Just as he invented the Iraq imminent danger crisis, George Bush has invented the Social Security financing crisis, this time to destroy by privatizing the program that one of Bush’s most vocal supporters, Ann Coulter, says benefits “greedy geezers.”
A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office says the Social Security trust fund is funded to 2052, and even then the system won’t be “bankrupt,” since money coming in from payroll taxes will cover 81 percent of promised benefits.
Economist Paul Krugman says that to extend the trust fund into the 22nd century with 100 percent benefits would cost less than we are spending in Iraq, or one-fourth of the revenue lost each year in the Bush tax cuts (a fraction of the cuts that go to people making more than $500,000 a year). “Given these numbers,” Krugman writes, “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.”
So why the manufactured crisis? Krugman points out what is obvious to anyone who has tracked votes by the majority of Republicans on Social Security over the years: The Republicans who want privatization “come to bury Social Security, not to save it … For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people’s lives better and more secure.”
“And that,” he says, “is why the right wants to destroy it.”
Ann Adams
Oak Harbor
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