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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
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To: greenspirit who wrote (129772)2/28/2001 9:48:43 PM
From: Nadine Carroll  Read Replies (2) of 769667
 
Bush and his team are doing EXACTLY what they said they were going to do if elected.

Yes, you're right. He is doing what he promised. Since I thought his ideas were idiotic when I first heard them, and I've heard nothing since to change my mind, I find Bush's honesty depressing.

The first thing you have to realize about this surplus that he's talking about is that it is not actually the Federal Government's surplus. It is the Social Security trust fund surplus, which the Treasury takes and replaces with IOUs. Check the numbers! The national debt has not been declining in recent years, as it would be if we had been running an actual surplus.

So when I hear Bush talking about structural reform of Social Security, I hear a plan to take Social Security's surplus and give it away in tax cuts.

If he then privatizes part of Social Security, every payroll tax dollar that goes into privatized accounts must be replaced at once from somewhere else, or Grandma will not get her check. This talk about an "average 2% return from Social Security" is a statistical fiction. We don't have any Social Security investments; the system is pay-as-you-go. And where will the money come from in seven years when the Baby Boomers start to retire?

Payroll taxes are already 15%, and outweigh Federal taxes for lower income workers. Does Bush intend to raise them still higher, after giving big tax cuts tilted towards the wealthy?

All this assumes that the rosy predictions on which he's basing his projection hold up. If we get an economic downturn, it's Katie bar the door.
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