Democrats all-out costly campaign via media ads to scuttle Social Security reform

Democrats in Congress are unanimous in their effort to scuttle Social Security reform. They need a victory over something, but mostly over Bush, to stop their zero record so far. To their good fortune, they have amassed many millions of dollars for a meida advertizing, TV included, to blare their program to block any serious change, so that Social Security may survive and do its job in the future, but on a new more stable fiscal foundation. In this effort to freeze Social Security into the pattern that will ensure its crisis and collapse in the calculable future, the Democrats in the House and the Senate have found a massive ally in the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP- I went to their website but after viewing many pages, I could not once find their name spelled out ... as I was wondering if its "Persons" or "People" - AG).

AARP is a Leftist organization that has built up its mass following among Seniors by offering discounts on all sorts of goods and services, knowing that Seniors are looking for deals to make their dollars stretch (and that in itself is, of course, not a bad goal). But piggybacking on these cheap goods and services is the negative Leftist ideology of AARP that depends on distorting the "facts" it ladles out in mischievously meagre quantities accompanied by a blizzard of twisted words to its members, hoping to confuse them about its own AARP goals on all sorts of political matters. Fortunately, another

Update: March 14 - see the CBS report on Chile's Social Security investment accounts>

organization of Seniors has begun competing with AARP, and has pointed out the Left-political piggybacking AARP imposes on Seniors' backs to meet the AARP partisan political agenda. The alternative group is named USA Next, and in its fite to expose AARP, it has become embroiled in a dispute over AARP's partisan support of Gay Marriage and a photo that is part of the AARP campaign to that end. It's all ironically amusing, because as a homo myself, I see the AARP running a campaign with its members dues money, while its members have never authorized AARP to campaign for Gay Marriage (to which many dues paying members are opposed, as I also am opposed). All the while AARP distorts the Bush Social Security reform plan beyond recognition - as AARP disregards its members differences of opinion and backs up the Dems in their mindless blockage of Social Security reform.

What's happening is that the Dems and the AARP are blocking the only Social Security that has the potential to save the Social Security system, a system which won't last long enuff to help younger workers who are paying into it today. The Dems and their allied AARP are setting up a phoney hue-and-cry that under the Bush Plan, the "guaranteed benefits" of Social Security will disappear. The problem here is that there are no "guaranteed benefits" with Social Security. There is no monster-huge savings fund into which the SS deductions from paychecks are sent by employers. There's no fund in the Federal Treasury system collects the Social Security receipts and lets them sit there to guarantee that the money will be there when a person is old enuff to receive benefit checks. Rather, the money is spent, and always has been since it was established under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But with the younger age-group always expanding in relation to the older age-group of Seniors, presentday taxes of the larger group of workers coming up was able to payoff the costs of the benefits paid out to the smaller group, who were the retired Seniors with Social Security entitlements. This favourable balance for the entitled Seniors is decreasing every day. At some point it is going to tilt the other side of the scheme, perhaps when most of the Seniors of today already dead and gone. But if they live on and on, due to medical advances, then the tilt point will come sooner because more people will retire and come on line for benefits every day. In either case, the crisis is coming, and the Dems and the AARP has their heads in the sand, endangering the coming generations. Or, they just want to induce a crisis that could destroy the US economy. But we don't want to be cynical about their motives. God help us!

The Bush Plan attempts to add a new significant factor, by which those under 55 can have part of their paycheck deducations by their employers placed in a personally-owned Portfolio for low-risk investment in profit-making accounts that will give a good yield beginning at retirement, and offering some borrowing or cashing out possiblities in the interim. This would be in addition to the part of their deducations that go into the presentday Social Security arrangement. Whereas, the way things

Update: March 16: Byron York exposes Washington Post misleading public on public opinion hidden in its poll


are now, the money of a young worker that goes into Social Security today will be paid out tomorrow, the very next day!, to Seniors over 55 among whom are those Seniors who are letting AARP take hold of their noses, as it pulls them into conflict with their own children and grandchildren. There may be a decrease in benefits to presentday recipients over 55, as I understand the matter. That's because the new Investment accounts will divert a small proportion from the government's day to day expense account, which includes Social Security payments, to the personal Investment accounts of the younger generations, thru Social Security. There will be some cost to the contracted middlemen who manage those accounts, but those costs will be far less than what goes now into the Social Security and Treasury bureaucracy tending the same money in the federal payout system now.

What's more, Congress' role in the plan for the reformed Social Security system would be to monitor the contracted middlemen who manage the Investments, thus double ensuring that the workers get the best returns for the lowest risk on the portion of their SS payouts that are put in their personal Investment accounts. As it is, the workers have no "guarantied benefits," despite the use of this phrase as a hypnotizing mantra, by the Dems and AARP. The Supreme Court a few years back rulled that Social Security payments do not guarantee benefits at all. The money paid in is owned by the federal

Update: March 23: David C. John: Social Security is a slow march to insolvency, demographics tell the story

government, and that means it is owned by Congress which alone can allocate and does allocate it for all sorts of things, of which Social Security payouts to retired workers are released only on a day to day basis - there just is no stable massive fund of collected revenues earmarked for Social Security payouts to Seniors. It just doesn't exist. The only way one can impress the owners of this Social Security money (the House and Senate in their negotiated votes), impress them to be true to Seniors who are entirely dependent on Congress regarding benefits, is to vote them out of office in the next election. The Dems are not telling Seniors this is the only "guarantee" they've got - and its after the fact. The House and Congress can do nothing when the balance tilts, so that there just aren't any more day-to-day revenues to be payout for Senior's SS benefits. At some point, on the Dem basis, Congress will have to drastically reduce benefits, or let the whole damn system collapse. Only Bush has a plan to prevent this catastrophe, and to give those under 55 another option.

The Dems and AARP are using scare tactics. Bush is emphasizing the positives of his plan. But there are definitely scary prospects down the road unless the Dems in Congress become responsible, stop whipping up false hope for the present system, and come up with something positive. They acknowledge they have no plan, no positive plan to restructure Social Security onto a new sound fiscal basis given the structural change in the American population and the demographics of retirement under a SS system based on a completely different population, and demographic of retirees within it. The Dems have let it be known that they won't offer any alternative plan to Bush's at all. They smugly intend simply to scare the aged and everybody else they can.

So, my fellow Seniors in retirement, let's move on over to USA Next; it's said their menu of benefits and discount items are bigger, and their discounts are deeper. What's more they don't make you finance a political agenda, neither right nor left. But they do oppose the Dem and AARP progaganda designed to block Social Security reform. In the end, the Dems and AARP will make the lot of us Seniors worse than ever. - Owlb


Link: Social Security in Leading Media