Wall Street wants your retirement...all of it

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From the "send-us-your-money" investment team sponsored by Newsmax.com, in their overly hyped solicitation piece, "FORGET ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY!", Newsmax does it's level best to scare the hell out of it's readers (with big, spooky looking font) by bringing back the old "social security is going bankrupt" canard.

Social Security is not in crisis.

What's in crisis is a morally bankrupt Wall Street and DC crowd that seems bent on putting ideology and their own interests above the good of the country.

Back when President Bush was in charge, Wall Street convinced the president that their interests were America's interests.

This explains why President Bush pushed for the privatization of social security immediately after his second term began.

Can you imagine how you would have felt in 2008 after the market collapsed, and waking up to realize that there no longer was a Social Security program because everything had been dumped into Wall Street?

The big financial players on Wall Street would have - as we have seen - kept their bonuses and fees (for doing such a bang up job protecting your money).

We, on the other hand, would have been left holding the bag (a much bigger bag, that is).



http://markmartinezshow.blogspot.com/2010/03/social-security-going-bankrupt-oh-my.html
 
Bush never pushed for privatization of Social Security. That's like saying Obama is for "Death Panels". You can only get there if you deliberately "misinterpret" what was offered.
 
Damocles said:
Bush never pushed for privatization of Social Security. That's like saying Obama is for "Death Panels". You can only get there if you deliberately "misinterpret" what was offered.
Click to expand...

President George W. Bush discussed the "partial privatization" of Social Security since the beginning of his presidency in 2001.

But only after winning re-election in 2004 did he begin to invest his "political capital" in pursuing changes in earnest.

In May 2001, he announced establishment of a 16-member bipartisan commission "to study and report specific recommendations to preserve Social Security for seniors while building wealth for younger Americans", with the specific directive that it consider only how to incorporate "individually controlled, voluntary personal retirement accounts".

Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security (CSSS) issued a report in December 2001 (revised in March 2002), which proposed three alternative plans for partial privatization:

Plan I: Up to two percent of taxable wages could be diverted from FICA and voluntarily placed by workers into private accounts for investment in stocks, bonds, and/or mutual funds.

Plan II: Up to four percent of taxable wages, up to a maximum of $1000, could be diverted from FICA and voluntarily placed by workers into private accounts for investment.

Plan III: One percent of wages on top of FICA, and 2.5% diverted from FICA up to a maximum of $1000, could be voluntarily placed by workers into private accounts for investment.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social...es)#George_W._Bush.27s_privatization_proposal


For a few weeks Rep. Paul Ryan was the toast of the punditocracy; his Roadmap was hailed as the serious Republican response to America’s fiscal problems.

But it turns out, predictably, to have been a Potemkin plan: it wouldn’t balance the budget, even after two generations.

What it would do is massively redistribute income upward, raising taxes and slashing benefits for most Americans, while providing huge tax breaks for the top 0.1 percent of the population.

Naturally, Ryan’s response to these revelations has been a hissy fit.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — which has always, in my experience, been impeccably honest and careful in its work — does the point by point rebuttal.

But I’d like to follow up on small but revealing point: Ryan’s claim that diverting a substantial share of payroll taxes receipts into individual accounts does not constitute partial privatization of Social Security.

You see, there’s a history here.

Back when the Cato Institute first began pushing for individual Social Security accounts, it called its push The Project on Social Security Privatization.

As the Bush administration got ready to make its privatization push, however, it became clear that “privatization” polled badly.

So the project was renamed The Project on Social Security Choice.

And Republicans began bristling at any suggestions that they were proposing privatization, calling that a slander. Really.

Wait, it gets better.

Cato engaged in Orwellian tactics — deleting the term “privatization” from older web posts and even from records of old conferences.

But they were sloppy; there were traces of the true history throughout. I don’t know if they’re still continuing the practice.

In any case, Ryan’s attempt to deny that what his own movement used to call privatization is, in fact, privatization should settle the question of his sincerity.


http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/saving-ryans-privatization/
 
What Bush proposed is far different than "privatization". Even Krugman couldn't get himself to lie enough to call it solely privatization, because it wasn't. Taking a miniscule amount and allowing them to put it into specific safe investment vehicles is very different than taking every account and simply privatizing the program.
 
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