Will the Cato Institute Even Offer a Reply to Mark Thoma?

Our friend Mark Thoma is fairly new to blogging, but he has already figured out that Cato crowd lies a lot with respect to the Social Security debate. The most recent “Daily Debunker” from Cato discusses the Johnson-Flake proposal, which sounds to me like an old song: (a) reduce government expenditures by switching from wage indexing to price indexing; and (b) allowing workers to take half of their contributions and invest them anyway they want. Yes, (a) addresses this alleged solvency problem by cutting benefits, but Cato claims that workers will be somehow better off because of (b).

Even though their free lunch claims have been refuted numerous times over the years, the Cato crowd just keeps repeating these bogus arguments. Mark does a nice job of debunking every aspect of this Cato op-ed. I suspect the Cato crowd will simply ignore Mark as they ignore all real economics.