The Obamaquester according to Harry

Harry Reid's view of the sequester -- and how we got saddled with it -- has been seeping into the national political narrative in recent weeks. Notwithstanding his alleged renewed bonds and recent successful teamwork with Obama, his view is not a pretty picture for the president.

In Twitter exchanges with Greg Sargent and others -- I think Jonathan Bernstein and Brian Beutler -- I have sought a convincing account and analysis and possibly justification of the Obama administration's thinking at the fiscal cliff -- why Biden, with Obama's backing, cut in on Reid's negotiations with McConnell and settled for half a revenue loaf and only a short-term sequester postponement. I haven't found one. And today's somewhat triumphal narrative by Sam Stein and Ryan Grim of the Democrats' short-term shutdown victory -- a purported tale of renewed harmony and mutual trust -- also provides the opposite of what I've sought: Reid's indictment of Obama's fiscal cliff conduct.

 He complained that Vice President Joe Biden had undercut fiscal cliff negotiations at the end of 2012, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was offered a more generous deal on tax revenue and sequester spending than Reid felt he could have crafted.
It didn't escape his notice, Reid said, that the deal Biden made conveniently postponed the budget cuts two months, or just long enough to allow the Inauguration and the State of the Union address to pass without the sequester's shadow. Senate Democrats had been pushing for a two-year delay and had been prepared to settle for just one.

Subtleties of life expectancy, cont.

Today, Aaron Carroll joins Ryan Grim and Jonathan Chait in highlighting a subtlety in the calculation of the effect of increased longevity on social security costs. Ever-increasing longevity has been used to justify raising the retirement age in the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan (to 69 by 2075 for full retirement).  The catch is this: life expectancy for those who reach age 65 has risen far more modestly than life expectancy from birth:

First, if you made it to 65, even back in 1950, you could expect to be on Social Security for 14 years... life expectancy for someone who lives to 65 and qualifies for these programs, hasn’t gone up as much, or as quickly, as people think.

The reason that Social Security has become more costly is not nearly as much that people are living longer on the program, as it is that many more people were born into the generation approaching 65. They aren’t getting more benefit individually; as a group there’s just more of them. When you argue that you want to raise the age at which they start to 68, instead of 65, you’re basicly giving them as many years on the program as a person who hit 65 in the mid 1970′s. That’s a pretty big change [i.e., we've been getting more years in recent decades?].

There's a further subtlety, though, that's been left out of this discussion. It's true that life expectancy before age 65 does not affect the total size of the benefit that retirees collect.  I presume, however, that it does affect the ratio of active workers to beneficiaries -- though I will note at the outset that that ratio has been remarkably stable since 1975, ranging from 3.2 to 3.4 in every year except 2009, when it dipped to 3.0. And I would guess that that dip occurred mainly because the number of employed workers dropped so precipitously in the Great Recession.