Sooner or later, we’ll all be eligible for Social Security. I’m lucky, because even though I’m retired and my Social Security check is pretty low, I also have a pension. But there are plenty of Americans out there who, when they retire, will not be able to survive without their meager Social Security checks. These are the same people who would not make enough money during their lifetimes to earmark part of their paychecks each week to go into “private” retirement accounts. Bush’s “crisis” is all hype and propaganda, another way for him to help the already financially comfortable and screw the rest of us.
George Bush and Republican leaders have made phasing out Social Security through privatization and massive benefit cuts their top priority for 2005. Members of Congress are choosing sides over the next couple of weeks.
We need to make sure they choose correctly now—before a massive election-style campaign by George Bush and the Wall Street interests gets to them including what might be a $100 million TV ad campaign.
MoveOn.Org is trying to gather 200,000 signatures to present to lawmakers when they return after the inauguration. Go here to sign the petition:
Social Security is a complicated issue, but the basics are really pretty simple:
° Social Security provides monthly benefits to some 44 million Americans who are retired, disabled or the survivor of a deceased parent. It provides most of the income for older Americans–some 64 percent of their support. It has lifted generations of seniors out of poverty.
° Social Security is not in crisis. That is an outright lie perpetrated in order to create the urgency for radical changes. Under conservative forecasts, the long-term challenges in Social Security do not manifest themselves until 2042. Even then Social Security has 70 percent of needed funds. That shortfall is smaller than the amount needed in 1983, the last time we overhauled Social Security. George Bush’s Social Security crisis-talk is an effort to create a specter of doom — just like the weapons of mass destruction claim in Iraq.
° Phasing out Social Security and replacing it with privatized accounts means one thing: massive cuts in monthly benefits for everybody. Social Security privatization requires diverting taxes used to pay current benefits into privatized accounts invested in risky stocks. Without that money Social Security benefits will inevitably be cut — some proposals even cut benefits of current retirees. These benefit cuts are inevitable, since diverting Social Security money into privatized accounts means less money to pay current and future benefits.
° Every serious privatization proposal raises the Social Security retirement age to 70. That might be fine if you’re a Washington special interest lobbyist but it is incredibly unfair to blue-collar Americans with tough, physical jobs, or for African Americans and Latinos with lower life expectancies.
° Privatization means gambling with your retirement security. There is probably an appropriate place for a little stock market risk in retirement planning — but it isn’t Social Security. Privatization exposes your entire retirement portfolio to stock market risks — and the risk that you’ll outlive any of your savings at retirement. You can’t outlive your Social Security benefit.
° So who does benefit? Wall Street. Giant financial services firms have been salivating for decades over the prospect of taking over Social Security. Wall Street would make billions of dollars in profit by managing the privatized accounts — money that would come directly from your benefits.
° Action is urgently needed today. President Bush and Republican leaders in Congress are joining forces with the financial services industry for a major campaign to convince the public there is a major crisis and pressure members of Congress to vote for privatization. Action is needed now before it is too late.
Please sign MoveOn’s petition to protect Social Security.
To repeat what I posted here that I got from an Op Ed piece in the NY Times:
The administration expects us to believe that drastic change is needed, and needed right away, because of the looming cost of paying for the baby boomers’ retirement.
The administration expects us not to notice, however, that the supposed solution would do nothing to reduce that cost. Even with the most favorable assumptions, the benefits of privatization wouldn’t kick in until most of the baby boomers were long gone. For the next 45 years, privatization would cost much more money than it saved.
Advocates of privatization almost always pretend that all we have to do is borrow a bit of money up front, and then the system will become self-sustaining. The Wehner memo talks of borrowing $1 trillion to $2 trillion “to cover transition costs.” Similar numbers have been widely reported in the news media.
But that’s just the borrowing over the next decade. Privatization would cost an additional $3 trillion in its second decade, $5 trillion in the decade after that and another $5 trillion in the decade after that. By the time privatization started to save money, if it ever did, the federal government would have run up around $15 trillion in extra debt.
Don’t let Bush succeed in overwhelming us, yet again, with his drivel and dung.