NYTimes.com > Opinion

Little Black LiesBy PAUL KRUGMAN
(also available on pkarchive.org)

Published: January 28, 2005

Social Security privatization really is like tax cuts, or
the Iraq war: the administration keeps on coming up with
new rationales, but the plan remains the same. President
Bush's claim that we must privatize Social Security to
avert an imminent crisis has evidently fallen flat. So
now he's playing the race card.

This week, in a closed meeting with African-Americans,
Mr. Bush asserted that Social Security was a bad
deal for their race, repeating his earlier claim that
"African-American males die sooner than other males do,
which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain
group of people." In other words, blacks don't live long
enough to collect their fair share of benefits.

This isn't a new argument; privatizers have been making it
for years. But the claim that blacks get a bad deal from
Social Security is false. And Mr. Bush's use of that false
argument is doubly shameful, because he's exploiting the
tragedy of high black mortality for political gain instead
of treating it as a problem we should solve.

Let's start with the facts. Mr. Bush's argument goes
back at least seven years, to a report issued by the
Heritage Foundation - a report so badly misleading that
the deputy chief actuary (now the chief actuary) of the
Social Security Administration wrote a memo pointing out
"major errors in the methodology." That's actuary-speak for
"damned lies."

In fact, the actuary said, "careful research reflecting
actual work histories for workers by race indicate that
the nonwhite population actually enjoys the same or better
expected rates of return from Social Security" as whites.

Here's why. First, Mr. Bush's remarks on African-Americans
perpetuate a crude misunderstanding about what life
expectancy means. It's true that the current life
expectancy for black males at birth is only 68.8 years -
but that doesn't mean that a black man who has worked
all his life can expect to die after collecting only a
few years' worth of Social Security benefits. Blacks'
low life expectancy is largely due to high death rates in
childhood and young adulthood. African-American men who
make it to age 65 can expect to live, and collect benefits,
for an additional 14.6 years - not that far short of the
16.6-year figure for white men.

Second, the formula determining Social Security benefits
is progressive: it provides more benefits, as a percentage
of earnings, to low-income workers than to high-income
workers. Since African-Americans are paid much less,
on average, than whites, this works to their advantage.

Finally, Social Security isn't just a retirement program;
it's also a disability insurance program. And blacks
are much more likely than whites to receive disability
benefits.

Put it all together, and the deal African-Americans get
from Social Security turns out, according to various
calculations, to be either about the same as that for
whites or somewhat better. Hispanics, by the way, clearly
do better than either.

So the claim that Social Security is unfair to blacks is
just false. And the fact that privatizers keep making that
claim, after their calculations have repeatedly been shown
to be wrong, is yet another indicator of the fundamental
dishonesty of their sales pitch.

What's really shameful about Mr. Bush's exploitation of the
black death rate, however, is what it takes for granted.

The persistent gap in life expectancy between
African-Americans and whites is one measure of the deep
inequalities that remain in our society - including highly
unequal access to good-quality health care. We ought to
be trying to diminish that gap, especially given the fact
that black infants are two and half times as likely as
white babies to die in their first year.

Now nobody can expect instant progress in reducing
health inequalities. But the benefits of Social
Security privatization, if any, won't materialize for
many decades. By using blacks' low life expectancy as an
argument for privatization, Mr. Bush is in effect taking
it as a given that 40 or 50 years from now, large numbers
of African-Americans will still be dying before their time.

Is this an example of what Mr. Bush famously called "the
soft bigotry of low expectations?" Maybe not: it isn't
particularly soft to treat premature black deaths not as a
tragedy we must end but as just another way to push your
ideological agenda. But bigotry - yes, that sounds like
the right word.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com