Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Video
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$26.00$26.00
FREE delivery: Friday, Oct 13 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $4.95
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the Authors
OK
Social Security: The Phony Crisis Paperback – September 15, 2001
| Price | New from | Used from |
Purchase options and add-ons
According to the authors of this important new study, the answer to these questions is a resounding no. In Social Security: The Phony Crisis, economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot argue that there is no economic, demographic, or actuarial basis for the widespread belief that the program needs to be fixed.
As the authors emphasize, there is virtually no disagreement about the facts of Social Security's finances, or even the projections for its future. Rather, the Social Security debate has been foundering on misconceptions, confusion, and lack of agreement on the meaning of crucial terms.
The authors also take on related issues: that privatization would help save Social Security, that America has a pressing need to increase its national savings, and that future generations will suffer from the costs—especially for health care—of supporting a growing elderly population.
As New York Times columnist Fred Brock recently wrote, "So-called reform of the Social Security system is looking more and more like a solution in search of a problem." In this accessible and insightful work, Baker and Weisbrot seek to cut through some of the myths and fallacies surrounding this crucial policy issue.
"Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot have no trouble at all demonstrating that even on highly conservative assumptions about economic growth, the much-forecast insolvency of the Social Security system by about 2030 is most unlikely to happen then, if indeed ever."—The Economist
"The authors challenge basic assumptions with vigor and intelligence. . . . An absolutely relevant and important analysis, presented with force and clarity, that asks, basically, what kind of a nation we really are."—Kirkus Reviews
"Proponents—like George W. Bush—of Social Security privatization . . . typically ignore prospects for a stagnant or falling stock market. In Social Security: The Phony Crisis, [Baker and Weisbrot] show how a falling stock market could place pressure on both future Social Security payments and privatization schemes because earnings from the trust fund could actually fall."—Jeff Madrick, New York Review of Books
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Popular titles by this author
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Product details
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 0226035468
- Product Dimensions : 8.99 x 6.1 x 0.63 inches; 11.01 Ounces
- Publication date : September 15, 2001
- Publisher : University of Chicago Press; New edition edition
- Country of Origin : USA
- ISBN-13 : 978-0226035468
- Release date : September 15, 2001
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,242,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #361 in Social Security (Books)
- #56,422 in Economics (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Important information
To report an issue with this product, click here.
About the authors

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is author of the book "Failed: What the 'Experts' Got Wrong About the Global Economy" (Oxford University Press, 2015), co-author, with Dean Baker, of "Social Security: The Phony Crisis" (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy.
He writes a regular column for Al Jazeera America, and a regular column on economic and policy issues that is distributed to over 550 newspapers by the Tribune Content Agency. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and almost every major U.S. newspaper, as well as in Brazil's largest newspaper, Fohla de São Paulo. He appears regularly on national and local television and radio programs. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.

Dean Baker co-founded CEPR in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. His blog, "Beat the Press," provides commentary on economic reporting. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan.
His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the London Financial Times, and the New York Daily News. He received his Ph.D in economics from the University of Michigan.
Dean has written several books, his latest being Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (Center for Economic and Policy Research 2016). His other books include Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People (with Jared Bernstein, Center for Economic and Policy Research 2013), The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive (Center for Economic and Policy Research 2011), Taking Economics Seriously (MIT Press 2010) which thinks through what we might gain if we took the ideological blinders off of basic economic principles; and False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy (PoliPoint Press 2010) about what caused — and how to fix — the current economic crisis. In 2009, he wrote Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (PoliPoint Press), which chronicled the growth and collapse of the stock and housing bubbles and explained how policy blunders and greed led to the catastrophic — but completely predictable — market meltdowns. He also wrote a chapter ("From Financial Crisis to Opportunity") in Thinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era (Progressive Ideas Network 2009). His previous books include The United States Since 1980 (Cambridge University Press 2007); The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (Center for Economic and Policy Research 2006), and Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot, University of Chicago Press 1999). His book Getting Prices Right: The Debate Over the Consumer Price Index (editor, M.E. Sharpe 1997) was a winner of a Choice Book Award as one of the outstanding academic books of the year.
