I was reading the New York Times yesterday because, well, I figured someone should, and I came across a self-congratulatory op-ed by Senator Mitt Romney, deceptively titled “Tax the Rich, Like Me,” whose thesis is that modest sacrifice by those who can afford it is the way to avert the looming (and inevitable and long overdue) Social Security crisis. The essay has been met with predictable applause from the “tax the rich” crowd, which is presumably the point. Because problem-solving is not. Nor is imposing taxes on Romney, or people like him. Read the piece carefully and you’ll find that every new tax Romney proposes would be paid not by him, but by others; none of it would prevent Social Security from ultimately failing; and it would all come at the cost of slowing economic growth, even though accelerating economic growth through lower taxes is precisely what candidate Romney argued in 2012 was needed to dig ourselves out of debt in the first place.
Now, before going any further, let me be clear: I like Mitt Romney, and I’ve taken more than my share of flak from conservatives for saying so over the years. What follows should not be mistaken for a personal attack. But there are moments in politics when a proposal is not merely wrong, but so fundamentally spurious that it demands rebuke. This is such a moment.
That is regrettable, because Romney is not an unserious man. He is not a demagogue, not a grifter, not a revolutionary pretending to be a reformer. He is, in fact, precisely the kind of moderate, competent, decent, compassionate conservative one wishes dominated American public life. He speaks calmly. He reasons carefully. He avoids hysteria. He plainly wants to solve problems rather than exploit them.
Which is why this argument is so disappointing.
Romney is correct about the danger. Social Security is barreling toward insolvency. Of course it is! It’s a pyramid scheme, and like all pyramid schemes it eventually collapses under its own weight. Absent reform, automatic benefit cuts of roughly 23 percent await retirees in the near future. The arithmetic is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether Romney’s proposal meaningfully addresses that arithmetic, or merely gestures at responsibility while leaving the underlying disease untouched.
It is the latter.
Romney invokes in his essay the specter of immense wealth: Elon Musk, multibillion-dollar estates, 300-foot yachts. The reader is primed for a moral reckoning with plutocracy. But what follows is not a plan to tax Romney, Musk, or anyone remotely resembling them in lived economic reality. What follows is a classic bait-and-switch.
Romney presents as a solution tax increases “on people like him,” that he would not actually pay. He argues that wealthy estates should pay more in taxes, but of course, he would not pay that, only his heirs once he dies. He says people who own investment properties should pay capital gains taxes when they sell their properties to buy others, but again, this has nothing to do with him or the wealth he has accumulated. Then, and this is so classic, he proposes raising payroll taxes, which again he would not pay since he’s not on anyone’s payroll. Such a tax does not touch billionaires living off capital. It does not touch dynastic fortunes. It does not touch Romney himself in any meaningful sense.
But payroll taxes do affect middle class folks who work. Doctors. Lawyers. Engineers. Small business owners. Dual-income professional households. Romney, under the guise of “tax the rich,” proposes raising these taxes on anyone making over $170,000, a figure that may sound lavish until one checks Zillow in New York, New Jersey, California, or any of the other states where high incomes coexist with staggering costs of living. We do not own superyachts. We do not employ battalions of accountants. We are trying to build wealth, not merely preserve it.
This is the sleight of hand, and it is depressingly familiar. Conservatives recoil at the phrase “tax the rich” because experience and logic teach us what it always means in practice: tax everyone in the upper half of the middle class and above. The rhetorical villain is Elon Musk. The actual payer is the working professional. Oh, and charities. Romney wants to limit how much wealthy people can give to charities as well.
And what, precisely, does the taxpayer receive in return? Nothing. No higher rate of return. No ownership. No inheritable asset. No flexibility. No opt-out. Just higher compulsory payments into the same pyramid scheme, structured in the same way, delivering the same paltry benefits, and facing the same inescapable demographic math, with just a slight delay in the inevitable collapse.
Here the argument implodes entirely. Social Security is not merely underfunded. It is structurally irrational. It is an investment program in which the money is not invested. A substantial portion of a worker’s lifetime earnings is confiscated, immediately transferred to someone else, denied the possibility of compounding in productive capital, and, crucially, leaves no principal behind for a spouse or children. When the beneficiary dies, the asset vanishes.
This is not a minor defect. It is a moral and economic catastrophe.
Over decades, this structure has quietly crippled intergenerational wealth formation and exacerbated economic inequality, particularly among those who rely most heavily on wage income. Had even a fraction of Social Security contributions been placed into private, inheritable accounts invested in the American economy, millions of families, especially minority families historically excluded from capital ownership, would today possess real, durable wealth instead of a government promise that expires at death.
A mere thousand dollars invested in the American stock market 68 years ago (full Social Security retirement age) would today be worth roughly a million dollars and producing $100,000 in annual income. Instead, Americans are compelled to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime into a system that, at best, pays a modest annuity of perhaps $30,000 per year while they are alive, and leaves their families nothing.
This is not social insurance. It is enforced dependency.
Romney does not confront this reality. He accepts the system as a given and asks only how to extract more money to sustain it slightly longer. And notably, he never tells us how much his proposals would actually raise, or for how long they would delay (not solve, mind you) insolvency. He offers no numbers, no timelines, no serious accounting. If this is “arithmetic,” the math is conspicuously absent.
Instead, we are offered moral language about fairness, accompanied by an admission that the cure may worsen the disease. Romney concedes that higher taxes slow growth, and adds “Of course, a much faster growing economy would save us from the debt cliff.” So he admits that growth is the true escape from the debt trap, and yet he proposes solving Social Security’s deficit by suppressing growth while refusing to touch the structure that guarantees its demise.
As I write this, I’m caused to recall an essay I wrote back in 2011 titled “Mitt Romney Versus Himself,” where I observed that one of Romney’s great skills is to take completely contradictory positions without any sense that he is doing so, or understanding as to why they cannot both be right. I guess he hasn’t lost his touch.
And here it serves him well, because the alternative is to speak forbidden truths. To say plainly that Social Security, as designed, is a bad deal, is to invite demonization. To say that future participants should be allowed to opt out into private accounts is to be accused, absurdly, of cruelty to the elderly. To say that the program’s structure would be criminal if replicated in the private sector is to violate a sacred civic taboo.
So instead, we get self-contradictory, self-serving, self-aggrandizing virtue signaling, without sacrifice. “Tax me,” says the politician, carefully proposing taxes that do not apply to him. “Be responsible,” he urges, without specifying what responsibility accomplishes. “Save Social Security,” he proclaims, while proposing reforms that would do nothing to save it at all.
Romney’s decency is not in question. His sincerity is not in doubt. But sincerity is not a substitute for clarity, and decency does not rescue a bad idea from being a bad idea.
Raising taxes on working Americans, to prop up a structurally broken system they would rationally abandon if given the choice, is not courage. It is the politics of deception, delay, and denial. It solves nothing, and builds nothing. We already have enough ideas, and politicians, that do that.
If conservatism means anything, it should mean the willingness to speak hard truths, to talk to our fellow Americans as adults, to say that some systems, however well-intentioned at birth, have outlived their usefulness, and that real compassion lies not in taxing people more to sustain failure, but in giving them ownership, inheritance, and the freedom to build.
It is imperative that Americans have adequate provision for their retirement. Social Security, as presently constructed, makes it harder to do so, by confiscating a lifetime of investment returns, in exchange for a pittance with no principal. It is an investment so poor that participation must be compulsory. That alone should tell us everything we need to know. And no amount of polite applause lines and phony demands about taxing “people like me” can change that.
