Good News on Social Security
I received this email about Democratic opposition to Bush's plans to privatizate Social Security:
Good News on Social Security
It looks like you won't have to worry about saving for your retirement. According to this newspaper article Social Security is not in financial trouble. The reason - Ted Kennedy says there is no crisis. Why does he say that? Because George Bush says there is a crisis. Of course it probably won't matter to Teddy if he's wrong and George is right.
My response follows:
I would like to point out that Kennedy did not say that Social Security has no problems, but that he doesn’t think Bush’s plan will “make it through Congress.” This is a far cry from being blindly contrarian. Check out what Kennedy said on “Face the Nation” (page 4 of the “rush transcript”) this past Sunday:“First of all, it seems that this administration tries to make a crisis on any political problem. […] So now we have the crisis in terms of the funding of Social Security that is non-existent. It's solid till 2042. And without any help, it'll be able to continue to 2075 with three-quarters of the benefits if there was going to be no help and assistance to it. All you have to do is raise the payroll tax on that and that would solve most of the kind of a problem that you'd have, other kinds of ways to dealing with it. And that is certainly something we ought to think about.”For all his faults, Kennedy has his facts straight; he recognizes that Social Security is flawed, but that it can be fixed without being eviscerated. Bush, with his propensity for prevarication, is up to his usual scaremongering. The future of Social Security doesn’t matter to Bush – not only because he won’t need it, but because he would rather see it destroyed in the name of “privatization.”
As writer Thomas Frank noted in “Get Rich or Get Out: Attempted Robbery with a Loaded Federal Budget,” from Harper’s Magazine, June 2003:
“Here [in Bush’s 2004 budget] war and recession are merely pretexts for getting the crudest social trends of the last twenty years moving again. This deficit is designed to enrich those at the very top of the social pyramid while cutting services for those lower down. This is not cyclical Keynesianism. This is not a helpful or even a merely benign program of deficit spending. It is a blueprint for sabotage. It is an instruction manual for how to power up a complicated machine and dash it headlong into a stone wall. After which the president will turn to us and say, ‘See? I told you big government doesn't work.’”