Let's Be Clear: Social Security Is Not Adding a Penny to US Debt

All those charts and narratives ascribing Social Security the top spender of federal monies—and, thereby, implying the prime cause of the U.S. debt—need debunking.


A woman walks into a Social Security office in Houston, Texas on July 13, 2022.
(Photo by Mark Felix for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

FREDERIC H. DECKER
Mar 05, 2023

Common Dreams

The narrative that Social Security eats up government revenue, driving the federal debt upward, is deeply entrenched in the Republican Party’s psyche. Former-Vice President Mike Pence insinuated such February during a private meeting with business leaders when promoting the age-old Republican wish to privatize Social Security. So maybe Social Security won’t be off the table, as GOP leaders earlier promised, as the current debate over the debt ceiling unfolds.

The public has favored shoring up Social Security with more taxes. But, also, concern over federal deficits has increased among both Republican-leaners and Democratic-leaners. Concern over deficits translates into concern over the debt. Consequently, debunking the myth Social Security feeds the debt seems an inherent requirement in gaining support for progressive proposals to reform Social Security. That, in addition to outlining how cutting benefits unduly inflicts harm within the aging population.

Now consider all those misleading charts. Those charts showing Social Security the top spender of federal monies surely don’t help foster favorable public opinion or keep the GOP benefit-cutting hatchet in the sheath. Nor do stories like that February 9 on PBS Newshour when a segment on Medicare and Social Security closed with this on the screen: "Almost a third of federal spending this fiscal year is expected to go toward Medicare and Social Security." PBS Newshour (which I support and watch regularly) is not alone, of course; the spending attributed to Social Security and other social programs is a recurrent theme during this debt-ceiling news cycle. Even the Treasury Department on one website has, at the time of this writing, a bar chart with Social Security the top bar consuming 19 percent of all spending.

Busting the debt myth can start with a report from the Government Accountability Office where stated how for years the Social Security program “built up reserves” from revenue collected that “were invested in federal government securities, reducing the amount that must be borrowed from the public,” including from other countries, to cover federal deficits. (By law surplus funds in Social Security have to be invested in government securities.)

Surpluses were possible, of course, given Social Security is largely funded by its separate payroll tax. Not totally by general revenue as likely some surmise, or haven’t considered questioning, from those typical charts on federal spending.

And, relatedly, not enough is made of this fact: Today, Social Security (formally, the “Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance [OASI] Trust Fund”) actually owns more U.S. debt, $2.7 trillion in Treasury securities, than the top two foreign governments, Japan with securities valuing $1.1 trillion and China with under $1 trillion.

It is true Social Security’s dedicated revenue in 2021 was not alone sufficient to cover benefits paid, as detailed in a recent report by the Social Security Board of Trustees. Although, it was sufficient in the preceding year with additional securities purchased then. But in 2021, the government had to reconcile payment for OASI-owned federal securities cashed in to cover that year’s shortfall. Put differently, installment payments on the loan from Social Security came due. This, admittedly, entailed some additional spending of general revenue. But not in sums making the program a major debt maker, particularly not relative to the deficit amounts caused by tax cuts during the Trump administration.

As outlined in the Trustees’ report (Table II.B1, page 7), $838.2 billion from Social Security’s separate payroll tax covered 84 percent of the $1,001.9 billion in operational costs during 2021. The other revenue sources were the routine interest paid on securities owned, the income tax on Social Security benefits, and $59.1 billion collected from the liquidation of some securities—a liquidation representing a small percent of the 2021 deficit. Granted, the deficit grew in 2021 to nearly $3,000 billion partly from Covid spending, but even if using for illustrative purposes the 2019 deficit amount of around $1,000 billion, the $59.1 billion would only have represented 6 percent of that deficit.

Shortfalls are now predicted to happen regularly each year whereby reserves (that is, owned securities) in the OASI trust likely will be depleted by 2034 if no reforms. Then only an estimated 77 percent of benefits due would be payable. But annual payments on securities cashed in isn’t á priori a dominant driver of deficits and debt, as the preceding paragraph reveals.

Aside from erroneously blaming Social Security for deficits swelling the debt, there is also a related and persistent argument that cutting benefits via raising the retirement age to 70 is necessary to control expenditures given the increasing life expectancy over the decades. But issues around life expectancy, ironically, actually contribute to disproportionate harm incurred by raising the retirement age again. Yes again, since a 1983 law increased the age from 65 to eventually 67.

