[chicagomom]

They are salivating over this one. And mounting a huge bonanza of expensive advertising to try to convince us Social Security isn't really healthy, isn't really successful, despite the CBO telling us it is healthy and doing just fine.

Quote:

Stephen Moore, head of the conservative Club for Growth, has raised $1.5 million and hopes to hit a $15 million target when his fundraising drive ends. But their contributions are likely to be dwarfed by those from corporate trade associations, spearheaded by the National Association of Manufacturers. Other likely contributors include the financial services and securities industries and other Fortune 500 companies, GOP officials say. White House officials, led by Karl Rove and Charles P. Blahous III, the president's policy point man on Social Security, are helping to shape the public relations campaign, said the officials, who talked about private discussions with the White House on the condition of anonymity. "It could easily be a $50 million to $100 million cost to convince people this is legislation that needs to be enacted," Moore said. "It's going to be expensive" because "it's the most important public policy fight in 25 years," he said.

Who cares if grandpa has to eat cat food - as long as the pirates get their booty?

If you want to defend Social Security from the Bush raiders, write your congresscritters, and contribute to one of the organizations working to combat this disinformation campaign, such as the Campaign for America's Future, or one of their sponsoring organizations. They will be working with the AARP, NAACP, NOW and other groups to preserve the right of all Americans to this basic safety net.

http://www.aarp.org/socialsecurity/
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/soc..._in_crisis.php
ABC News poll

 

[sleeping queen]

One of the big problems with social security is that when it was started the average life span was about 62 and retirement was at 65. Plus add in the fact that there is a decrease in the ratio of workers to retired people and we have a big problem. Privatization would allow a person to keep their own money and know for sure that they have something saved.

Quote:

Some policymakers are against making changes to the current system, and propose reducing benefits, raising taxes, or reducing overall government spending to ensure long-term solvency. However, these methods have not worked in the past. Congress has never cut spending to help fund Social Security and cannot be expected to do so. To deal with the problems facing Social Security in 1983, the Greenspan Commission investigated the system and proposed a combination of benefit reductions and tax hikes to ensure solvency until 2058. Many of these proposals were passed into law. Despite the changes, experts predict that Social Security will cease to be solvent as early as 2014. Studies show that payroll taxes must be raised from 12.4 percent to 18 percent to achieve solvency for the next 75 years. History shows that pouring more taxpayer money into a failing system does not solve its problems.

http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?...ecurity_Reform

 

[brookely ash]

Thanks for the links, Chicagomom. This scares me a lot, because the profits that can be made off of our money. I don't totally get it and need to learn more.

grrrr.....

 

[Unagidon]

Here's 6 conservative reasons not to follow Bush's radical neo-con plan.

1. If Social Security is in trouble (and the disinterested experts, that is, those not funded by people interested in cashing in on the plan say that it is not), it is because the government has been taking all monies out of it beyond what is needed for benefits in the current year. This "borrowing" has been added to the national debt, itself mostly created by the radical policies of Reagan and the two Bushes. Bush II wants you to think that if Social Security is privatized, we (meaning we the people) won't have to pay back this debt to Social Security, however

2. The privatization plan won't apply to nor will it cover current recipients of Social Security. So Bush wants to borrow another $2 trillion to institute this plan, on top of all the money that has been "borrowed" already.

3. The government will have to expand and create a vast new bureaucracy to manage the 300,000,000 individual accounts. These radicals in power now claim certain traditional conservative values. Two of them are smaller government and the idea that government is inefficient. The Bush plan flies in the face of both of these.

4. The stock market is risky. Period. The money pouring in from the Bush plan will a) fuel a new stock bubble and b) will be speculative. I know that the Bush is trying to sell the idea that the people will be trading from their private accounts. Wrong, for two reasons. First, what they will be doing is choosing one of a small number of funds in which they can participate. (But which funds? Who gets the nod for the guaranteed megabucks from Uncle Sam). Second, unlike real traders and investors, people "investing" in this scam will be unable to withdraw their money if the market changes.

