SOCIAL SECURITY: Inventing a Crisis

From the New York Times courtesy of WorkingForChange, Princeton economist and good guy columnist Paul Krugman on the web of lies concocted by the right-wing class warriors who want to privatize Social Security:

Given these numbers, it's not at all hard to come up with fiscal packages that would secure the retirement program, with no major changes, for generations to come.

It's true that the federal government as a whole faces a very large financial shortfall. That shortfall, however, has much more to do with tax cuts - cuts that Mr. Bush nonetheless insists on making permanent - than it does with Social Security.

But since the politics of privatization depend on convincing the public that there is a Social Security crisis, the privatizers have done their best to invent one.

My favorite example of their three-card-monte logic goes like this: first, they insist that the Social Security system's current surplus and the trust fund it has been accumulating with that surplus are meaningless. Social Security, they say, isn't really an independent entity - it's just part of the federal government.

If the trust fund is meaningless, by the way, that Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980's was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice.

But never mind: the same people who claim that Social Security isn't an independent entity when it runs surpluses also insist that late next decade, when the benefit payments start to exceed the payroll tax receipts, this will represent a crisis - you see, Social Security has its own dedicated financing, and therefore must stand on its own.

Click here for the rest.

I haven't really posted much about the whole Social Security debate because I don't really know much about it. But I'm learning, and one thing is becoming clear: it's pretty easy to confuse people, myself included, who don't know much about an issue. I've kind of bought into the whole crisis meme for some years now simply because it seems like everyone says that Social Security can't last, that the baby-boomers will break the system. According to Krugman, both in the above linked essay and in his book The Great Unraveling, Social Security is in pretty good shape. The real force behind this drive to "reform" this geat legacy of the New Deal are the bankers, brokers, and financiers of Wall Street; you know, the guys who Bush calls "his base." They're absolutely salivating at the thought of billions of dollars very quickly coming under their control. This is the same old story. Steal from the poor; give to the rich.

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