Research has shown those of lesser means have experienced smaller improvements in mortality over the years. Conceivably, as life expectancy declined during the Covid-19 pandemic, this discrepancy was magnified. In any case, what is known according to the Congressional Research Service is raising the retirement age to reduce costs “would [because of their lower overall life expectancy] affect low earners disproportionately (i.e., reductions in their lifetime Social Security benefits would be considerably larger than for high earners).” By the way, privatization of Social Security would also disproportionately harm the well-being in retirement years of those with lesser means.

Research by the Social Security Administration also revealed that a sizable portion of those retiring before the full retirement age had health problems impairing the ability to work. And these early retirees more likely worked in physically demanding blue-collar occupations. This and other studies led the Congressional Research Service to observe that “early retirees who have work-related health impairment…would be disadvantaged” by an increased retirement age, which worth noting they also were by the earlier increase legislated in 1983.

Cutting benefits, in general, subverts the intended purpose of Social Security. And justification for cutting benefits is partly based upon the faulty claim Social Security continually increases the debt, ignoring most expenditures on the program do not entail general revenue. If only charts on federal spending demarcated expenditures on programs by revenue type. The one on general revenue only would show a percentage attributed to Social Security considerably less than advertised in the all-inclusive charts today.Essentially, the Social Security program has not contributed in any markedly way to the totality of deficits and associated debt. Rather, paradoxically, the program has historically loaned the government monies to cover the debt and, thereby, help pay for other federal programs. So, don’t blame Social Security for the sum of existing debt today accumulated over the years.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

FREDERIC H. DECKER is a Maryland-based sociologist and, today, an active writer with commentary appearing across local newspapers nationally. He earned his Ph.D. at Florida State University.

RIGHT WING HAIR ON FIRE

‘I Understand Your Passion’: Painfully Awkward Moment Ensues After MSNBC Guest Calls CPAC a ‘Gathering of Sexual Predators’

By Caleb HoweMar 5th, 2023, MEDIAITE

Lindy Li, a DNC national finance committee member, had MSNBC anchor Yasmin Vossoughian momentarily nonplussed on Saturday’s Yasmin Vossoughian Reports when she described CPAC as a “gathering of sexual predators” and Donald Trump as a “serial rapist.”

In the segment, Vossoughian spoke with Li and MSNBC political analyst Susan Del Percio about CPAC, 2024 GOP hopefuls, and what “woke” means.

After attacking Nikki Haley as “cringeworthy” and a “total sell-out,” Li responded to the discussion about how “woke” is being defined.

“Let’s be clear what anti-woke means. It’s anti-Black,” she said. “And I think people are very reluctant to say it, but I don’t mince any words, and that’s the truth. That’s their way of, you know, sounding the dog whistle without being extremely explicit.”

Li then gave her summary of the annual event put on by the ACU.

“Let’s also not ignore the fact that CPAC has become a gathering of sexual predators. Let’s be honest,” Li said. She went on to bring up accusations against organizer Matt Schlapp and Rep. Jim Jordan, and the investigation into Matt Gaetz. She called Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene an “adulteress” and said Rep. Lauren Boebert “brags about carrying a Glock.”

Speaking about Saturday’s keynote at CPAC, Li said “and then tonight, we have Trump, a serial rapist.”

“This is the party that claims to be the party of Christian family values, And I had nothing to say or do but laugh at that,” she concluded.

About four and a half seconds of awkward silence then preceded some stammering by Vossoughian before she tried to offer a walk-back on the characterizations.

“I, I just — I just want to be clear here, though, you know, that – it’s important to put out there, we, we understand the accusations that have been made against, of course, the former president, Lindy. And of course, I understand your passion in this topic as well. But I want to be clear, of course, that that — none of that has actually rung true as of yet. Just, they’ve all been accusations so far,” Vossoughian managed to say before thanking her guests and ending the segment.

Del Percio, a former advisor to Democrat Andrew Cuomo, did not comment.

The show’s Twitter account did highlight Lindy Li’s appearance on Saturday, but for whatever reason chose a different clip to highlight.

6 scholars explain what a real climate solution is

 2 SLIDES
Researchers say protecting mangroves that soak up carbon is a great climate solution. But they caution against programs that slap carbon offsets onto it as those offsets can be hard to verify.

CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES


BY
Julia Simon
MAR 05, 2023 NPR

Scientists say there's a lot we can still do to slow the speed of climate change. But when it comes to "climate solutions", some are real, and some aren't, says Naomi Oreskes, historian of science at Harvard University. "This space has become really muddied," she says.

So how does someone figure out what's legit? We asked six climate scholars for the questions they ask themselves whenever they come across something claiming to be a climate solution.

A big climate solution is an obvious one

It may sound basic, but one big way to address climate change is to reduce the main human activity that caused it in the first place: burning fossil fuels.

Scientists say that means ultimately transitioning away from oil, coal and gas and becoming more energy efficient. We already have a lot of the technology we need to make this transition, like solar, wind, and batteries, Oreskes says.


"What we need to do right now is to mobilize the technologies that already exist, that work and are cost competitive, and that essentially means renewable energy and storage," she says.

Think about who's selling you the solution

It's important to think about both who's selling you the climate solution and what they say the problem is, says Melissa Aronczyk, professor of media at Rutgers University.

"People like to come up with solutions, but to do that, they usually have to interpret the problem in a way that works for them," she says.

Oreskes says pay attention when you see a "climate solution" that means increasing the use of fossil fuels. She says an example is natural gas, which has been sold as a "bridge fuel" from coal to renewable energy. But natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and its production, transport and use release methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.

"I think we need to start by looking at what happens when the fossil fuel industry comes up with solutions, because here is the greatest potential for conflict of interest," Aronczyk says.

A solution may sound promising, but is it available and scalable now?

Sometimes you'll hear about new promising technology like carbon capture, which vacuums carbon dioxide out of the air and stores it underground, says David Ho, a professor of oceanography at University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Ho researches climate solutions and he says ask yourself: is this technology available, affordable, or scalable now?

"I think people who don't work in this space think we have all these technologies that are ready to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, for instance. And we're not there," Ho says

If it's adding emissions, it's not a climate solution

These days all kinds of companies, from airlines to wedding dress companies, might offer to let you buy "carbon offsets" along with your purchase. That offset money could do something like build a new wind farm or plant trees that would - in theory - soak up and store the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions of taking a flight or making a new dress.

But there are often problems with regulation and verification of offsets, says Roberto Schaeffer, a professor of energy economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. "It's very dangerous, very dangerous indeed," he says.

He says with offsets from forests, it's hard to verify if the trees are really being protected, that those trees won't get cut down or burned in a wildfire.

"You cannot guarantee, 'Okay, you're gonna offset your dress by planting a tree.' You have no guarantee that in three years time that tree is gonna be there," he says.

If you make emissions thinking you're offsetting them, and the offset doesn't work, that's doubling the emissions, says Adrienne Buller, a climate finance researcher and director of research at Common Wealth, a think tank in the United Kingdom, "It's sort of like doubly bad."

If a solution sounds too easy, be skeptical

Many things sold as carbon offsets - like restoring or protecting forests - are, on their own, great climate solutions, Buller says. "We need things like trees," she says, "To draw carbon out of the atmosphere."

The problem is when carbon markets sell the idea that you can continue emitting as usual and everything will be fine if you just buy an offset, Buller says. "It's kind of a solution that implies that we don't have to do that much hard work. We can just kind of do some minor tweaks to the way that we currently do things," she says.

Schaeffer says there is a lot of hard work in our future to get off of fossil fuels and onto clean energy sources. "So people have to realize there is a price to pay here. No free lunch."

It's not all about business. Governments must play a role in solutions, too

We often think of businesses working on climate solutions on their own, but that's often not the case, says Oreskes. Government often plays a big role in funding and research support for new climate technology, says June Sekera, a visiting scholar at The New School who studies public policy and climate.

And governments will also have to play a big role in regulating emissions, says Schaeffer, who has been working with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for 25 years.

That's why all the scholars NPR spoke with for this story say one big climate solution is to vote.

Schaeffer points to the recent election in Brazil, where climate change was a big campaign issue for candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula won, and has promised to address deforestation, a big source of Brazil's emissions.

There's no one solution to climate change - and no one can do it alone

Aronczyk wants to make one thing clear: there is no one solution to climate change.

"We're human beings. We encounter a problem, we wanna solve that problem," Aronczyk says, "But just as there is no one way to describe climate change, there's no one way to offer a solution."

Climate solutions will take different forms, Sekera says. Some solutions may slow climate change, some may offer us ways to adapt.

