Social Security is in the process of morphing into “universal basic income” (UBI). The previous statement isn’t an endorsement of UBI, as much as it’s a prediction about what’s going to happen.
Is this a good development? The view here is that it’s a bad one, and not because people will cease working.
Instead, surging technological advance means the Americans of tomorrow will work more than ever precisely because they’ll want to do much of the time what showcases their unique skills and intelligence. As pointed out with great regularity in my 2018 book The End of Work, there are no lazy people and there are no stupid people. But there is a relative lack of economic growth that suffocates individual genius such that people appear lazy and stupid. Watch stupidity and laziness (my much better working title for The End of Work was The End of Laziness) rapidly disappear as technological advance erases so much of what people used to do for a living in favor of living for work.
Which means that just as Americans in ever greater numbers happen on work that they can’t not do, they’ll suddenly find themselves “beneficiaries” of ever more government handouts that they don’t need or want. More than most will admit, government checks are a sad effect of prosperity as governments take in a great deal more in the way of taxed wealth that enables a great deal more borrowing by those same governments. All of this will be discussed in my next book, The Deficit Delusion.
Until then, watch as ever more prosperous Americans live longer as medical advances and happiness on the job elongate lives defined by work precisely because it doesn’t feel like work. Consider the latter through the prism of self-proclaimed budget experts claiming Social Security is set to go insolvent within the next ten years. Don’t bet on it. And the reason to not bet on it has to do with the fact that the so-called Social Security “lockbox” was always a myth, and because it’s always been a myth, it’s always been empty.
The above truth will free politicians to make the funding of Social Security all about general revenues. And general tax revenues are set to soar as work increasingly reflects our unique skills and intelligence. Which is yet more evidence that deficits will soar not due to a lack of government revenues or too much government spending (both analyses were always simplistic), but because our federal government is sadly poised to take in exponentially more tax revenue in the future. Translated, the deficits and debt have always been a logical effect of too much tax revenue in the present and the expectation of much more in the future.
Which is why the view here is that UBI is a really bad idea. It is because it’s a signal of ever more prosperous people ignoring the growth of government that’s an effect of their wealth. This isn’t a call to shrink wealth, rather it’s a call to massively shrink the federal government’s tax share of wealth that’s set to multiply.
The amount is way too sizable, which is why Social Security looms as a backdoor path to UBI. A federal government with way too much money will no longer be constrained by Social Security withholdings, and will instead just fund what’s never made sense with endless tax revenue borne of people working all the time even when they’re not working. UBI will unfortunately reveal its monumentally dense head at a time when no one needs it.
