Well, we now have
the basics of the Bush Social Security "plan": screw anybody who's 45 or younger.
Workers who will retire in 17 years or more will have their benefits cut by nearly 10% from present levels. Those who are younger will be harder hit, according to the Chief Actuary - up to a 54% reduction.
And the beauty of the White House political strategy is that the people who would likely oppose the plan the most - the AARP - won't even be affected because you can't join the AARP until you're 50!
Who says you can't fool all of the people all of the time?
Update [2005-1-4 0:7:34 by Thinking Republican]:
And who says you can't screw them with their socks on to benefit your friends and contributors?
As I've posted
here before, the real "crisis" in Social Security is that the federal government won't be running a surplus in 2018, the year that it will have to start paying back the IOU's that have been used to fund the federal budget deficit for years. If the Congress and the president had simply
not borrowed money from the Social Security Trust Fund, Social Security would have sufficient assets to meet the obligations of nearly
all us forty somethings, because most of us will be dead by 2040, the year the trust fund is unable to pay benefits.
But Congress and the president didn't do that. Instead, they spent the trust fund; now, they can't repay what they took because the federal government won't have the cash flow to meet the costs of general government AND still meet the federal government's obligation to repay the Social Security trust fund.
Well, we can't repay what we owe without breaking the Administration's pledge for "tax relief" and an elimination of the "death tax". If we did that, we might actually have sufficient cash flow to repay those obligations.
But if you're George W. Bush, who do you want to screw, if you're given a choice and a
cowering, gullible press corp will buy into your lies and not challenge what you tell them? Do you want to screw over your pals, your contributors and Dad's friends from Bechtel and Halliburton? Or the guys who run all those engines of capital - hedge funds from their estates in Greenwich?
Or would you rather screw the guy who drives a truck for a living and lives in a double-wide in Mobile, Alabama?
It's a tough choice, because they all voted for you...but one of them only sent you a $10 congtribution....