Mythbuster
No creamed spinach," says Nancy Altman, even though it's a specialty at the Caucus Room, a self-consciously bipartisan Washington, D.C., watering hole cofounded by Haley Barbour, now the Republican governor of Mississippi, and Democratic lobbyist Tommy Boggs. Altman, who worked on Alan Greenspan's 1983 Social Security reform commission, taught retirement policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School and has just written The Battle for Social Security, is trying to debunk popular myths about the insurance system. It's not just for toothless old creamed-spinach eaters, for example. Social Security sends out checks to about 3 million kids who are disabled or who have a parent who has retired,become disabled, or died. And Social Security helps middle-aged folks like 55-year-old Altman avoid having to support their retired parents.
It's also not just for the poor. As she munched on her caesar salad, Altman recalled the day's headlines about IBM's freezing its pension plan: The more corporations force workers to rely on the ups and downs of the stock market for their retirement income, the more crucial is Social Security's steady income that keeps pace with inflation and can't be outlived.
The system's financial troubles are minor, she argues. Social Security will most likely have a surplus through 2040. And the later deficit could be fixed with some tweaks: slightly increasing taxes on the top 6 percent of earners, allowing part of today's surplus to be invested in top-flight stocks, trimming the annual cost-of-living adjustment, and requiring all government workers to contribute.
"If the Democrats and Republicans wanted to solve the Social Security problem," Altman says, "they could solve it over lunch here."
Wal-Mart: a Bargain?
Almost everyone has heard that Wal-Mart destroys Main Street and lowers the bar on U.S. worker pay and benefits, but apparently there's even more reason to feel queasy when reaching for that $4.84-a-pound salmon at your nearby superstore. Charles Fishman's The Wal-Mart Effect delves deeply into how the retail monolith shapes the economic life of the nation--while never flinching from how Wal-Mart "mirrors our own energy, our sense of destiny, our appetite for bigness and variety and innovation." And, of course, for everyday low prices.
Fishman, a senior editor at Fast Company magazine, probes the relationship between the world's largest retailer and its subservient suppliers. Vlasic had a "devastating success"when Wal-Mart began selling its gallon pickle jars priced at $2.97 each. The gallons cannibalized Vlasic's sales of more-profitable jars at other stores; why buy a $2.49 quart of kosher dills? Vlasic's pickle profits plummeted, even while sales grew.
As in the case of the cheap salmon from Chile, Wal-Mart "distorts markets," Fishman argues. The everyday low prices are lies, he says, having nothing to do with consumer demand or product supply. And yet, as Fishman freely admits, those prices have saved U.S. citizens $30 billion annually, by some estimates, and have significantly lowered the nation's inflation rate. Society has struck an uneasy bargain here, Fishman writes, urging a closer look at megacorporations in American life.
This story appears in the January 23, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.