Weekly Shredder 35:
Bush Talks to West Virginians About Social Security
by James Norton

Has President Bush lost it?

Has Karl Rove lost his magic touch?

Have the blood-drinking pagan idols that power the Republican Party finally had it with the O negative, and gotten in touch with their warm, New Age inner selves?

It isn't clear. What's clear is that the Bush Social Security Privatalooza, far from bringing a suspicious nation around on the question of gutting the country's most successful social program, has actually had the opposite effect.

That leads us to a treasure hunt.

A treasure hunt for signs that the campaign has descended into strange mixture of desperation and magical thinking.

The field that we are searching in is President Bush's recent address to the people of West Virginia, and the Easter eggs we seek are colorful little nuggets of rotten logic.

Let's start near the top, where Bush assesses the effectiveness of the campaign thus far.

More and more Americans understand there is a problem, and I hear from more and more Americans that they expect those of us who are honored to serve in Washington to fix the problem.

This statement is elegant. It's very distinct from the statement that "more and more Americans support my plan to privatize Social Security," but it gives a similar impression: "more and more" people are doing something — and if the president's presenting it, it must be something he good for his team.

For archives, audio, and background about the column, click here.

But that's not the case.

I have just come from the Bureau of Public Debt... You see, a lot of people in America think there's a trust, in this sense — that we take your money through payroll taxes and then we hold it for you, and then when you retire, we give it back to you. But that's not the way it works.

There is no "trust fund," just IOUs that I saw firsthand, that future generations will pay — will pay for either in higher taxes, or reduced benefits, or cuts to other critical government programs.

The office here in Parkersburg stores those IOUs. They're stacked in a filing cabinet. Imagine — the retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet.

Here you have the president of the United States suggesting that treasury bonds — one of the safest, least volatile, most reliable forms of investment — are not trustworthy because they are symbolized by paper in a file cabinet.

At one point in time, it was a real point of concern if wealth wasn't represented by metal bars. Then, in 650, the Chinese invented paper currency.

It is now nearly 1,500 years later, and the leader of the world's preminent military and economic power is expressing skepticism about the financial health of Social Security because its assets are stored in computers — and symbolized as paper in a file cabinet.

How dumb does he suppose the American people are?

On my trips around this country I have made it as clear as I possibly can that the government will keep its promise to those who have retired or near retirement.... The system will not change in any way for people who have been born prior to 1950.

There are a number of problems with the president's underlying logic.

Let's assume:

A) President Bush's Social Security plan is going to guarantee the health and solvency of the program.

Does B) then make logical sense?

B) In order to protect elderly people, they will be exempted from President Bush's Social Security plan.

It's a conundrum. And more than anything, it's a sign that Bush realizes he can't sell the well-informed elderly citizens on his plan, so he's going to shear them away from the issue by convincing them it won't affect them personally.

It's a smart political tactic. Split the elderly — who are well-informed, and fight for their interests — from the easier-to-fleece younger Americans who have not yet come to depend upon their Social Security checks as a safety net.

The hitch: Elderly people care about their children. And their grandchildren. And some, even their great-grandchildren, and those who will be born after them.

And that's why they're rejecting Bush's plan in sky-high numbers.

And to compound the issue even further, a lot of people running for office in the past have said, vote for me, I will increase your Social Security benefits. And so my generation has been promised greater benefits than the previous generation.

Ah, this is the part of the speech known as "passing the buck." "Those wily politicians of the past! They've played havoc with our finances. Now we need to fix what they've done."

In fact, the politicians of the past did pretty well. The Clinton era was marked by surpluses and balanced budgets. It was the Iraq war and tax cuts that put the economy in a world of hurt, and made a gentle adjustment to Social Security more difficult to execute.

I'm willing to listen to any idea. This isn't a Republican problem, or a Democrat problem; this is a problem for the United States of America.... I recently traveled the country on some stops with former Democrat Congressman Tim Penny, a Democrat from Minnesota, who has some good ideas... And I asked the Democratic — former Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York to chair the commission.

A George W. Bush classic. Talking expansively about open-mindedness and bipartisanship while using a classic Rush Limbaughism — calling the Democratic party the "Democrat" party to deny the left any claim to representing democratic values.

To the point of correcting himself for accurately describing Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a Democratic senator.

This does not win friends on the left.

But does the president's implicit criticism of Democrats' lack of a plan hold water?

In a sense, people are right to criticize Democrats for not doing the obvious: clearly presenting a party-wide message of a gentle tweak to the current Social Security system that ensures solvency without exposing the most vulnerable Americans to the risk that privatization inevitably creates.

But that's a message problem. It's not an idea problem. And Americans have caught on to the difference.

Americans must reject temporary measures. In other words, you'll hear people in Washington say, well, we got a 75-year fix, for example. You know, in 1983, the issue came to focus, and President Reagan and Speaker Foley, as well as other Republicans and Democrats, set aside their partisan differences and said, look, we have an obligation to act on behalf of the country. And they came together and put what they thought was a 75-year fix to the problem. The problem is that the 75-year fix wasn't a 75-year fix, because here we are, 22 years later, talking about it again. See, that's a misnomer.

Hold on there, pardner. Social Security doesn't start to pay decreased benefits until 2041 under the worst-case scenario put forth by the Republican partisans that run the Social Security system. That's nearly 60 years into the "75-year fix," which is really pretty damned good, by Washington standards. Who knows — if the economy recovers from the eventual collapse of infrastructure caused by the administration's irresponsible and massive tax cuts, it could even live up to its original goal.

The end of the 75-year fix isn't when Republicans start scaring people about it. It's when it genuinely starts to fail.

We'll make sure the good options to protect investment from market swings on the eve of retirement — there are ways to make sure the system works.

Actually, one of the best ways to protect people from market swings already exists. It's called the Social Security system. It's not a system for people to gamble in order to increase the luxury of their retirement. It's a system to provide a baseline of support to everyone, no matter their investment-savvy, without the dangers that other forms of investment inevitably entail.

I'm going to continue to discuss this issue around the country. It's an important issue.

It is an important issue. Not as important as the implosion of Medicare, the top-down tolerance of torture and human rights violations, the declaration of a war under false pretenses or the redistribution of wealth from the common good to the richest one percent — but it's up there.

The tragic aspect of this quote, however, is the verb: "discuss." It gives the illusion of Norman Rockwellian democracy where there's a give and take of ideas. But anyone's who's been to one of these "town meetings" knows that a free exchange of opinions is not what happens.

They're pep rallies.

But this is no election. It's hard to get the kids fired up, this time around.

Like a secret albino uncle breaking through from beneath the floorboards with a pickaxe in his hand, the weirdness of the Bush Social Security plan has finally stumbled into the light of day.

And people are unnerved.

As well they should be.

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)