Excellent writeup of the current actual situation regarding Social Security. Bush is a shithead.
[Bushes current projections on the finances of SS are] using the Social Security Administration’s economic and demographic assumptions, which are habitually pessimistic. Using the assumptions of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the surplus runs out in 2052. And if one uses the economic growth assumptions that Bush’s own budget office uses when it calculates the effects of his own tax cuts, the surplus runs out in—er, maybe never.
The much-hyped “crisis” looks suspiciously like the Social Security equivalent of W.M.D.s. This time, though, we have better intelligence. “White House officials privately concede,” the Times reported last week, “that the centerpiece of Mr. Bush’s approach to Social Security—letting people invest some of their payroll taxes in private accounts—would do nothing in itself to eliminate the long-term gap.”
The really cynical explanation is that privatization is a nice, clean way to transfer gigantic sums to Wall Street brokerage houses.
The idea behind Social Security is not just that old folks should be entitled to comfort regardless of their personal merits. It is that none of us, of any age, should be obliged to live in a society where minimal dignity and the minimal decencies are denied to any of our fellow-citizens at the end of life.
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