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A Trillion Here, a Trillion There

To the Editor:
After reading “Social Security’s Predictions: Off by $1 Trillion” (May 11), one can only be thankful that the Social Security Administration is not a publicly traded company, and that investors are not using its predictions for guidance.

I can understand the reluctance of Chief Actuary Steve Goss to constantly rejigger the components of his model, as this could generate potentially confusing and incomparable results. However, when confronted with discrepancies of this magnitude, one has to be honest enough to admit that some serious changes are needed. It appears that the massive complexity of the model has made it unwieldy.

The Social Security Administration needs to review its methods and adopt some of the more modern modeling technology that is readily available.
Arthur M. Shatz
Oakland Gardens, N.Y.

To the Editor:
The Social Security article should have given some consideration to the effects of the political decisions and cultural changes since 2000. The actuaries did not predict the effect of eliminating the income offset that Congress passed in 2004, whereby collecting Social Security became a reward for living to full retirement age, instead of actually retiring. Older workers stayed in the workforce, depriving younger workers of jobs, while softening wage pressure.

Even if there is an expectation of reduced Social Security revenues during a turndown, who would have predicted the explosion of disability claims filed by the long-term unemployed?
Brian F. Smith
Lake Wales, Fla.

Perils of War

To the Editor:
The wonderfully written Editorial Commentary in the May 11 issue, “Their Darkest Hour,” should remind us all of the perils of appeasement.

As Edmund Burke said long ago, evil triumphs when good men remain silent, and it nearly triumphed in Europe in 1940 for that very same reason.
Dr. Stephen Cherry
Spartanburg, S.C.

To the Editor:
The lessons of World War I as learned by the British and the French were valid. France suffered over a million soldiers killed and over four million wounded, out of a national population of 39 million. Britain’s losses weren’t as catastrophic, but were stunning. The killing was so senseless and horrific that no one could write it off as ugly but necessary.

The war led to the collapse of four empires [German, Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian] and the fatal weakening of the British empire. The war solved nothing, and, indeed, it sowed the seeds for the next, even more brutal, war.

Arguing that the French and British “preferred peace to shame” is simplistic. World War II had little to do with the “hard road to liberty.” Invoking Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt is all well and good. But “strong leadership” is almost always praised when it moves toward war and not peace. The world needs good sense much more than strong leaders.

The lessons of World War II drawn by the U.S.—that foreign intervention and military solutions always triumph—are equally dubious. Neoconservativism has been as big a failure as appeasement.
Robert Trimble

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