March 16, 2005
Bush's 'Swiftian' Argument For Social Security Reform
By Froma Harrop

At first, I thought President Bush had decided to mark St. Patrick's Day by paying homage to the great Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift.

In 1729, after Britain cut off Ireland's farm exports, Swift wrote a bitterly funny essay suggesting that the English eat poor Irish babies. He had been assured, Swift wrote, "that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled."

The president seemed in a Swiftian mood when he ventured that because black men die young, they would be well served by Social Security accounts that pay off quickly.

"African-American males die sooner than other males do," the president said, "which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people. And that needs to be fixed."

We soon made the grim discovery that Bush was not attempting satire. He was dead serious.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama found Bush's argument "stunning" and "somewhat offensive." Rather than use these disparities to dismantle Social Security, Obama said, the president should find ways to equalize life expectancy among the races.

Bush is correct that black men tend to die younger than white men. And under the current system, the longer a retiree lives, the more he or she collects from Social Security. So it makes a kind of gruesome sense: If you're black and are going to check out early anyway, you might as well have a private account to leave your heirs.

A few problems here. For one thing, supporters of private accounts routinely compare life expectancies from birth -- rather than from the age of retirement. Blacks suffer higher rates of infant mortality than whites, and young African-Americans are more likely to die from violence than young whites. While these deaths are tragic, the victims did not work and pay Social Security taxes for many decades. At the retirement age of 65, a black male is expected to die two years earlier than a white contemporary. Any gap is too big, but this is not the 10-year disparity being waved around.

The current issue of Health Affairs discusses racial disparities in longevity. For example, it notes that African-Americans have a generally lower socio-economic status, which is a marker for shorter lifespans. People with little education and low incomes are more likely to smoke, drink too much, eat junk food and get fat. This applies to low-income whites, as well as blacks.
(By the way, today's Social Security benefits formula does favor low-income workers. It replaces about 60 percent of the pre-retirement income of low-wage workers, but only 30 percent of what the highest-earning group made on the job.)

Some threats to good health are directly related to race. African-Americans at all income levels suffer more stress. And blacks, even those in the middle class, are far more likely to live in segregated communities than Asians or Hispanics with similar incomes. Many hospitals have followed white patients into the suburbs, leaving behind second-rate facilities to serve urban blacks.

And the doctors themselves may practice racial bias. Consider the famous chest-pain study of two years ago, when eight actors -- four male, four female, four black and four white -- were taped complaining of the same cardiac symptoms. The actors dressed the same and were equally articulate.

Doctors shown the tapes were asked how they would refer the patients. Most would have sent the white males for aggressive cardiac intervention. The others "patients," however, were more often referred for a gastrointestinal work-up. (The doctors thought the blacks and women needed Maalox, not coronary angiography.)

Of course, President Bush could have stood before white factory workers and said, with accuracy, that they would probably die at far younger ages than their bosses, and that this made the Social Security system "inherently unfair" to them. But somehow you don't see him stoking class warfare -- even to hype the private accounts. Nor would he expect white workers to passively accept their expected earlier demise as some unchangeable fact of American life.

Jonathan Swift would have had a field day with these dripping expressions of concern -- not over blacks' shorter lives, but how their shorter lives affect their Social Security benefits. Wherever he is, the dean of St. Patrick's is having a big, dark laugh.

©2005 Providence Journal Co. Distributed by Creators Syndicate

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