Burnt Orange Report

You can't lead a dead horse to water and make him drink

By Nathan Nance

Guest post by Nate Nance

I couldn't help but notice Andrew's post on my Social Security posts, so I thought 'why not keep the discussion going?' Somewhere we might find a compromise position between the two of us and therein find a politically viable option for our party to use in campaigning. There are two wings of the party here, those that thinks as Andrew does and find privatization to be workable and then there are those who find everything wrong with privatization. I think that if Andrew and I can work through our differences on this, we will really have accomplished something.

I'd like to start with some things we agree on, since this is what it's all about. I think we agree that there is a problem with Social Security and that something needs to be done. I think we can agree that payroll taxes are regressive and hurt poor people and working people and whatever we can do to limit that damage is a good thing. I think we agree that we can't trust George W. Bush to sit the right way on a toilet, let alone understand how best to help fix a problem without totally screwing it up. I think we can both agree that Bob Shrum totally sucks as a consultant and we can't understand why people keep hiring him.

That's a lot in common. And I'm going to let you in all in on a secret, Andrew's right about the market doing pretty well over time. I think I've adressed it before, why exactly I don't think a good market yield really helps his argument because of the overhead associated with putting you retirement money in the private sector. I think there are probably ways of limiting risk investing through well-managed mutual funds or maybe even have the option of buying government bonds and letting them mature in your private account. I'm willing to concede all of that to Andrew's wing. Privatization could probably work if it was done by people who knew what they were doing.

I'm just going to lay out on the table why it is I think my wing of the party doesn't like privatization, though. Number one has got to be who's proposing it. These people are the Keystone Cops of Wall Street and I definitely don't want my golden years in their hands. Two's got to be just how unfair it is. When Greenspan's group decided on the trust fund in 1983, they raised payroll taxes to way more than they had to buy bonds to put in the trust fund. If we go to privatization, that means poor and working people have been paying extra high regressive taxes for 20 years for no real reason. There will be no corresponding rise in income taxes on the wealthiest to pay for those bonds for the payout to reitirees.

The thing that bothers us most, or at least bothers me the most, is just why it is Republicans are so keen on privatization. I don't mean some greedy Wall Street conspiracy, I mean the simplest flat out reason: Because it was started by a Democrat. Since Reagan's inauguration, the GOP has been doing everything possible to get rid of government-run programs, any trace of Johnson Great Society or FDR's New Deal. They've more or less succeeded. Under the second Bush administration and even the Clinton administration welfare programs have become so mismanaged that people are asking that they be shut down and Bush can happily oblige when it comes time to write the budget. Anyone who has seen Bowling for Columbine knows what I'm talking about with welfare-to-work and other such disasters.

The one thing they haven't been able to touch is Social Security. People like Social Security, and they want to keep it. Twenty years ago, the Republicans (and everybody else for that matter) realized there was a looming crisis in the system so they've been working on a PR campaign every since to radically change the system. The whole point of Social Security is to spread the risk of investing throughout the federal government so that you are guaranteed by law to have enough to live on when you retire. Privatization is not about fixing Social Security, it is about eliminating the last best vestage of liberalism and government being a force of good in people's lives.

I don't know if Andrew and I are any closer to a compromise, but the discussion is still ongoing. As long as we're talking there's hope.

Guest post by Nate Nance. Nate is a sports/news clerk at the Waco Tribune-Herald and writer/editor of Common Sense a Texas-based Democratic Web log. He can be reached at nate_nance@yahoo.com