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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (53985)	10/21/2004 12:12:07 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Privatizing Social Security won't save it Marie Cocco October 21, 2004 Sen. John Kerry has to stop repeating the false charge that President George W. Bush has a secret plan to privatize Social Security. There's no secret plan, silly! Bush's intent to turn today's guaranteed benefit into tomorrow's uncertain mutual fund balance has been central to his agenda since the 2000 campaign. It remains so now, as the president has said many times. So why are Republicans all freaked out because Kerry's talking about it? Because what was a bad idea back then looks worse now. For one thing, the economic trends that made Social Security privatization seem reasonable to some of them four years ago have reversed. The switch happened on the president's watch, the result of his fiscal policies. For another, the president appointed a commission to study privatization of Social Security. So now he can't find political protection behind the fuzzy math of a campaign promise. The commission's own findings are plain: There's no way to have younger workers put some of their payroll tax money into personal accounts without cutting future benefits drastically, racking up trillions in more government debt - or, as Bush's commission suggested, both. Let's roll back the clock. Americans in the 1990s were stock-market junkies, hooked on double-digit returns and mesmerized by market gurus who told us the sky would never fall. But is your fund balance better off now than it was four years ago? The middle-class intoxication with stocks as a presumed route to investor-class riches was only one reason people weren't so spooked by the privatization notion. Another was - forgive me for bringing this up - the "lockbox." That was the political device that was supposed to secure some $4.6 trillion in projected federal budget surpluses to "save" Social Security for the future. Supporters of the current system wanted to use the money to shore it up. Supporters of privatization wanted the surplus to finance the switch to private accounts, using the surplus to pay current retirees while younger workers pulled their money out and put it into private accounts. Somebody has to keep paying the old folks, you know. Al Gore promised to safeguard the lockbox. So did candidate Bush, sort of. But Bush had a competing claim on the very same money: his big tax cuts. As president, he went for the tax cuts and looted the lockbox. This has helped transform the projected 10-year surplus into a projected 10-year deficit of about $2.3 trillion. Yet Bush sticks with his pledge to supposedly save Social Security through privatization, even though he's already spent the presumed money for it. That's only half the trouble. Bush's own commission laid some other facts out in December 2001. Its three plans for adding private accounts would involve massive new federal borrowing - about $2 trillion - as well as benefit cuts for the elderly and even the disabled. The Bush commission confirms Kerry's political argument. And the commission made an even more astonishing admission: Introducing private accounts to Social Security doesn't "save" it from future fiscal straits at all. "Social Security's fiscal problem exists independently of the debate over whether personal accounts should be part of a reformed system," the panel said. Translation: The whole rationale for tampering with Social Security is phony. Privatization has been sold, by the president himself, as the magic potion to save the system for future retirees. But his own commission says privatization doesn't do the job - that the program's fiscal problem "exists independently" of such a scheme and still would need to be fixed. So here is the president's proposed trade-off: We are to give up the security of lifetime guaranteed benefits for the insecurity of private savings accounts, with reduced benefits. In exchange, we don't get a retirement system that is "fixed," we get one that's still broken. It's a lose-lose proposition. This is why Bush wants voters to think Kerry is just scaring them. Because if they actually looked at the president's plans, they'd be positively petrified. Marie Cocco is a nationally syndicated columnist and member of Newsday's editorial board. Her e-mail address is cocco@newsday.com. Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.