Do private accounts really protect you from benefit cuts?

Dan Froomkin quotes Chuck Blahous, the White House Social Security guru, pushing a common administration talking point:

Chuck Blahous, the White House's Social Security expert, took questions on the White House Web site yesterday. He didn't explicitly address whether the trust fund was worthless. But he did suggest a new link between the government's spending of the trust fund surplus and personal accounts:

"The President believes that surplus Social Security money should not be spent, which is one reason why he has proposed creating a system of personal accounts," Blahous wrote. "These personal accounts would save Social Security money, protecting it in the accounts of individual workers, where the government could not take it away."

Think of it as millions of little lock-boxes.

But the government is going to take away most of the gains from private accounts with a clawback that will reduce your traditional benefit by the number of dollars contributed plus 3% interest above inflation annually. What's to stop them from changing that number and taking back more? It's just as easy or hard as cutting the traditional benefit. This argument makes no sense to me.

Update 4/7: In a post referencing this one, Brad DeLong explains an argument that Blahous may be paraphrasing (badly). Apparently, the idea is that we need to divert the Social Security surplus into private accounts since the GOP Congress can't restrain itself sufficiently to use it to pay down the debt. Then we cut benefits by the amount diverted in order to make up for the resulting shortfall. In some ways, this is a more coherent argument for private accounts than the one the administration is making. It's especially helpful in understanding why the administration claims the projected Social Security deficit in 2017 is a crisis even though private accounts that will move that date forward. It's not a bug, it's a feature!

A commenter also claims that people think private accounts are a "private safe" and that politicians will be more reluctant to tamper with the clawback because of it. I doubt it. Almost no one understands the clawback today, and it's not part of the "private safe," but an accounting mechanism that changes the traditional benefit you'll get when you retire years in the future. As a result, changes in it would disproportionately impact people who are far from retirement, whereas changes in the traditional benefit hit seniors right now (though you can phase in traditional benefit cuts via something like "wage indexing"). In short, I still think the Blahous claim makes no sense.

Comments

[b]

"It's just as easy or hard as cutting the traditional benefit. This argument makes no sense to me." -- well it shows you're politically clueless. Cutting collective benefit politically is a different thing than cutting what is perceived by the voters as PRIVATE SAFE. Any politician trying to break into a private safe is in big trouble. Any politician tweaking with collective system has it relatively easy. It's illogical/irrational of people maybe, but that's the way things are.

Of course, this private safe is not impenetrable, but it's much stronger than traditional s.s. benefit.

If you mean it's legally the same, it doesn't matter. It may be, but essentially that's irrelevant. Legality doesn't really matter. What matters is what you can get through and it's politics, not law, that is decisive in this regard.

[ben]

well if Brad DeLong is linking to you, you must be a big shot Brendan. And I'm with you, it's nonsense. How do these accounts "save Social Security money"?

[battlepanda]

b,
If I understanc correctly, Bush's 'plan' only allow you to partially privatize your social security. Say the proportion of funds that goes into your private accounts is a third. Obviously you still get some money from traditional benefits too since 2/3 of your money went into the general pool. But what you get is less than the 2/3 of traditional benefits. This discrepancy is the clawback.

Confusing, no? Well I have a feeling the more confusing it is the easier it is going to be to take away people's money.

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