Jan. 24, 2:59 p.m.: Bush’s Social Security scam

A crisis not in the making. Or, let’s scare the people into doing something stupid.

By: Hank Kalet
   The Social Security crisis is such a load of bunk that the White House, as Josh Marshall points out in his Talking Points blog, is attempting to enlist the Republicans’ favorite target, Bill Clinton, to lend it credibility.
   Marshall cites a Washington Post article in which the White House points to statements made by Clinton in 1998, when he said that saving the retirement system should be the priority one. The speech in question, Marshall points out, was actually an attack on the GOP’s attempts to spend away the Social Security surplus and a plea for responsible budgeting.
   "The point of the ‘save Social Security first’ rhetoric was the same: practice responsible budgeting now to prepare for whatever challenges Social Security may face down the road," he writes. "That makes sense because … aggregate national debt really is a zero-sum game. The more debt we build up now, or create for the future in the form of structural deficits, limits our freedom of maneuver down the road. And nobody is saying that Social Security is in perfect shape from now to eternity. Fixes may need to be made over the coming decades. And Clinton’s approach of getting the nation’s fiscal house in order to be able to deal with whatever challenges arose was a sound one."
   But in the Bush years, responsible budgeting has gone out the window, thanks to an administration committed to the upward redistribution of wealth and committed even more strongly to the creation of structural deficits, which will allow it to claim poverty and force massive spending cuts on the federal budget.
   The other point Marshall makes is that the future may not be so bleak for Social Security as the president wants us to believe. In trying to lend context to the Clinton comments, he reminds us that "six or seven years ago, the outlook for Social Security was actually different from what it is now. Each successive report of the Social Security Trustees has presented a rosier picture than the one before it."
   That is another way of saying that Social Security is not in crisis, which is the point of this op-ed from Mark Weisbrot and Dean Baker of Center for Economic and Policy Research.
   "The June 2004 estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security can pay all promised benefits without changes for even longer, until 2052. That’s nearly half a century.
   "And we are supposed to be worried about this? It brings to mind the image of Woody Allen as a nerdy young child in ‘Annie Hall,’ becoming suddenly depressed because he has discovered that ‘the universe is expanding’ and life on Earth is ultimately doomed."
   I like that.