Ends do not justify means

Max Sawicki thinks Ben Bernanke is lying:

So, the question arises, why did Bernanke not tell the truth about social security in his Senate Budget committee testimony? Why did he publicly go along with the fraud and encourage the Rosemary's Baby Under the Radar Hit Squad on the Senate Budget Committee that he was testifying before, especially when I strongly suspect that he has studied the numbers almost as well as Bruce Webb and knows that the intermediate cost projection of the Social Security Trustees is a bogus standing pile? While he may be doing it to get a high paying job on Wall Street after he is out of the Fed, I kind of doubt it. I think it is at least 50-50 that he will return to academia at that point.

I think it may get down to a very cool calculation about the politics of the situation combined with his desire to get some kind of combined budget deficit reduction by any means possible, even if it is based on a lie.

He rules out a number of budget deficit reducing options Bernanke might have considered and rejected and continues:

Which leaves social security. And there he surely knows about the bipartisan under the radar hit squad being put together by Conrad and his co-plotters, apparenty including Charles Rangel, with the Rosemary's baby being hatched in a back room to be sprung on an unsuspecting public. Eschewing privatization for now, the deal looks to be the following: benefit cuts for young people in the future, a pain for the Dems, for a tax increase now (possibly by lifting the income cap), a pain for the GOP. Given that the victims of the benefit cut are so ignorant and have been so thoroughly propagandized by the long "social security is in crisis" campaign, they can be sold on the nonsense that their benefits will be cut in order to avoid cutting their benefits.

From Bernanke's perspective, the near term net out of all this will be a FICA tax increase, some movement on reducing the budget deficit. Hence, he may see it as the most possible way to do something about that, and therefore is willing to go along with promoting the fraud that underlies this possible outcome. Bah!

Here's the point. The Social Security system is not broken and doesn't need to be fixed. The trust fund will not run out until 2042 at the EARLIEST. Usually, the trustees projections have been overly gloomy, so it may never run out. Even if it does, by then the baby boomers will be dead and we can return to a pay-as-you-go system with the younger generation funding their parent's retirement. The system is not broken and does not need a fix. Why can't Democrats get that through their heads?

If we want to reduce the deficit, raise the tax rate on the wealthy and on investment income. Restore sanity to the estate tax (albeit at a higher exemption than before). Take those steps and then let's talk again if there is still a problem.