5. Some promoters of this scam like to say that the average returns on the stock market taken over years out performed bonds, blah blah blah. Yes. Does it follow that people don't lose huge amounts of money in stocks? We have recovered from stock market crashes, but if you reach retirement age when a crash or even a bear market happens, you yourself could lose your money, even if the rest of us who aren't retiring can stay in and recover. The average rate of growth argument is like the average longevity argument. On average, people live until their late '70's. But lots of people die younger. Care to gamble your social security on it?

6. Another thing that real investors can do is diversifying into foreign equities and bonds. I have seen nothing in the Bush scheme that says that a US fund will be able to do this. There are two things about this. First, foreign investment by a government-controlled fund will be susceptible to political issues. If Germany or Japan does something we don't like, do you really think that the government is going to allow the Social Security system to invest billions there? Second, do we want to help other countries by sending our money to support their economies? The point is this. If there is no free investment, there is no free market.

This privatization scheme is a scam. What it is really meant to do is to divert monies that we are supposedly putting aside to cover our retirement risks into stock speculation. You don't see Bush proposing that all government monies now in bank accounts or bonds be flushed into the stock market to garner speculative returns do you?

The real Social Security problem is the current level of the national debt. The interest on the national debt takes 20 percent of our tax dollars now. If these radicals that have stolen the Republican Party since 1980 had not been borrowing money for their useless imperial schemes, we would not be talking about a "Social Security crisis" today.

Quote:

History shows that pouring more taxpayer money into a failing system does not solve its problems.

The money we poured into the system went to radical projects that yielded us nothing. That is the monkey that needs to be taken off the back of the system.

Bush's rich corporate sponsors just see a potential cash flow for themselves here and they know that we have a government radical enough to give it to them. That is all that this is.

 

[Indigomama]

Unagidon -

Saw a lot of people foolishly invest money over the years in the stock market. I don't see how it wouldn't exascerbate poverty among senior citizens... though I suppose most neocons can look down and say poor people deserve what they get ...

 

[Unagidon]

The fact is, we don't have a Social Security crisis now. This "crisis" is being fabricated by an administration that wants to send a big cash flow to their allies on Wall Street.

We do have a national debt crisis now. When one fifth of our tax dollars are going to interest payments alone, when we are running the deficit spending levels that these radicals in office are running, and when we are running the trade deficits we are running, the problem is not going to get better. "Cutting the deficit in half" does not attack the debt.

Meeting a non-crisis by by borrowing another $2 trillion dollars will make the real crisis worse. But Bush doesn't care. It will all be paid by the middle class.

This Social Security scam will make the nation weaker.

 

[RowansDad]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unagidon The fact is, we don't have a Social Security crisis now. This "crisis" is being fabricated by an administration that wants to send a big cash flow to their allies on Wall Street.

But we all know how much Wall Street needs to be bailed out these days....right?

That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It's Bonus Season on Wall Street

"The year-end bonus is a Wall Street tradition, and for a second consecutive year, the amounts are significant. Three major Wall Street firms - Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns - have reported record profits for the year and all are said to have given out handsome bonuses.

"The totals in 2003 were already impressive: Lloyd S. Blankfein, the president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs made $20.1 million, of that only $600,000 was salary; and E. Stanley O'Neal, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, received a bonus of $13.5 million and restricted stock worth $11.2 million on top of his $500,000 salary. At the other end of the compensation spectrum, an investment banking analyst right out of college would have made a $65,000 salary and a $35,000 bonus last year. An associate just out of business school might have made $85,000 in salary and a $115,000 bonus.

"This year, investment bankers are expected to see gains in bonuses of 10 to 15 percent, amid a year-end flurry of mergers. Fixed-income traders, who have been the best compensated Wall Street professionals in recent years, will also be amply rewarded, but their percentage gains may be smaller than those of bankers. Bonuses, of course, vary by bank, by division and by individual. They reflect the firm's profitability and the group's performance, as well as the individual's contribution."