Among his numerous articles are "The Benefits of a Financial Transactions Tax," Tax Notes Vol. 121, No. 4 (2008); "Are Protective Labor Market Institutions at the Root of Unemployment? A Critical Review of the Evidence," (with David R. Howell, Andrew Glyn, and John Schmitt), Capitalism and Society Vol. 2, No. 1 (2007); "Asset Returns and Economic Growth," (with Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman), Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2005); "Financing Drug Research: What Are the Issues," Center for Economic and Policy Research (2004); "Medicare Choice Plus: The Solution to the Long-Term Deficit Problem," Center for Economic and Policy Research (2004); The Benefits of Full Employment (also with Jared Bernstein), Economic Policy Institute (2004); "Professional Protectionists: The Gains From Free Trade in Highly Paid Professional Services," Center for Economic and Policy Research (2003); and "The Run-Up in Home Prices: Is It Real or Is It Another Bubble," Center for Economic and Policy Research (2002).
Dean previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor at Bucknell University. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, and the OECD's Trade Union Advisory Council. He was the author of the weekly online commentary on economic reporting, the Economic Reporting Review (ERR), from 1996–2006.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
As far as calling the authors left wing or crackpots. I can tell you the work done by Dean Baker and by the Center for Economic and Policy reseach is some of the best economics done in the country. They are one of the few economic institutes of note who have not sold out to large power interests. If you sit in the top 2% of wealth in the country, go ahead and call them names. You need to, because their facts can not be argued away so easily. However, the rest need to wake up. If you are part of the rest of population (the other 98%) of the country in income and agree with Social Security "reform" you either don't know what is intended for Social Security (i.e. handing it over to wall street) or did not understand the arguments expressed in this book.
The 1935 Social Security Act created a special payroll tax to be used exclusively for funding Social Security. General revenue funds were not to be used to pay Social Security benefits, and Social Security tax receipts were not to be used for any purpose other than Social Security. Payments into the Social Security system were to be kept separate from general revenue funds and credited to the individual accounts of those who made the contributions. The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 re-enforced this.
(my own understanding of events is that during the Viet Nam war, Congress enacted a new law that lumped Social Security funds in with the general income. Then they could legally raid Social Security "surplus" because they just made it legal to do so. But, since I don't have specific data, I'm putting this in as an aside.)
In 1983, Congress enacted a Social Security tax increase to cover the ballooning benefit payments that would result from the retirement of the "baby boomers" beginning in 2010. The increase began generating large Social Security surpluses that didn't go unnoticed by the Reagan and Bush administrations which began "dipping" into Social Security revenues and using them for non-Social Security purposes. President Clinton followed suit, and every administration since Clinton. (I don't know why everyone blames the president when Congress is in charge of spending).
In his February 27, 2001 State of the Union speech, George W. Bush promised "to pay down 2 trillion in debt over the next 10 years,... "fund the nations priorities with money left over" and protect "all $2.6 trillion of the Social Security surplus for Social Security and for Social Security alone..." Within five months, Social Security surpluses were already being used to replace lost revenues created by huge tax cuts.
Approximately $1.5 trillion of our hard-earned Social Security Trust Fund dollars, legally set aside for our retirement, have been "borrowed" and spent without our knowledge or permission. The resulting I.O.U's represent 21.3% of our National Debt and have no value unless the government at some point decides to repay the money. President Bush admitted the iou's were "worthless".
Former Congressional Budget Office Director June O'Neill indicated that the trust fund "holds no real assets." "These so-called trust fund 'assets' simply reflect the accumulated sum of funds transferred from Social Security over the years to finance other government operations."
For additional information, try "The Looting of Social Security" by economist Allen W. Smith, Ph.D.
Furthermore, a blinkered analysis that regards debt instruments such as bonds as fundamentally riskier than "real assets" such as (I presume) real estate, stocks, and other equities is not only to ignore cases where land values crater, stock markets collapse, and companies go bankrupt, but also to willfully invert the relationship between risk and reward. No investment counselor would do this, for instance.
In any event, Baker's and Weisbrot's book illuminates issues like these with a bracing clarity (albeit with a little dryness). I highly recommend it.








