A stumble after a

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A stumble after a run of good Social Security news articles from the Post.

On A3 today, Michael Fletcher discusses the part of the president’s pitch in which he argues that shorter lifespans make Social Security a bad deal or unfair to African-Americans.

Down into the piece Fletcher mentions some of the key critiques of this argument — the disproportionate benefit African-Americans get from the survivors’ and disability portions of Social Security, as well as the program’s progressive benefit structure, which also gives a disproportionate benefit to people with low-incomes.

What goes wholly unmentioned is that the way lifespan statistics are used in this argument is inherently misleading.

African-Americans have substantially shorter lifespans than whites — a fact the president seems concerned about primarily, or perhaps exclusively, as an argument for phasing out Social Security. The argument being that African-Americans don’t have as many benefit-collecting years as whites and thus get a worse ‘rate of return’ on their payroll contributions.

The problem with this argument is that most of the difference in lifespan is tied to death in childhood and early adulthood — before people have any ability to pay substantial amounts into Social Security and at ages when Social Security survivor benefits are particularly important.

(The issue is discussed in this Paul Krugman column from January 28th.)

This fact receives no mention in the Post article.

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