At last details of Bush’s plan for social security are out, and they are grim details indeed for older people like myself. A story in today’s Washington Post reports that Bush’s plan would cut SS benefits by one-third, primarily by changing the formula used to calculate them. The plan assumes that younger people might eventually make up some of the lost benefits through savings accounts, but of course nothing about that is guaranteed, and in fact the theory behind private accounts is very unsound. Max has more on the privatization issue here and here.
Bush and his cronies have worked hard to convince people that Social Security is in grave danger, when in fact it is not in grave danger at all. While it may eventually need some tweaking (and that need may be 40 or 50 years off), the primary danger facing Social Security is that our lawmakers will break their word, and use the SS surplus to help pay down the criminal levels of general fund debt created by the Bush tax cuts and the red-ink Republicans’ inability to hold their wild spending in line.
The SS surplus was painstakingly built up as a hedge against the baby boomers’ retirement needs. That money has come from the wages of working people like you and me, and those of us now reaching our 50s must fight to keep the red-ink Republicans from stealing what we so carefully tucked away. I’m surely not the only person who will need SS to stave off poverty once I retire. If we let the red-ink Republicans start whittling away at our retirement funds, life will only get that much harder for us later on