www.harpers.org/online/trillion-dollar_hustle -> www.harpers.org/TrillionDollarHustle.html
As with the Nasdaq bubble, they'd rather just look the other way. Thinking about what really went wrong with the nineties would mean abandoning the reverence for the corporation and Wall Street that underpins this whole farcical scheme. What it actually proposes, though, is that Social Security be replaced by a system of compulsory saving in which everyone's payroll taxes will go to his own account alone and be invested however he chooses. As the report puts it, in a criticism repeated again and again throughout the document, Social Security is "a system utterly devoid of options for building a net worth that reflects the dynamism of the American economy. Social Security's goal is not to furnish citizens with a shot at dynamic "net worth"--leave that to the authors of Dow 36,000 and to the Illinois state lottery. Social Security is about minimizing the catastrophic possibilities that are unavoidable in a free-market system. Owning shares of stock might give you a secure retirement or permit you to ride out a period of disability, but only if you're lucky. If you pick lousy stocks, or if you don't earn enough to buy very many, or if the market doesn't go up and up and up forever, a privatized system won't work. Social Security, on the other hand, uses money contributed by all working members of society to insure each of them against economy-wide events--like, say, a stock-market crash--that, by definition, can be insured against only by government. By covering so many people it also provides services that private insurers will simply never make available at an affordable price. Social Security is, however, also the foundation of the welfare state. It redistributes society's wealth, taking from some and giving to others. And it is the single most successful government program of all time, the bedrock on which the New Deal and Johnson's Great Society were built. Its existence is a constant reminder that the free market once failed monumentally to provide Americans with the basic stuff of life. It is also a tantalizing suggestion that human intelligence can sometimes order things more effectively than market forces. Social Security has thus traditionally annoyed the country's owners far out of proportion to its subversive content. Those who prosper the most from laissez-faire capitalism have an objective interest in making Social Security seem to be in perpetual crisis, in constantly undermining it, in mocking it, in mystifying it, in spending its surpluses, in giving its Trust Fund away as tax cuts to the very rich. During the presidential campaign of 1936, Republicans charged that the Social Security system, what with its identification numbers, was a step toward totalitarianism. Newspapers supporting Alf Landon, the Republican candidate, tried to sow panic by claiming that the Social Security system would require workers to wear numbered dog tags. Management left notes in workers' pay envelopes alerting them to the imposition of the payroll tax and warning them that there was "no guarantee" they would ever see any benefits at all. Men of the far right, however, hammered obsessively at these charges for years. Assailing the welfare state as the first step on the road to Communist dictatorship was, by the late 1940s, an editorial standard in publications such as Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. The other, somewhat contradictory, argument--that maybe government will just take all that tax money and then do nothing--proved equally durable. Today paranoia about big government is wholesome fun for the entire family, not a dark disorder of the far right. And distinct echoes of the Landon campaign can be detected throughout the commission's report. Under the existing system, "workers and beneficiaries have no legal ownership over their Social Security benefits," the commission steams. This logical morass is as good an example as any of what might be called the train-wreck ideal: the right's belief that it can persuade the public that government is bad by giving us spectacularly bad government. Just as Republicans in the Reagan era ran up towering federal deficits in order to discredit deficit spending, just as congressmen of the Gingrich era let government services grind to a halt in order to show just how irresponsible congressmen could be, just as Republicans of our own day have taken to electing cretins to positions of great public authority in order to discredit the very notion of public authority, so the present Social Security commission uses the possibility that politicians might try to do away with Social Security as a justification for doing away with Social Security. Of course, the real solution to this puzzle is refreshingly simple and straightforward: abolish this wretched commission at once and send the privatizers the way of Alf Landon. The war on welfare sometimes used a barely concealed racism to advance the cause; Those accustomed to understanding conservatism as Strom Thurmond writ large might be surprised by the exotic species of racial grandstanding that this new thinking has unleashed among the privatization set. Meredith Bagby, a strident young privatizer who testified before the commission in October, looks forward in her book, Rational Exuberance, to a day when a largely nonwhite young America rebels against Social Security because its benefits go mainly to a still-white--and thus deeply and correctly hated--elderly America. Then there is Wade Dokken, CEO of the American Skandia mutual-fund firm, whose book, New Century, New Deal, insists, first, that Dokken is the staunchest sort of Democrat imaginable (even though his book was published by Regnery and blurbed by Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes) and, second, that Social Security has to be privatized at once because it is clearly racist: whites receive more in benefits from it than blacks. Social Security is unfair to African Americans, the report maintains, since blacks "have shorter life expectancies than other groups" and therefore collect less in retirement benefits on average than others. Although the commission doesn't mention it, this is because so many black people die young. And when the mortality rates are broken down by socioeconomic factors, it becomes clear that, in fact, African Americans live about as long as the average for their socio-economic level. Middle-class blacks have nearly the same life expectancy as middle-class whites; The tragedy of black America is largely a tragedy of poverty: so many African Americans die young because so many African Americans are poor. For many this fact would naturally indicate that we need to renew the War on Poverty; But on Social Security they cynically heap the most far-fetched innuendos. Having rolled back welfare, having stopped every effort to win national health insurance, having taken massive steps toward eliminating affirmative action, the right now looks out at the world it has created and finds in the raggedness of its cruelty a mandate for abolishing the welfare state altogether. In order to sell privatization as the solution for "Low-Income Americans," the commission professes to be worried that Social Security "is not nearly as redistributive as many people believe" and ticks off a list of legal quirks that prevent the system from benefiting the poor as well as it was intended to do. But, of course, any privatized system is going to magnify this problem, not solve it. Social Security pays out proportionally more to the poor than it does to the well-off; For bankers, brokers, and existing shareholders, though, it promises a stock-market boom of dot-commian proportions as the forced savings of middle America puff their portfolios on into the endless empyrean. Why are so many willing to affix their signatures and good names to such a dishonest document? Why push such a pro-plutocrat scheme when, in every other field, patriotic "unity" is the order of the day? There is, first and most obviously, a stupendous windfall in the works for Wall Street if privatization actually takes place. Bush's commission has already ruled out the kind of semi-privatized system proposed to solve thi...
|
http://csua.com/feed/