The key thing, Aronczyk says, is that climate solutions will involve governments, businesses, and individuals. She says: "It is an all hands on deck kind of a situation."

 [Copyright 2023 NPR]

U$A

Child Labor and Immigration

Mostly a policy lament.

STEVEN L. TAYLOR · SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2023 ·

Via WaPo: A cleaning company illegally employed a 13-year-old. Her family is paying the price.

At 13, she was too young to be cleaning a meatpacking plant in the heart of Nebraska cattle country, working the graveyard shift amid the brisket saws and the bone cutters. The cleaning company broke the law when it hired her and more than two dozen other teenagers in this gritty industrial town, federal officials said.

[Since the U.S. Department of Labor raided the plant in October, Packers Sanitation Services, a contractor hired to clean the facility, has been fined for violating child labor laws. The girl, meanwhile, has watched her whole life unravel.

First, she lost the job that burned and blistered her skin but paid her $19 an hour. Then a county judge sent her stepfather to jail for driving her to work each night, a violation of state child labor laws. Her mother also faces jail time for securing the fake papers that got the child the job in the first place. And her parents are terrified of being sent back to Guatemala, the country they left several years ago in search of a better life.

I suspect that this case, and others like it, are a bit of a Rorschach Test. Some will see it as a corporation exploiting desperate people, while others will see a family who shouldn’t be in the United States (and who exploited their own child by letting her work).

I will state from the onset that I am more sympathetic to desperate people whose desperation leads them to engage in, well, desperate behavior, but will certainly acknowledge that there are reasons to lay some blame in their direction. Packers paying a fine and the consequences for the family are ultimately not equivalent in my mind.

A sweeping investigation of Packers found 102 teens, ages 13 to 17, scouring slaughterhouses in eight states, part of a growing wave of child workers illegally hired to fill jobs in some of the nation’s most dangerous industries. Driven in part by persistent labor shortages and record numbers of unaccompanied migrant minors arriving from Central America, child labor violations have nearly quadrupled since 2015, according to Labor Department data, spiking in hazardous jobs that American citizens typically shun.

[…]

Packers has faced no criminal charges, despite evidence that it failed to take basic steps to verify the age of its young employees. Last month, it quickly resolved the case by paying a $1.5 million civil fine. The families of the teen workers, by contrast, have been exposed to child-abuse charges and potential deportation. None have applied for work permits and the protection against deportation that is available to the child workers, fearing retaliation in a company town where almost everyone’s job is somehow tied to the meatpacking industry.

[…]

Packers officials said they have dismissed all the minor workers and fired two managers in Grand Island. They accused “rogue individuals” of using counterfeit documents to prove that the children were of legal age and emphasized that the 102 workers made up a tiny share of the company’s 17,000-member workforce. The full statement from Packers is available here.

For anyone who has paid attention to this general topic will recognize the broad outlines here. Companies need employees and immigrants need work. Both either break, bend, and/or ignore the law to make the transaction happen. Once someone gets caught the company basically says “whoops” and pays a fine, and the employees (and often their broader communities) tend to suffer very direct consequences.

Let me pause and note that there is no easy solution to any of this. The easiest of them all is “seal the border” (or similar formulations) and it is an utter impossibility. As I have noted on multiple occasions, there are too many legitimate transactions across the border to “seal” it or “close” it in any meaningful fashion. Calls to “seal” the border are just a way of saying “I wish this problem would go away” with all the efficacy such a statement implies.

What I am constantly struck by when I read stories about immigrants and immigration policy are the very real market forces that help drive all of this behavior. There is a market for labor in this country that is not being satisfied and there is a supply of labor south of the border willing to do the work in question. There is also a very real demand for security and opportunity in many people living south of the border (especially in places like Guatemala and El Salvador) and the ample supply of security and opportunity in the United States. Combining these two push-pull circumstances means that US policymakers have some very, very powerful forces to contend with if we are going to find solutions to deal with this situation in any way that actually makes it better.

(I have held this view for decades, in fact).

Instead, we remain in a spiral of nonsensical approaches. We don’t want to really deal with the labor demands (which would include better enforcement of existing labor laws and, quite frankly, things like paying better wages to attract workers, but that would lead to higher prices that no one wants to pay). We don’t want to figure out a better way to allow labor to enter the country legally. We don’t want to pay to increase the bureaucracy needed to deal with migrants.

We really don’t want to do anything.

