Insecurity over Social Security

Social Security is indisputably one of the most successful government programs of all time. It 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, providing some 64 percent of their income. It has lifted generations of seniors out of poverty. That is fact, and must be always present when considering the push to dismantle Social Security.

Social Security is, simply, not in crisis. There isn't even a problem that small -- and more importantly safe -- changes won't solve. The myth of crisis is a calculated lie perpetrated in order to create an urgency for radical change. Using conservative estimates, from the Congressional Budget Office, the long-term challenges in Social Security do not manifest themselves until 2053. Even then Social Security has 80 percent of needed funds. That shortfall is smaller than the amount needed in 1983, the last time we tampered with Social Security.

Social Security is and was conceived to be an insurance fail-safe for the aged and others, and as a complement to individuals' personal savings. It was never meant to be a retirement system. In their effort to dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal, President Bush and his extremist allies are trying to convince the American people that the Social Security system is obsolete and "in crisis." It was then and still is an insurance program, plain and simple.

President Bush has already vowed that raising taxes is the one option off the table. That's a shame because merely repealing his tax cuts on those making $500,000 a year or more would solve the long-term problems.

Nothing is guaranteed if we proceed to phase out the current Social Security system and replace it with privatized accounts. One sure thing is that Social Security benefits will have to be cut. Social Security privatization requires diverting taxes used to pay current benefits into privatized accounts invested in volatile stocks. So 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 monies 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 an independently wealthy, Texas oilman or a Washington special interest lobbyist but it is incredibly unfair to blue-collar Americans. It would be particularly unfair to people with tough, physical jobs like those working at Northrop Grumman, in the shrimping industry, or in the construction industry, whom have shorter life expectancies due to the nature of their work and its wear and tear on their bodies. It also shortchanges minorities whom have shorter-than-average life expectancy.

A sane person wouldn't take their retirement money down to The Grand Casino poker room and try their luck. Unfortunately. many privatization schemes would have us do just that. Like in a casino, the brokers or dealers take their cut. Like at a poker table, you may do well if you have superior skill, but if you place your bets wrong for any number of reasons, you may be left out in the cold. We, as Americans, have too much compassion to allow someone who played their hand badly to suffer; so we would bail out these people using the public treasury. We have then come full circle paying more in the end for a program that would have cost less had we left it alone.

As you can clearly see the only people to benefit from privatization are those nice millionaires on 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 at the expense of benefits.

As we watch this theater of the absurd, the financial services industry and its considerably wealthy allies are gearing up to spend at least S100 million on a national media campaign to convince us wage-earning Americans that Social Security is unstable. They can only be acting out of their own self interest.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank founded in the late 1970s, has been arguing for 25 years that Social Security is on the verge of crisis. (It has been financed by the same people and groups soon to wage the media campaign).

Since 1997, the projection for when the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted has been pushed back 13 years, and each year it is pushed back further.

George Bush, himself, projected in 1978, when he was running for Congress, that the trust fund would be broke by 1988. His math was quite a bit off, as it is now.

One Democrat President Bush is fond of is the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who advocated private accounts in addition to Social Security. A quote by Sen. Moynihan seems quite fitting in this mangled debate:

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."

John W. Leek is a student at Ocean Springs High School. He can be reached at mseditor@themississippipress.com.