October 26, 2004

I told you that Social Security would make a brief appearance in the campaign for the presidency and then disappear as it has so many times in the past. Here we go again.

George W. Bush made a lot of points when he mumbled something about "personal accounts" for Social Security during his first campaign in 2000. Since then, the subject has been on the back burner for four years. Bush has done nothing about it.

Oh, he did appoint a commission to study the feasibility and method of implementing something similar to the government's own Thrift Savings Plan, a highly successful 401(k) type plan implemented in 1987 by his father, but he put the fox back in the henhouse to co-chair this commission and we ended up with a wishy-washy report on actuarial data that the major members didn't write or sign off on and has since been shelved.

In 1983, after seven years of drawing down on the Social Security trust fund, it was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, together with Senator Robert Dole, raised payroll taxes far beyond what has been necessary to keep Social Security rolling in surpluses ($71 billion in 2004 alone). And they did this in a little more than a month after serving on the Greenspan Commission to study Social Security. A commission that delivered another incomprehensible report that dealt primarily with actuarial data instead of the problem. Do you know what the report recommended? Neither does anyone else.

In 1983, all other members of Congress jumped on the Dole/Moyhihan idea to raise payroll taxes because these two senators had been members of the commission that delivered its report in Greenspeak, the government's equivalent of Professor Irwin Corey. In other words, these two must know what they're talking about because they spent a year studying the issue and no one wanted to wade through the report anyway. It's the same with Bush's commission report.

Not a Third Rail.

The solution was then, is now, and ever shall be to STOP STEALING THE MONEY. But this requires honesty, something that seems to be lacking in Washington.

If, by some fluke, we ever get Washington and the media to consider true solutions for American workers and hence the Middle Class, we will eventually come down to only two practical steps that could have been taken long ago.

One: Cut payroll taxes back to where they were before the ridiculous and unnecessary 1983 increase. This will put a sizable chunk of cash back in the pockets of workers and help stimulate consumer spending which, in turn, helps the economy. Or....

Two: Put the massive surpluses being generated each year into a real trust fund. Because we already know that we can't trust the government, such a trust would have to be managed by people in the private sector who are not above the law. This is definitely not the sort of trust fund George W. Bush is talking about for his "personal accounts," and it is opposed to John Kerry's promise that he would "not privatize Social Security," assuming that he means he would not privatize any portion of Social Security.

It's only the trust fund that we need to deal with first. Improvements in actuarial details, particularly any baby-boomer problem, can wait until after this outright theft is brought to a complete halt.

Congress already wasted years of our time debating "lock-boxes" when real trust funds always have been lock boxes. The wasted years were nothing more than a weak attempt go "go straight" or become honest.

Since its inception in 1935 and implementation in 1937, the federal government has been stealing surpluses generated by payroll taxes. They simply were not of amounts significant enough to be noticed. Only the second option above eliminates this entirely. (See chart)

Once the election is over, the Social Security issue will disappear again. The rip-off of your retirement money is a nonpartisan crime and O.J. will find the real killer before the bandits give up their most lucrative slush fund.

The avoidance of this issue is the fault of the public, the watchdogs, and the media's absolute refussal to flush the problem out in the open by asking the right question. How did the Social Security trust fund ever become more than 22 percent of the national debt?

Denial is not a river in Egypt.

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Thanks George, For $917 Billion In New Debt!

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