Blast From Paul Krugman's Past: "Social Security Is A Ponzi Scheme And Will Soon Be Over"

[stockholmer]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/paul-krugman-social-security-ponzi-scheme-and-will-soon-be-over

It is one thing (what thing that is we are not sure, but we have heard others say it, so like all good lemmings we will say it too) for Rick Perry to call Social Security a ponzi scheme. After all he is some crazy, foaming in the mouth conservative, as uber-Keynesian liberal Paul Krugman may call him. And that's fine. What confuses us, however, is why Social Security would be called a ponzi by the same liberal noted previously: none other than Paul Krugman himself.

Exhibit A, from a distant 1997, which perhaps one would have expected to remain buried (source http://www.bostonreview.net/BR21.6/krugmann.html ):

Social Security is structured from the point of view of the recipients as if it were an ordinary retirement plan: what you get out depends on what you put in. So it does not look like a redistributionist scheme. In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today's young may well get less than they put in).

This coming from the same person who a year ago said the following much anticipated truism http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/opinion/16krugman.html , and has in the interim become a caricature of himself:

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