2008 Woodie Awards
We’ve been wondering what Fix Our Future meant when it declared they’d be hosting more ’storms’ during August in support of privatization. Finally, we’ve got some clarity. According to its website, FOF trying to organize “storms” around the country in September and October.
Will progressive students organize to counter the crisis-mongering of the FOF crowd?
A week from today, Social Security turns 70. Will FOF host a genuine “storm” to mar- er, mark the occasion?
Trying to answer the truly big question surrounding this week’s YAF conference in DC, I was just poking around the Fix Our Future website and came across this message:
Two Storms on Capitol Hill in less than a month! Stay tuned. More events to come!
I’m assuming that the second “storm” was the roundtable discussion one of their organizers participated in on July 26th. It’s not clear, however, that this latter event can legitimately be considered a “storm” in the tradition of the now infamous events of June 27th. Sitting around listening to a bunch of adults yap about policy issues seems substantively different than a rally defined by a creatively absurd political stunt.
Was July 26th really a “storm”? Will the rain clouds hover over Capitol Hill before the end of August and cool this steamy city with a shower of privatization lies courtesy of FOF? Undoubtedly, these are the two most important political questions of the summer.
Yes, yours truly. And I talked to young Republicans at the rally as well. I said I was a journalist, which I am. They asked if I was a “friendly” journalist. And I said I was, because I think I am a nice person. And then they asked me if I supported “saving” Social Security. And I said I did, because I DO support “saving” Social Security . . . saving it from them, that is.
Republicans appear to be unwilling to give up their baby of Social Security privatization. Yet another proposal, much anticipated, was revealed on Wednesday. This time, the surplus Social Security currently runs will be subject to privitization so that workers can devote part of thier payroll taxes into their own personal account. This neglects the fact that the “surplus” is already being used to fund government spending, so that any diversion of it will require more borrowing, which means larger deficits. Plus,
By Congressman McCrery’s and Senator DeMint’s own admissions, the plan would do nothing to restore solvency to Social Security. Its purpose instead is to serve as a foot in the door for more extensive private accounts in the future.
This goes hand-in-hand with the fact Republicans want to eventually kill Social Security. Private accounts is a first step on that road to death, and like Hell (to paraphrase Buffett), it is easier to get into than to get out of once events start moving in that direction. Private accounts do nil for the fiscal picture, and thus should be nixed.
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has their usual cutting and insightful analysis on why the plan is bad:
1. Basic analysis demonstrates that by diverting substantial sums from the Social Security trust fund, the plan would worsen Social Security’s solvency problems both over the short run and over a longer horizon, unless substantial sums were shifted from the rest of the budget to Social Security.
2. The plan would substantially increase deficits and the national debt (i.e., the debt held by the public).
3. The proposal would reduce traditional Social Security benefits, potentially leaving workers worse off.
4. The proposal would require the hiring of thousands of new federal employees and increase government administrative costs.
The debates that have sprung forth over the future of Social Security, whether heard on the college campus or in the newspapers, have often centered on forecasted dates and buzzwords like 2017, “private accounts,” “crisis,” and 2041. But what may be the most important, and something certainly lost among the sea of figures and dates and calls for individualized private accounts, is the human side to the program (and not some “town hall” propaganda). That’s why it was comforting to see the NYT devote a large article to the ways and means Social Security affects everyday Americans.
Talking Points Memo points to a story that says senate Republicans are discussing a Social Security plan that may not have private accounts and will use other avenues (besides just benefit cuts in the Pozen plan) to maintain fiscal solvency like increases in the retirement age and a slowdown in the benefit rises for the rich. Josh Marshall:
To my reading, this sounds very much like the phase-out death rattle, the phase of a legislative struggle — grimly reminiscent for some of us of late 1994 — in which a doomed legislative initiative rapidly de-evolves into more and more pitiful and anemic forms of its original self before finally disappearing into thin air — perhaps with not a few of its champions going ‘poof’ along with it.
Let’s hope so, at least until we get a more fiscally responsible President in office, who is not for killing Social Security, to make some small adjustments and solve the deficits the program will face.
The best thing congressional Democratic leaders could to regarding Social Security would be to let a vote on privatization take place in the House and work their asses off ensuring its failure in the Senate. Obviously, the Republicans don’t want this to happen, but I think their bloodlust for privatization may cause a vote to happen. According to the Washington Post, Bill Thomas is trying to attatch the solvency issue onto the pension legislation they’re drafting, but I think it’s going to be coupled with tax reform. But these bills will deal with solvency, not private accounts. Odds are that a vote on privatization won’t occur, but I can just see the potential in ‘08 - “Congressman X voted to cut your Social Security benefits - do you want Congressman X in office again?” Priceless.
Yesterday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing on pension shortfalls was a typical example of the deference that American politicians have towards corporations. Here we have the CEOs of three major airlines, all of whom have shortchanged their pension funds to the tune of billions, and all they get from Congress is a little tut-tut from Grassley and Wyden? Meanwhile, poor Americans are told on a daily basis that they need to take more responsibility for themselves as they see their own social safety net being eroded in order to finance the safety net conservatives are setting up for corporations. The bankruptcy bill had the same odor - passing legislation rewarding corporations for misguided business practices that hurt consumers. There are 1,108 corporations whose pension deficit is larger than $50 million (up from 221 in 2000), and the total shortfall is around $370 billion. Bush, Grassley and the Republicans are talking a big game about the legislation that they’re supposedly drafting to limit the legal permissibility of concealing underfunded pension plans, but my guess is that the bill will amount to exactly the opposite. For the immediate fix, however, we’re about to cover the corporations’ behinds again.
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Alexandra Walker somewhat hit the nail on the head this Friday with respect to the charge that Democrats have no “ideas” about how to reform Social Security. But there’s a lurking assumption in what she writes that I find problematic: that there is some sort of Social Security “crisis” that we need to be addressing right now. The point that not enough progressives get is that THERE IS NO CRISIS. I’ll say it again: there is no Social Security “crisis.”
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