Text 8594, 96 rader
Skriven 2005-02-03 16:42:50 av Alan Hess
Ärende: Bush wants to end SS?
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So says this columnist:

     
washingtonpost.com
Assault on Social Security

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, February 2, 2005; Page A23

Tonight the president of the United States will come before Congress and call
for the repeal of the New Deal.

Not frontally, of course. Indeed, George W. Bush has taken to invoking Franklin
D. Roosevelt as a fellow experimenter-in-arms. That's true as far as it goes,
but the goal of Bush's experiment is to negate Roosevelt's.

The roots of Bush's speech tonight go back almost as far as the New Deal
itself. Social Security was enacted in 1935, and in 1936 Republican
presidential nominee Alf Landon questioned its solvency.

Since Landon (who carried two states against Roosevelt's 46), right-wing
attacks on Social Security have proceeded along two lines: those that doubted
its solvency and those that disparaged its ideology.

Bush tonight will probably not delve into matters ideological. The polls may
show that the percentage of self-identified conservatives exceeds that of
self-identified liberals by two-to-one, but that doesn't mean those
conservatives are economic libertarians. (Indeed, many are conservatives out of
their quarrel with cultural libertarians.) Besides, at any given moment the
number of Americans who are pragmatists dwarfs that of any political tendency.
The only way the American people are going to turn against a massive program
that clearly works is if they can be convinced that at some point it won't.

And so we will hear tonight that Social Security may be doing fine today, but
it will be a toothless geezer of a program by the time today's young people hit
65. There will be so many retirees living so long that only by redirecting
young people's money out of the program and into the market will we preserve
the solvency of the old.

All this is nonsense, of course. According to the system's actuaries, if we do
nothing at all, the system will remain in the black, paying out full benefits,
straight through 2042. Beyond then, its liabilities will amount to just a
fraction of 1 percent of the national income. The program, like all programs,
could use some modest fixes over time, and by such measures as raising revenue
through a hike on the employer's payroll tax (by eliminating the cap on taxable
employee income), it can be fixed.

But Bush is not seeking to strengthen a strong system; he's seeking to
dismantle it. The private (or "personal," in poll-tested Bushese) accounts
we'll hear so much about tonight provide the pretext for slashing benefits to
future retirees by as much as 40 percent. As with that village in Vietnam, it's
become necessary to destroy Social Security in order to save it.

And the plans to privatize Social Security, it's important to note, have been
devised by people who are ideologically committed to its destruction. When
Milton Friedman was calling for privatization a half-century ago, it wasn't
because he feared the system would run out of money when the boomers retired.
(The boomers were at that point just midway through being born.) It was because
he was a committed advocate of laissez-faire capitalism.

Similarly, the advocates for privatizing Social Security have for the past
quarter-century been housed at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute
-- the nation's leading institutions of economic libertarianism. But since 1983
-- when a commission appointed to augment Social Security's solvency declined
to consider privatization, though it was appointed in part by Ronald Reagan and
headed by Ayn Rand-acolyte Alan Greenspan -- they have understood that the only
way to realize their libertarian hearts' desire was to convince the American
people that the system was teetering on bankruptcy.

To that end, Heritage Foundation analysts Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis
authored a what-do-we-do-now article in the Cato Journal in 1983. The piece,
"Achieving a Leninist Strategy," called for mobilizing support among financial
institutions that would profit from privatization. As well, "an economic
education campaign," they wrote, "must be undertaken to demonstrate the
weaknesses of the current system." (All praise to Los Angeles Times reporter
Janet Hook, who recently uncovered this article.) The critical point here is
that all these doomsday predictions come from the people who yearn to be the
system's executioners. I do not know of a single economist who's not already a
committed opponent of the government's involvement in the nation's social
welfare who adheres to such a dire scenario for Social Security's future or who
recommends so deadly a prescription. Economists have been known to switch sides
on public policy questions when the numbers compel them to -- Paul Samuelson's
recent declaration of skepticism as to the merits of free trade is a classic
case in point. But I can't find one who's come around to Bush's position on
Social Security simply because the actuarial tables compelled a conversion.

Tonight, we'll hear that a great system is in trouble. It is, but only because
the people who run the government wish it ill.

meyersonh@washpost.com

+ 2005 The Washington Post Company

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