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The Truth about the Trust Fund-- Destroying Social Security to Destroy the Two Party System
By Thom Hartmann (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)
President Bush on Tuesday used a four-drawer filing cabinet stuffed with paper representing government IOUs the president said symbolized the Social Security Trust Fund's bleak outlook for meeting Americans' future retirement needs. . . .
Later, Senator Rick Santorum made an odd admission for a Republican con: "You can't pay benefits with IOUs," he said on the Senate floor. "You have to pay it with cash."
"A lot of people in America think there is a trust-- that we take your money in payroll taxes and then we hold it for you and then when you retire, we give it back to you," Bush said in a speech at the University of West Virginia at Parkersburg.
"But that's not the way it works," Bush said. "There is no trust 'fund'-- just IOUs that I saw firsthand. . . .
"[Susan] Chapman [of the Office of Public Debt] opened the second drawer and pulled out a white notebook filled with pseudo Treasury securities-- pieces of paper that offer physical evidence of $1.7 trillion in Treasury bonds that make up the trust fund."
And where will that cash-- now nearly $2 trillion-- come from over the next decades as Boomers begin to retire?
A Con-made Crisis
Technically (and legally) it's simple: the Social Security Trust Fund will give back its IOUs to the Treasury Department and in exchange for them get cash to pay the Boomers' retirement checks. Practically, though, it'll be a crisis of biblical proportions. For the Treasury to come up with that kind of cash will require either massive tax increases or increased massive borrowing-- at a time when we're already borrowing so heavily that China is propping up our economy with weekly loans.
Thus, Bush talks about a "crisis" in Social Security with some accuracy. But he doesn't dare tell us what the real "crisis" is-- or how Reagan and Greenspan set it up-- because when it becomes widely known that Reagan set the course to steal the Boomers' Social Security savings, it will destroy the reputation of both supply-side economics and the Republican Party for generations to come.
If the cons have their way, however, no one will ever know that they destroyed Social Security. That's because the cons-- who have largely taken over the Republican Party-- have figured out a way to convince young Americans to gut Social Security before the financial crisis begins.
Progressives make the mistake of thinking that today's Social Security debate is about Social Security. It's not. It's about creating single-party rule for a generation or more. To do that Republican cons believe that they need only to grab the hearts and minds of the generation currently under thirty-- and they can do that, win or lose, by properly framing the Social Security debate.
According to exit poll data from the Associated Press, under-thirty voters were up more than 9 percent in voter participation in 2004, bringing 4.6 million new young people to the polls just since 2000.
And, as Martha Irvine of the Associated Press noted in an article in USA Today the week after the 2004 election, "This time, young voters were the only group that favored Democrat Kerry. The AP's exit polls found that under-30s favored Kerry over Bush, 55% to 44%."
This was not lost on the Republicans. As Irvine noted in her article, even safe-seat Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa designed an entire ad campaign "targeting young people."
And many among this young demographic-- the first generation in more than 200 years raised in schools largely unable to teach civics and American history both because of budget cuts and fear of claims of "liberal bias" from conservative fanatics-- are politically naive and ripe for the picking.
Those under thirty don't remember-- or, largely, don't even know-- that the leading causes of death among the elderly, the widowed, and the disabled after the stock market crash of 1929 included starvation and hypothermia. Before Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted Social Security in 1935, the majority of America's elderly lived in poverty. Today it's 11.9 percent, but take away Social Security and today's elderly poverty rate would be 47.6 percent.
These are statistics that the Republican cons and their corporate media will not be sharing with people under thirty.
Thus, as David King of Harvard's Institute of Politics told the AP's Irvine of the young vote: "I think that young people are there for the taking."
Joseph Stalin's year for the final consolidation of single-party rule in Russia was 1927, and that rule lasted more than fifty years. American cons are planning for a similar fifty-year horizon and intend to use "age warfare" as a tool to bring young people along.
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