"Debt, n. An
ingenious substitute
for the chain and
whip of the slave-driver."
- Ambrose Bierce
After weeks of refusing to disclose details, President
George W. Bush finally explained his plan to privatize Social
Security the other day.
"Because the - all which is on the table begins to
address the big cost drivers," Bush said Feb. 4 in
Tampa. "For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on
the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or
price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are
being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost
drivers, affecting those - changing those with personal accounts,
the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be - or
closer delivered to what has been promised."
Well, after a brilliant analysis like that, who could
possibly doubt that they'd want to place their hopes
for retirement security in Bush's steady hands?
Seriously, folks, confidence in Bush's Social Security scheme to
divert Social Security contributions into Wall Street fees wasn't
high to begin with.
And it wasn't enhanced by the revelation that his
administration's cost estimates on its prescription
drug benefit for Medicare were off by a mere third of a trillion
dollars (i.e., $400 billion vs. $724
billion).
Bush actually let the screeching, clawing cat out of
the bag last week when he revealed that the famous Social Security
"trust fund" he had always pledged not to touch has long since been
looted by his massive tax cuts to the rich.
"Some in our country think that Social Security is a
trust fund - in other words, there's a pile of money
being accumulated," Bush said. "That's just simply not true. The
money - payroll taxes going into the Social Security are spent.
They're spent on benefits, and they're spent on government programs.
There is no trust. We're on the ultimate pay-as-you-go system -what
goes in comes out.
And so, starting in 2018, what's going in - what's coming out is
greater than what's going in."
By the way, just a reminder that I was writing about
the fictional Social Security "trust fund" years ago,
even while Bush and Gore were peddling their nonsense about "Social
Security trust fund lock boxes."
"I was absolutely shocked at what Bush said about the Social
Security trust fund," economist Allen Smith remarked. "President
Bush has finally acknowledged what I have been saying throughout his
entire presidency. The $1.6 trillion of Social Security surplus
money that is supposed to be in the trust fund waiting for the
retirement of the baby boomers has all been spent on other
government programs and replaced with worthless non-marketable
government IOUs."
Smith, the author of 'The Looting of Social Security: How The
Government Is Draining America's Retirement Account,' said he has
been waging an uphill battle to alert the public to the fact that
Bush and his predecessors have been spending Social Security money
as if it were general fund revenue, in violation of federal law.
Smith also accuses Bush of continuing to illegally
spend approximately $400 million of Social Security
money each day.
Newsweek's Allan Sloan noted that switching to private investment
accounts would require massive borrowing by the federal government,
adding to the already gigantic deficits.
"Under the current system, your Social Security taxes go to pay Ma
and Pa and Grandma and Grandpa," Sloan wrote. "If your money is
going into a private account instead, how will Uncle Sam pay Ma and
Pa? The same way Bush has paid for everything, be it tax cuts, wars
or his Medicare prescription-drug benefit: borrowing."
And that would mean borrowing some $4.5 trillion over the first 20
years of Social Security privatization - from a bank that Bush has
pushed near the breaking
point already.
"My father lost a major part of his investments in
mutual funds in the 1970s, and watched his investments in mutual
funds in the 1990s dwindle before he was forced to jump that sinking
ship again," wrote Judy Brown in the New York Times.
"One set of grandparents also lost their investments
in the stock market crash of 1929, and my other
grandfather lost a thriving business to the
Depression. Each time there was a stock market
'adjustment,' these small investors lost security for
their senior years, but Social Security neither
dwindled nor disappeared.
"Now I face my retirement years, with President Bush willing to
gamble that part of my security away despite the history of regular
downturns in the stock market," Brown said.
Bush, the most fiscally irresponsible president in
modern American history, actually dared to propose a budget that
doesn't include the cost of his Iraq
invasion or his Social Security boondoggle.
That's right. Although it gives more funds to the
Pentagon, Bush's budget contains no money to pay for military
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which average about $5 billion a
month. The White House says that's because the war costs can't be
known ahead of time.
That makes sense. I don't know what my heating bill will be for
February, so the best thing for me to do would be to assume it will
cost nothing and not budget for it,
Maybe we'll all wake up tomorrow and suddenly find that the cost of
the Iraq invasion is nothing. Maybe magical elves will have taken
over all U.S.
responsibilities there. That's so likely, it seems,
that zero is in fact the figure Bush counts for war
expenses.
In his budget, Bush disingenuously proposed cuts he knows Congress
will certainly reject.
Bush proposed slashing farm subsidies, for example, a mere two and a
half years after he signed a 10-year, $190 billion farm bill
designed to expand those very benefits.
"This bill is generous and will provide a safety net for farmers,"
Bush said as he inked the document in April 2002.
"It's true that by some standards this is the
tightest budget that Bush has submitted. But that's
not much of a standard," said David Boaz of the
libertarian Cato Foundation. "They spend like drunken sailors for
four years, and then say, 'We're only going to spend a little more
this year'."
The Fox-fed lie that Bush is "tightening the budget
belt" is ludicrous. Look at the facts. In fiscal year
2003, the deficit was a record $378 billion. Last year
it hit $412 billion. This year it will soar to at
least $427 billion. Add that to the national debt
which, as of Friday afternoon, stood at
$7,629,334,023,890.
"So in three years' time under President Bush and a
Republican Congress, we've added $1.4 trillion to our nation's debt,
largely because government revenues were reduced through tax cuts
benefiting the rich," noted Jay Bookman in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution.
And remember, that's not even counting the costs of
the Iraq invasion and the Social Insecurity
privatization scheme.
By the way, don't fall for any of that nonsense about
Bush's "private account" money being passed on to
heirs. According to the New York Times, most
lower-income workers would be required to purchase government
lifetime annuities which provide a guaranteed monthly payment for
life, but expire at death. Money in those annuities cannot be passed
on to children.
"For all its talk of deficit reduction, President
Bush's 2006 budget is a map of reckless economic
policies and shows how they have backed the United States into a
precarious position in the global financial markets," the New York
Times noted in an editorial Monday.
"It's not hard to see what brought the United States
to this juncture. Mr. Bush's first-term tax cuts were
too expensive and too skewed toward top earners to work as
effective, self-correcting economic stimulus.
Instead, predictably, they've driven the nation deep
into the red. Having reduced tax revenue to a share of the economy
not seen since 1959, the cuts are a huge factor in the swing from a
budget surplus to a $412 billion deficit."
Obviously, Bush
likes his ink just as red as his
states.