Social Security brings out Americans' smarts.
I admit that America looked to be at an intellectual nadir when they voted ol' George back in office. For a time, I had lost faith that this country had enough sense to sustain a democracy. But there is a glimmer of hope, and it's coming from Social Security.
According to USAToday's assessment of recent polls, Americans are rejecting Bush's plan to loot the system and drain millions into buckets on Wall Street. They don't want privitization and--by a wide margin--they'd rather see taxes raised than benefits lost. That's about the worst news the GOP could ever hear on this subject.
It shows that Americans understand the word "security." Security doesn't mean gambling with the stock market. It means a guarantee that it will be there. And even if all we have right now are I.0.U.s, they're still official promises from our government. The only reason for those promises to not be kept will be the direct decisions by future politicians. And nobody wants to be the guy who reneged on THAT promise.
Maybe America knows what I've been saying all along, and that few pundits will say: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH SOCIAL SECURITY. That's right, I said it. Somebody had to say it. There is no need to "fix" it because it ain't broke.
The problem we will face in the 2040s is an anomaly, a glitch, a unique (but unfortunate) circumstance of a bubble in the population's age demographics. There will be a span of time where we have way too many people drawing Social Security compared to the people paying it in. But as gruesome as it sounds, those people won't live forever. They will eventually die off and the worker-to-retiree ratio will return to normal.
The Republicans are being dishonest by saying SS is a broken system that needs overhauled. It's a scheme they've concocted to undo the biggest, most successful social program in human history. (And we all know how much the GOP hates the gov't helping anybody but the rich.) If they can undo SS, they can erase the whole New Deal and destroy political liberalism.
The proper view of SS right now is that we have a storm we need to weather. It'll take some effort, and not a little bit of money. But we need to think not just of ourselves but of the future generations that SS will help. Given the current trending of workers' benefits (smaller every day) granted by businesses, we cannot put ourselves or our children in the position of relying on corporate America for our old age.
If there's one institution that workers would be foolish to trust, it's the corporations. The corporations have never operated with the worker in mind, and they never will. I have personally seen people's retirement benefits cut in half just because of the company's whim. There's no security in company-provided retirement. Just ask the good workers at Enron...
America is being very smart by not buying into Bush's scheme. And it's about time they told him "no."
posted by Daniel Preece @ 9:57 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
You like IOU's huh?
Say you're planning to send your kid to college. You have ten years and think you need $100,000. In Scenario A, each year you put an IOU for $10,000 in a jar. At the end of ten years, you pour out the jar, swear a bit more than is proper, and then scramble to come up with $100,000, either through borrowing, selling assets, earning more, or spending less. In Scenario B, you skip the jar and IOU charade and advance to the final step: you swear and scramble. The IOU charade was irrelevant.
You're not making any sense. Who pays in social security thinking they'll use it for their kids' tuition?
Today's workers pay in money. That money pays for today's awardees. The "IOU" in this scenario is that the government is promising that the same deal will exist once YOU get old. (There used to be a better funding system SS, before Reagan needed the money to fund his tax breaks for the wealthy.)
In that sense, ALL gov't expenditures are IOUs. Next year's school budge? An IOU. Next year's road maintenance? An IOU. Everybody expects that money to be there for their community, even though none of it is resting in a bank account anywhere.
Heck, even your bank account is an IOU. You don't think the bank just sits on all those deposits, do you? No, they invest it somewhere else. That's why the FDIC exists: as a guarantee that the bank honors all those IOUs in their vaults.
If you don't like IOUs, then you pretty much don't like the American economy.
And the only charade about Social Security "IOUs" is Bush's baloney explanations.
No the tuition example a simile. The real point is that IOU's are worthless especially when you let money grubbing elected officials put their finger in the pie.
Perhaps you can understand these two quotes.
"I will keep it in a lockbox. The interest savings, I would put right back into it. That extends the life for 55 years." "I give a new incentive for younger workers to invest their own money. My plan is “Social Security Plus.” -Al Gore
What Al Gore wanted younger workers to invest their own money? No wonder he was laughed right out of the Democratic party for that crazy idea. Lock up the money so that purveyors of pork can't get their fingers in it. Blasphmey.
The worth of an IOU is directly related to the risk in not honoring them. If the public continues its demand the IOUs be honored, then there is no chance they won't be.
And your argument about Al Gore glosses over the fact that it was Republicans, not Democrats, who voted against the Lockbox idea. (And last I checked, Gore was still a Democrat.)
I don't know the details of Gore's plan, but I've heard details of Bush's plan (from the CATO Institute). If Gore's details were similar to Bush's, then I'm glad it isn't happening.
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