Social Security

SOCIAL SECURITY – THE LENINIST STRATEGY: How has Social Security privatization, once an unspeakable notion on Capitol Hill, moved to the top of President Bush's agenda? As the Los Angeles Times reports, nothing less than a twenty-year right-wing "economic education campaign" inspired by the work of Russian Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin. "Our reform strategy involves what one might crudely call guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it," Heritage Foundation analysts Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis wrote in a 1983 Cato Journal article titled "Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy." Today, as President Bush musters support for his plan, he is able to draw "on a deep reservoir of resources – including policy research, ready-to-hire experts and polling on how to discuss the issue – that conservatives have created over the last 20 years." And despite the fact that conservative predictions about Social Security's financial collapse have proven false, and that the privatization model in Chile they hold with high regard has left Chileans worse off, the "education campaign" continues.

SOCIAL SECURITY – "YOU CAN'T GET OUT WHAT YOU CAN'T PUT IN": When the president starts bemoaning the life expectancy gap between minority groups and whites, it should give us hope that our government is finally going to begin tackling health care access, community violence, high unemployment, disparate wages, and other social ills. It should not be a ploy to garner support for an ill-fated Social Security plan. Unfortunately, President Bush has decided to step up his privatization rhetoric by taking advantage of a sad statistic: the discrepancy between the life expectancy of blacks and whites. In fact, President Bush neglects that some of the actual realities of life for blacks in America – lower wages and a higher chance of disability – are part of the reason why "the [Social Security] program may actually benefit blacks more than whites." And analysts from the AARP, economic scholars, and the Social Security Administration's own actuaries agree with this conclusion. As economist Jeffrey Liebman stated, "If the problem we're trying to address is African-Americans having lower life expectancy, increasing their retirement benefits and their ability to pass wealth on to their children is not the way to do that." In response to President Bush's latest Social Security sales tactic, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) replied, "It is one of the cruelest things that I have ever read, and I regret that it comes from the office of the president."