The Government Plan To Destroy Social Security

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
January 19, 2005

Divide-and-Conquer
Bush's Strategy to Privatize Social Security
By DAVE LINDORFF

President Bush, in his second inauguration speech Thursday, will lay out what he is calling a "reform" of the system, designed to "rescue it" from "bankruptcy." This man .... will soothingly describe his "reform" as leaving retirees and those nearing retirement with the same system they are used to, while giving young workers the chance to "own" some of their retirement tax contributions.

Don't believe a word of it. This isn't reform. It is a classic divide-and-conquer scheme by the Right designed to destroy Social Security while it still has a chance to do it. If Bush can convince a Congress dominated by Republicans and their timid "moderate" Democrat allies to approve his devious scheme, those under 50, or perhaps 55, will be given the option of taking some $1-2000 of their Social Security tax each year and placing it in an investment account. That money, Bush and his backers claim, would grow faster than the money in the Social Security Trust Fund. Of course, there's no promise of this happening. Nor does he talk about the fact that these private investment funds, like 401K funds, will be handled by Wall Street brokerage houses, which will be charging huge fees to churn those investments.

Meanwhile, the older folks, who remain in the current system, will find that their benefit payments, which for decades have been funded by current workers' contributions, are under mounting pressure to be cut. Why? Because all those hundreds of billions of dollars that younger workers take out of the tax stream to invest in their private accounts, which would have been supporting current and future retirees, will have been removed, leaving the trust fund as much as two trillion dollars in the hole by 2020.

At that point, Congress will have a much easier time cutting benefits to seniors because it will only be a portion of the elderly who will be seeing their monthly checks reduced, not everyone. Those who are in the private plan--which over the years will no doubt have been expanded to allow even larger shares of the Social Security tax to be diverted--will not be impacted.

Later, when those with the private plans start to retire, and discover that their "ownership society" nest eggs are not going to hatch, it will be their turn to suffer. There will be no mass support for their crisis, since older retirees, who normally could be expected to rally to support the retirement system in a crisis, will not be affected by the private funds shortfall.

It's all part of a massive, wide-front assault on workers, who are also seeing their pensions terminated by artificial bankruptcies, such as those now being filed by the airlines. If Americans don't wake up soon, we'll be right back to 1930, when reaching retirement for most people meant sinking into a life of Dickensian poverty and despair, or going hat-in-hand to already financially strapped children for help.

Please go to this link the read the entire article:

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff01192005.html

[oneighty]

1. And by that time

Bush and his generation will be dead or dying. Hopefully more practical people will control our country and things will be corrected so that no old person will have to die destitute.

Maybe. It is too late for me. Tomorrow belongs to the young people. Choose wisely young people.

180

[jdj]

2. it's a projected trillion dollor give-away to stockbrokers.

so every policy he puts forward is a give-away to some lobby group.

The energy-bill? billion to energy companies

The medicare-bill? billions to insurance companies, the biggest, United Health Care, is the corp. that handles the AARP's policies, surprise, surprise.

and so on.

Why doesn't some one run an ad that says something like "Who are you giving our money to this time, Mr. Pretzeldent"?

edit: I have no plans to retire. I'm gen X and dropped out of college in the 80's and am now back in school, so God willing, I will work til I die. I'm working on my tight-wadding now, so I hope to have it down by then. If I get real sick I think I'll just find homes for my animals and then go out in the woods and die. As long as my animals are taken care of, I don't care.