Social Security
Destroying Social Security to save it
By Seth Sandronsky
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Dec 10, 2004, 20:24

Officially, the people of Fallujah, Iraq, are being �saved� with bombs and bullets by the Bush White House. The flattened city, roughly the size of Sacramento, is proof of that. Meanwhile, the administration is pressing forward to �save� the Social Security system for Main Street America. Presumably, introducing personal savings accounts will preserve this program of social insurance.

To that end, a coalition of the two political parties will be needed, readers learned in a Dec. 4 column by David Brooks in The New York Times (NYT). For him, this two-party coalition, including GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, must learn to get past political differences to reform Social Security for Main Street, and not to swell the pocketbooks of the nation�s upper class. Its drive to slowly privatize Social Security is less newsworthy than pro athletes such as Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and Marion Jones using steroids to �be all that they can be� in the corporate world of modern sports. Crucially, those who question Brooks� desideratum on Social Security are �special interests� who fail to grasp the reality of the system�s financial fragility.

Still, Brooks lacks the �scientific� credibility of a mainstream economist concerning the future solvency of Social Security. For that, we can turn to N. Gregory Mankiw, chief of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Bush. Taxes should not be raised to cover the system�s funding shortfall in 2042, Mankiw said in the Dec. 3 edition of the NYT. It is of no consequence that taxes have been increased several times to bridge such gaps for Social Security in the past.

Such history is down the memory hole. And pundits like Brooks are well trained not to mention that. Likewise, he is mum on the CFA�s forecast in July 2003 that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would create 5.5 million new jobs by the end of this December. The reality is short of this figure by about 3 million new jobs for the 17-month period.

Meanwhile, what passes for information from a top economist for the president is supposed to empower the mass of the American people to make rational decisions on Social Security. Then, as isolated individuals investing in personal savings accounts, they will reap all that the stock market has to offer them. Such investments will replace, in part, the current system of social insurance that is lumbering, clumsily, towards a sea of red ink. Nobody in their right mind wants that.

It is far better to act now and avoid that future pain. After all, private is good, and public is bad. This theme is a favorite one of the GOP and the Cato Institute, taking the �hard line� versus the �soft line� of the Democratic Party and the Brookings Institute. For Brooks, Mankiw and the Republican Party, now is the time to get a move on with the program to save Social Security for the baby boom generation.

So to financial markets Main Street must go. Invest, invest, that is Moses to the prophets! But invest in what is the question. Currently, there are trillions of dollars invested in financial markets that are unconnected to the useful production of what regular people use to live.

In brief, this is what attracts surplus capital to financial markets. And the more capital they attract, the more of it there is to contribute to Democrats and Republicans to help Wall Street fleece the population. This process is the driving force to slowly privatize Social Security. Hitching it to financial markets for the purpose of preservation is a little like promoting sex as a way to become a virgin.

Speaking of preservation, recall the stock market inflation of the 1990s? It partly funded retirement benefits for government and private-sector employees in the U.S. Many of their employers bore these pension costs. These are called defined benefit plans.

Then the stock market soured. Employers began to flee their investments in workers� retirements. They began to bear market risk for pensions. As a result, employees had to invest in what are called defined contribution plans.

Tens of millions of workers, not their employers, now bear the risk and reward for retirement based on how financial markets rise and fall. Nobody can predict what they will do. There are simply too many actors involved in millions of transactions for predictions to be much more than speculations. To somewhat paraphrase the late American author Flannery O�Connor, all that rises in financial markets must eventually converge on future uncertainty.

That much is certain. Certainly, Social Security provides stability for America�s working majority. Hitching it to the �irrational exuberance� of financial markets is a recipe for instability. In contrast, social prosperity requires stability.

Here lies the main contradiction between the needs of Wall Street and Main Street. Here is a current example of the conflict between capital and labor, underway for centuries. U.S. wars on Iraqis by sanctions and munitions are both diversions from and complementary actions to the upper-class agenda of destroying the material stability of the American majority. Awaken.