And I realize that at the base of my assumptions about this situation is that migrants are going to come and we need to figure out how to deal with that fact. This automatically makes the “seal the border” faction of the population want to ignore me as being an “open border” type. But the issue to me is simple: the empirical reality is that migrants are going to come. If the US really is the land of opportunity, the land of the free and the home of the brave, as well as a shining city on a hill, people are going to come. Desperation is a major motivator. Indeed, it seems to me that the desire for self-improvement, broadly defined, is a major motivator for a lot of humanity and human history shows that people will endure much to improve the lives of their children.

While I have no easy solution (and if an easy solution was possible in a Sunday morning blog post, well, the problem wouldn’t be inspiring blog posts), I will say this: if we had a flooding problem you solve that problem through the construction of dams, levies, dikes, canals, and the like to control the flow. Such systems do not guarantee universal fixes, but it allows for control of the flow of water, to help stop catastrophic flooding and to help direct the water where needed. You don’t just send out the bucket brigade while complaining that we need to “seal” the horizon.

I suspect that if we had a more rational process to deal with migrants, it would be possible to better control the flow (but it would never stop the illegal crossings).

Instead, we refuse to really do anything.

THE REPUBLICAN CHILD LABOR AGENDA

 BY ERIK LOOMIS

 

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ON MARCH 5, 2023

 

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As Timothy Noah notes, the rise of child labor in America is directly connected to Republican policies on the issue, as in Republicans are objectively pro-child labor.

Child labor is back. The Labor Department’s wage and hour division recorded a 37 percent increase in 2022 in the number of minors employed in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which outlawed most child labor way back in 1938 and imposed strict limits on the rest. The 37 percent increase was over the previous year. Over the previous decade, the number of minors employed in violation of the act was up 140 percent. 

The surge in child labor reverses what had been, for most of the past 20 years, a significant decline in the number of minors employed in violation of the FLSA. Nobody knows exactly why the numbers started to climb in 2015, but probably it was because the labor market was getting tight. The unemployment rate, which had been falling since 2010, dropped in 2015 to 5 percent, which was then considered full employment. Workers were getting hard to find. The unemployment rate has since fallen further to 3.4 percent. 

The violations began piling up just as Republican state legislators, many of them newly in the majority, went on the attack against child labor restrictions, pressing in various ways to expand the number of work hours and work settings available to teenagers aged 14 to 17. (With exceptions for farm families, child actors, and a few others, child labor under age 14 is illegal.) One Wisconsin bill went so far as to ban the phrase “child labor” from state employment statutes, requiring that the offending term be replaced by “employment of minors.” A bill introduced in Iowa last month would allow 14-year-olds to work in meatpacking plants. If the youngster gets hurt due to his own negligence (whatever that means at 14), the meatpacker will be indemnified against civil liability. 

Only a few of these Dickensian pro-child-labor bills got enacted, but some did. In June, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu signed into law a bill that allows 14-year-old busboys to clear tables where liquor is served and expands from 30 to 35 the number of hours 16- and 17-year-olds may work during the school year. These restrictions had “become too cumbersome,” New Hampshire Deputy Labor Commissioner Rudolph Ogden explained to The New Hampshire Bulletin. Sununu is weighing a presidential bid in 2024. Working campaign slogan: Bring Back Warren’s Blacking Factory. (Just kidding.)

With this political backdrop, it’s little wonder that an investigation published Saturday by Hannah Dreier of The New York Times revealed a “shadow work force” of migrant children “across industries in every state”: 12-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee; 13-year-old girls washing hotel sheets in Virginia; a 13-year-old boy in Michigan making auto parts on an overnight shift that ends at 6:30 a.m.; a 12-year-old working for a Hyundai subsidiary in Alabama (this last courtesy of Reuters). The good news is that the Cheetos you’re snacking on or the Fruit of the Loom socks warming your feet may have been manufactured right here in the United States. The bad news is that they may have been made with child labor. It’s no longer just a Third World practice, or a bad memory from How the Other Half Lives.

Worried about the debt: Tax the rich

BY AMY HANAUER, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 03/05/23

Supporters of taxes on the very rich contend that people are emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic with a bigger appetite for what they’re calling “tax justice.” Bills announced Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, in California, New York, Illinois, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Washington and Connecticut vary in their approaches to hiking taxes, but all revolve around the idea that the richest Americans need to pay more.

