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WORD COUNT
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MARCH 16, 2005
BUSH ON SOCIAL
SECURITY: NO HONESTY, PLEASE – by Donald Kaul
President Bush’s
efforts to sell his peculiar “privatization” remedy for the Social
Security ‘crisis’ haven’t been going well. Recent polls show that Mr.
Bush gets his lowest marks on his handling of that issue.
But, like any good
snake oil salesman, he presses on. He’s been crisscrossing the country
telling people that Social Security is sick and that only privatization
will make it well.
His sales pitch has
been characteristically Bushian---dismissive of evidence and encased in
syntax that is virtually impenetrable to logic. Here’s what he said the
other day:
“I’ve been reading
the newspapers and been seeing some folks saying ‘There’s not a problem,
he’s just exaggerating.’
Well, I’m going to
keep telling people we’ve got a problem until it sinks in, because we’ve
got one. You can’t dodge whether we have a problem or not. Because, see,
the next follow-on question to that is, if you’ve got a problem, what do
you Republicans and Democrats and a few independents intend to do about
it up there?’”
He also said that,
under his proposed privatization fix, income from personal accounts,
goes to supplement the Social Security check that you’re going to get
from the federal government. “See, personal accounts is an add-on to
that which the government is going to pay you. It doesn’t replace the
Social Security system.”
That either means he
doesn’t understand the plan he’s proposed (always a possibility) or that
he is outright lying (more likely). You can’t pay full Social Security
benefits and have part of the payroll tax going into personal accounts
at the same time. There’s just not enough money to go around. The term
“add-on” is generally used to mean a payment into a private account
above and beyond what now goes into the retirement system. That’s not
what Bush is proposing.
It’s always dangerous
to assume that President Bush is as dumb as he sounds. He gets what he
wants too often to be written off as a dunce. It’s far more likely that
he’s deliberately trying to confuse and frighten people about Social
Security so that they’ll be stampeded into support for his cockamamie
privatization scheme.
And I wouldn’t bet
against him. He’s calling his shock troops into the battle. Business
groups are ratcheting up multi-million-dollar lobbying efforts and the
airwaves will soon be filled with stories of Social Security’s peril.
(Like they care.) And the people who gave you the Swift Boat veterans
(remember them?) are joining the fight. They have been hired by USA
Next, a big-money conservative lobbying group, to trash AARP as they did
John Kerry.
They’re trying to
brand the seniors lobbying group as a left-liberal, gay marriage-loving
cabal that is standing in the way of the brave president’s efforts to
save Social Security. You would think that absurd on the face of it, but
this bunch managed to convince a lot of voters that Kerry’s Vietnam
credentials (three purple hearts) weren’t as good as those of Bush, who
hid from the fray. Maybe they can convince people that AARP is a bunch
of hippies.
Personally, I doubt
that Mr. Bush will get his plan enacted this time around but he might
get a piece of it now, then push for more later. That’s the way the
Conservative movement works: patiently, relentlessly.
Conservatives have
been talking about getting rid of Social Security for the past 35 years,
ever since Barry Goldwater suggested it be made voluntary. He was
laughed out of the election in 1968 but here, 37 years later, we’ve got
a two-term president who’s pushing privatization---voluntary Social
Security by another name---and no one’s laughing.
This so-called
Conservative movement is not conservative, of course; it’s reactionary.
It looks longingly back on a time when retirement was the exclusive
province of the rich.
For the rest of us,
it was work ‘til you die and if you couldn’t, hope you died young.
That’s the golden sunset Captain Bush is steering us into now, or trying
to.
--
Donald Kaul recently
retired as Washington columnist for the “Des Moines Register.” He has
covered the foolishness in our nation’s capital for 29 years, winning a
number of modestly coveted awards along the way. Email:
donald.kaul2@verizon.net -- A photo of Donald Kaul is available
CLICK HERE
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