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Social Security: The Inherent Contradiction

• Published By Cato Institute
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In this comprehensive examination of America’s social security system, economist-lawyer Peter J. Ferrara offers a thorough and solid brief against maintaining the present system.

He presents conclusive evidence that social security has been sold to the American people by deceit and misrepresentation and that the social security system’s financial troubles, far from being ameliorated by recent tax increases, are getting worse by the day because of the demographics of population growth. He analyzes, and finds wanting, the rationales for the system made by some of America’s leading economists and social security officials.

But this book is not all negatives. After laying a careful groundwork of statistical fact that indicts social security — most of it gathered from the Social Security Administration itself — Ferrara explores the more important philosophical questions that a social security apparatus necessarily raises for a free society and then confronts the ultimate question: Should there be a social security system in America’s future?

You may not agree with all that you find between these pages, but this work will be an invaluable reference source for anyone interested in the continuing problems of one of this country’s most ambitious and expensive social programs. No other single source gathers together so much material on benefits, law, economics, and political theory, all in one volume at the reader’s fingertips. This book will become an integral part of the ongoing debate on the future of the social security system.

About the Author

Peter J. Ferrara, former associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute, is general counsel and chief economist for Americans for Tax Reform. A leading Social Security scholar, he is the author of Social Security: The Inherent Contradiction and several other books on Social Security. He served in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1983 and as associate deputy attorney general of the United States in 1992–93. He has also practiced law and taught at George Mason University School of Law.