Is Paul Krugman suggesting that we should shoot Deficit Commission members in their heads? Or is he just insane?

Krugman: Zombies Have Already Killed The Deficit Commission.

It must have sounded like a good idea (although not to me): establish a bipartisan commission of Serious People to develop plans to bring the federal budget under control.

But the commission is already dead — and zombies did it.

Now: that either means that the Federal Deficit Commission – the “bipartisan commission of Serious People,” as Krugman calls it – has been entirely consumed by said zombies, because that’s what zombies do, or else Commission members are now zombies themselves, meaning we should shoot them in their brains as soon as possible to prevent the infection from spreading any further.

Krugman obviously doesn’t understand this. His misunderstanding of zombie folklore is, however, dwarfed by his misunderstanding of Social Security, and possibly also by his misunderstanding of the word “lie.”

Krugman goes on:

But it’s actually much worse than that. On Social Security, (former Senator Alan) Simpson is repeating a zombie lie — that is, one of those misstatements that keeps being debunked, but keeps coming back.

Specifically, Simpson has resurrected the old nonsense about how Social Security will be bankrupt as soon as payroll tax revenues fall short of benefit payments, never mind the quarter century of surpluses that came first.

We’ll come back to those “surpluses” later. First: payroll tax revenues have already fallen short of benefit payments. Michael Barone pointed it out earlier this month, just over a week ago. Social Security is in deficit now.

More Krugman:

We went through all this at length back in 2005, but let me do this yet again.

Social Security is a government program funded by a dedicated tax. There are two ways to look at this. First, you can simply view the program as part of the general federal budget, with the the dedicated tax bit just a formality.

Expensive freaking formality.

And there’s a lot to be said for that point of view; if you take it, benefits are a federal cost, payroll taxes a source of revenue, and they don’t really have anything to do with each other.

Revenues and spending: totally unrelated.

Alternatively, you can look at Social Security on its own. And as a practical matter, this has considerable significance too; as long as Social Security still has funds in its trust fund, it doesn’t need new legislation to keep paying promised benefits.

Trust fund! “As long as Social Security still has funds in its trust fund!” Did you know Social Security has a trust fund? I didn’t know Social Security has a trust fund. You know why I didn’t know that? Because it doesn’t! There’s no such thing. No such thing, and everybody knows it. The federal government spends that money. It doesn’t sock it away anywhere as, apparently, Krugman thinks.

OK, so two views, both of some use.

For fisking, maybe. Not much else.

But here’s what you can’t do: you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that for the last 25 years, when Social Security ran surpluses, well, that didn’t mean anything, because it’s just part of the federal government…

Newsflash: it doesn’t mean anything, because that money’s gone. If the feds had, in fact, put the money in a trust fund where it was earning 4% annually, then those surpluses would mean something. But they didn’t, so they don’t.

…but when payroll taxes fall short of benefits, even though there’s lots of money in the trust fund, Social Security is broke.

This is like that time George W. Bush lied us into war. Because, see, Dubya knew – even when nobody else did – that Saddam Hussein didn’t have any WMD. The entire world believed that Saddam had WMD, except Dubya. But Dubya told us all Saddam did have them – even though he knew Saddam didn’t. And he led us to war based on that knowledge that nobody else had.

Everybody knows there’s no trust fund. Everybody but Krugman.

And bear in mind what happens when payroll receipts fall short of benefits: NOTHING. No new action is required; the checks just keep going out.

Indeed, they do, and they should, because the people getting those checks have paid Social Security taxes for decades based on the promise that they would get those checks.

But: “new action” most certainly is required. The federal government has to spend money from some source other than Social Security taxes on Social Security benefits. That’s a new development that isn’t going to get any better. Social Security is now a net expense for the federal budget, and this will only get worse.

So what does it mean that the co-chair of the commission is resurrecting this zombie lie?

The “zombie lie,” in case you’ve forgotten, is that “Social Security will be bankrupt as soon as payroll tax revenues fall short of benefit payments, never mind the quarter century of surpluses that came first.”

On the one hand, Krugman’s right: Social Security won’t be “bankrupt” as long as China keeps buying U.S. bonds.

On the other hand, though: the surpluses. They’re still gone, Paul. They’re not coming back.

It means that at even the most basic level of discussion, either (a) he isn’t willing to deal in good faith or (b) the zombies have eaten his brain. And in either case, there’s no point going on with this farce.

True dat, Paul. There is no point, and this is a farce. Except: a former Senator sounding the alarm on a federal program in trouble? Not a sign of zombie infection.

A Nobel Prize-winning economist who thinks money can be both spent and in a “trust fund?” Paul, if anybody’s been replaced by a mindless undead shambling mockery of the human it once was, it’s you.

Via Memeorandum.