More here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/bu...rint&position=

 

[chicagomom]

Yes, this is about the national debt, and not wanting to pay it back. Josh Marshall:

Quote:

AS PRETTY MUCH all the sensible articles on Social Security have made clear, to the extent that we have a problem, it is not a Social Security problem, but an accumulated national debt problem. And this isn't just a looking at one side or the other of the coin issue, but a category difference. ... The United States has a bit over $7 trillion in accumulated national debt. ... Almost the entirety of President Bush's Social Security phase-out plan comes down to a simple proposition: finding out how not to pay it back. Now, admittedly, this is an approach that the president is rather familiar with from his own business career at various failed energy companies. But it is, in so many words, a straight up con -- one of vast scale, and one which virtually no one in the media ever frames in just these terms.

Pretty much sums it up.

 

[chicagomom]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sleeping queen One of the big problems with social security is that when it was started the average life span was about 62 and retirement was at 65.

This is misleading, because the average life span in 1940 included a much larger number of children dying in infancy than we have today. Life expectancy at age 65 was 78 years in 1940. Now it's 82 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average life span has increased just over four years since 1940, and the retirement age has been increased by two years.

Quote:

Privatization would allow a person to keep their own money and know for sure that they have something saved.

No.

Privatization would ensure that your benefits would be cut, and might be cut a lot depending on whether or not you lost your shirt playing the market.

And if you think this is going to be a cost-effctive scheme...

Quote:

Despite the apparent windfall in business that could create, many Wall Street executives are less than enthusiastic about administering tens of millions of very small accounts if, as is likely, the government forces them to charge much lower fees than on traditional mutual funds. But administration officials have already signaled that the government would probably take responsibility for accounts of less than $5,000, relieving financial companies from dealing with millions of accounts that would probably be unprofitable.

I'm so glad he's looking out for Wall Street. This, of course, means more government bureaucracy to deal with the millions of accounts. Who's going to pay for all these new government jobs? Hmmm...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/bu...?oref=login&th

 

[Indigomama]

I've already started seeing the ads.......

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RR.

Social security is such a freaking important institution and rather than having any such intelligent debate, they spend $ on scare tactics to get the average uninvolved person not to protest so much as they get raped.

 

[chicagomom]

Let the scripted "Town Hall Meetings"/advertisements begin!

Quote:

How scripted was this event? Check out this exchange: MS. STONE: I would like to introduce my mom. This is my mother, Rhoda Stone. And she is grandmother of three, and originally from Helsinki, Finland, and has been here over 40 years. THE PRESIDENT: Fantastic. Same age as my mother. MS. STONE: Just turned 80. Of course, the script probably told Bush to say, "same age as my mother" after Ms. Stone mentions her mom is 80.

:LOL

 

[Arduinna]

This whole SS privitization plan is insane IMO.

 

[simonee]

Quote:

Originally Posted by chicagomom ..social security piratization

(emphasis mine)

LOL was that Freudian or intentional???

I wonder, don't voters realize that THEY will be the ones eating dog food?

 

[RowansDad]

I recommend folks consider the following when they hear Dubya Chicken Little yammer that Social Security is doomed to be "flat bust, bankrupt" anytime soon:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction"
Dick Cheney
Speech to VFW National Convention, Aug. 26, 2002

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
George W. Bush
Speech to U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 12, 2002

"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
Ari Fleischer
Press Briefing, Jan. 9, 2003

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
George W. Bush
State of the Union Address, Jan. 28, 2003

"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more."
Colin Powell
Remarks to U.N. Security Council, Feb. 5, 2003

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
George W. Bush
Radio Address, Feb. 8, 2003

"So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad?... I think our judgment has to be clearly not."
Colin Powell
Remarks to U.N. Security Council, March 7, 2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
George W. Bush
Address to the Nation, March 17, 2003

"Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly... all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes."
Ari Fleisher
Press Briefing, March 21, 2003

"There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. And... as this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them."
Gen. Tommy Franks
Press Conference, March 22, 2003

"One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites."
Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark
Press Briefing, March 22, 2003

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld
ABC Interview, March 30, 2003

and then this:

US ends fruitless Iraq WMD search
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...an11&printer=1