Tyler Cowen breaks with the pack (or pact) and explains the implausible and potentially disastrous economics of Social Security privatization—a subject the Mises Institute has been publishing for at least 7 years. Actually, that privatization would require vast debt and/or tax increases should have been obvious since the May 1996 issue of the American Economic Review (86.2) published a complete symposium on the topic; the leading advocates also called for vast new “transition premiums.” And yet, not for the first time, somehow there persists this gulf between the academic world and the policy-advocacy world in which the facts of the case are buried.
Privatized Forced Savings
