Rule by Fear: Social Security is the New Terrorism

Over the next several months we're going to be hearing a lot about the Crisis of Social Security, as the Bushies push their latest privatization scheme for soaking the anxious middle class to benefit the rich and incompetent. We'll hear scary numbers and complex sounding analyses. But just about all we need to know about all of it is contained in a handy few hundred words of Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times linked below.

It turns out to be quite simple. There's a problem but...

"But it's a problem of modest size. The report finds that extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending - less than we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of the revenue lost each year because of President Bush's tax cuts - roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes over $500,000 a year."

The Social Security scare has much less to do with economics and more to do with the Rabid Right agenda. Nor is there really an issue of fairness here: the media drones feed the perception that younger people are going to get hit up for the retirement of self-indulgent baby boomers. The truth is that middle class baby boomers have been paying higher payroll taxes for twenty years, so their retirement funds are paid for, despite the fact that the wealthy got their first round of tax cuts at about the same time---you know, in the 80s, the first time that Supply Side Economics failed horribly.

Why is sowing fear and making Social Security the domestic equivalent of Osama bin Laden so important to the Bushheads? Here's Krugman's conclusion:

"For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it."

Link to this column, copy it, and refer to it many times over the next year. It'll keep you sane. (The NY Times requires registration, but it's free and doesn't take long, and it's worth it just for Krugman's columns.)

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Inventing a Crisis