Warning!
Be Prepared!
If you were impressed by the Presidential Campaign, just wait for the Social Security Battle. The fanatics in the Bush juggernaut are gearing up to gut our Social Security system. In the next few months they will spend thirty or forty million dollars to convince you that a perfectly workable system is in dire jeopardy and that your Aunt Tilly's check might not come next month. The fact is that Social Security is safe for the next forty years or so. Even the most pessimistic predictions see solvency for twenty-five or thirty years.
But Bushco will try to induce panic. Why not? The tactic has worked before. If the American people believed that Saddam Hussein was prepared to slip a nuke under our doormat, then it shouldn't be hard to convince them that Social Security is a thing of the past. Already funds have been raised from various and sundry PAC's and foundations and business associations to be spent for the purpose of convincing you that the sky is falling on Social Security, which they will claim they want to mend but they really want to end.
Here is the message. Save your money.
In my political career, I have served time as both a Republican and a Democrat. That was before I had the dismal realization that there wasn't ten cents worth of difference between the two. If you look at the members of Congress, you will see that it is the Red state millionaires on one side of the aisle and the Blue State millionaires on the other. By very virtue of how much money it cost them to park their pampered posteriors in those seats, we know that the Representatives and Senators of both parties are owned by many special interests. American politics has always been a marvel of practicality over principle. It runs on two fuels that are as unalike as oil and water--money and votes. This is why Social Security is a sacred cow.
Let's get real about this. Social Security is a tax. It is not insurance, as many people believe. The money goes directly into the treasury. It gets spent on things like wars and imaginary missile systems and bureaucratic salaries. Not only is it a tax, it is a regressive tax. Twelve and a half percent of your paycheck is confiscated by SS UNTIL you make 90,000 bucks a year. Then you quit paying.
On the other side of the equation we have the fact that there is no means testing for SS recipients. If you are retired and making a hundred thousand a year on your interests and dividends, you still get a check. So, the whole system is tilted toward the rich and in that sense it is in need of reform. But to suggest that there is a crisis and the the whole system is insolvent is pure hysteria of the brand that landed us in Iraq. Weapons of Mass Insolvency.
In his last press conference, the President declared that he wasn't going to "debate with himself" in public about the details of his plan to reform Social Security. Despite the unbelievable arrogance of that phrase, it indicates that this administration either has no plan for the overhaul of the system or, more likely, that they just want to end it altogether and are looking for ways to sabotage it, ways such as instituting private investment accounts which will concurrently rape the system and enrich their buddies on Wall Street.
The Bushco administration has two main domestic goals in its second mandated term. One is to 'save' Social Security, which translates to gutting the system, and the other is 'tort reform, ' which is Newspeak for denying our citizens the right to fair access to the courts. They will try to convince you, at great expense, that the reason that your healthcare is astronomically priced is that people can sue their doctors for malpractice when all the croakers have done is saw the wrong leg off or removed the wrong organ or left a scalpel inside, or if the drug company sold you a product that caused a heart attack or if you were an asbestos slave and secured lung cancer because of it. Tort Reform means that if you live on a toxic waste dump, you won't be able to bring a 'frivolous lawsuit' against the company that dumped the waste. Even when your children come down with leukemia.
Isn't Compassionate Conservatism wonderful? It can declare No Child Left Behind while it robs local school districts of money, it can claim reform of Medicare drug benefits when really giving a big bonus to the drug companies. Compassionate Conservatism will steal your access to the courts, as flawed as they are, and it will also rape your Social Security safety net in the name of reforming it. Compassionate Conservatism is a miraculous thing. It can make grand gestures about providing us with 'security' while robbing us of our privacy and our rights. It can save Social Security by ending it. I wish I had invented it. Yeah, Compassionate Conservatism--better than sliced bread.
The Poet's Eye sees that Americans will buy almost anything if it is packaged well and advertised at length. We will buy Ashley Simpson and weapons of mass destruction and duct tape security and unsafe and inefficient SUV's and some of us even believe that professional wrestling is real. But don't let the Bushco PR department sell you on the notions that Social Security is having the death rattle or that you are somehow better off if you can't access the courts and sue for damages.
