The Bush Administration is seeking to play on fear when the president asserts, “African-American males die sooner than do other males, which means the (Social Security) system is unfair to a certain group of people and that needs to be fixed.” This is a blatant misstatement of the facts that have been reported by the Social Security Administration, by the Government Accountability Office and other credible sources. For years, this flawed argument has been made by those who seek to privatize the Social Security System.
This disinformation draws on a variety of conservative resources, including policy research, ready-to-hire experts and polling on how to fashion the issue of radical reform of Social Security for the public. A carefully calculated strategy to garner needed support for private account plans has been created by conservatives over the last 20 years to nudge political and public opinion their way.
Bush relies on information from the Heritage Foundation, which did a study a number of years ago that purports to show that because African Americans have a shorter life expectancy, they receive less return for the taxes they pay into the Social Security System.
But the low life expectancy of African Americans can be explained by high death rates in childhood and early adulthood. Statistically, African-American men who reach age 65 have an additional 14.6 years to live to collect benefits n just two years short of the figure for white men.
Scrutiny by actuaries at the Social Security Administration and the Government Accountability Office revealed serious methodological errors and numerous false assumptions in the Heritage Foundation Study. Since African Americans tend to earn less than whites, our Social Security benefits are larger in comparison to the taxes we pay. Moreover, Social Security pays out more than retirement benefits; it also includes survivor and disability benefits, and African Americans benefit disproportionately from those programs. Almost half of the African Americans receiving Social Security n47 percent n are getting disability benefits or survivor benefits.
However, Social Security, a complex program, does lend itself to misrepresentation or misleading statements that are confusing for the general public. The Bush Administration is seeking to capitalize on this confusion in its strong push to compromise the current system.
Syndicated columnist Paul Krugman reminds us that despite the Bush sales pitch, African Americans do benefit from Social Security and rightly declares that Bush’s overt attempted exploitation of the African-American death rate is shameful. Further, Krugman, an economist, advises us that any of the promised benefits of Social Security privatization would not materialize for many decades.
This president seems indifferent to the persistent health inequalities that account for the shameful fact that African-American infants are two and half times as likely to die in their first year compared to white children. Nevertheless, he is willing to treat premature African-American death as an expedient to push his ideological agenda rather than address the deep inequalities that remain in our society n including highly unequal access to quality healthcare.
Bush should advance policy that promotes our health n not exploit our deaths to put the much-needed benefits provided by Social Security at risk.
