Looting Social Security
Looting Social
Security
Just because the general public rallied
and stopped the privatization of Social
Security in its tracks during Bush's term let
us not feel safe about our present or future
retirement. Anti-security vultures are
circling overhead just above the clouds -- or
maybe "smoke" is a better word. The plan
is for convoluted economics to reduce us to
willing and docile accomplices in our own
fleecing.
It's the strategy governments the world
over have used throughout history to get
citizens to accept a lie. Tell it
often enough, convincingly enough, include some
impressive sounding numbers, and people will go
along. However, the plan does not
work if the prevarication is discovered before
it has been told often
enough.
My
fervent hope is that some facts that appeared
in a January issue of The Nation magazine will
expose the true-financial condition of our
Social Security Trust Fund and the plans of the
right wing fiscal hawks. The
article is written by National Affairs
Correspondent William Greider. According to Mr. Greider, a
Wall Street billionaire, a Mr. Pete Peterson,
has hired eight seasoned journalists, has
invented a "news service," and committed $1
billion to the cause of shrinking the Social
Security Trust Fund.
To
quote Mr. Greider, "Despite Mr. Peterson's
inflamed rhetoric, Social Security is not broke
-- It has a huge surplus of around $3 trillion
(not billion). With no changes at all, the
trust fund will be solvent for at least another
thirty years. Here is what really worries
the fiscal hawks: as the Social Security trust
fund built up huge surpluses, the government
borrowed the money and spent it. In maybe
ten or twelve years the treasury will have to
start paying it's debts to Social Security.
The accumulated wealth does
not belong to the government any more than does
the money it has borrowed from
China."
It
is reported Mr. Peterson has two Senate
advocates, Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg, and
congress is being pressured to create an
eighteen member commission empowered to slash
benefits, raise payroll taxes, or both. A year
ago the Obama Admn. offered Mr Peterson a lead
roll in it's fiscal responsibility summit until
The Nation wrote an article on the
billionaire's looting scheme, ("The Man Who
Wants to Loot Social Security," March 2, 2009).
The Whitehouse immediately
downplayed it's summit and dropped Mr. Peterson
as keynote speaker.
Mr
Greider goes on to advise that some on Pres.
Obama's fiscal staff are devoted to Mr.
Peterson's logic. It seems now as citizens our
imperative responsibility to adamantly inform
our Representatives and Senators that we do not
intend to stand idly by and have our retirement
security plundered.
Anyone desiring to read the article
from which I gleaned this information -- it
appears in the January 25 issue of the The
Nation Magazine.
Buz Cormany