Republicans are using the need to raise the debt ceiling to demand cuts to spending. They are not showing much enthusiasm for saying what spending to cut and for good reason. Americans, it turns out, support most of what the federal government spends money on.

When President Biden said during the State of the Union that some Republican politicians want to cut Social Security and Medicare, it generated boos from Republicans in the room. But what would they support cutting? Many won’t say, probably because Social Security, Medicare and other health care and the military are the bulk of what’s in the federal budget.

For those concerned about the debt, here’s a better idea. Do more to tax rich people and corporations.

In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly cut and rarely raised taxes on wealthy people or corporations. Over 80 percent of the tax cuts passed since 2000 went to the wealthiest 40 percent. Nearly two-thirds of those went to the wealthiest 20 percent and most of that to the richest five percent. This enriched the uber-rich and simultaneously ballooned the deficit, fueling today’s debt ceiling drama.

The corporate minimum tax and other reforms in last summer’s Inflation Reduction Act show we can break that pattern. In contrast to the Bush and Trump eras, Biden-era tax changes raise hundreds of billions of dollars to preserve the planet, improve people’s health and reduce the national debt. But the increased revenue from last summer’s reform is just the beginning of what’s needed to catch up to what people and communities deserve.

In the State of the Union, the president proposed changes that would add revenue and improve tax fairness. The Billionaire Minimum Income Tax would phase in for those with wealth over $100 million, requiring they pay at least a 20 percent tax rate on all income including unrealized capital gains. Currently, the very wealthy can accumulate capital gains and pay no taxes if they don’t sell their assets. Correcting this could raise over $350 billion over a decade from only the extremely wealthy.

The president also proposed expanding the tax on stock buybacks from 1 to 4 percent. The tax hasn’t slowed stock buybacks, which are at record levels. Forecasters conservatively estimated that the 1 percent level will raise about $75 billion over 10 years. Increasing the rate to 4 percent will further increase revenue for public needs.

There are other ways, beyond those the president proposed, to raise more while addressing inequality. On the corporate side, we could close the loophole corporations get for offshoring jobs and tax huge “passthrough entities” that are currently allowed to dodge the corporate income tax. Each would raise hundreds of billions over a decade.




On the individual side, we could raise hundreds of billions of dollars by eliminating the tax break for capital gains income, making investors pay the same rate on income from wealth as workers pay on wages. And we could tax capital gains on assets at the point of inheritance, so dynastic wealth doesn’t permanently escape taxation, generating over $100 billion.

If Congress chooses, it could use some of the proceeds for debt reduction. And we’d still have more resources for essentials that citizens of other nations get, like low-cost college, universal paid leave and quality childcare.

The United States used to channel much more corporate profits toward broad support for the economy and society that made those profits possible. In the middle of the 20th century when economic growth was fastest and most broadly shared, corporations paid dramatically more, and the U.S. put more toward tackling collective challenges

Corporate profits hit a new record of $2.8 trillion in 2021. Yet, corporate income taxes now cover just 10 percent of federal revenue, down from more than 30 percent in the 1950s High egg prices: Getting to the bottom lineThe performative politics of Marjorie Taylor Greene

The U.S. ranks sixth from the bottom among peer nations in the share of resources spent on public needs (less than a third of GDP). In contrast, European countries put closer to half of their economy into societal investments. That’s why our competitors have universal health care, universal parental leave and lower poverty. And it pays off: People live longer throughout western Europe than here.

As one of the most prosperous countries in human history, we have enough resources for our collective needs. By better taxing corporations and the wealthiest, we can generate revenue to improve family security, strengthen our communities, and reduce the debt too.


Amy Hanauer is the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Tal Bachman: Remembering Getz/Gilberto

by Tal Bachman
The Bachman Beat
March 5, 2023

It's Monday morning, March 18, 1963. Blustery day. New York City. Three Brazilians—two men and a woman—take a cab to a building at 112 West 48th Street. The sign on the building says, "Manny's". It's New York's premier music store.

But the Brazilians aren't interested in buying any instruments. They walk up three flights of stairs to the fourth floor, directly above Manny's, where they enter a recording studio.

There, a young recording engineer named Philip Rabinowitz greets them. So does Verve Records producer Creed Taylor. Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz arrives shortly thereafter, with a bassist and drummer in tow. The three Brazilians are composer and pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim; his friend, guitarist and singer João Gilberto; and Gilberto's 22 year old wife, Astrud. Antonio and João are there to record an album with the American musicians. Astrud is tagging along just to watch.

