And we’re off …
I had the text of the speech a bit in advance. But I intentionally didn’t read it because I wanted to hear it first as a speech rather than in the written word.
And I found the choices imbedded in the speech quite surprising.
First, there wasn’t all that much about Social Security, and quite little that was new.
As someone who is not at all neutral on whether Social Security should be preserved or dismantled, that struck me as a missed opportunity. It’s not every day that even the president gets an hour with the American people, with all the pomp and ceremony reared up in his favor. Even the privatizers have a story to tell. And the State of the Union gives the president a moment of conversational intimacy with the American people. On Social Security, I don’t think he made much good use of it. And there was little on Social Security at least that was memorable.
As a final point along those lines, I also thought he did little to weave a narrative about privatization into the other themes of his presidency. The whole second half of the speech (I wasn’t watching a clock; but that was my sense) was about foreign policy issues that are distant from what the country will be debating in the coming months. They remain issues of deadly importance and high ideals; everyone can agree to that. But nothing was connected together — no bridge from the issues and touchstones which won him reelection to the policies he now wants to enact.
A few other observations.
First, now we know how much phase-out the president wants: 1/3 of Social Security. He said so tonight. So at least that nugget of his plan is clear.
Second, there were a slew of bones tossed to the cultural right pretty clearly aimed at bringing them back on board the phase-out bandwagon. Again, it didn’t seem woven together, all disconnected.
Third, the president is now saying — and saying emphatically and militantly, with an eye on his critics — that if you’re 55 you’re home free, nothing to worry about when it comes to phasing out Social Security.
One might observe that this is a rather unfortunate dividing in half of the country. If you’re 50 today, you spent most of your highest earning years not only paying into Social Security, but advance-paying even more, under the 1983 Social Security Commission which put in the extra level of tax to build up the Trust Fund. Now you’re hosed. Too bad.
The important point though is that this is simply not true. And the defenders of Social Security would be straight-up fools to let the president get away with a guarantee as obviously bogus as that one.
The president can say whatever he wants. But the truth is he’s going to try to siphon off one out of every three dollars that goes into Social Security — the money that goes to pay those benefits he’s telling you 55-and-over folks not to worry about.
Remember, he says the program’s in trouble in 13 years and bankrupt in less than forty as it stands now. And now he’s telling people who are 55 and over that they can rely on the program with complete confidence even though, under his new plan, it’ll have to make do with 2/3 of its current revenues.
Does those two facts compute to you? You think that might put a little stress on the system? Even if the president just decides to pull out the national Visa card and borrow a few trillion more dollars to make up the shortfall, that will just come back and hit the program in other ways and more than soon enough to hit people a decade from retirement. People who are 55 today will be alive in 10, 20, 30 and more years from now. And like so many of President Bush’s promises this is one he couldn’t keep even if he wanted to.
With Social Security phase-out, we’re all in the same boat. Actually, let me rephrase that: With Social Security we’re all in the same boat. With phase-out, it’s everyone overboard and every man for himself.
