and of itself possibly trigger a debt crisis.
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No mention of what Trump has done to the deficit. Means testing is a horrible idea and would turn the program from an earned social insurance program into a welfare program, and we all know how much Republicans love welfare and what they do with that. Raising or eliminating the cap would keep the program solvent, but Ryan and his rich buddies don't want their taxes raised, so they're never going to advocate for it.