The studio itself isn't much. It's a simple, high-ceilinged room with fairly basic recording equipment. It doesn't cost much to rent. For more polished recordings, musicians go to one of New York's fancier recording studios—the kind with top-of-the-line recording machines, dozens of mics, strategically built-in sound baffling, miniature echo chambers, slick glass, fine carpets, wood paneling, fancy reception area, lounge with a pool table, and a mixing room acoustically-tuned so as to minimize odd frequency pockets. This one, at least up until very recently, musicians visit only to record rough, or "demo", versions of their new songs.

But recently, some good records have come out of the spartan little affair in midtown Manhattan. Its reputation is growing. Musicians are starting to book it to make real records.

After all, Philip—the house engineer and minority co-owner of the operation—is easy to work with. And he knows his stuff. The room itself—precisely because it hasn't been professionally redesigned to deaden or balance the acoustics—retains its natural, idiosyncratic sound. That unique sound comes through the microphones just enough to lend a certain character to all the music recorded at the studio. And right next door to the building is Jim & Andy's Bar, a watering hole increasingly popular with musicians in town. Word has it that Charlie Parker had a drink there once. Or was it Chet Baker? Or John Coltrane? Rumors have started to fly, but the attraction of them all, to New York musicians, is that if you book a session at Philip's new studio, you might just bump into one of the world's greatest musicians during a break down at Jim & Andy's. Maybe you could even become friends. You never know.

And so, the little studio has started to make its mark. And as a result, much to the delight of young Philip, Verve Records has rented his A & R Studio for this two day project with the Brazilian and American musicians.

Producer Creed and engineer Philip—who has decided to change his last name from Rabinowitz to Ramone—spend that day and the next recording various versions of eight songs. The songs don't quite sound like standard jazz. They don't quite sound like samba, either. They're best categorized as belonging to a new genre called bossa nova (literally, "new wave"), developed by Jobim himself, the man playing piano on the sessions, and the man who's written most of the songs on the album.

Now, you might ask: How the heck does anyone invent a whole new genre of music?

From a distance, we can guess the answer—you take bits and bobs from pre-existing styles, put them together in a new way, add in a couple of features of your own—and voila! You've just created your own new genre. It doesn't have to be radically different from other genres. It just has to be identifiably different. And that only takes a few little adjustments, in the same way that humans and chimps share 98% the same DNA. It's that two percent that makes all the difference.

But still...how do you invent a whole new genre of music? To know in theory what that looks like is one thing. To actually do it, and do it well—to create a brilliant new genre—that takes genius. But the man now sitting in Philip's studio, playing piano, Antonio Carlos Jobim, is just such a genius. He's actually done it.

Sure, he's had help. He's had musical ancestors and colleagues. But for the most part, bossa nova is his thing. He's taken jazz chords, samba rhythms, classical guitar, light piano, his own unusual melodic and harmonic sense, put them all together, and come up with something new, fresh, and exciting. And supremely creative.

Here are a few specifics:

Jobim uses the same quirky little pulse to drive each song—accents on beat 2 and beat 3 and. Each song he writes is a marvel of casual-sounding complexity. The chords he uses include just about every combination of notes you could ever come up with: diminished chords, half-diminished chords, seven with a six on top, augmented chords, major sevenths with a flat five, seven flat-nines, seven sharp-nines, minor sixes, and dozens more, which he then strings together in alluringly strange sequences. He even throws in unexpected key changes, yet he always finds a way to get back to the original root chord.

Over and through all those strange and beautiful chords, he threads seductive, twisting melodies. His lyrics range from witty to wistful to deeply romantic. His instrumentation is string bass, light drums, classical guitar, piano, single vocal, and often a sax.

He plays around with standard song structures. For example, some of his songs have unusually long bridges—sometimes double or more the standard length. In others, the melody and chords change slightly on the final verse. He uses enough repetition in each song to make it memorable, but more variation than you ever hear in a standard jazz or popular song. Back to the recording:

The American and Brazilian musicians at the studio record various takes throughout the day. The sax player Getz, the son of impoverished, Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, is a difficult man to work with. He's nasty, short, mercurial, stingy, and damaged from past drug addiction, incarceration, and a challenging childhood. Yet somehow, the musicians manage to forge on, hour after hour. And surprisingly, the cantankerous Getz turns in some of the most evocative, emotionally compelling sax solos ever recorded.

