When politicians make factual claims to a public audience, who ensures what they say is true?
Well, first of all, political speeches don’t have to be true. The First Amendment allows anyone, politicians included, to promote falsehoods about public policy matters (see, e.g., Donald Trump).
So it’s caveat emptor (“buyer beware”). Voters are responsible for assessing the veracity of political claims. Many voters don’t bother, and most who do delegate that time-consuming task to the media, independent fact checkers, or we just choose to believe or disbelieve what politicians say based on our party loyalty.
In the video below, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) claims we can “fix” Social Security by getting people who never paid into it off the benefit rolls. Is this true? Not by a country mile. He may believe this, but it’s nonsense.
Before I explain why, let’s talk a little about Markwayne Mullin (bio here). He’s the only senator without a college degree, which means he never had formal training in factual rigor and reasoning skills, as that’s what a college education is for (see my article here).
Of course, you can get that in other ways; there are plenty of self-educated people who are fully capable of factual discipline and have good reasoning skills. But as the video below shows, and this posting will demonstrate, Mullin isn’t one of them.
Now, I’m not impugning Oklahoma voters; I respect their right to elect whoever they want to represent them in the Senate. The only requirements to serve in the U.S. Senate are American citizenship and being at least 35 years old. (These requirements are found in the Constitution.)
Mullin, despite his lack of advanced education, is wealthy, having inherited a family plumbing business. He was successful in business, so he has number-crunching skills. But that doesn’t make him knowledgeable about Social Security (he isn’t), and he wouldn’t say the stuff he’s saying in the video below if did even a little research, unless he’s being dishonest (which I suspect he is).
Mullin correctly states that Social Security is spending down its surplus, and at some point in the future will have to reduce benefits if Congress does nothing. That’s common knowledge, is frequently mentioned in the media, and easily researched on the internet.
But he’s off-the-charts wrong when he claims that’s caused by people collecting benefits who never paid into the system. To begin with, you have to pay Social Security taxes to be eligible for benefits, except a non-working spouse can receive survive benefits, but that’s still based on the taxes paid by the working spouse (see article here).
So if people who didn’t make tax contributions, either personally or through a working spouse, are receiving benefits it’s either by mistake or fraud. Of course that happens, but how big a problem is that? Not big at all, far less than 1% of total benefits paid (see article here), which is nowhere near enough to make up the shortfall even if all that money could be recovered.
The main cause of the shortfall is demographics. Birth rates aren’t even over time; there was a “baby boom” after World War 2 when the soldiers came home, followed by smaller generations. With Baby Boomers now retiring, there’s a larger drawdown of Social Security reserves simply because more people are receiving benefits, and at the same time the smaller generations behind them mean fewer workers paying payroll taxes.
You can’t “fix” that by removing from the benefit rolls people didn’t pay into the system. For practical purposes, the number of such people is nil. Even if you arbitrarily cut off benefits to eligible non-working surviving spouses who receive benefits legally, which amounts to confiscation of their deceased spouses’ payroll tax contributions, you wouldn’t save anywhere near enough money to cover the difference between tax revenues and benefit payments.
A senator’s job is to solve problems for the American people which are a government responsibility. What to do about Social Security is one of those problems. Sen. Mullin is serving up pabulum to his Turning Point USA student audience. If that’s how he does his job, that’s up to him, and up to Oklahoma voters. But his suggestion has zero value for actually resolving the Social Security financing issues.
So how do you deal with unserious politicians who float unserious (or just plain false) solutions to real problems? My advice is push the “Ignore” button.