After reading his opinion piece on Social Security Monday, I was baffled when I saw that Travis Hornsby was a senior majoring in statistics and economics.
First, his point that the life expectancy has risen from 66 to 77.8 since Social Security started is irrelevant. Much of that increase has come from a lowered infant mortality rate, which skews the statistic in a way that doesn't affect Social Security payouts.
The figure worth looking at is remaining life expectancy after reaching 65, which for males has gone from 13 to 15 years. The difference is not nearly as drastic as Hornsby portrayed.
Hornsby's point about the difference between white females and black males is clearly a case of him pushing the race button (as ham-handedly as possible). Women as a whole have longer life expectancies than men as a whole, with the difference between genders larger than between races.
Hornsby doesn't portray it as a wealth redistribution issue based on gender.
If you compared black women to white women and looked at life expectancy after age 65, the difference is only 11 percent, not 300 percent like the comparison in the article.
It's nice to know that Hornsby did his research when it comes to Social Security disability payments: By his own admission, it involved the show "Divorce Court" and a guy in line at Walgreens. Apparently, this is what passes for an acceptable argument in the economics department, although this lack of standards might explain the great success economists have had in the world lately.
Hornsby's discussion of the national debt in an article about Social Security is nothing but a red herring. They are completely separate issues. Social Security is funded solely by a dedicated tax: Surpluses don't go back into the rest of the federal budget, and shortfalls aren't made up by borrowing money and accruing debt.
If the Social Security Trust Fund runs out of money, the deficit won't change in the least; payouts will simply decrease. Hornsby is hitting the scary-issue-of-the-day to mislead you.
Furthermore, Hornsby's assertion that Social Security won't exist when we college students retire is self-fulfilling fear-mongering put forward by conservatives who have wanted to kill Social Security since it began. Social Security doesn't die when the Social Security Trust Fund runs out.
Remember that, because Republicans will always try to imply as such, just like Hornsby did.
When the fund runs out, the benefits will simply be reduced. There will always be Social Security taxes collected, so there will always be money paid out.
Finally, we can keep the Social Security Trust Fund from running out and prevent the benefit levels from decreasing with a minor, simple fix. Currently, the Social Security tax is only levied on the first about $100,000 of a person's annual income. Hornsby was right when he said that the tax was regressive, but making it less regressive doesn't mean taking it away, it means removing the cap.
Make $1 million a year? You get taxed on all of your income, just like the guy making $30,000 a year.
I'm sure Hornsby will have a talking point to explain to everyone why this is a terrible idea, but if one rule of thumb has never failed for me, it's this: Never trust a Young Republican who grew up with rich parents and who will never have to truly worry about money in his life.
He cannot relate to you, he does not sympathize with you and he's proud of the fact that he'll step on you to get ahead. He's more of a burden on society than anyone receiving Social Security.
Matt Schneider is a physics senior at UF.
