Saying Social Security is in crisis is anti-Social Security; it is repeating a Republican lie, the same one Prez Bush tried to use in 2005 to get Social Security cutbacks and private accounts started. Saying ‘everything is on the table’ twice in early 2007 is anti-Social Security, message effectively sent to Wall Street even when he later backtracks from it.
But Tuesday in Wisconsin Barack Obama proposed forcing employers to open private accounts for workers:
A Secure Retirement – Obama will require employers to enroll every worker in a direct deposit retirement account that places a small percentage of each paycheck into savings. Workers would be able to retain this account even if they change jobs, and the federal government will match the savings for working families.
Why the heck do that? If you support Social Security, why not instead force employers to contribute more money to Social Security?
Let’s face it, Obama can’t help himself, he is attracted like a magnet to privatization, to siphoning America’s retirement savings away from Social Security and off into more expensive and less-reliable private accounts. Why? Well, it is very easy to line these rightward ‘libertarian’ economic leanings up with two of his three most important economic advisors:
Liebman, an expert on Social Security, isn’t easily pigeon- holed either. He has supported partial privatization of the government-run retirement system, an idea that’s anathema to many Democrats and bears a similarity to a proposal for personal investment accounts that Bush promoted, then dropped in 2005.
“Liebman has been to open to private accounts and most people in town would say he’s a moderate supporter of them,” said Michael Tanner, a Social Security expert at the Cato Institute in Washington, a research organization in Washington that advocates free markets and often backs Republicans.
In a 2005 policy paper Liebman, along with Andrew Samwick of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Maya MacGuineas, a former aide to Senator John McCain, advocated a mix of benefit cuts, tax increases and mandatory personal accounts to shore up the system, which will begin paying more in benefits than it takes in through taxes by 2017 under current actuarial estimates. [2017 is a scare tactic year, btw; the system is designed and supposed to take in less from then, because it’s been taking in way more than it has needed during the baby boom working decades.]
He rated Bush an ‘incomplete’ on the Social Security issue, in this 2005 ‘Report Card’ orginally published by the Chicago Tribune:
COMMENTS FOR: SOCIAL SECURITY
GOOLSBEE (Incomplete): Bush bailed out before the fight on this one. By the end, even he admitted his private account plan wouldn’t erase the coming Social Security deficit. He gets credit for raising the issue, which is more than the Democrats can say. But without a plan to pay for reform we’re still at ground zero.
What American doesn’t want a secure, MORE generous not less generous Social Security check when he or she retires? We make it harder to reach what should be a relatively easy to achieve goal by siphoning money off into more expensive and less reliable private accounts.