Bush Sells Snake Oil to Cure Social Security
MinutemanMedia.com

by Donald Kaul

[George W.] Bush’s efforts to sell his peculiar “privatization” remedy for the Social Security ‘crisis’ haven’t been going well. Recent polls show that Mr. Bush gets his lowest marks on his handling of that issue. But, like any good snake oil salesman, he presses on. He’s been crisscrossing the country telling people that Social Security is sick and that only privatization will make it well.

His sales pitch has been characteristically Bushian - dismissive of evidence and encased in syntax that is virtually impenetrable to logic. Here’s what he said the other day:

“I’ve been reading the newspapers and been seeing some folks saying ‘There’s not a problem, he’s just exaggerating.’ 

Well, I’m going to keep telling people we’ve got a problem until it sinks in, because we’ve got one. You can’t dodge whether we have a problem or not. Because, see, the next follow-on question to that is, if you’ve got a problem, what do you Republicans and Democrats and a few independents intend to do about it up there?’”

He also said that, under his proposed privatization fix, income from personal accounts, goes to supplement the Social Security check that you’re going to get from the federal government. “See, personal accounts is an add-on to that which the government is going to pay you. It doesn’t replace the Social Security system.”

That either means he doesn’t understand the plan he’s proposed (always a possibility) or that he is outright lying (more likely). You can’t pay full Social Security benefits and have part of the payroll tax going into personal accounts at the same time. There’s just not enough money to go around. The term “add-on” is generally used to mean a payment into a private account above and beyond what now goes into the retirement system. That’s not what Bush is not what Bush is proposing.

It’s always dangerous to assume that [George W.] Bush is as dumb as he sounds. He gets what he wants too often to be written off as a dunce. It’s far more likely that he’s deliberately trying to confuse and frighten people about Social Security so that they’ll be stampeded into support for his cockamamie privatization scheme.

And I wouldn’t bet against him. He’s calling his shock troops into the battle. Business groups are ratcheting up multi-million-dollar lobbying efforts and the airwaves will soon be filled with stories of Social Security’s peril. (Like they care.) And the people who gave you the Swift Boat veterans (remember them?) are joining the fight. They have been hired by USA Next, a big-money conservative lobbying group, to trash AARP as they did John Kerry.

They’re trying to brand the seniors lobbying group as a left-liberal, gay marriage-loving cabal that is standing in the way of the brave [Bush]’s efforts to save Social Security. You would think that absurd on the face of it, but this bunch managed to convince a lot of voters that Kerry’s Vietnam credentials (three purple hearts) weren’t as good as those of Bush, who hid from the fray. Maybe they can convince people that AARP is a bunch of hippies.

Personally, I doubt that Mr. Bush will get his plan enacted this time around but he might get a piece of it now, then push for more later. That’s the way the Conservative movement works: patiently, relentlessly.

Conservatives have been talking about getting rid of Social Security for the past 35 years, ever since Barry Goldwater suggested it be made voluntary. He was laughed out of the election in 1968 but here, 37 years later, we’ve got a two-term president who’s pushing privatization - voluntary Social Security by another name - and no one’s laughing.

This so-called Conservative movement is not conservative, of course; it’s reactionary. It looks longingly back on a time when retirement was the exclusive province of the rich.

For the rest of us, it was work ‘til you die and if you couldn’t, hope you died young. That’s the golden sunset Captain Bush is steering us into now, or trying to.

Donald Kaul recently retired as Washington columnist for the Des Moines Register. He has covered the foolishness in our nation’s capital for 29 years, winning a number of modestly coveted awards along the way.  Kaul's columns can be found at MinutemanMedia.org.


   Click here to receive action alerts from Rapid Response - Iowa