The Tribune 11.18.04

After her children were grown, my grandma worked well into her 80‘s sorting items for fire and liquidation sales that were all-too-frequent in her declining Houston neighborhood. Widowed before Social Security became law, she worked to qualify for her own benefits, and when she had earned enough, she retired with income just sufficient to pay for necessities, although there was always enough to squeeze a quarter into the palm of each of her grandchildren at the end of every family gathering.

Grandma always taped her spare cash to the back of her dressing table mirror. One night, while she was away, her house was broken into and the cash was stolen. The same thing happened again, and after the second time she finally put her money in a bank, but the loss was hard and she could never understand how someone could steal money from a poor old woman.

In the aftermath of the 2004 election, President Bush and Republicans in the House and Senate are about to launch a “reform” plan for privatizing Social Security that is the moral equivalent of stealing from grandmother.

Social Security is a contract between generations. It’s fundamental that today’s workers contribute from their earnings to support the retirement of those who worked before them. Our parents did their part and their parents before them. The success of the system depends upon the integrity of this cycle. Break the cycle, and you might as well be removing cash from behind your grandmother’s mirror.

Privatization will allow today’s workers to take a portion of their Social Security payments and invest them in stocks, bonds and other private interests in order to bolster their own “personal retirement accounts.” While this sounds good, it shatters the contract between these workers and those of yesterday who played by the rules and now depend upon Social Security to keep them out of poverty.

Diverting wages into private investment accounts will remove at least $1 trillion from the treasury and leave today’s Social Security beneficiaries with the prospect of very large cuts, or taxpayers with the prospect of very large tax increases, to make up the difference. The Bush administration, already trillions in the hole and strictly adhering to a “taxes are bad” ideology, can be counted on not to raise the new tax money needed to sustain Social Security.

We know that Social Security needs fixing, or there will come a time (estimated to be 2042) when more demand is made from retirees than can be filled by today’s workers. But privatization will only hasten the time when this tipping point is reached. By making a lopsided appeal to self-interest, the Bush advocates of private investment expose the darker side of capitalism, where workers are deserted after they are no longer productive cogs in the machine. Our grandparents shouldn’t have to work until they die or live in poverty because the Bush administration promotes self-interest over the common good as a moral value.