The recordings progress as expected until a lyricist arrives with English translations for two of Jobim's songs. Sensing an opportunity to spice up the album, producer Creed Taylor decides someone should sing those two songs in English. But he also says he wants to get the record done on schedule—that is, by the second day of recording.

Maybe the solution, he thinks, is for João's wife Astrud to try singing them. She isn't a professional singer, but she's in the studio, and she can speak English. It's worth a quick shot. Astrud obligingly steps up to the mic and sings "Girl From Ipanema" and "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars". The effect is instant. Creed loves what he hears. Astrud doesn't sound like any other singer he's ever heard. She certainly doesn't sound like a jazz singer. Her voice is almost entirely devoid of affectation—no vibrato, no trills, no acrobatics. She sounds utterly guileless. She also sounds charming, feminine, alluring, innocent, and intimate. It perfectly fits the music. It's magic.

The musicians finish the album. To their frustration, Verve Records sits on it for the next year, afraid it will bomb. But when Verve finally releases it a year later under the title Getz/Gilberto, "Girl From Ipanema" becomes a smash. Astrud Gilberto becomes famous and begins a long singing career. The album hits #5 on the Billboard charts, wins four Grammys (including Album of the Year), and makes saxophonist Stan Getz a rich man. It also puts the upstart A & R Studios squarely on the map, along with its young house engineer, now known as Phil Ramone. Phil in fact wins a Grammy—his first, but not his last— for his engineering on the album. Through his choice and precise positioning of mics around the room, his spacing of the players, and his clever use of EQ and compression, he has captured not just world class performances, but conveyed an intoxicating atmosphere of seductive intimacy.

Phil goes on to become one of the most successful record producers of all-time, winning fourteen Grammys, and selling hundreds of millions of records. (Just a few years after his work on Getz/Gilberto, Ramone also helps record a brand new band out of Canada. Called The Guess Who, it features my dad, Randy, on guitar. Ramone records the band's breakthrough song, "These Eyes" at A & R Studio's new location).

Beyond the commercial success and industry awards, Getz/Gilberto cements bossa nova's status in global music consciousness as a distinct, enduring genre. It also cements the characteristics of the genre: instrumentation, singing style, lyrical topics, chord progression styles, rhythm, vibe, etc. Jobim, with help from the Gilbertos and Stan Getz, does for bossa nova what Bill Monroe had earlier done for bluegrass, and what Bob Marley would later do for reggae: he establishes the phenotype.

There's something else—something more than just music. Getz/Gilberto, and bossa nova more generally, conveys a particular mood, attitude, life aesthetic—a way of being. The bossa nova world is unhurried. It's smooth. It's understated class—awesomeness without any exhibitionism (just like Astrud's voice). It's effortlessly sexy and devastatingly smart. It's a leisurely stroll along a warm beach by day, with cocktails (and romance) at night. It's not a tuxedo or a ballroom gown. It's not a ball cap with jeans. It's a tanned, fit guy wearing a crisp, casual collared shirt and well-fitting trousers, and a tanned, fit woman wearing light makeup and a dazzlingly simple dress. It's deep comfort with oneself and the world around you. It's an ultra-pleasant world within the world.

Some American musicologists will later claim that American jazz in essence created bossa nova. It would be much truer to say bossa nova re-created American jazz. No sooner did Getz/Gilberto hit than virtually every jazz songwriter began trying to write bossa nova-style songs, and virtually every jazz singer began adding bossa nova songs to his repertoire.

Here, for example, you can see Frank Sinatra perform a medley featuring "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars" with Antonio Carlos Jobim. Here, you can see a joyously-sauced Dino play second fiddle to Caterina Valente in a performance of the Jobim song "One Note Samba". Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr., Ella Fitzgerald—you name 'em, they sang 'em. Even Andy Williams got in on the new craze. Almost everyone did. And almost everyone still does. To this day, it's hard to find a lounge act who doesn't roll into "Girl from Ipanema" at some point. Heck, I've done it myself during those late night impromptu jam sessions on the Mark Steyn Cruise, up in the Crow's Nest. You should come along with us next time and sing along.

In any case, in my books, Getz/Gilberto is a huge moment in the history of popular music. It's what really blasts bossa nova on to the world musical stage, and insinuates that difficult-to-define bossa nova way of being into popular consciousness. And it all came from a recording session sixty years ago this month.

Not bad for two days work.