Protect Social Security!

Congress and the President have dared each other to get serious about reforming Social Security to ensure that it works in the future. I wish them well. But I do want to focus on one much-neglected piece of the puzzle. You can’t fix Social Security if you don’t fix immigration.

I don’t believe the charge that Social Security is a fraudulent Ponzi scheme, but I agree completely that it is depends on a growing population and economy. If a population shrinks, then the number of old folks grows as a proportion of the whole. In one generation, you could have ten healthy young people supporting each retiree; then in a later generation, you might have three. That’s not sustainable; it can’t work well for long. Social Security depends on population growth.

The birthrate in families of people born in the United States is already below replacement rate. That is, if you don’t count immigrants, we are already a shrinking country. When our population decline began, it was not obvious, because two things happened at about the same time. While families got smaller, medical care improved and people lived longer. Keeping older folks around longer kept our population up, which hid the drop in the birthrate. But still, for locally grown Americans, we are already below replacement: we have fewer children than parents. That could destroy Social Security.

Immigration keeps the nation growing, vibrant, young, and healthy. It’s better than Cheerios, better even than Guinness. Our population is NOT declining, despite our catastrophic birthrate, because people are flooding in by the millions.

I’m not saying that we should exploit our immigrants. I’m just pointing out that immigrants are paying for Social Security, like the rest of us, and that their contributions mean that the system can work (if Congress and the President, whoever they are whenever they get around to it, will get serious about reform).

On the other hand, if you want to guarantee that Social Security breaks and stays broken, just throw out 12 million immigrants, and tighten the border. That will break our hearts and bust the bank, both.