President Bush began his 2nd term with fixing Social Security being a priority. Social Security as it exists today is doomed to fail. On that, there is no disagreement.
Bush told us his plan at the State of the Union speech. First, he had to convince Congress and the American people that there is a problem. After getting that consensus, he wants suggestions on how to fix it. He has ideas of his own of course, but wants participation by everyone in coming up with recommendations on how to fix it. Then he’ll fix it.
So the President and Vice-President, and others in the administration are out on a 60 day campaign to educate the public on the matter. I call that fulfilling a campaign promise. The biased media mocks the process as if the president was selling used cars. He’s out ‘pushing his plan,’ putting on the ‘hard sell’. I’m sure the word snake-oil has come up somewhere too. You get the point. What’s the left call it? They call it pandering to Wall Street.
The last thing the dems want to do is fix Social Security using any part of private accounts. Their answer is higher taxes. Isn’t investing in America and its future, with rates of return higher by orders of magnitude than anything Social Security could possibly provide under current legislation, better than investing in a government hell-bent on taxing you more to give to someone else? What Winston Churchill said:
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Buying U.S. Savings bonds won’t create jobs. Investing in America does. Everyone wins. Even democrats if they’ll admit it. Isn’t it a little ironic that the government has taken this long to see the benefits of that which made us a superpower, our freedom and free enterprise.
What really drives dems crazy about the people owning their own accounts, is that they really will own it and be able to pass it on to survivors upon your demise, and, out of their reach to tax. Not possible under today’s system. The government gets to keep it, your family gets nothing of what might have been paid out in benefits regardless of how much the departed had paid into SS over the working lifetime. Dems today are benefiting from the peoples’ false impression that the money they’ve been paying for taxes is being held for them until they retire, so they don’t see any difference between private accounts and the current system. You can see the hill the administration has to climb to win this debate.
